hazelhawkCasual Contributor
Reaching out..
Hi everyone,
I'm brand new to this forum (only found it tonight) so I'm a bit nervous about my first post.
I want to reach out and share my story to see if anyone else has had a similar experience.
When I was 19 I had a brief episode of psychosis and was hospitalised for two weeks. I had been quite a party girl as a teenager, smoked a lot of marijuana, and had tried meth once and contributed my psychosis to this. After my hospitalisation, I worked really hard to change my lifestyle, I was compliant with my medication and the doctors were all very impressed with my recovery. They said if I stayed on the medication for five years, I had a 95% chance that I wouldn't ever have another episode of psychosis.
After four and a half years, I was in a really good place. I had completed a degree, was in a stable and loving relationship, working full-time and hadn't had any problems with my mental health. I no longer had a psychiatrist, and my GP thought it would be okay for me to stop the medication.
I was fine for twelve months, and then a year almost to the day of me stopping the medication, I again lost control of my thoughts. It started with insomnia and extreme anxiety, and then racing thoughts, beleifs that I was powerful, irrational beleifs and delusions. This time I was taken in an ambulance to the hospital after yelling at my neighbour and punching my poor loving husband in the face. I was again detained. The weeks after I returned home, my mania continued and then in the months after I had a bout of severe depression.
Through the support of my family, medication and again a diligent attitude towards healthy lifestyle choices, after a year and a half I have again been able to reach a place of 'recovery'. What I am still struggling with is that I have never been diagnosed with an illness. My psychiatrist who now says I only need to see him every six months says he is treating me for bipolar/schizoaffective disorder and I am on a combination of antipsychotics, antidepressants and mood stabilisers. Again I have managed to impress my doctors with my recovery and my GP says she has never seen anyone get so sick so quickly and then get better so quickly. She attributes it to me following all the advice that I have been given. My GP said she has read something interesting about cases like me where we don't fit with a certain diagnosis but may just have a tendency to have episodes of psychosis.
I have joined this forum in a hope to find people who may have had a similar experience with psychosis, and perhaps have never been formally diagnosed with a certain illness.
Also, I would like to share my experience as I truly believe recovery is possible even from the scariest corners of mental illness. I know others have suffered greater and for longer than I have, but I too have felt what its like to lose something that most people take for granted: your mind. And I know what has worked for me, so if it helps others to hear that, I am more than willing to share tips and advice.
Lastly, I still have bad days, and this seems like a supportive community that may help me through some of the darker moments.
Well, this is my first post and I would love to hear from you. Thanks for reading 🙂
