What does catatonia feel like?

Just wondering and thought it would be a good discussion topic. I've had visions where I lost touch with everything around me but those don't last very long so I'm not sure I'd call it catatonia. I've also had negative symptoms wherein I didn't move or talk much for hours or a few days, but I still responded to external stimuli so I don't think that's catatonia either.

Is there a way to know if you are going to become catatonic? Etc.

So I've never experienced it but I heard a little about it in this dvd

Take These Broken Wings | Wild Truth

One of the women Catherine Penny was catatonic----she couldn't even open her eyes beyond small slits for a while but she still managed to get to her pdoc appointments while living in a hospital so even though she was capable of some movement she didn't have full control and never spoke to anyone like for years. Anyway its sounds like she was aware of the world not dissociated from it and one day her pdoc said something that made sense to her and she started getting better. These are stories of recovery without psych meds so they are a bit older and I imagine it would be viewed as unethical now not to treat with meds. Still catatonia is pretty rare so I wasn't sure if you would get first person accounts or not so I wanted to give you at least one story to look at.

Wow, I've only had experiences like that from sleep paralysis and Abilify (muscle stiffness and all that). And that didn't last nearly as long. That sounds terrifying.

I think catatonic schizophrenia is probably rare, but I've heard of it coming from other disorders like depression and bipolar so I thought it was worth asking...

Definitely worth asking I mean you never know until you ask right? But yeah super scary but these days they would just keeping injecting you with stuff until you came out of it...not that that is great but better than losing years of your life...

I had catatonic stupor in the summer of 2008 due to severe depression. I actually remember very little of the 6-8 weeks that I was like that: I think maybe it impairs memory formation. What I do remember is that it felt soooooo tiring to move and respond to stimuli so I usually just ignored it. I could still think things in my head but my thoughts were very slow and actually verbalising them was too much effort. I would sit in the exact same position for hours and not feel like that much time had gone by. Mostly I just tried to close my eyes and sleep because I was so tired, but I don't know if I actually fell asleep or not.

Nobody professional in my home town was that concerned about it (my Uni pdoc sent me home), though my parents were really worried about me. I was on an antidepressant but they never tried to increase it or anything while I was like that. All I remember is a nurse screaming at me for faking it for attention and calling me rude because I couldn't answer her questions. (It didn't occur to me to tell my parents about her, and I was so exhausted from trying to summon the energy to talk to her though I couldn't, that I probably wouldn't have been able to tell them anyway.)

Is that kind of what you wanted to know?? I know it scared the cr@p out of me when I 'woke up' out of it, that I could be so out of control like that.

*Willow*

Isn't this a band from Wales?

Sorry, I am manic! Eeek!

Wow. That's an amazing story. I'm sorry you had to go through that.

I've been catatonic a lot. It's very difficult for me to describe the experience. It still happens to me from time to time. It's hell. When I'm catatonic I'm lost in a swirl of (psychotic) thoughts and I am completely powerless to stop it. I become completely unresponsive and I don't move at all for hours on end. I can't move even if I want to. If someone else moves me I'll stay in the position they moved me into, etc. It's all around a complete mess and I hate it with a passion because it's been one of my more persistent symptoms.

For me there are warning signs. My movements become very slow, and I start noticing that my right hand/arm in particular will stay in the same position for hours without me moving it, and if nothing is done about it it can and will turn into full blown catatonia where I can't move anything. I also become very quiet right before a catatonic episode. Another thing others have commented on is that my breathing gets very shallow.

I hope this helps, if you have any questions about my experiences you can go ahead and ask.

I'm glad you mentioned this Willow because I've experienced similar. When I'm catatonic it doesn't seem like much time is passing but in reality hours have gone by, it just doesn't feel like it. Thanks for writing about your experience!

I've never been catatonic and know very little about the subject. I was dx'd with conversion disorder at one time (I think it is called something different now, but idk) because I would experience paralysis of my arm under extreme stress, but I'm not sure I'd consider that being of any correlation to this. I do have a great aunt who would experience catatonia, but the family doesn't really talk about it. The main instance I know of with her is she'd get paranoid delusions and then disappear and family would go out and search for her and she'd be hospitalized. After at least one of these episodes they found her sitting in a chair completely unresponsive to external stimulation and her legs were weeping from edema and lack of movement. She's spent the majority of her life in hospital (for psychiatric reasons) but like I said, family doesn't talk about her.

I have always wondered what that is like for someone experiencing it. I never was "catatonic" in the psychotic sense of the term (because I do not have that type of mental health problem). However, is it possible to get "catatonic" for a little while from being under the influence of psychadelics? There were a few times I think I may have experienced something like this while "out there". I have had a couple of experiences with drugs (mushrooms and massive amounts of weed) where I just kind of went into this state where I "ceased to exist" for short periods of time and just sat somewhere like a comatose person staring at the wall saying nothing with either a blank look or retarded grin on my face. I felt, and still feel that these moments were like looking into something beyond the reality that we all live in on a day to day basis. I feel like those moments truly were an ultimate form of enlightenment even if it was simply a drug-induced stupor, especially since some friends of mine have attained the same state with no drugs involved. I know one guy who it just randomly happened to without the use of any drugs or even meditation. He just looked at a brick wall and all of a sudden, he just became instantly "enlightened" in a similar manner through the power of his own mind. Is this anything like what "catatonia" is?

That sounds like ego death to me...but I can't say for sure...

Of course, that is ego death. I thought maybe catatonia was like a version of ego death that does not come from being on drugs

weed makes me catatonic. im serious. i related a bit to you Steve223. when you said you felt comatose on massive amounts of weed. my tolerance is low for it. so i dont need massive amounts to go into that state of comatose. thats partly why im afraid of it.

i remember two weeks ago or so smoking weed and my brain felt like it was restarting a million times over. but my body was almost robotic like. i was just sitting there. i remember trying to shake the feeling off and sitting in the shower with the hot water on for an hour and then the cold water on me for another a hour after the hot water ran out. so i was just sitting there and there was nothing happeneing my mind mind because my brain felt like it was restarting over and over every second. and so if 1 second i was sitting there then the next second i sat there. and each second added up. time passed so fast and i didnt even realize. i just sat there. staring.

why smoke weed if it makes u feel bad?

because sometimes it makes me feel good. its just about the amount i smoke. im not a regular smoker of it. like 3 hits would be too much for me. 1 is ok. but that day when i went into that comatose state i took too many hits. my tolerance is low.

oh. i know what u mean. sometimes it made me feel good and sometimes it didnt. its a risk to smoke it

It wasn't for me.

*Willow*