When Was Your First Episode?

When was your first psychotic episode? How long did it last? How did you get out of it?

When I was twenty-five I had my first manic episode in which I heard things that weren't there, etc. It lasted for almost a month. I checked myself into the hospital and a week later, I took the the Depakote they prescribed me, and woke up the next morning with the realization that it had all been an hallucination.

When I was 38 I had my next psychotic experience, which was much more frightening, and changed my diagnosis to schizoaffective. I'd say the episode lasted for about a month. Again, I was hospitalized and meds. are what brought me back to reality - Seroquel.

It's very difficult when we go through a psychotic episode to believe that it is not real. I had a hard time believing it wasn't real even after I was better. This makes it hard to take medication. I thought medication would some how muddle what was really taking place. But the opposite is true.

I've had hallucinations and out-of-body experiences since been very young, and severe crashes into hopeless depression and emotional turmoil from the age of around 16. But I'm guessing that you mean a episode that instilled serious fear, confusion and panic - an episode of nightmarish existential despair. For me that was when I was 21. I was homeless at the time and into drugs. I hung around with "friends" who were also drug users. After a night of taking speed and going without sleep, I then the next day smoked some weed. The combo of speed-comedown, cannabis, poor living, and been surrounded by people I could not trust was the trigger. Reality shattered. I can only remember fragments of what happened that night.

Thinking that people were trying to poison me, plotting against me, making fun of me.

Going into the kitchen to drink from the tap rather than what was offered.

Faking unconciousness like a mongoose so that people would leave me alone.

My "friends" trying to bundle me into the car and my subsequent escape attempt.

Finding the door locked and having to fight my way through the crowd around me.

Hiding in the bathroom, under the sink, tears, snot and blood running down my face from where I clawed my face.

People gathered around me with ear-pieces and invisible pumps that controlled the levels of the chemicals in my body.

Hyperventilating and almost passing out when people got me out of the bathroom.

Been taken to someone else's house where I fell unconscious and finally slept, dreamlessly.

After that I had periodic attacks of less intensity for several months, and it took me around three years to truly overcome the shock of that night.

Hmm, mine was before I turned 20, and I was in severe panic in a different country. Mostly I was on edge from too much stress during the trip, too much suppressed emotion or fear perhaps, seeing sick relatives did not help. Needless to say, I was hypersensitive and the places where my mother and I were going did not make me feel safe. I was terrified and I saw lights flashing during a different night, and basically that was a sign that day that something was really going to go wrong energetically. It was as if no one else saw those flashes, and denied seeing them, so then I didn't trust the people around me. I nearly jumped out of my hotel room because of panic and not having enough air. It was seriously like a horror movie! Needless to say I was in a difficult place and the circumstances that time were so strained both with my mother and my environment that I did not know whom to trust. Too much panic, adrenaline for two weeks, and I snapped at the end of that week. I was unconscious for a day. I threatened and yelled and screamed, it was truly terrifying and the worst possible experience of my life. Once I got back to the states, well eventually with some medications and hospitalization my mental state evened out. But to this day, it's difficult to talk about because it was simply too much for me to handle, too much anger, fear, sick relatives, foreign country, bad relationship with my mother, though we later made up. Just it was too much psychic or psychological trauma, and being a sensitive introvert in that setting did not help. People and some circumstances are absolutely vile and it's not my fault that I was a victim of those circumstances. I'm learning to let go of self-blame and recovering my dignity despite psychological illness.