So I was giving a talk at a national meeting on my research and at some point during the conference some of the talks started seeming weird almost fake...that was the beginning of my episode then someone actually laughed at one of the talks, that would never happen its a very rigid professional environment but I believed it to be real I had zero insight. Before the conference I was so busy writing two grants and training in a student into the lab. I also had to write a new IBC(biosafety) protocol. We work on E coli and diarrheal disease. Anway I was fine but stressed during that period, then came the talk then came and then the crazy----I started thinking that the professional organization that I belong to was actually made up of psychics and that I was selected for my psychic ability(hearing voices) as well as my scientific ability for a special subsection of that was interconnected for their psychic powers and they all worked on grants together. I fully believed this as the people I knew in this organization who I'd been interacting with at the conference but not in day to day life all became voices.

The delusion that got me caught was about a former lab member who I thought had raped me. While I was in the hospital for the "heart attack" I remembered that I had also been raped earlier that morning---it was a combination of physical hallucination and delusion. Anyway the former lab member was several states away and had recently announced his marriage so it made no sense---I mean I had to talk to the police and everything and give them my underwear. It was a real thing and I thought it was this really complex scenario where I had been psychically raped but then when I woke up my door was unlocked so I thought it could be real too. But I was supposed to set up this former lab member for the rape because he was also the devil. So I told the cops that I thought it was this guy and later when they called back luckily I had been over the delusion with the pdoc so I realized that just because my door was unlocked didn't mean that I was raped. So I told the cops I had just gotten out of inpatient and that I thought I was wrong. They were very nice and told me they hoped I was feeling better. Sorry if this is complicated but it really was.

Anyway zero insight until after the meeting when I was back at work and I thought the voices could be schizophrenia but that was for like 5 minutes somehow my brain preferred that I be special and psychically gifted...and the voices proved themselves to me with various knowledge that is probably just stuff I learned at one point then forgot. So initially I paid the voices no heed thinking it was a big prank and someone had put a transmitter in my ear or tooth or something then 2 weeks went by and I knew the batteries for something so small I couldn't see would not last that long. So it had to be real----I was lost entirely but I kept going to work everyday at the 2 week point I became manic, doing 3 days worth of work in one and sleeping 2 hours a night if you could call it sleep..it was more like I blacked out. I once had the voices call me a paranoid schizophrenic while I was trying to goto sleep, they were all having a big conversation about me. I was only sick for a month and a half but I remember everything in great detail. Pdoc called it acute, apparently a lot of people have a slower onset. On the meds I can totally tell when I'm hallucinating though so I have some idea what it must be like to know. Frankly it felt better and was a lot more fun not to know; however it was dangerous...when I thought that I had a transmitter in my tooth I was thinking of breaking all my teeth out with a hammer----that would not have been good. Luckily I figured I'd have to go to the dentist after breaking them out to get the stubs removed and I was afraid they'd just put another transmitter in. So I decided I would just put up with it until the batteries died. Sorry this is so long, but that's how my story began.