Tag: psychotic breakdown
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Bipolar Cocktails
I’m on three medications for bipolar now, let’s call them Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They’ve worked for a few years, but I’ve been going through some rough times, so it’s time to change the cocktail. Unlike your plain old, garden-variety, soul-crushing depression, in which you usually can take one pill a day, and use that […]
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A Check-Up at the Home Asylum
It’s now been two months since my psyche broke with reality, on Christmas morning. I started feeling better about three, four weeks ago; at least, I started functioning again. My family and I know this pattern all too well, one that began when I turned seventeen, almost forty years ago. In my first journal, in […]
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The Sudden, Psychotic Need for Jazz
About a week after the breakdown on Christmas day, in a moment of relative calm, I was sitting outside in my pajamas, staring at the property fence, and two things happened: I said, “Fuck this shit,” and I rearranged my room. The Fuck this shit wasn’t about my room—the room where I spend most of […]
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Psychosis, Erotica, and That Woman Over There
During this winter’s illness, I couldn’t read. It happens every time. The words lift off the page. I could call it lack of concentration, but that doesn’t come close to the experience of losing the flow of sentences, one after the other, in the weave of a story that has, due to a chemical imbalance […]
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A Weekend Note from the Home Asylum
I’ve received emails from people, responding to posts about my recent psychotic breakdown. Some of them are friends who ask: 1. If I’m okay and 2. Do I really want to do this? Write about my mental illness? They’re concerned that it will set off another episode. They might have a point. Then there are […]