How close have you been to madness?

WELCOME Forums Unicultism & Other Ideologies Health How close have you been to madness?

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  • #938
    unicole
    Keymaster

    What is the closest you ever got to totally losing your mind? Did you gain anything from that experience? Why did you come back? What does it mean to “lose your mind?” Is it purely societal?

    • This topic was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by unicole.
    • This topic was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by unicole.
    #983

    I used to have the problem where my mind would have continuous spiraling thoughts. I didn’t know how to make it stop until I did a lot of dealing with unresolved issues. I felt like I was not in control of my mind. It got really dark. I came out of the the end a happier, more joyful person. I really had to face some horrible things head on and let them go in order to get my mind back. I spent so much of my life giving my mind power to others that hurt me. Free at last!

    #998
    unicole
    Keymaster

    Amazing Diana! That’s so powerful.

    #1056
    Cyan Goon
    Participant

    My worst era of psychosis was while I was working a super stressful job in a kitchen (many tactile knife hallucinations and empathetic pains for the violence suffered by The Inanimate (preparing turkey wings was the worst -_-)), locked in a relationship which had become co-dependent and terrible for both of us, doing very large doses of lsd and mushrooms every couple of days, living in a ghetto apartment which was haunted by a ghost couple and targeted by KGB via Ouija spy techniques and infiltrated by Unicorn with shape-shifting doppelgangstalker agents.
    My girlfriend and I had conceived a child, and I was freaking out because a moment before what I believed then to be the conception I had felt a demonic Lovecraftian pagan deity whom I used to worship enter my body and channel through me [there’s a separate tentacle rape scene somewhere in my memories but I’m not sure how it fits temporally…], and so I felt a deep dread toward this child. My girlfriend had believed herself to be an avatar of Isis, and reported after this that she had perceived Ra coming through my body, and saw this child as a divine seed. Moreover, she had been told by a doctor that she was infertile. This terminated in a miscarriage, my girlfriend fell into a Hell of depression in which she was tortured by three demonic nightmare entities each night. Rapid cycling of emotional states; lots of really intense fighting and making up. During this time I was engaged in psychic and spiritual warfare with demons and aliens, trying desperately to right things through internal strife but ultimately accomplishing nothing of value in the external world. Basically The Maxx. At one point I’m hanging over some rocky precipice on a nearly featureless landscape and sending a distress signal over and over to angels or whomever might care that I want to die. Now wondering if that’s what attracted this one vicious knife-cougar spirit to me… pretty dumb of me.
    Anyway eventually I am drunk and fighting with my girlfriend outside and I’m really unhealthy at this point, really seriously depressed, and I insanely try to jump off of the bridge which we were on. I have the memory of going over the bridge but then suddenly I am lying on the bridge, some man has grabbed me and pulled me back and for some reason I am yelling at him that I had a knife (though I didn’t).
    After that I decided to move back to Squamish for a while to put my head and life back together and to try to deal with the guilt of my actions.

    #1058
    unicole
    Keymaster

    o_o
    That’s hardcore af

    #1059
    unicole
    Keymaster

    Before I tried to kill myself I thought I could fall into madness like sleep. I tried for several hours each day to slip into not having to be responsible for my thoughts or actions but no matter how hard I tried, I felt my mind alert and aware. Then I decided I could give myself a brain aneurysm and spent a few hours building up energy in one spot in my head. I knew that I could have willed it to happen at that point but I got too scared. I was afraid I’d end up just brain dead or something so I didn’t go through with it but I am convinced I could have accomplished this. After I tried to kill myself there were still a ton of drugs coursing through my body and brain for a long while after. At first I was hospitalized and I actually did achieve that madness I was trying to have before, where I was carving things into walls and screaming my head off when they didn’t give me any drugs for my anxiety. After I was released from the hospital I literally thought I was in hell. I didn’t give a fuck. If I got tired, I’d sit down, no matter if it was in the middle of a store or whatever. People would talk to me and I wouldn’t have the energy or understanding to respond. I think I was just really, really high on pharms for like 3 months since I ingested so many. Anyway, slowly I got better.

    #1060
    Cyan Goon
    Participant

    I remember walking around my neighbourhood in a frosty winter morning, age 16 or 17 maybe, sleep-deprived, thinking something along those lines – feeling that there was a pit of madness (felt more like a ditch seeing as I was walking next to one) which I could fall into if I was to make the wrong mental motion – it had an appeal as it seemed to represent a bestial state of oblique freedom from the constraints of reason.

    I wish that I had a better sense for the correlation between internal locations and their representation in the external world -> seems to me to be a key component in psychokinesis and grand-scale super-movements of the exo-body.

    I had an experience with catatonia during one emotional breakdown, which was terrifying. The catatonic state preceded by: dragged behind a train of thoughts culminating in an arete of ‘One transitioning to a state of Zero’; at this point finding that I had become imprisoned in my own mind, with an untraversable gap between my intentions/internal impulses and my body, which was slumped over in a weird position, drooling. I then receded further, unable to connect my feelings to my mind to produce intelligible thoughts – producing only oozing gibbers of mind-muck. Eventually I pulled out of it though was still in a disassociated and psychotic state, cut my chest up a bunch with some scissors and rubbed some salt into the wounds, which brought me fully back into my body, and things improved from that point.

    I was looking into admitting myself to an institution for a while but all of my research IRL and online suggested that it would end up being ultimately a bad decision -> that at best I would be put on unwanted medications which would suppress symptoms but wouldn’t actually result in improving my mental health; that at worst I would be negatively affected by the experience and would have wasted a lot of time. In the end my decision was based on my own feelings of desire for independence, whether I was consciously aware of that at the time or not. After reaching that conclusion, I began to radically take claim of the potential power I had within my life, particularly through making independent decisions with regards to social connections (stopped [acting nice] / [abiding as much of others’ bullshit out of fear of conflict]), activities (starting spending a lot more time outside alone, spent less time cleaning up after my roommates); basically just forced myself to get over feeling like [having self-esteem was selfish] and that [selfish == evil].
    I was working as a produce clerk at this time, and one of my coworkers was an INTJ. We became friends pretty quickly and when work was slow and nobody else was on shift, we’d spend hours discussing science and ethics and whatnot. He was insistent upon the importance of the Self, and many of our conversations came to some back-and-forth on this matter, of the value of service-to-self vs service-to-others in the Absolute. I believe that his influence was instrumental in helping me to break free of co-dependency patterns.

    During one LSD trip I intro-nauted really deeply and found myself to be a spirit trapped in Hell. Was/is this a currently eternal state, was it a vision of a pre-life state, a premonition, or just an abstracted amplification of anxieties? – I am not sure. This Hell was mostly a digital experience – no external fires or blades to see or feel, though they were implied as stressors. It was a Capricorn existence – a sort of gauntlet of ceaseless trials and work requiring one to be alert and focused the entire way through – if one was to lose focus, they fail the trial and have to start over from the bottom. The feeling-implication of the scenario was that this gauntlet would take hundreds of years to complete, that I had failed countless times already, and that I was nearing the end on this run-through and feeling that I was liable to fail at any given time and have to restart. Sort of a worse fate than Sisyphus’ seeing as there was this faint hope of completing it. Perhaps somebody will develop a Rogue-like virtual reality game in this vein within the next ten years.

    I’m very glad to be in one of the timelines in which you didn’t kill yourself, Nicole!
    Madness of these magnitudes is perhaps a prerequisite for certain sorts of magick.

    #1277
    Rachael
    Participant

    I feel so good about you guys sharing your stories! It is brave to be transparent about mental illness and there is obviously a lot of strength here for being survivors. I feel blessed to know your stories!
    The first time I tried to suicide I was 15, however that was a secret kept to myself until I went into a psychiatric ward at the age of 16. I was there for three weeks, and despite my surroundings I felt safer and I didn’t have to deal with the ‘real’ world, which was much of suffering. They don’t like to diagnose kids, however in my notes there were suggestions of severe depression and Borderline Personality Disorder. After being discharged I started to heavily self medicate.
    From the age of 15 to 21 I tried to suicide around 12 times that I remember. There may have been more, however because of my drug and alcohol abusing its hard to know if I had just over did it or not. I was self harming too, which was quite an isolated issue back in the day – especially where I was from.
    At 19 I was in substance abuse counselling which led to another psychiatric ward stay at 21. I was there for two months and attended a drug programme on most days. That stay I was diagnosed with dysthymia disorder and Body dysmorfic disorder. I feel like that’s the most accurate diagnosis Ive received and they therapy that followed was extensive and very nurturing. However, I continued to use and wound up in A & E a good couple of times with poisoning myself and one more suicide attempt.
    At this point the hospital was pretty sick of me, so I was sent away to a residential rehab programme at 24 and it literally saved my life. I haven’t had a suicide attempt since then and I experienced real joy for the first time in years. I even felt emotions which I hadn’t experienced since childhood. I was there for 17 weeks and met the most amazing people.
    These are probably the most significant events when my ‘sanity’ is concerned, however Ive been in counselling and other therapy on and off in between these incidents. Ive been diagnosed with Trichotillomania and EDNOS also – which is extremely relevant.
    I know that there is a biological predisposition that sets up the foundation for my mental illness experiences, however I know that my environment played the triggering part in my ordeal. The whole time I just felt traumatised by the world, like I didn’t belong. And if it wasn’t for my core beliefs I don’t know how I would have survived.
    Now I am training and working in mental health and addictions to give back for all the help that Ive received. I want to grasp onto the ancient Egyptian psychiatry/ psychology and bring it into the 21st century.

    #1687
    TheOpalfawn
    Participant

    My first brush with madness/ spiritual awakening. I had fallen int0 a deep depression after being in a really t0xic relationship in highsc00l. I g0t but 0f it but had t0 risk seeing him everyday and I was trying t0 focus before exams and just couldn’t d0 school without throwing up in fear and things becoming unreal. I tried s0 hard t0 be positive that I stayed up one night l00king t0 the stars asking and asking, visualising in a trance state my heart synchronising with the world. Fr0m the next day forward s0 many c0incidences were happening that I thought i had gone nuts and was freaking myself out, b00ks appeared t0 be applying directly t0 my current situations, everything that I noticed had such meaning t0 me but it was overwhelming. I went t0 school and my vision started t0 g0 blurry, I tried t0 act normal but g0t s0 sp00ked when everyone was walking along in a trance like state like zombies (which was probably normal because it was morning) but I f0und it all t00 scary and enlightening and ran t0 the toilets crying and jumping up and down 0n the gr0und demanding something t00k me h0me feeling like a total alien in a strange world. I hid this all from people but i couldn’t hide my feeling 0f torment and loneliness and desperateness f0r different. I grew paranoid I was g0ing t0 die and everyone was g0ing t0 leave me if I went t0 sleep and I didn’t know where I was g0ing t0 wake up and I was t00 nervous t0 eat

    #1987
    Poopthuglife
    Participant

    Closest I’ve been to madness was probably the time I stayed up for 3 days solid on a cocktail of drugs. I was lucky in that my behavior was relatively benign, possibly because I was aware of what symptoms to expect, in the past I’ve had horribly unpleasant experiences as a direct consequence of desperate and irrational behavior.
    The more I think about it the more stuff comes up. I guess my greatest hits would be like:
    -“Test drive suicide” by Long Term Depression featuring. Fear of Abandonment
    -“I didn’t know fish knives were that sharp” by Intense Argument With Parent
    -“Oops I Overdosed again!” by Heroin, Xanax and the relapse gang.
    I worry that my recollections of experiences might be mistaken for bragging; I always saw my issues with depression, self harm and drug addiction to be mild until I started addressing them properly, so sorry if I come across like a douche-nozzle here, or anywhere!

    #2268
    infinitereality
    Participant

    I spent more than half my life institutionalised for “madness”
    Brain shocked til I basically have no brain left.
    Finally free, free for a year, the only way I got out of madness, although honestly I never got out of it , was to disconnect from the ones “curing” madness.
    Now I am alone dealing with the madness, which is hard, but no one can fucking tlel me what is and isn’t real anymore, I think I’m old enough to make that decision for myself.
    Sorry if that didn’t make sense I’m half asleep

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