Delusions and hallucinations.
Now everybody is different and our experiences vary greatly from one person to the next. And of course there is always that wacky Hollywood filling people's imaginations. So I'm going to list just a few of my experiences.
1. Jésus the Mexican janitor. The first time I landed in a psych ward and was loaded up on four different pills, I was seated in a common area and was carrying on a conversation with my first Person Who Is Really Not There. Whether it is my mind producing this stuff or I'm like that kid in The Sixth Sense who sees dead people, he was totally real to me. He talked about nothing good ever coming out of Mexico. He worked as a janitor in the hospital and people didn't notice him much, that he was invisible to everyone. But he asked me if I knew why I was talking to him. I asked him why and he pointed with conviction to the name on his plastic name tag on his shirt. Jesus, it said. I told him my friends were worried about me and I somehow ended up in this crazy place. We talked about art and he told me he decorates wedding cakes on the side. There was one other (real) man in the room staring at us (well, me talking to nobody there) and then my friend Gretchen came to visit me and Jesus the Mexican janitor just disappeared.
2. A group of dozens of men in black suits standing outside the Ritz-Carlton as I walked to work one morning. I felt fear, that they were after me or staring me down and judging me. I rushed past them and told a coworker what I just saw. He said, 'There's nobody there!' I ran back out of the office to get a cup of coffee and sure enough there was nobody there.
3. A man in a white tshirt and jeans walked into my department at the bookstore where I worked. He had dog tags around his neck, put his finger to his lips to tell me not to speak and pointed to his ears. I kept my mouth shut. Actually I don't know if he was real or not. I immediately knew he was a war vet suffering from PTSD. I felt a connection to him for some reason...
4. An African-American girl in a hospital was trying to talk to me, trying to get my attention and when I spoke to her, a nurse yelled my name and asked me who I was talking to and told me there was nobody there.
5. Years into my mental illness when I realized that I was seeing things that weren't there, I went back home to my parents for a few days and asked my mom about a few people I remembered from childhood:
5a: When I was riding my bike down our country street near home at about age seven or eight, a man drove past me in a car and drove into my path, pushing me off the road and laughed an evil laugh at me and said something evil to me I didn't understand. I just knew he was a Bad Man. I sped off into a field to some dirt trails I knew. I don't know if that really happened or not.
5b: I was in Kmart with my dad when I was about ten and I saw an abducter man staring at me who looked like a man from the made-for-TV movie that had just aired called 'I Know My First Name Is Steven.' I told my dad and I don't think he saw what I saw and I had to go outside because I was too terrified. That was surely tv playing in my head. Remember those scary TV movies when they'd state at the end that the criminal was still on the loose and if found, call the FBI. Yeah.
5c: I asked my mom about the Indian that was sitting on the chair on a trip we took somewhere when we were visiting my grandparents. I couldn't remember where in the US we were, but it was near a coastal area that had a rocky beach. I was four or five and spent a lot of time with adults. I would usually sit on the floor behind a chair, too shy to talk, and would play with my dolls or color. I remember looking up to an Indian man, a Native American, with a flannel shirt and two braids on each side of his face. He sat sternly with his arms crossed. He looked down at me and nodded once in my direction. I never forgot that. I wasn't afraid of him. He was reassuring to me.
And so there you have it. Did I have paranoid schizophrenia as a kid? Was my brain chemistry wired differently than everyone else's in the seventies and eighties? I'm sure if I would have grown up in a later decade I would have been put on the autistic spectrum and things would have been handled differently. It's really odd stuff. Schizophrenia was a diagnosis given to me at certain points. But bipolar episodes can produce hallucinations and delusions as well. I also heard voices at times, and one episode I felt caught in all the scary parts of the Bible and had weird voices and flashes of visions racing through my head until the pills sedated me again. The name 'John' kept filling my head too and offered this strange comfort to me. The presence took away my fear. The religious part of mania is a mysterious thing. I can't talk much about that stuff because it's way too powerful to discuss. I've tried.
There was other stuff I 'heard,' 'saw' and 'sensed' as well, but the stuff above is enough for today I think. The medication stops all that stuff, stifles it and all, so that's why it's important to dope up on the stuff. It's too scary otherwise.
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