What Psychosis Feels Like

It was like living in a perpetual dream state. The scary part: I can't confidently tell the reader how long it lasted. What I do know is that a psychotic episode prompted a visit to the emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital in March 2016. After a day's worth of evaluation and medically induced sleep, I was transported to McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA, for inpatient treatment.

Psychosis is characterized by a break from reality and common in conditions like schizophrenia. My psychosis was brought on by substance abuse--adderall, specifically. In the months leading up to my hospitalization I had been working on a long-term project that was slowly but surely changing the way I perceived how the world operates. I grew angry and confused and my addictions overlapped in the worst possible ways.

I binged adderall to keep me focused on the project, frequently operating about 20 hours a day. Many nights, I would sneak into bed around 5 a.m. only to wake up again a couple hours later when my wife would head out for work. I wasn't sleeping so much as closing my eyes for a minute, allowing myself to come down just enough before popping another pill to get back to work.

My hands shook constantly, and when I tried to string together a sentence, nothing much came out of my mouth. It felt like mania on steroids. My brain was stuck and I wasn't trying to stop. At some point in early 2016, it felt like my subconscious was slipping into reality. I couldn't stop "connecting dots" and "seeing signs" in everyday life.

In my head, I wasn't ill, but rather, a super genius who understood how all of this works, functioning on minimal sleep and driven by a cause. When I was psychotic, I was missing a filter for my thoughts. Substance abuse helped flood my brain with dopamine and the lack of sleep didn't allow me to reset. I was floating in a nonlinear loop.