The Terrifying Time I Thought Obama Was Sending Spies to Kidnap Me

From the mind of a Schizophrenic.

I stormed into the Psychiatrist's office, paperwork in hand detailing my case against a famous magician who I was accusing of stealing my thoughts. I threw my essay on the floor and demanded that she help me contact the authorities and arrest him.

I was meant to be there to have an assessment for potential PTSD treatment. Between making the appointment and attending, my mind had gone entirely. I was in the middle of a psychotic episode as part of my later diagnosis of Schizophrenia.

The psychiatrist was startled, changed my medication, and returned me to my primary Doctor. The battle of my life had begun.

What is psychosis?

Firstly, being a Psychopath is very different from having a Psychotic episode. The media uses these terms interchangeably, and it creates a stigma. Most killers are Psychopaths. It’s a personality disorder that entails antisocial behavior, untruthfulness, and lack of remorse.

Psychosis involves a loss of reality. Sufferers may suffer hallucinations and believe things that aren’t true.

Hallucinations may involve any of the senses and create experiences that don’t exist outside of the mind.

Delusions often revolve around conspiracy theories that involve harm to the sufferer.

When you combine hallucinations and delusions, the result is severe distress and behavior changes.

Voices of destruction.

Most of the time, my voice told me to harm myself. It often took over from the guilt I experienced as part of PTSD and told me I was a disgusting, terrible person.

At its worst, it was relentless. Gnawing away at my resolve hour after hour with the same self-destructive message.

After a while, the voice turned into several different people. Some of them took the form of those I felt I’d let down by arriving at incidents as a Police Officer too late to save them. I had an entire army of victims shouting at me every day.

Driving became unsafe when the voices started telling me to crash the car. At the very least, I couldn’t concentrate on the road, and if I were to give in, I could have hurt many people. I did the right thing and gave up driving — even to this day.

I’m grateful that the voices never told me to hurt anyone else. It was all focused on my self-destruction.

I remember talking to one Doctor, and it was like a three-way conversation because one of the voices was talking to me from the opposite side of the room.

I’ve even had dog toys talking to me.

Delusions and spies.

The legacy of my psychotic episodes is that I can’t trust my mind. New age and sentimental types are always talking about “following their gut,” but my gut told me the CIA was coming to ship me away to a Siberian death camp and that secret operatives were on every street corner. I now need hard facts and corroboration to believe anything.

The closest I came to violence was believing that a famous magician was stealing my thoughts and using mind control tricks. I wanted him arrested for harassment, but no one took my complaint seriously. So I decided that if he didn’t stop using the tv as a form of mind control, I would track him down and sort it myself.

Medication stopped this before I went beyond the point of no return.

I also believed the Department for Work and Pensions was sending spies, sanctioned by Barack Obama, to take the weak and the sick to a death camp and kill us in secret. I even wrote a garbled essay and diagrams to explain to my mum and dad how it all fit together.

They looked at me like I was mad (!) and tried to figure out a nonconfrontational way to acknowledge my real fear, but without adding validity to the complete nonsense on the pages.

You should never contradict someone with such a profound psychosis. Recognize their genuine pain and focus on that.

Other brief delusions involved me thinking my partner was cramming pencils down my throat late at night and that I was psychically causing dogs to attack people.

The kind of terror that makes you barricade the door.

Many people focus on the horrific nature of hallucinations and delusions but forget the abject terror behind them.

Imagine being stalked every day and threatened by people always in the same room as you, whispering and shouting at you. It doesn’t matter if it’s objectively real. The horror is the same.

I remember calling my mum and telling her I would barricade my front door with a wardrobe, sofa, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down because people were coming to get me.

I couldn’t stay in a house or room alone and had to have someone with me when I woke up each day, or I would descend into panic.

The rare times I would go out in public — usually to walk our dog with my mum — were horrific. I would be scanning every single person for signs they were operatives looking to kidnap me. If I found one, I would start shouting, “HE’S ONE,” At that point, I would go from being the person in danger (in my mind) to an actual threat.

When my mum got me in front of a psychiatric nurse, she recommended time as an inpatient. This was terrifying because I believed that apart from Depression and PTSD, I was fine, and she wanted me in a “hospital” to carry out torture and tests. After all, I was privy to top-secret information.

Eventually, I did spend time in a mental hospital, and it was suffocating, oppressive, and dehumanizing.

The loneliness of being locked in a world where only you live.

Having such internal chaos is isolating. I was locked in my world of nightmares every single day. No one understood or experienced any of the same things.

There was no point talking about it because I would get confused looks. I lived in mortal danger at every turn, and no one believed me. It would only be a matter of time before “they” got me.

The imaginary campaign to get me to harm myself was still underway, and I was resisting. I had been prescribed antipsychotics, and I had been taking them because I heard they might help with my depression, but to this point, nothing had helped with anything.

The way back.

Eventually, I found a medication that worked for my depression. It was also an antipsychotic, and the voices went away very quickly. I stopped feeling so paranoid and stopped being so wrapped up in my inner world of turmoil.

It almost felt like my mind warmed up again and connected to the land of the living like an old computer that had been disconnected for years.

This is why it makes me angry when people bad mouth medication for mental health issues. Therapy never helped me — I tried many times, and by the time I was psychotic, therapy wasn’t permitted.

There’s nothing that can heal a psychotic mind except medication. Yes, that medication can be brutal. I gained 90 lbs in a year, my teeth are weak, my cholesterol and heart need monitoring, and I slept 15 hours a day at one stage.

But beggars can’t be choosers.

This is real mental illness. It’s ugly, dirty, and scary. It’s not a quirky series of personality traits where you can hit the gym and lift your way out of feeling down in the dumps. It’s not something teenagers get when their crush rejects them. This is the brain malfunctioning.

I’ll be on medication for the rest of my life. It keeps the demons at bay and allows me to survive and thrive. For anyone who has been seriously mentally ill, bodily weaknesses are a small price to pay to be rescued from hell.

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