Hello, from new member...

[zanther]

Hello,

I decided to join the forum so that I may have a chance to exchange thoughts and communicate with other people in similar situations.  Perhaps to get some advice over time that will get me unstuck from where I am a the moment.

About 8 years ago I suffered a first psychotic episode, which came out of the blue.  Granted I was living under a lot of stress at the time due to various circumstances in my life.  I was relatively old, 37 at the time, and had no previous history with mental illness whatsoever...  Following that, I suffered another 2 episodes in a span of 4 years, the last one being in 2007.  Since then I fortunately did not experience anything like that, but life had been very hard.

Following my last episode, which was diagnosed as "schizoaffective disorder", I collapsed into a shocked state as I realised how ill I was and the many odd things I did.  I felt exposed irrevocably to the eyes of people, particularly co-workers and other people that knew me as a down-to-earth and grounded person.  In fact many of the people I thought of as friends discontinued their contact with me and abolished me from their lives.  Fortunately, my co-workers were very understanding, and although I was very odd and almost insulting towards them, they understood that this was something beyond my control, that it was a genuine mental illness and nothing more.  I am an academic in a UK University and as I was recovering this was a very strong reference point to find some comfort in at least knowing I would continue with my job, a career path that I aspired to since I was very young in high school...

But, the intensity of the psychotic episode was so high that I was really living in another reality no knowing what I was doing or why I was doing it.  I spent a lot of money during that period, roaming around Europe in a paranoid state and did many crazy things.  All this traumatic experience came flooding back to me as I started recovering and I entered a very deep depressive and withdrawn state.  During that period, I had really no one with me and I had to recover on my own without a single person to talk to at home.

At the same period, my mother's health started deteriorating, and in that state I had to cater for her needs and organise her care - in another country...  She had chosen not to come to the UK and live with me, so I had to support her, both financially and otherwise, in another country.  She was 84 at the time and her faculties were impaired due to rapidly advancing vascular dementia.  She died early this year and that was another shock to the system.  I have no close relatives anywhere and in the town I live and work I am left with absolutely no friends.  I have one or two acquaintances but to be honest I just make a big effort with them so as to have at least someone even though they are not close friends, or people with great understanding and genuine feelings.  I will mention more of this later, as in these past 4 years I have found myself forced to maintain relationships like this out of sheer need and lack of support.

After about a year of sick leave to even manage to get myself out of the couch where I spent my days and nights, I started slowly picking up at work to rebuild my career and move forward at least in one direction in life.  Work has been going well for me lately and that is a source of goals and directions.  But it is not enough and not a replacement for the sheer isolation I experience.  At work we mostly communicate by emails and rarely act like friendly co-workers.  We don't go out for drinks, or coffee, or a meal at all.  There is virtually no contact in our office.  People are nice and work well together but we simply do not have any other form of socialising or building friendlier relationships.  I have accepted that and in a sense I am fine with it, but that leaves then very few options to expand one's horizons in life.  The workplace is often a starting point to meet with people and through them build a network but that here is not happening (I have been working here for almost 17 years and it has always been like this).

I try to rationalise it, by saying this is only our workplace and that we don't have to be friends there.  To a certain extent that is true I think everywhere, but yet I do know of cases where people also open up their homes and do become friends through work.  I have made friends through my work and it is true, but all these contacts are scattered across the globe and none of them is in my home town...

So that more or less is my situation.  In my mum's home country I have some property and at the moment to manage it I have a couple of friends who help me.  These two people helped me a lot during the rough times of the past 4 years, but I have to admit that the relationships have been of mutual benefit.  One person is clearly "with me" because of fringe benefits through my acquaintance and friendship.  She helped me a lot in taking care of my mum, but it was always not without some benefit for herself.  I would of course have given presents and even money to anyone who helped us in that dire situation, but what really made me feel uneasy was the way that this was done so obviously by her.  To this date we maintain this kind of relationship as I cannot cope with taking care of my mum's house.  It is not always bad, this person is good company but I feel oppressed at times by this relationship.

So, although I made compromises so that we had someone in our lives it has not been easy, and it was a negative factor actually on me while I was recovering from mental illness.  Still I persevered, and still do so I can get through the difficulties of life, the isolation and the things I have to do to keep things together until I can cope better.

Here at home, I am very alone.  With no friends and no one to go out with, and no family of my own left.  In the evenings after work, I just sit and watch the clouds in the sky smoking and thinking of the past.  Past people, past dreams, my parents and the good years we had.  We were at times quite poor, but we still coped and we were there for each other.  This I don't feel any more.  There is no person on this planet that in all honesty I would feel sorry if they even died...  Sure, if I see someone in pain or in suffering I will automatically wish to help them, but it is 'automatic'.  It is not me, it is not who I used to be.

I suppose I am depressed, but not in a random and unprovoked way.  This life that I lead, the circumstances that I went through in a way have made me dry without anything to hold on to or to hope for any more...  I used to love music, I taught myself how to play the keyboards and was very much into classical music and opera, but now it has been 4 years that I don't listen to music.  Sometimes I watch something from YouTube, but never any more in the house.  I even threw away my stereo as it broke down some time ago, and I don't see myself buying a new one.  

There is simply no need any more for that...

[Sweetpea]

Hello and welcome to the forum, we are a friendly bunch  :).

S x x x x

[Zaf]

Hi, I hope we can help in someway

Z xx

[Buttercup]

Hi Zanther

Thank you for sharing that with us, I found it very moving and hope that we can help in some way.

Xxx

[whiteadder]

Zanther, welcome to the group and thank you for sharing some of your story. I personally find comfort in both listening and being listened to, and I hope you find it similarly helpful here :)

[Catbrian]

Hi zanther
Thanks for sharing that post. I can relate to a lot of what you say. It's very true what whiteadder says. Looking forward to your future posts!

Cat

[mamalou]

Hey Zanther ! I'm Louise! Hope you find comfort in sharing on here.   

[Maddymoo]

Hi zanther, I'm maddy, I do hope you find this forum helpful xx

Maddy

[Ezel]

 .>,

[KateG]

Hi and welcome

Kate x

[zanther]

Zanther, welcome to the group and thank you for sharing some of your story. I personally find comfort in both listening and being listened to, and I hope you find it similarly helpful here :)

Thanks to everyone for writing in response to my initial posting.

I guess that what you say Whiteadder is true, it does help to speak and to listen to others.  I am not sure how comforting is writing on a website...  I've tried that in the past and at the end felt I had to give up.  It is a different thing to speak to people in real life.  However, there are difficulties in finding like-minded people where on lives and then even harder to build a relationship with them and a friendship.

What I find hard in "real life" is that people are very closed and in a way play/act roles that make them feel comfortable, or so they think.  We all do that, we adopt norms of behaviour so that we feel safe in interactions with people, particularly when meeting new ones.  But to a certain extent I find that modern society and lifestyle have gone overboard with this.  

The second time I suffered a psychotic episode I was walking through the town centre believing I was in the "Matrix", literally...!  I felt that I was the only one perceiving reality and having self-awareness and that everybody else was just a simulation presented to me to test me.  I started looking intensely at people and the more I looked the more I was convinced they were simulacra...  Everybody was downcast, they never looked up straight, never to see who they were passing by, just looking down at their feet and walking.  And strangely enough people never talked while they walked (most were alone).  I felt truly I was in some alien scene.

During that time I also had very strange thoughts and altered perceptions of reality.  I had for a first time an out of body experience one afternoon I took a nap.  In this I was fully aware, and that only moments ago I was in my bed and could not tell how I ended up in a weird dome.  All I wanted was to wake up but couldn't so it was a pretty horrifying experience.  Eventually, things escalated and  I ended up in a mental hospital.  There I became preoccupied with relationships with people, how instead of improving our lives we isolate ourselves and others, and that the world in general "sucked" because of our choices.

I started exploring silently and internally thoughts I never had before, such as what reality is, the lack of meaning in anything by itself and that we are the ones who have to define what is bad or good and what meaning our actions have.  I started seeing that the world we have constructed and live in is nothing but a construct based purely on concepts.  Nothing has innate truth and that all in the Universe is relative.  I started discovering, in the midst of a paranoid state, concepts that Buddhism puts forward without having ever studied it.  I did some reading after that experience and explored things a bit.

But my philosophy of life has always been atheist, at best at times agnostic.  I had many many ideas about a superconsciousness and how it would be for the world to be as we see it, not as holy scriptures written in dark ages dictate it to be.  Eventually, despite having had many interesting thoughts and ideas I see them as without value as they relate to nothing tangible and nothing that can be experienced in a shared fashion, or in the shared material reality that our existence is hinged upon.  I simply think there is nothing "out there"...

Still though, I do have humanist ideals and I did see something striking while in the care of the mental health system.  That although most psychotic episodes involve a deep spiritual seeking and questioning, along with some truly paranoid thinking, the mental health professionals completely disregard this dimension.  I think that out of this experience, like everything in life, there is something to be learned and to be gained.  Particularly when such existential thinking takes place at the core of your being.  All they seem to care is to suppress the symptoms, medicate you back to health, and very quickly classify you in some pathological subcategory.

Contrary to this way of dealing with mental episodes, is the small group of practitioners that regard psychotic episodes as spiritual crises and of a potentially spiritual emergence nature.  It is too silly I think to idealise such situations into something beyond what they are, but it is really cruel and damaging to ignore a deep unconscious reaction to stressors and situations in life that do give you paranoia but also bring you in contact with unconscious processes within yourself and also perhaps archetypal constructs that we are born with.

All these experiences I wish there was some way to explore with other people who have had them, perhaps try to investigate if they have commonalities that can be of practical use to other people.  I guess it's the scientist in me seeking to systematise observations and find new knowledge.

But all I do the past few years is just sit silent.  Think about these things while smoking and interacting with no one in life.  Things are as they are...

[Catbrian]

Thanks zanther for your post. I can relate to what you say about spirituality etc... I am constantly searching for new knowledge and a deeper understanding of life. 

[zanther]

Catb,

I think the way to understand life is by following our nature.  Our nature I tend to believe strongly is in sharing reality with others, in the fullest possible by each interaction and to try to push the envelope of our mutual limitations.  When I suffered my third episode, I increasingly felt unreal as because of my state my interactions were limited.  At some point I started asking directly and indirectly people to confirm I existed...!

I don't think that great advancements come from isolation or from introspection alone, a life that I am forced to live the last few years of my life.  And of course I am not alone in this, I realise a lot of people of my age group who somehow had it bad, either through misfortune in their personal lives or through similar illnesses, have to live life without any real contact.  We all need some time alone, to think and digest our observations from sharing life, but that should be balanced.

The way I work in my area, I am an academic teacher and researcher, is to always do things in a group.  I spend a lot of time on my own studying and learning new things but then I try to do any advancement in a shared way with others in my field.  Unfortunately that is the only interaction I can have and seems to be the way my future is also prescribed.  To use work so much as a goal setting mechanism in your entire life is not stable.  There are days that without ever having opened my mouth to say a word to anyone I feel that I might destabilise again and go into some parallel reality.  In the evenings I feel really low, pondering about death and what possibilities might exist once we are gone.

Now I have found this forum, which perhaps might help make online friends and talk freely about things.  If sharing experiences is to be designated to the virtual world then so be it...

[whiteadder]

I think the way to understand life is by following our nature.

I think there's a lot of truth in this. Harder for us as humans than for say, dogs or trees, which I sometimes feel are just as much 'the universe experiencing itself' as we are. I'm intrigued by your ideas and experiences Zanther - the second time this week I've come across the suggestion that some of our experiences can be interpreted as a shamanic awakening.

[Zaf]

I find your experiences fascinating zanther, I too was athiest for much of my life but more recently have found a mystic path via a type of animism, taoism, buddhism and similar faiths;  astral travel and out of body experiences are considered normal and in fact desirable - our experiences in the human form being described as our spirit/soul/consciousness having a human experience and that the material world is no more than being an actor on a huge stage (very simplistically put).

I too feel the need to seek more knowledge and an understanding what everything, including life, is all about