My Psychosis (part 1)

In 1921, my grandmother died of an ear infection in the days before antibiotics were available. She was a young mother of three, my grandfather was a binge drinker, and they lived a life of material, social, and emotional privilege that to many would seem unimaginable.

My father was eight years old when his mother died and soon afterwards he entered what would now be termed a dissociative fugue state for several months. Concerned about him, my grandfather turned to the auto-suggestive affirmations of the French psychologist, Emile Coué, “Every day, and in every way, you are becoming better and better” which he would repeat every night, sitting by my father’s bedside as he slept.

Six years later, in 1927, my grandfather died of wood alcohol poisoning during Prohibition, alone in a New York City hotel room, after an evening at the Yale Club where liquor was readily available for its patrician members. His obituary described him as ‘the wealthiest widower in Cleveland’ and yet when his body was found he only had a small amount of loose change in his pocket.

Forty years later, lying in my dormitory bed at boarding school, I woke to the smell of smoke wafting from my chest of drawers. I leapt from my bed so that I could quickly snuff out the smouldering clothes, but no matter how much I rustled through my folded tartan uniform skirts and navy blue sweaters, I could not find any embers to extinguish. This was one of the first signs of my emerging psychosis.

Earlier that year, I had frequently been admitted to the school infirmary for various unexplained somatic and sensory symptoms. It seems likely to me now that the doctor and his clutch of nurses considered these to be either signs of rather melodramatic malingering or hysterical neurosis. My complaints of various vague aches and a sense of general malaise usually sufficed to gain me admission for a few nights stay, during which I felt relatively safe.

I derived comfort from the twice daily rituals of having my temperature taken and heart rate listened to, together with hearty meals, good New England fare which I left untouched, delivered by a dumbwaiter from the kitchen.

What I could not tell them was that I believed my thin body was being devoured from within due to syphilis (a condition I knew very little about, but I understood it was horrible) and while every day I would watch my legs and abdomen shrink beneath my constant gaze, I was surprised that the medical team never once commented on what I believed was startling visible evidence of my gradually vanishing body.

Once I returned to my dorm room, my physical misery was compounded by steadily worsening insomnia, and I would often lie awake all night in order to remain vigilant to a fairly unchanging and growing list of dangers I needed to watch out for. Shadowy presences hovering by my bedside, murmuring sotto voce, phantasms slipping through the closed door, voices behind the skirting board, malevolently cackling and snickering about me as they plotted and orchestrated my thoughts and actions.

I would sometimes whisper back to them, softly, in order not to disturb my roommate’s sleep, begging them to either leave me alone or just do their worst and get it over with as soon as possible to put me out of my suffering, only for my feeble pleas to set off their cackling yet again. I whimpered, ‘what do you want from me?’

The voices were a psychic jackhammer that I had no escape from. They were a constant, wearing, presence in my life, doggedly following my movements and thoughts, aware of every fear, thought, and intention that I had. At times, I would attempt to trick them by abruptly changing my route or switching my train of thought in order to wrong foot them and regain some control. I would be heading down the path to my classes, then stop, or take a wrong turn, or even head back to the dormitory under the pretence of having forgotten a book.

But my ruses merely caused the conspirators to laugh even more, as, of course, my belief that I could somehow fool them was also part of their broader plan. They not only knew what I was thinking at any given time, but they also knew what I was about to think, and indeed influenced it. They were in charge, not me. So I fell back under their spell, resigned, knowing I could do nothing to alter the inevitable path that they had determined for me, and their yakking would plague me wherever I went.

At some point I was referred to a psychiatrist in Boston. A taxi would pull up outside our dorm every week at the same time to take me into the city. During the drive to the clinic, I would start to sit back and relax in the safety of being whizzed away from school, with an anonymous, silent and deferential driver taking me to and fro.

Over time, it occurred to me that the driver was part of the scheme, and that my movements and thoughts were being conveyed to my controllers who noted everything, discussed it among themselves, and then communicated further instructions to my driver. The drive became a dreaded trap, and I would eventually sit on the edge of my seat, staring at the back of his head, paralysed with fear, wondering what they had in store for me next.

Once afternoon, gazing through the window of the taxi, watching the bustle of pedestrians getting on with their lives, I grabbed the car door handle in order to make an escape at the traffic lights. But then I heard the dreaded cackle and realise that my persecutors already knew my intentions and I sat back in my seat, succumbing to their omniscience.

In his large and bright office, my psychiatrist listened closely and quietly as I hesitantly tried to describe my experience. He was well trained and had years of experience at McLean Hospital working with very severely disturbed adolescents. It did not take him long to recognise the pattern of thoughts, emotions, and behaviour that I described in what felt like telegraphic sentences.

The day arrived when he told me, quite early in the session, that I needed to be sent home from school immediately, and that I was to pack my things as soon as the taxi had taken me back to the campus. I was asked to sit outside his office while he called the headmistress who, in turn, rang my dorm mother and my parents.

I was not alarmed or even surprised by his announcement, and simply felt a sense of numbness rather than relief at the idea of leaving the setting where these phantoms hounded me so relentlessly. And yet, the image of home was a comforting one, and temporarily filled my head with thoughts of my bedroom, our pets, my loving parents.

My parents met me at the airport with a warm embrace, and my father, who had experienced psychotic depression on and off for many years, seemed implicitly able to understand what I was suffering. His intuitive understanding, together with my mother’s pragmatic optimism, enabled my arrival home to feel like a sanctuary, rather than a failure, even though I had no idea what was happening to me, and had no sense of the future, or of how things would progress. I did know, however, that the enormous emotional and physical security that home provided could only be salutary.

But my psychosis was a many-headed hydra that had not stayed behind in my New England school, and here it was again. That very first night, as I lay down to sleep, I could hear the rustling of my tormentors readying themselves, a Lilliputian army, as they settled in behind the walls.

In the comfort of my childhood bed, lying beneath my grandmother’s silk quilt, my cat at my feet, I lay awake, holding my body as stiff and as still as I could.

The next morning, as I sat at the dining room table while my mother made breakfast, I realised that my kind and loving parents were, in fact, imposters.