Warning: How a Balanced and Reasonable Friend Became Psychotic

This true story shocked me a lot and showed me many things I didn’t expect.

When I was a teenager I had a group of friends that I adored. Most of them were my neighbors.

One of my most balanced and reasonable friends was Arnold. I knew his family, who were excellent. He had two sisters and his parents were very kind.

He was smart and good-natured. I never imagined that a person as sensible as he could acquire a serious mental illness and lose consciousness forever, but this is what happened to him to the great surprise of everyone.

It all started when he traveled from Brazil where we lived to Europe for a few months. He said that he had nowhere to stay during the winter and that’s why he decided to join the Hare Krishna group when he was in Holland. He pretended to agree with the group just to have a place to stay.

When he returned to Sao Paulo, our city in Brazil, he laughed when he told us about what happened when he was hosted by Krishna’s religious group.

However, he started to attend several other religious groups in Sao Paulo because he liked to seek the truth. He intended to study psychology and was about to take a college entrance exam when he started having psychological problems.

At that time I went to the US to study English and live with my uncle’s family in California, and I didn’t follow what happened to him.

After the USA I traveled with my mother to Greece and it took me a while to return to Brazil.

A Shocking Surprise

My Greek relatives and my mother told me to live in Greece, as my parents had separated, but I didn’t know if this move was a good idea, so I decided to go back to Brazil to decide what to do.

When I returned to Sao Paulo I saw that the situation in the city was terrible because there were many robberies and we didn’t have the slightest security.

However, much worse was what happened to Arnold. His unexpected psychosis was one of the most important facts for me to decide to live far from Brazil.

He sent me letters when I was living in California and also when I was in Athens, Greece, and he seemed to be doing fine.

However, one day I received a letter from his mother saying that Arnold was not right in his head.

I didn’t understand what she meant by that, but when I got back to my city I was more than shocked to find Arnold in a clinic for the mentally ill!

My mother and I went to visit Arnold’s family and then we went with his mother and his two sisters to visit him at the clinic where he had been hospitalized after having had a nervous breakdown when he began to break various objects in his house and he hit his sisters.

He had electric shock therapy.

When I saw him at the clinic where he was, I almost fainted. Nothing he said made sense. He went completely mad and lost consciousness. I didn’t start crying as I wished to do to give his family courage.

I was more than scared by what happened. His mother said that he was once again part of the Hare Krishna religious group in Sao Paulo and that he became a vegetarian. Several times he didn’t eat anything, he only drank milk. He started taking cold showers and doing very weird things when he had the madness attack and was hospitalized.

I talked with other friends in our group about what happened with Arnold, especially with my ex-boyfriend Sergio, who was his best friend. He said that Arnold became too absurd. He talked to him several times but couldn’t get him to change his mind and so let him follow his way.

My mother found him a good psychiatrist, who was recommended by a friend of hers. I returned to Greece while my mother stayed in Brazil to sort everything out so we could move to Greece.

A Tragic End

Arnold sent me letters from time to time, but his writing was poor and what he said didn’t make sense. He wrote to me that he was taking very heavy medication.

One day I had a dream in which I saw the terrestrial globe. In the dream, someone told me that a certain person was looking for the elixir of life, but could not find it.

At that time I still hadn’t learned to interpret dreams using Carl Jung’s method, but that dream impressed me a lot.

A few days later I received a letter from Arnold’s younger sister telling me that he moved alone in an apartment because he didn’t want to live with his family.

In the end, he threw himself from the window of his 14th-floor apartment and ended his life after being treated by a psychiatrist for about three years without success. Unfortunately, psychiatrists do not cure mental illness…

I was very sorry for what happened to my great friend. His tragic story was yet another reason why I became interested in dream interpretation according to Jung’s method and did everything I could to solve my psychological problems when I was married and pregnant.

Arnold’s sad example showed me that anyone can go crazy from one moment to the next, no matter how balanced he may seem.

At least my friend’s tragic example made me take my psychological problems very seriously and understand that my exaggerated nervousness needed to be controlled.

If you have psychological problems as well, be sure to get treatment before it’s too late.

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