What it’s like living with psychosis

FOR many, long-lasting psychosis feels like a dream. For me, it started when I was convinced my organs were on the outside of my body.

EVERY time Danielle went to take a shower she saw the word “slut” scrawled on her bathroom door.

Mark once heard Kevin Rudd ask him for advice on what to do about Iran.

For me, it began when I was convinced I’d been born with organs and muscles on the outside. I was the Inside-out Boy and nobody had ever told me.

For Matthew Ball, it began when he was 13.

“I was sitting in my school classroom and I started to see this translucent blob come through the wall,” Matthew told news.com.au.

“I had this feeling it was going to swallow me up and everyone else in the classroom. Then I heard voices screaming in my ears. I got onto the floor and I thought everyone in the classroom was on fire.”

Matthew was experiencing a hallucination — one of two experience types, the other being delusions — that characterise what we call psychosis. Experts say psychosis exists on a spectrum, so it includes everyday paranoia and hearing voices. University of Queensland researchers say one in 13 of us experiences psychotic symptoms.

When people ask me what an acute, long-lasting psychosis feel like, the simple answer is: like a dream. There is no concept of time, events and reasoning that made sense during the psychosis make no sense when you try to describe it to someone, and the whole experience can be very hard to remember.

And like dreams, the content of your psychotic breaks can seem like a random pile of nonsense, or they may appear to have hidden and metaphorical meanings.

It’s in finding these meanings in specific psychotic content, some argue, that profound healing can happen.

Journalist and author Luke Williams has suffered psychosis and says the easiest way to explain it is to compare it to dreams. Picture: ABC Radio

Dr Glenys Dore, the clinical director and a consultant psychiatrist at the Northern Sydney Drug & Alcohol Service works with people who experience psychotic episodes. She told news.com.au while psychosis is associated with high dopamine levels in the brain — a neurotransmitter associated with motivation and reward — the condition is something of a mystery.

“Psychosis certainly has a personal, cultural and social context,” Dr Dore said.

She worked with the woman I’ve called Danielle, the one who saw the word “slut” written on her bathroom door.

“It turns out she had some very guilty feelings about being involved with an abusive partner because she had child,” she said. “We needed to work on that in order for her hallucinations to clear.”

Matthew Ball said: “I kept hearing a voice. It came from the right side of my body. It used to tell me it had access to all the street cameras everywhere in the world and he could see me everywhere I went. There was nowhere to hide.”

Indeed, mental health workers around the world have reported that the delusion you are being covertly filmed (called the Truman Show Syndrome) has become increasingly common since the rise of social media and collective concerns about privacy.

But in Matthew’s situation there was also a personal context.

Throughout his teenage years and into young adulthood Matthew had started hearing a number of other voices that told him he was useless, “that I should kill myself”.

When he was in early 20s he started seeing a psychotherapist.

“I began to think back to my life experiences. When I was eight years old a man stopped and I got in his car outside my school, where he threatened to shoot me with a gun he said he had in the car. My parents split up six months later, then I got sexually assaulted a few years later, This left my brain overloaded with stimulation and it kind of split-off,” Matthew explained.

“I reckon the voice inside my head was the man who threatened to kill me when I was eight. He was saying I will you follow everywhere, I can see you everywhere.

“But as I got older, my life became more stable, I felt safer, I had goals. The voices went away completely,” he said.

My first episode of psychosis happened 17 years ago, when I was 20. I’d taken ecstasy with a friend. My friend made what was probably a passing remark about my dad’s job as a slaughterman. Not long after he said that, I looked down at my hands they were purple from the cold. But I concluded they were that colour because they had been turned inside out — that my entire body had been born with the organs and veins on the outside. I believed nobody had ever told me and that I’d finally worked out what was wrong with me: I was the Inside-out Boy. This realisation explained everything — friendship breakups, being picked on at high school, the time when I was eight and Mum said I had to start using my own bathroom towel.

Looking back, being a gay teenager in the ’90s led me to believe I was born a mistake — the opposite of what should I have been. I also know I have angst about my working-class origins, separation anxiety and I should never take amphetamines. It wasn’t therapy that snapped me out of that slaughter-house-themed delusion that day. After 12 hours of believing I was Inside-out Boy, I went to look in the bathroom mirror. I can’t begin to describe my relief when I saw my pasty white skin in its proper place.

Matthew Ball began experiencing psychosis when he was 13, but has turned his experiences around

Matthew Ball, now 42, lives in Adelaide where as works as a mental health nurse and psychotherapist. His practice is called The Human Clinic and he works with people experiencing delusions and hallucinations.

“In my therapy sessions, I talk to people’s voices. I ask the voices what they need, how they feel, whether they are staying and so on. I look for metaphors and meanings. People who experience psychosis don’t just have random chemical imbalances, they have traumas, adversity, spiritual realities and they need to be treated like human beings who have been through difficult things” he said.

As for Mark who believed he was advising Kevin Rudd, he was put in a psych ward and the psychiatrists decided not to medicate him.

“He wasn’t hurting anyone. If we put him on antipsychotics he just would have been catatonic,” Dr Dore said, “and the delusion was actually giving his life meaning.”

Luke Williams is an author and journalist. His new book Extreme Asia will be released in 2018.

Originally published as What it’s like living with psychosis