My experience of psychosis

Dr. Debra Bercovici PhD and Eden Arefaine’s article on autism & psychosis describes what psychosis is and the relationship between autism and psychosis; but if you’ve never experienced psychosis yourself, you may have a hard time understanding what it’s like and why a psychotic person believes their own experience. But as someone who has experienced psychosis, I can tell you that the experience can be really quite subtle, and the realization that you’ve experienced psychosis may not come until after the fact.

In this article, I will describe my own experience of psychosis, from back in 2011.

Hard to grasp

It’s pretty hard to put my experience of psychosis into words. When you take a psychoactive drug, you know your experience has been synthetically altered. But with psychosis, you can similarly experience a deviation from normative reality, yet not fully grasp or appreciate that your subjective experience of reality has been altered. In a state of psychosis, others may notice an obvious break from reality that isn’t at all obvious to you. In fact, during my psychosis, I would have said others just aren’t seeing reality accurately, or not as deeply as I came to see it. Other people just weren’t paying enough attention!

What’s interesting is that even now that I’m no longer experiencing psychosis, I can’t fully accept that I was irrational; some of the things I experienced during my psychosis in 2011 still feel like deeper truths about reality.

Before I explain why, let me briefly say something about a more straightforward experience of psychosis, which is easier to relay in a way, as I can fully accept this constituted a break from reality. I would often experience reality like a dream. And this is something I was also aware of at the time. I noted it with amusement; it was both fascinating to me, and actually quite an enjoyable experience overall; although it had some darker undertones as well.

The pleasant & dark sides of psychosis

The pleasant experience was walking outside, and feeling an altered state that made everything seem dream-like. I don’t mean visually; it wasn’t that I saw the world in altered colors, or that I saw things that weren’t there. It was more of a phenomenological experience; the best way I can describe it is that it just felt like I was dreaming, but a more or less mundane dream. Maybe there was a slight sense of walking on clouds, or reality seeming more vivid and more illusory. But the experience was more bodily and conceptual than visual. I guess this could be described as dissociation.

The darker side of this that would sometimes come up is the diminishing of certain constraints. When you’re of a sound mind, you probably won’t be thinking of ending your life. But this is something I would think about quite often. Not in the sense of being suicidal and actually wanting to pursue death, but more of a philosophical mind state, where I would think about the illusory nature of life and the fascinating possibility of stepping in front of an incoming tram or train, and the consequent lack of sense experience. Life is not much more than a culmination of sense experience and the conceptualizations we impose on life and make sense of our sense experience, isn’t it? Well, imagine your sense experience becoming dream-like, and your conceptualizations of what constitutes life, what gives it meaning, and what allows you to discriminate between an abundance of different aspects of life—imagine all that becoming altered by significant cognitive distortions.

I don’t know if I’m making much sense here. It’s probably impossible to grasp or truly appreciate any of it without having experienced it. It’s hard to imagine a subjective reality for which you have no frame of reference. And I think that is really what makes psychosis possible; without a frame of reference, you’re going to more or less trust and rely on your experience of reality no matter what. It’s quite impossible to live your life on the basis that your experience of reality is fundamentally unreliable.

The part of my psychosis that is harder to explain is how my cognitive distortions affected all aspects of my experience beyond conscious awareness. Note how I said you have to be able to trust and rely on what you experience being more or less true. That’s certainly what I did. While I could acknowledge experiencing dream-like states that clearly deviated from normal everyday experience, I wasn’t really aware of anything that presented to me AS IF they were normal everyday experiences.

Meaning generation overdrive

Most significantly, what I experienced during my psychosis was a drastic increase in meaningful connections between events. I came up with a name for what I was experiencing: ‘guided events’. Years later, I came across Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity, which is somewhat similar. Synchronicity is when you meaningfully relate circumstances that aren’t actually causally related. The subjective experience of this phenomenon is finding great coincidences that are meaningful to you, but which are causally unrelated. An example of this would be hearing a song on the radio that perfectly describes something you’re going through, or something that just happened. Or, you happen to think of an old friend which you haven’t been in contact with or even thought about for years, and then that very evening, they happen to call you to ask how it’s going.

But synchronicity acknowledges that these events are not connected in any way except for in your mind, where you ascribe special importance and a meaningful connection to them. My conception of guided events goes deeper than that. During my psychosis, I was absolutely obsessed with the idea that there is some guiding principle to reality. I wasn’t thinking of a God actively wishing events into existence, but rather I was thinking of some kind of physics or metaphysics that quantized events in reality, thus increasing the chances of events becoming meaningfully connected. Not meaningful in an objective sense, because things are only meaningful insofar as we ascribe meaning to them. Rather, I believed there was some force or natural principle to the world that increased the likelihood of events showing up in clusters, from which different people could derive different meanings, if only they paid enough attention.

And this was the fundamental belief that drove my psychosis; the idea that unlike most other people, who were so preoccupied with their own lives, I was actually paying attention to some fundamental aspects of reality that escaped other people’s notice. I experienced many guided events daily, and I would meticulously log them in a document that—in a matter of months—became over a 100 pages long.

It also seemed to me that “bad luck” came in clusters. It just never happened anymore that I would experience a singular event that impacted me negatively; no, if one thing would go wrong, I could count on a whole chain of negative events. Things like my USB drive no longer working, missing the train to my parents, and my phone breaking down happening all in one day. Things like that made me believe that there was some force actively working against me. What did I do wrong that I “angered reality?” I’ve never believed in God or spirits or anything like that, but these are the kind of thoughts I would frequently have. I wouldn’t necessarily believe an actual entity was working against me, but I was certainly quite preoccupied with thoughts like that.

I don’t actually remember how I got out of my psychosis. I guess my preoccupation with the fundamental reality of life gradually just diminished. Eventually, I stopped documenting the guided events altogether. It’s not like I disregarded the existence of guided events, but rather that I started feeling that my obsession with them wasn’t conducive to me.

Magical thinking returning?

As it happens, just yesterday, I told a friend about a guided event I experienced. It’s actually interesting that I was asked to write about my psychosis now, because in the last weeks, there have been about three guided events I made note of—whereas I haven’t really paid attention to them in quite a while before these last three weeks. Oh the irony of me ascribing some special meaning to guided events coming up again right before being asked to talk about my psychosis. Except, I knew weeks ago that Debra was writing two articles on psychosis, so maybe these events aren’t actually disconnected; maybe I started paying attention to some of the same things I was obsessed by during my psychosis, exactly because I was confronted with the topic of psychosis.

For me, the fundamental aspect of psychosis is exactly this uncertainty about things that allows for magical thinking to try to make sense of it all. As such, whenever synchronicity comes up, I deliberately refrain from engaging with them. I don’t want to lose myself in that again.

Have you experienced psychosis? Did you realize it at the time?