BY: ANONYMOUS

The author of this article wishes to stay anonymous.

TW: sexual assault

Since college I’d been smoking weed. I’d known what it felt like to get high. To feel elevated. As I smoked with friends, my friends would tell me I should try acid and shrooms. I always hesitated. One time I micro-dosed on shrooms and I remembered feeling my grandmother’s spirit and that a painting in my ex’s living room looked like it was melting. I never tried more or other psychedelic drugs after that micro-dosing experiment. Nor did I need to.

In college, I moved day to day not knowing I had bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed just weeks after I graduated following a severe breakdown. During that breakdown and further along into my hospitalization at two different psych wards for a total of six weeks I went through extreme psychosis. It was like a very long bad acid trip that was prompted by unbalanced chemicals and exacerbated by poorly prescribed medication at one hospital.

Writing about this nearly four years since then feels harder than speaking about it for some reason. Like right after it happened I would tell strangers about this experience on first dates often, I think, as a way to just process. Now I feel less inclined to tell every person I meet that this happened to me. I think I’m finally starting to move on from it, even though it will always be a huge arch in my character development.

Psychosis for me was mostly terrifying. I still look back on my time in the hospital and I wonder what things happened and which didn’t. I remember vividly that I imagined there was an active shooter in the mental ward. I also had political conspiracy theories that manifested into psychosis events like I thought I was being auctioned off as a sex slave by Kim Jung Un and Donald Trump. It was wild. I, a white woman, also thought at one point I was Barack Obama.

At another point I thought I was getting threats of sexual assault by other patients and that other women in the psych ward were telling me they were experiencing the same. That last one feels more confusing than the latter examples, but is the most believable the more I think about it.

I can and can’t remember

The memories that feel like dreams

Questions swarm my truths

In trauma

Craziness shrouds the white man’s definition of

Validity

But what about

The lucidity

Of these memories

That nothing could possibly

stick so vividly

Still in my mind

Over

And

Over

Again

All I know is there was fear. Fear of myself and fear of others of my hallucinations. And possibly those who were seething to take advantage and feed off the fear.

To talk about psychosis as a woman in a mixed gender mental ward -- the psychosis is not something that can be discussed in a silo. Poor systemic accountability of understanding how doctors worsened the psychosis through poor prescriptions and then failed to protect me and other women from other male patients seeking to take advantage of our vulnerability must be considered as well. One man touched my ass in the kitchen, another woman warned me to be weary of the male patients, while another woman confessed to me she was sexually assaulted. Another man repeatedly called me “my pussy.” All these things feel hard to believe. Everything that I try to remember in that ward, because of my psychosis, has caused me to gaslight myself. I try to shove it down, because the haze, the fear, and the predatory behavior was the most vulnerable I have ever felt in my entire life.

If you ever go through psychosis, please make sure you are in an environment, if possible, that is safe. That your doctors do not fear you. That they don’t over medicate you (I was given three antipsychotics at the same time) because of their fear of my hallucinations. Make sure your support system holds healthcare providers accountable for your safety. I was lucky to be switched to another hospital which eventually helped stabilize me. I’m still left with scars from being locked up in one of those isolation rooms where I received unnecessary sedation shots straight to my ass.

I wasn’t a threat. I was abused, because of my psychosis. While I wish this was a story about how I laugh off the silly thoughts I had that weren’t true -- the reality is it snowballed into a fucking nightmare that couldn’t stop getting worse until I was literally ripped out of the environment I truly had no control in.

I’m glad I’ve never tried acid, because I’ve hallucinated enough for many lifetimes. With unfortunately very few highs.

I still feel compelled to share this story, because it’s my truth. A truth that I don’t think we, as people who go through severe mental illness, are able to have spaces to share often. Mental illness took me into the darkest place and most unsafe space of my entire life. But somehow I was blessed enough to find the right medication, and I don’t suffer from the anxiety that I had before my diagnosis and treatment. At the very least, I am grateful for that freedom.

Did I deserve to be abused to get to that point? Absolutely not. And as hard as I try not to define myself by it, I still find myself talking about it. I see the concern in people’s silent responses. And I don’t blame them. It’s a powerless feeling, when a whole system abuses you for your mental illness, and they can get away with it. But it’s being able to walk away and survive and somehow tell your story to keep it alive, that takes a little bit of that agency back.

Just know if you’ve been abused after psychosis, I see you and I hear you and I hope you find a space somewhere, anywhere to process your story. Just to take back a little bit of what they stole from you. Know you are loved.

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