Into the vortex: Luke Williams’ spiral into ice-induced psychosis

LUKE Williams was researching ice addiction when he became addicted himself. This is how he sank into psychosis.

Like a movie ... how dangerous is this drug to society? Luke Williams shares his story. Picture: ABC Radio

LUKE Williams is a freelance journalist and former drug addict who was researching addiction to crystal meth, when the worst possible thing happened — he became addicted to it himself.

This is an edited extract from his book The Ice Age, published with permission, about his descent into psychosis.

***

A FEW years back, I met a 60-year-old guy named Bernard; he was smoking crystal meth in a public area in a gay sauna. I was between addictions, and so I didn’t join in — I just listened.

Bernard was a very skinny, extremely well spoken, former private-school teacher. He was, first and foremost, polite and dignified. He talked in a kind of pure poetry, with just the right amount of detail, poise, and rhythm. He was old-fashioned, genteel; it was almost as if I had met the ghost of Patrick White.

As he smoked more meth, though, he began to resemble Mr Burns from The Simpsons, especially the episode in which Mr Burns is found in the woods and mistaken for an alien.

His voice became higher-pitched as he told me: “I had a good job, I was on a very good salary, I had a nice house, and I was very well-respected in the community. Then I met Crystal, and she wrapped her sweet, toxic tentacles around my heart and never let go.”

As the night wore on, he explained to me that when he smoked crystal meth, he could sit for hours on end with his eyes shut, imagining himself climbing mountains and surviving snow avalanches, or going on heroic journeys through deep tropical jungles.

“Once, I sat there for three straight days and explored these caves until I found the ruins of an ancient underground kingdom with huge castles and pyramids. When Crystal ran out of her love, I went and got more so I could continue with the adventure.”

This would often continue for up to 18 hours at a time. After years of going on these adventures, Bernard woke up to find he no longer had his job, or his salary, or his house — all of which, in turn, led him to smoke more meth.

***

Jack Nagle was a tall blond basketball-mad 19-year-old living in Melbourne’s southeast suburbs when he decided it was time to broaden his horizons.

“I wanted to get out in the world, start mixing with people who weren’t from my high school,” he told me. “I guess there wasn’t really anything missing in my life, I just wanted to try new stuff, meet new girls, that kind of thing.”

Along the way, Jack stumbled across crystal meth. Curious — having already dabbled in other amphetamines — he smoked a bit, and then a little bit more, and then the next weekend, and the one after that, and then during the week, until he was lost in a fog of thoughts, ideas, and theories.

At one stage, he went on a 10-day binge, where he smoked more than $7500 worth of meth and was consumed by fantasies, starting with the recurring belief that he was at the airport waiting to get on a plane to Thailand, when he was, in fact, in his bedroom.

He told me that after a while, “I became convinced it was all part of a TV show plot, and that my life was a TV show, and I was being filmed all the time.

“Like The Truman Show?” I asked.

“Yes” Jack replied “exactly like The Truman Show,” and he went on to relate how he had once confronted a girl (who had rejected him) about her role on this TV show — she, quite naturally, freaked out.

“Eventually I started kind of performing for the camera,” he explained. “So one day I got home after a day of smoking, believing that the cameras were on me, and I thought to myself what a boring day it had been, and that the viewers probably would have been really annoyed with me. So I stood up in my lounge room and broke out in this mad dance for 15 minutes just so the audience would be entertained.”

***

One winter evening in Perth, in 2014, Cassy McDonald took an intravenous shot of crystal meth in her suburban home and, almost immediately afterwards, heard her phone ringing.

“For some reason, I felt really desperate to answer it, like it was some kind of emergency,” she said.

“I had this feeling it was my mum calling to tell me something really important.”

Having decided that the phone must be somewhere in her car, she went out to the car, which was sitting unlocked in her driveway, and began to search.

“All I remember was fear; I was terrified, I locked all the doors and refused to get out, and ripped open all my dashboard and seats looking for the phone. It seemed like I was only in there a few hours, but I was in there for two whole days. I only came out when my partner’s sister pulled up with my son.”

After a long conversation with her sister-in-law, Cassy realised that not only had she been in the car for almost 48 hours, but also that she didn’t even own a mobile phone. Cassy had been experiencing a drug-induced psychosis, and in fact, as a former dealer, she has seen more than her fair share of people having psychotic episodes.

“There was one girl who came over and started plucking out all her eyebrow hairs. At first her eyebrows looked pretty good, but she just couldn’t stop. When she had not a single eyebrow hair left, she started on her hairline.”

***

I put these three stories together to begin to illustrate the link between crystal meth and what we might call, at its simplest, imagination. In broad terms, this refers to the ability to form new images and sensations in the mind that are not perceived through the five senses.

What Bernard, Jack, and Cassy describe is neither a daydream, nor mild paranoia — instead, these experiences are all encompassing and self-generating, and produce complicated narratives and/or visions within a state that often blends, and then sometimes confuses, metaphor for reality.

I call this state the Vortex: powerful, self-perpetuating, highly graphic, highly detailed, highly imaginative, rolling-stream images and ideas that flow in your mind whether you like it or not.

They can be used for creative purposes; alternatively, one can get stuck in the “movie”, or fall into error, thereby taking them literally and entering what modern medicine would describe as a psychotic break.

The Vortex can be an irresistible force, often offering a visual narrative that is far more exciting than the here and now, and sometimes far more exciting than what some users will otherwise do in their entire lives. When I met Bernard, I hadn’t experienced the Vortex but I had experienced psychosis in the form of delusion.

In my experience, the Vortex — at least in the early days of my crystal meth use and abuse — followed the “up” of crystal meth use, the “Fantasia”; it usually occurred when I was alone. The images and ideas are far more vivid than Fantasia, so vivid that you almost can’t do anything other than experience them. They don’t just float in the background like they do in Fantasia, and they are often hard to articulate, especially during the experience.

The Vortex is a highly individualised and usually compulsive experience; fantasies rage through your head without the slightest bit of effort — but often these fantasies are not about yourself, your fears, or your desires, although they can be.

***

There is often a waking, lucid-dream-like feeling to the Vortex, and not long after moving into my mate Smithy’s house, I entered this strange new world.

On one of the first nights at Smithy’s during which I took crystal meth, I remember he was entertaining three guests in his bedroom. He had music playing loudly, and I could hear them talking over the top of it.

I had the lamp on, and I was typing away at old notes from my rehab days, trying to pull together an article. I was typing away effortlessly, rhythmically, quickly, and without judgment. Soon there were 1000 words on the screen, then 2000, and then, as two hours passed in a few heartbeats, I had 4000 words written.

I had a break to make a cup of tea. As I was standing in the kitchen, leaning against the bench, I started seeing very vivid images of people I had once met at mardi gras. They were living in an alternate dimension that looked like rural Queensland centuries ago.

A few minutes later and I had written up these images as best as I could, but I was struggling to keep up with them as they joined together, becoming more like a movie.

As the night passed, I would either be trying to write these images down, though often struggling to articulate the detail, or I would become so enraptured with them that I would just stop and sit on the couch to enjoy the show.

People would appear in elaborate, original costumes; the valley and surrounds created themselves, conversations began, and plots thickened.

This was my first experience of the Vortex, and I loved it. When I started to become conscious of what was happening, though, I got into a bit of a panic. I began to see this process as a kind of creative ecstasy that could yield very positive results; but then it seemed that the more I willed it, the more I wanted it, the more I brought my ego into it, the less vivid and self-generating it became.

To return to the night in question, though — at around four in the morning, I became aware that Smithy’s guests had left. This occurred to me because Smithy was hovering around me, pinching his crotch. He was hovering like ... let’s say, a cat that had just swallowed a bird, or a kid about to ask their parents for money.

Smithy had a tendency to mumble when he was on crystal meth, though it was nonetheless clear to me that he, too, was having wildly vivid fantasies of his own.

At this early stage of me living in the house, though, he seemed hesitant to give away the detail of his visions; it was almost as if he were giving me bits and pieces of what he was thinking to either get me to fill in the gaps or to get me interested.

Eventually, these hyper-sexed images of his broke into my already dwindling creative stream, and in turn started another self-perpetuating, perhaps even clearer, image stream that I struggled to switch off — a rolling movie of crazy, hot, sex.

The Vortex, it seemed, had grown a libido, and the images even had a Fantasia-like quality, featuring me performing as a sexual champion with various lost and unrequited lovers.

After a short time, I moved into my bedroom and started masturbating to this self-generating porn that seemed as if it had been made just for me, with all the people I liked best, performing the most erotic acts I could imagine.

I found these images totally captivating, “even better than the real thing”. In the “real thing”, people weren’t at my beck and call; the actual world, with its limited opportunities, rules, and actual other human beings was always going to run a distant second place to a magical alternate reality where I was the star and nearly anything — and everything — was possible.

So there I was under the blanket; the light was on, and I was pulling and pulling, and I didn’t want these movies to stop, and I kept pulling, but I couldn’t seem to ejaculate. So I kept going, and then I saw, from under the plastic blind in my tiny bedroom with nothing in it but my bed, that it was starting to get light outside.

I remember thinking that it must have been at least an hour that I had been masturbating because it had become day. No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn’t ejaculate. The “movies” just kept getting better, and I couldn’t stop watching them: for one thing, it felt as if I wasn’t actually in control of them or of anything I was doing. And, naturally, I was also enjoying being there.

I think it’s fairly well recognised that sexual fantasy can express more than just sexual desire, and that the things we fantasise about are not necessarily those we want to do in real life. But I found the sexual fantasies I experienced in the Vortex to be especially morally complicated; they presented me simultaneously as who I wanted to be, and who I would never, ever want to be.

And yet the more unpleasant and unclean the fantasies became, the more exciting they seemed. When I finally finished, I pulled the blanket off myself; my hair and face were as wet as if I’d just got out of the shower, and it seemed as if the daylight had been part of the Vortex: it was clearly still dark outside.

So I got up and walked into the kitchen, where Smithy looked at me in surprise.

“Where have you been?” he said. “What time is it?” I asked.

“It’s about 8.45.”

“8.45 at night?”

“Yep — where you have been all day?”

“All day?”

“Yep, you were gone for ages,” Smithy said.

“What day is it?”

“It’s Sunday night. Have you been in that bedroom all day?” Smithy asked.

Yes, I had. I had been masturbating for sixteen hours non-stop, and it felt as if I had been in there for less than an hour.

***

Twenty years ago, Rebecca McKetin did a PhD on whether repeated amphetamine use could cause psychosis in lab rats.

At the time, this was considered a fringe topic in Australia. Today, McKetin is an internationally renowned expert on the links between crystal meth use and psychotic meltdowns.

In her long-term study, McKetin found that methamphetamine users are five times more likely to show symptoms of psychosis than non-users.

The study also showed that the greater the dose, the greater the risk of psychosis. The risk of psychosis also increased with the severity of dependence, and dependent methamphetamine users were a particularly high-risk group for psychosis even after adjusting for a history of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

The study also found that other factors often associated with regular meth use, such as lack of sleep, a history of trauma, and the concurrent use of alcohol and cannabis, also increased the odds of psychosis.

***

After that first weekend in the Vortex at Smithy’s, I was determined to make the most of these self-generating images. I thought the best way to handle this was to use in low doses, sit myself down at a computer as soon as I had a dose, and concentrate on putting energy into creative ideas.

Poetry, songs, more ideas for novels followed.

Songs? Yes — while my dad is a musician, and I used to sing as a young teenager, I have never played an instrument, played in a band, or done anything remotely musical as an adult. Yet here I was, writing and performing songs — even if they weren’t exactly worth listening to.

What happened next is evidence of my increasingly delusional state.

One of the reasons I began writing music was that I had met some professional musicians when I was in Sydney who were exceptionally kind and who had invited me to a few events. During a conversation with one of them — a well-known performer from London — at an after-party, he told me that I had a made a “boring choice” to become a lawyer when I obviously enjoyed doing creative things, and he asked me if I ever felt like writing music.

When I was high on crystal meth, I would daydream about these events, and eventually decided that these musicians had deliberately sought me out because they believed me to be an extraordinary talent who could be a professional musician, and that they had started me on something called “The Journey”.

I even believed that, at times, the performer from London was sending me lyrics for songs via telepathy.

At other times, these delusions would darken, and I believed that they had invited me to the events in order to pretend that they wanted me to become a professional musician, so I would make a fool of myself on stage, and they would get revenge on me for a long list of other nasty things I had, in turn, done to other people throughout my life.

One day I started having invasive thoughts about things people had said on Facebook that I didn’t understand. The more I thought about these references, the more it seemed like everyone, collectively, was making fun of me.

At the time I was also freelance writing, so I thought I would go over to a friend’s and check the computer to see if my article had been published. I googled my name, and some key words from the article, and nothing came up — instead, one of the first hits to come up was a blog written by an American musician of the same name. When I clicked on this blog, which was showcasing this other Luke Williams’ new music, it struck me how poorly written and self-absorbed it was.

I immediately thought that everyone was making fun of me and had invented this satirical blog to send me up.

Because I found it so incredibly clichéd and poorly expressed, I decided that it must be a parody. A parody of me! And, for some reason, I linked this back to my failed attempt at doing a show at Triple J — that somehow the people behind this were people who I used to work with at the station, who were making fun of me.

And when I went back to my Facebook feed, it looked like all my triple j ex-colleagues were making coded allusions to me, and how lame I was, in their status updates.

I contacted a trusted friend, who was able to talk me down from my delusion, and soothe me, at least momentarily.

The Ice Age by Luke Williams.

This is an edited extract from THE ICE AGE: a journey into crystal-meth addiction by Luke Williams (Scribe $29.99).

Originally published as Into the vortex: Luke Williams’ spiral into ice-induced psychosis