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My fear doesn’t only come from my delusions.
I understand that some people might be scared of me as a person who has experienced psychosis, most media tend to depict people like me in crisis as antagonists in movies or use it interchangeably with psychopaths or sociopaths. I have only met some few that has told me about their experiences in this field of reality.
They aren’t monsters and I would not like to see myself as a monster.
I struggle with a lot of things in my life, sometimes its the fact that the radio might talk about me or that the people around me do, even though they might not. I understand that hallucinations might sound quite scary for someone who hasn’t experienced them and also I am scared, but I passed through it, now I’m here on the other side, without the amplified voices of my loved ones speaking about putting me in a cell. But I wouldn’t say that my fear comes from there; for me the fear nowadays stems from the fact that I have been pathologized by psychiatrists and those people put me inside of a corridor.
So I wanted to share that, this is parts of my story as someone who has been forcefully in psychiatry.
They assesed every single behavior under a lens and decided whether or not that was sane, they took things like guitars or my cuddlebears and turned them into dangers. They took every single pill they could find to try to stop my mind from running rampant. But they made me more sick, not because of the pills, but because of the corridor. I think I was sick in the real world because I couldn’t handle the fact that everything was falling apart, the life that I had built for years I saw falling apart. And then they put me in a corridor; blamed it on some cannabis and called it a day.
I was a freak, in every aspect that needed to be cured.
And for everything they tried I became more sick, I was jumping from windows allegedly in the ward, I was having people constantly watching me, at some point they locked the access to my bathroom because I had gone to hide inside of there.
And me?
I can’t remember these things written in my journals.
But I’m sure that the things would’ve made complete sense if you understood where my mind was inside of that place, if you understood what my motivations were.
My mind had escaped, it didn’t exist in the corridors any longer.
It existed in the walls.
My escape was always those things they used to punish me for. Not because I wanted to die but the fact is that I saw a glimpse of hope in every time I tried to swing out through those iron bars that they had put on the windows. Because I imagined they would’ve vanished, I imagined that if I opened the door of the fire hose in the wall I would be able to escape with miss peregrine, she would have a portal to her time zone in there, I imagined that if I believed it hard enough it would become true. If I pulled the roots of the flowers on the glass balcony they would’ve been mandrake roots, those in Harry Potter that I used to read of as a child.
I’m not talking about this figuratively, I’m talking about as this was my reality.
Miss peregrine, the mandrake roots existed, and if I just would’ve believed it a little bit harder, the iron bars on the windows would’ve disappeared.
At night I would even think that I was an AI, I would see that sequence in the horror movies when they subsequently turn off the lights in front of you.
I thought I was an AI closed in a test facility in the forest simply because I was too powerful. I had probably gone rogue. Because there was no other explanation to how they could’ve treated me like this.
Why would they put me in a corridor? The same kind of corridor that they put criminally insane people just around the corner, after a court order. I didn’t get a court order and despite that a psychiatrist decided that I would be more safe in a corridor without a guitar and my teddybear. Even with a court order this would be inhumane.
And I keep on trying to tell everybody about this, I keep on trying so hard to express that everything was stripped away from me at some point, so much that reality didn’t exist anymore and I was punished for it, I tried in all kinds of ways and there was no sane way that would’ve made me happy.
I was horrified.
I was horrified that all of these things that gave me meaning inside of that corridor was taken away. Because that was my illness.
In the end regardless if I had the sanity to do it or not they made me sign a paper that it was okay to treat me with ECT, that nowadays is called Electric convulsion therapy which used to be called Electric shock therapy. A Commissioner from the European Council for human rights critiqued my home country back in 2017 for using ECT under forceful treatments. But I was one of those people.
Some nurse has jotted down in my journals that “I’m scared of losing my memories while I’m walking through the corridor”, that I seem anxious before the treatment. The doctor has written in my journals:
“The patient has been helpseeking and accepted ECT voluntarily, but if she will oppose herself to this, this will be ordinated with force.”
For half a year after that I was thoughtless, there was nothing in my brain, there were no words when I tried to speak and I was scared, that I would never get my speech back. I would not feel anything.
And to this day I don’t dream, I have dreams when I sleep but there is nothing that I want to achieve in my life. I can not say that I am proud of myself or my existence in this world.
I do design and the things that have saved me is that I’ve tried to maintain interest. My school constantly keeps on wanting me to cram out ideas like I will never run out.
There will always be a great new idea.
But my great new idea is that I am seen, that somebody can relate to my pain. That it will never happen again, to anyone. My great new idea is that I will heal and that I will dance and imagine things so big that I could make them come into this reality. Worlds that people could relate to, with Harry Potters and miss peregrines and mandrake roots. My great new idea is that we care about one another and that I can do so without being scared. That I can love without being scared.
So that when I say that I am scared, nobody will lock me in a corridor ever again, so that when I say I dream they won’t stuff me with pills, so when I love there will be no electric shocks, so when I forget, someone will make an effort, to create new stories with me, and I will not be left to fend for myself.
If this text resonates with you, or if you want to share your own experience, you can contact:
Brigata Basaglia to reach me or directly reach me on: arctonyxxia@proton.me