My Psychosis Story
A personal story of psychosis, mental health recovery, and starting again
Before I dive in, a trigger warning: this post covers health emergencies and mental health crises. If that sounds like too much for you today, it's a-OK to give it a miss.
I also want to make clear that I'm not a mental health professional sharing advice, nor am I looking for solutions or advice in return. I'm purely sharing my experience, in the hope it helps someone else feel less alone — just like Anna Considine's story did for me.
I've had several ups and downs with my mental health over the years, but my psychotic episode was like no other.
I heard a strange scream from downstairs.
I ran as fast as I could into the living room to find my husband shaking violently on the floor, unresponsive. I dialled 999 immediately, and the woman who answered talked me through what I needed to do.
A few minutes into the call, his face suddenly lost all colour. He went completely still and silent. I panicked and the emergency services told me they’d escalated the call to highest priority.
I truly thought he was dying. That moment remains etched in my brain.
A few minutes later he became active again, rolling around on the living room floor, but still unresponsive. Shortly after, five paramedics appeared in our living room.
My husband’s eyes looked wild and scared. He had no idea who I was, or where he was. He was packed into an ambulance and taken to hospital.
I followed the ambulance into the hospital and sat with my husband through various tests and scans until it was time for me to go home, and for him to go into a ward over night.
That night I was unable to get the flashbacks of his still body and grey face out of my mind.
At 4am the next morning, just as the pink sky began to illuminate, I heard a cuckoo start to sing. I was overwhelmed by emotion and my eyes filled with tears. A new day had arrived.
Later that day, my husband was discharged from hospital with some big bruises and without a driving license for a year, but otherwise unharmed.
As my husband needed to drive for his job, he could no longer work and I took the responsibility on board to bring in all of our joint income through my business.
I doubled down on ‘hacking’ my productivity. I got up and exercised. I meditated, journaled, listed my gratitudes, got my steps in, and I worked.
My husband started retraining. Learning skills that could drive an income working from home.
We made a plan. We got excited about it. And then the universe laughed.
About a week after my husband’s seizure, I felt my body overflow with a white hot rage. An anger I couldn’t explain or control. My blood would boil at the smallest of things. My brain and body overflowed with pure rage, and tears. So many tears! Then came this overwhelming, primal urge to run.
I ran to a field near our house and hid in the crops. I stayed there crying uncontrollably. My husband eventually found me. All I could say, over and over, was I can't do it. It's too hard. I feel so angry and I don't know why.
He brought me back inside and I went to bed, but as I heard him cleaning up in the kitchen, I followed an instinctive urge to sneak out of the house to run and hide again. I didn’t know who or what I was running and hiding from. I was purely following a drive that had completely taken over my mind and body.
Before I go any further, it's worth explaining what psychosis actually is, because it's nothing like the knife-wielding caricature the media tends to portray. I didn't know it yet, but I was experiencing a psychotic episode:
Psychosis, or a psychotic episode is when you lose touch with reality. The most common experiences are paranoid thoughts, hallucinations, delusions, and disorganised thinking.
In my mind, I was being monitored, tracked, poisoned, chased. I had a visceral, absolute certainty that people wanted to trap me and control me.
If you’ve ever seen the Truman Show - that was me. I wholeheartedly believed I was being used as a human experiment. I felt an undeniable pull to run away and find somewhere safe. Somewhere in nature where no one could find me.
I turned off my phone so I couldn't be tracked, and stayed hidden out in the fields where I had a good vantage point to see if people were approaching me.
My husband, terrified and panicked, eventually found me and slowly walked me home.
I sat in our living room and tried to explain that I was being watched, that our food was being poisoned and that I thought our home was a film set, all dressed up to make me believe I was living a normal life while I was actually the subject of an experiment.
Michael called my brother for some support. I wouldn’t let him come over as I was worried he one of the ‘experiment people’, but he did reassure me that this fear and feeling would pass, which I did find some comfort in.
After a few hours of feeling pure fear and staring at the walls seeing them as a film set, something started to settle. I was exhausted and went to bed and slept solidly for twelve hours.
My psychosis symptoms came and went in waves over the following days.
Each peak would leave me exhausted, spacey, hollowed out. At night I had vivid, erratic visions, including flashbacks to my husband’s seizure. I kept thinking I was seeing people - stood outside the house, in our bath, hiding behind the tree in our garden. It was terrifying.
After a few days of cycling through waves of pure fear followed by exhaustion and sleep, I knew I needed help.
My brother came over and we called a family friend who is a retired psychiatrist. He put me at ease. He told me what I was experiencing was a response to the trauma of my husband’s seizure, and that the right thing to do was visit my GP for a referral to the local mental health crisis team.
Getting into the car to go to the doctor was one of the hardest things I've ever done.
I fought the urge to run the entire way there. Before my brother started the engine I said to him: "Don't lock me in. I'm trusting you not to take me away."
When we arrived, my brother went ahead to let them know I was there and asked if I could come in through the back door. The doctor came out to meet us. But when I went to open my car door, I found it locked.
I lost it completely. "I told you. They're locking me in. They're taking me away. GET ME OUT."
It was the child lock that had accidently activated. But by the time my brother had let me out, my whole body was shaking. At every doorway into the surgery I stopped and asked people not to lock me in. In the doctor's room I refused to let her close the door, and kept my foot wedged in the door frame.
I was mid-sentence, trying to explain how I was feeling, when I turned and saw someone looking through the gap in the door directly at me. I ran. Screaming.
My husband found me in the car park, curled up and crying, while my brother arranged with the doctor for an emergency referral to the local mental health crisis team.
Someone from the team called a few hours after my doctor’s referral and took my details with enormous patience and care. They arranged for a nurse to visit the following day.
Once I was referred to the mental health crisis team, things slowly got easier.
The nurse that visited me asked me questions about what was happening, how I was feeling and about my mental health history.
I spent most of her visit perched on the edge of my seat, wringing my hands, keeping my distance in case she tried to sedate me and take me away (which is what I was telling myself might happen). I had already put my trainers on and left all of the doors open so I could run if I felt I needed to.
She prescribed me an antipsychotic and some other medications to help me sleep. I felt, for the first time in weeks, something close to relief.
A nurse came every day after that to monitor how I was responding to the medication. Slowly, the paranoia and hallucinations began to lift.
And then, one morning, I woke up feeling the best I had ever felt in my life. Invincible. Euphoric. Like a happy drunk, high on my own brain supply. There was no self-doubt, no overthinking, no insecurity. Just pure, unfiltered YASSS.
I thought I was healed.
Reader, I was not healed.
What followed was three weeks of what was later diagnosed as a manic episode - periods of overactive, high-energy behaviour, that can have a significant impact on daily life, as the Mind website describes it.
This felt like a surge of dopamine, rushing around my brain, making everything feel electric, exciting and urgent and absolutely essential right now. In practice, this looked like:
Making endless plans with people.
Reaching out to people I hadn't spoken to in years.
Having ideas… so, SO many ideas - for everything and everyone.
Pitching joint business ventures to friends.
Online shopping sprees.
Sending manic voice notes at odd hours.
Booking workshops and holidays.
Racing thoughts thsat I couldn’t keep up with.
One afternoon, my brother came over while my husband had to go to a holpital appointment - a follow up on his seizure. In the hour between my husband leaving and my brother arriving, I’d already fallen off a ladder holding a mini-chainsaw, while boiling nine eggs for no discernible reason, and pitching business collaboration ideas to three separate friends through my ear pods…
On my daily visit from the mental health nurse that day, her first question was… "Have you been buying a lot of things? Being impulsive with money? Have you been making lots of plans with friends? Do you feel really creative and inspired?"
"Yes," I said.
"This sounds like hypomania," she said.
She recommended setting phone alarms for mealtimes, and removing my card details from every shopping site and my Apple Wallet. The next morning, I woke to a notification.
Your inflatable pink flamingo is on its way… I have no memory of ordering an inflatable pink flamingo. 🦩
The nurse doubled my prescription. The hypomania settled. I started to feel more like myself.
Feeling well enough to leave the house, I booked a haircut - my first proper outing after five weeks of home and hospital. I drove into town feeling cautiously optimistic. But, as I turned into the one-way system, a thought arrived, quiet but certain: these houses aren't real, it’s a film set, and these people are all actors.
I drove straight home.
It was a stark, necessary reality check. Until that point I had been finding humour in my situation, but this moment reminded me that I needed to take it slow. To accept cancelled plans, accept less ‘productivity’, to accept that I absolutely had to slow down and heal.
After a few weeks, the mental health crisis team referred me to the Early Intervention Psychosis team, a multi-disciplinary teams set up to identify psychosis early, reduce treatment delays, and support recovery and reduce the risk of relapse.
After some questions from their team I was offered their full support for three years. I felt a huge relief.
Their support covered everything from access to therapists, employment support workers, psychiatrists and medication to a dedicated mental health care support worker from the team who I could go to whenever I needed support.
For the weeks that followed I continued to have weekly visits from my dedicated mental health support nurse. I had a physical health check, and I had regular appointments with their psychiatrist who helped me understand my diagnosis.
Through the work I did with the Early Intervention Psychosis team, I had to accept that, although the main trigger for my psychotic episode was obvious - the trauma of my husband’s seizure, what made it worse was the pressure I was piling on myself to prioritise my work above all else, be ever-present online and ‘hack’ my productivity for maximum output.
I knew I had to make a change to heal myself and my mental health in the long-term.
I made it my priority to replace doom scrolling and relentless productivity with long rambling walks, eating my meals outside listening to bird song and away from screens, and noticing the subtle shifts in nature each week.
Nature became my sanctuary and over time, the rhythm of the seasons gave me something steady to hold onto when everything else felt fragile.
Slowly, a gentler way of living took shape.
As I write this, it’s been two-years since my psychotic episode.
I still feel like I’m very much in recovery still, and that lifestyle shift that brought me closer to nature and living more in-tune with the seasons remains a priority. It has to be, it’s how I maintain good mental health.
Making sure I go for a walk every-single-day. Noticing each seasonal shift and finding the joy each week in what nature has to offer - even in the depths of winter. All of these things help nurture my well being.
Does that mean my mental health has been perfect ever-since? Nope, unfortunately not. But nature is always my sanctuary when I need to replenish my brain-batteries.
My psychotic episode turned my world upside down, but the silver lining I’ve found in my recovery is that I unapologetically prioritise time in nature over productivity.
Outdoors over inbox, every time.
Before I wrap up here, if you're struggling with your mental health, please do reach out to your GP or, in a crisis, contact the Samaritans on 116 123.
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