Reflections on Kate’s experiences & tips

April 20, 2013: “Kate”

Did you have the experience that people were trying to understand what you were going through? And if so did it matter in any way?

I definitely sensed that people were trying to understand what I was going through but this was mostly coming from people who loved me (family, friends). I felt their love reaching out to me. They wanted me back. Without this sense I don’t think I would have healed. So much of my healing had to do with my determination to break through that “pane of glass” that was separating me from the people I loved. Half of that determination came from my need and love for them and the other half came from their need and love for me. Throughout my psychosis I still knew they loved me and I knew I had to “get to them” but I just didn’t know how. But this sense that they were reaching out to me helped me to strive with all my might to get better. I didn’t have much control and certainly couldn’t will myself to get better but I did feel as though I was striving to get back to them.

At the same time however, it scared me that people in fact couldn’t understand what I was going through. Through no fault of their own they looked at me in confusion, wondering what was wrong with me. This added to the terror and the belief that I was all alone. When I was severely depressed but not yet psychotic, I wanted to express what I was going through but I felt it was futile. This feeling that they clearly could not understand me is where that “pane of glass” came from. Now that I’ve been through a number of episodes and have had the opportunity to later express what all of this is like, as I am doing now, I think that when (if) it happens again in some way it won’t feel quite as futile. Not that it won’t be scary. But even in my most recent episode, the experience of psychosis was different because I had been through it before. There was some sense of familiarity. There were small moments in which I remembered that others knew this part of me and thus the “pane of glass” was not futile, was not as permanent, was not “eternal damnation” even though it may have felt like it. I am not as scared of psychosis as I was when I didn’t know what it was like. When you are on that edge of the cliff and you are afraid you are going to fall, it is so much scarier if you have no idea what will happen when you fall. I now know that if I fall, I am perfectly able to get back up again eventually because that has been my experience. I understand myself better and my family and friends also understand me better.

I also came to realize that others have in fact experienced the same thing. I’m not alone in having had experiences of severe depression and psychosis. So many people suffer these things. And when I hear some of them describe it, it seems very much like my own experience. And I realize now, that we all live under the same human condition. I’m not somehow special as I ignorantly thought when I had never experienced anything of its strangeness before and thus assumed no one else had either. It is not spooky. It’s just an experience. And one I am not alone in.

The very first time it happened no one understood and I knew they were trying to understand but couldn’t and like I said before, this may have been the scariest part of the whole thing. What might help is if we all accept the fact that this could happen to anyone. That psychosis is a real thing that happens and if it happens to someone you love or someone you are trying to help, they are still the same person and they often can still sense your love even if they don’t act like it. At least that’s how it was for me. I can’t really speak for others but I would venture to guess that other people can also sense that you are trying to help and understand, and that this does in fact matter and make a difference!

Did the outside world penetrate your world? Were you processing what people said and did? Were you aware of your own body and your own physicality?

I would consider my descent into severe depression and psychosis a process of slowly losing my sense of the outside world. But I still saw people. I knew for example that someone was at one point pushing me in a wheelchair but my interpretation of that was inaccurate. I thought that I had traveled in time and was now an old woman in a nursing home on the verge of death. The difference between this reality and that unreality was not so much about physicality for me but about my interpretation of that physicality. I felt it when someone touched me and I knew they were touching me. I could look in someone’s eyes and know that I was looking into their eyes. The difference is that I may have thought that that person was, for example, an incarnation of God or the devil. Something completely disconnected from reality. But the feeling of touch from someone who showed genuine care for me was still a positive sensation just as it would be in the “real world.” A positive and genuine touch would be interpreted as “God” touching me, while a negative non-genuine touch would be interpreted as perhaps a ghost or the devil touching me. Everything was in extremes. But all the senses were still there.

However, during the worst parts of my state of catatonia, I’m not sure but I may have been so “gone” that I didn’t sense anything around me and was in a sort of sleeping state. I do remember periods when everything was happening in slow motion and I have a clear memory of my family visiting me and watching a movie with me in the hospital. But for me the movie only lasted what felt like just a few minutes and it felt like time had sped up. I really had lost a sense of time or maybe my brain was just shutting off periodically. I don’t really know. It just felt really strange and scary.

How did “touch” feel to you and when/how and by whom was it helpful and when was it not?

Like I just said in the above question, touch really did affect me. In a very real way I could sense a “genuine” touch (one with love and care attached to it) as opposed to a “non-genuine touch” one that maybe felt fake or insincere. When I was psychotic, “touch” was experienced in an extreme. It mattered a lot. A “good touch” was extremely healing. The fact that I felt so alone and disconnected from others made it so that when someone touched me, it was as though that “pane of glass” had been broken momentarily. But if someone touched me in a fake way as though they were pretending to care, I really could tell, and it made me feel even more distant from reality because their touch was not honest. It made me feel even more alone. Only when someone touched me with a purpose of caring for me did I feel the positive effects and those positive effects were tremendous!

I know for myself there is certain music with which I feel a very deep, in a sense spiritual connection, and I imagine if I were in a similar situation this music would help me stay connected to what I love about this life. In your writings you mentioned playing the guitar, so I wonder what role music might have for you in this way?

When I was becoming severely depressed I remember that music felt very powerful. However, because I was so depressed it sometimes felt emotionally painful. It reminded me of beauty but I felt that I could never feel happy again and that I had lost happiness forever. Sometimes poetry or any written word had the same effect. I remember sitting alone, re-reading a card that my parents had given me for my high school graduation. In it they quoted a passage from the Bible that goes: “You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.” (Isaiah 55:12). When I read this I wept. I sensed its beauty and at the same time I sensed how profoundly distant “joy” and “peace” were from me. It was as though I was reading words written by a recently deceased loved one. Music was the same way. It was an experience of grief that I could no longer feel joy, yet I could still feel the beauty. This is how it was as I was descending into psychosis. When I was on the other side and in the process of healing, music and poetry had a different effect. Rather than feeling the grief that I was losing my ability to feel joy, instead I felt a stirring in my heart that I was “relearning” the experience of joy. The beauty of music and writing at that time was leading me back to the experience of joy. No one can guess what effect music will have on someone experiencing mental illness. But there is never anything wrong with providing the opportunity for something beautiful.

How does the spiritual lens through which you understand those early moments of coming back to this reality impact your world now? Are the “angels” who were on the unit with you still felt and experienced in this reality or were they inhabitants of that in-between place?

I have often grappled with my spiritual connection to those psychotic experiences. It is not just the first episode that I have a spiritual connection to. It is every single episode, both manic and depressive. Your question is my own question. I am a very spiritual person and my “illness” is in a way an overflowing of that spirituality, which is scary. It makes me question where the border between my spirituality and my “illness” exists. What is real about it and what is not? It would not be fair for someone to tell me that all that I experienced was delusional. I remember on the psych ward when I was in the process of healing, I would look out the window at the sun rising or setting and I felt the deep spiritual beauty of it and my “psychosis” intensified that experience. It was extremely powerful and healing. When someone spoke to me with love and care, it doesn’t matter that I interpreted them to be a manifestation of God. In my right mind, I believe that God and Love are one and the same. So in my psychosis, that sense that Love and God are the same was simply intensified. When they showed me love, they showed me God. That is very real and will always be real to me. I want to write so much more about the connection between my spirituality and my illness. I’m working on it.

What a gift! Kate offers these reflections without expectation for responses. However, I am happy to share with her any responses/reflections/further questions. I know she would value hearing from you.

BTW, Kate would actually prefer to use her ‘real name.’ For now, I’m sticking to the pseudonym “Kate” until we have a chance to think through the possible ripple effects for choosing to share her identity. Do you have any ideas here?

Peggy

Thanks for sharing this Peggy! So nice to have an ongoing connection to Kate and her insights. I am so glad to hear she is going to work as a mental health counsellor as it feels like her experiences, insights, ideas, openness, and loving ways will help make her a skilled counsellor – skilled in the ways that most matter to me. I am also glad she is writing more of her thoughts around spirituality as I’ve noticed in conversations with many people who have struggled with some delusional thinking – that they feel often all their ideas around spirituality might get dismissed and they do not get a chance to express the pieces that really matter to them. In fact, I am working with a young father right now who wants to see his children more but child protective services are questioning his “mental fitness.” And one of the areas of concern is how he expresses his spiritual beliefs to his kids. I am glad I read this post as when I speak to him about this I will hold some new ideas in my head- particularly about intensity and what might be the essence of what he wants to share.
As for the name change – Kate is Kate to me now as I have followed her story for a while so I might be confused!! I would need the “formerly know as” help. But I am fine with her using whatever name she wants! Mind you I am in a land very far way….

Thanks again,
Sarah

Hi Sarah,
Hi Peggy,
Hi All,
It’s been a while and too many different directions I have taken my life since first learning about Kate’s relationship with the psychosis. I just quickly looked through her recent writing and the one thing that stood out for me is the use of the word “my” and the word “illness” i.e. ‘my mental illness’.
I have been noticing that the folks who come for consult use the same kinds of possessive pronouns when they speak of “THE mental illness”. As I purposely emphasize on “THE” I ask if it is intriguing in any way for them that they would hold possession of “the mental illness” that has colonized their lives. Where does the “my” come from? When did they take ownership of “the mental illness”.
I had this conversation with someone who has been coming for consult to me for over five years and has been associated with the clinic for far more years and the “mental health delivery system” for over 40 years just this past week. “Is it in any way curious that he would refer to himself as mentally ill and would call it ‘my mental illness’?” “Does referring to it as ‘my mental illness’ mean something to him?” I elicited the “bad seed theory”. That he somehow, as well as many others in his family, had the propensity, the gene if you will, to “be or become mentally ill.” “He was born that way.” Which may mean that “the mental illness” and he are one and the same. Something that he may never get rid of until he dies. Perhaps explaining attempts against his life, even.

(This theory is upheld by our clinic and even more so by the sister rehabilitation program that very much is dependent on the number of folks attending the program daily. Since dismantling the state run sanitariums, private industry provides the space for folks who are in need of a “sanctuary”. To call our system at this time “Health Care” or “Mental Health Care” is a misnomer. It is more apt to call it: “Disease Management” and the word management pertains to privatization and its profit making imperatives.)

He began to explain that even an aunt, “mother’s sister who had married a prominent academician and moved to west coast had had nervous break downs,” though he postulated that the move to west coast could have been a strain as it would be so different. I shared with him briefly some of my thoughts about “the trauma of dislocation” and asked could it be “that his aunt was plucked away from her kin and the life that she might have envisioned for herself?” “Could it be that she was expected to give up pursuit of her dreams to follow the dreams of the man she married for that was the prescription of the time, as is even still now, that women may be expected to forgo their dreams as those of their male partners are privileged and considered to have more worthy and possessing more potential to achieve?” “Could the so called nervous break downs have been expression of the sense of loss and the protest against the injustice of being expected to let go of dreams and remaining near her roots.” I also asked if he had been around plants at all and ever noticed that they may not survive “being plucked away” and “Root Shocked”? (Mindy Fullilove has written on Root Shock).

I learned for the first time that he indeed had worked for a couple of years landscaping and often visits some of the trees he helped plant and “wonders how they have grown”. “And then could it be that ‘the terror’ that his father’s abusive actions opened the door to and made way to take residence in their household and subsequently in his body as well as his mother’s and likely his siblings too, may have brought on the disorganizing and bewildering experiences of psychosis?” “Could this be another theory to consider beside the ‘bad seed theory’ suggested by the use of “my” in relation to the so called “mental illness”? If it were an expression of protest to the intruder why then is it “illness”? Who calls it “illness”? What happens when it is considered to be “illness”? Does the word “illness” itself implicate the person whose body and whose life has been “afflicted”?
Is “Mental Illness” an affliction of the body? Are folks afflicted or are they protesting an injustice? Are folks mourning losses of potential and dreams that they had to forgo? “Could a man who in reaction to the ‘terror’ that colonized his life went on a detour of psychosis, partly induced by the LSD and other drugs he turned to to get some relief from the upheaval he felt inside of him, still have some dreams that are reasonable to hope for realizing, if he were to chose to pursue them?”
Love and Light!

Mohammad
Mohammad Arefnia

Cate Ryan » Sun May 19, 2013 5:25 pm

there is so much to ponder here, the generosity in reflection and sharing here has me thinking of some challenges i’m up against in my life with family and i love the pathways this has me considering and remembering.

peggy, i’m so greatful to kate for her translation of the experiences of psychosis and am reminded how grounding and affirming they made me feel last year when walking along side a dear young person experiencing their first psychosis…and mine for that matter. I will always be in debt to this knowledge.

from one Cate to another…at least for now. Thank you.

Cate Ryan

Hi Peggy,

I was having a conversation earlier this week with an ex-student of mine and she was sharing her current studies in the practices of mental health and social work and how there seems to be significant gaps in respect for or inclusion of the ‘consumers’ experiences or life in looking at response for mental health and psychology. Hearing this, I thought of Kate’s insights and wealth of knowledge and was wondering if it is okay to share Kate’s work with other outside of the study group?

thanks
Cate