Psychosis Is Like A Bad Trip

Think of a drug trip gone wrong, except there's no coming down from it. That's close to what psychosis does. Your own mind stops answering to you, and the cruel part is that you often can't tell it's happening. A person in that state might harm someone and never register what they did. In an earlier era, behavior like that could land you behind the locked doors of an asylum. Put them away, lose the key, move on.

The nearest I've come to anything like it was after back surgery, when I had a pain pump running through an IV. I leaned on that button more than I should have, and every minute stretched out long. All I wanted was for the fog to lift, and the whole time some part of me knew I wasn't thinking straight. Imagine not having that part. Imagine being altered like that with no awareness and no brakes. When it was over, I went around apologizing to people for whatever I might have said or done.

Years before that, as a small kid on codeine cough syrup for my asthma, I had hallucinations. Orange and green bugs, swarming across the room. My mother flipped on the light and they stayed right where they were. Only when the codeine left my system did they vanish. For a child, seeing really is believing.

The same kind of untethering shows up with Alzheimer's and other dementias. My father had Parkinson's, and watching him taught me more than any article could, though the attention paid to patients and the people who care for them has helped the rest of us understand it. People in that condition stop being themselves and have no idea. What chills me most is that early diagnosis now lets some of them see exactly what is coming for them. These patients are so difficult to look after that nursing homes build separate locked units, keeping them from wandering off and losing track of who they are, where they're headed, where they started.

Paranoia breeds ideas that turn dangerous. The conviction that someone is hunting you. Voices in the head giving instructions to do harm. A belief in some private mission that has to be carried out at any cost.

So when do we strip away a person's freedom? And why aren't there more places built to recognize what these people actually need and provide it? Diabetes gets more sympathy than psychosis does. For the person living it, the illness can be a private hell. When someone's brain changes enough that they can no longer function, where exactly do we send them, and do we bother to care for them once they're there? Illness comes in many forms. Some of them society finds palatable, and those get treatment. The ones that aren't socially acceptable get ignored. We tend to claim that people with mental illness want to be sick, that they picked this road for themselves.