In 2020 I entered a major psychotic episode and completely lost contact with any agreed reality.  The pandemic hit in March of that year and during a period of when I was already struggling hard with a yet to be diagnosed mental illness.  The pandemic and its ensuing chaos sent me to the edge of insanity.  The compounding mix of pandemic and mental illness meant that I had only one place to go, insane.

The problem with bipolar psychosis or mania is that you are so supremely confident what you are feeling is real and have absolute confidence you know it all to be how you say it is.

The suggestion of medication by a psychiatrist didn’t go well when levelled at me in my psychotic state.  I distrusted everything apart from my manic thoughts and the new reality I had created in my bipolar mania.

I thought the psychiatrist was trying to poison or kill me and this thought was heightened by the fact that the medication she suggested, Risperidone, was an anagram of ‘Prisoner Die’.  In my manic state I decided I was the ‘prisoner’ and that she wanted me to ‘die’.

I was supremely confident, or to use the lingo I was grandiose, I dare not reveal to her that I had sussed out her evil machinations.  As my mania grew and ate away at my life, I had more weird zoom meetings with my psychiatrist and tried my hardest to be ‘normal’.

I obviously wasn’t very successful as she continued to insist I try going on the Risperidone (prisoner die) as it would help alleviate my lack of sleep, racing thoughts and erratic behaviour.  I both rejected whole heartedly what she was saying but knew deep down I was sick.  But I didn’t want to die and was scared of everything, particularly her and her suggestions.

After a particularly bad episode of hallucinations and believing reality was like a ‘Truman Show’ or ‘Matrix’ type deal, with everyone in on my torture apart from me, the levy broke on my medication resistance.  After this horrendous day I conceded and agreed to take medication, as my partner could take no more.  In fact I didn’t yet know it, but I couldn’t take anymore physically or mentally.

At first I took half the prescribed dose and would open my mouth to show my partner I had swallowed it whilst saying ‘thank you Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest).  Even in my torturous mania I was funny, or thought I was!

The following week was hell on earth as my manic mind fought hard against the medication.  I temporarily became more hypomanic and would sit and say nothing to my partner whilst in a busy world of my own.  Getting up at 5am and watching Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut back to back.  I became convinced I was better and now believed Stanley Kubrick had made all his films as a message to me and me alone.

My partner was in despair as I became temporarily worse and harder to handle in some ways.  After a week or so I agreed to the full dose and came crashing back to reality, and fuck me reality was anxiety provoking and desperately, darkly depressing.

Once out of a manic phase you are left with nothing, nothing apart from embarrassment and damage to your close relationships.  I instantly became aware of my predicament and it was all encompassing in its ability to make me anxious and depressed.  I had ignored bills, jobs, friendships and any responsibilities for nearly a year of extreme grandiose mania.

The anxiety was the worst I had ever experienced and felt like I was being suffocated or choked by a ghost.  I would imagine I had cancer or an impending stroke.  My mind would not leave me alone, every thought was filled with either a life threatening condition, dread or something that I had neglected.  The sense of guilt and pressure was as big as the universe and my appetite for torturing myself even bigger than that.

So began the cycle of speaking to doctors again (whilst not trusting them) and getting medication to treat my now chronic anxiety and depression.  My General Practitioner prescribed  Buspirone and I couldn’t work out any anagrams and was so desperate would of snorted cyanide if he had said it would abate my all enveloping anxiety, so i took it and thank god, it worked.

After a few weeks my anxiety had gone, or was manageable at a certain level, should I say.  With its departure I accidentally welcomed in depression.  A soul crushing, empty void of misery.  The depression was bigger than anything I thought I could experience.  It filled every part of me, it tainted everything and everything was shit.

So you guessed it, back to the psychiatrist this time.  I explained how bad the depression was and how I would happily sleep all day so as not to experience any more mental pain.  I informed him the anxiety and mania was thankfully gone and all I’m left with is a soul crushing, energy sucking, doom laden depression of a kind that I had never ever experienced.  He suggested the depression was the flip-side to the mania and that the deeper and longer the manic episode, then the deeper and harder the depression.  This made sense to me, as I had literally used myself up in that glorious, confident diversion from a shared consensus.  The mania was like rock hard ice and that ice had melted and flooded and water logged every part of my mind with dirty, dank, septic water.

Ive now been prescribed Lamictal and thankfully can feel a slight lift and a glimmer of hope that this depression, in time, will go.  The other good thing is that I cannot for the life of me get any anagrams out of ‘Lamictal’ apart from climatal and that its meaning is pertaining to or relating to ‘the climate’ and can be officially used as a word in the game of scrabble apparently.

See, I told you I was funny.