I am one of the lucky ones who has experienced psychosis. I want to write about it because it is possible people will hear me, when they don't hear the voices of people in psychosis who are not white, not middle class, not educated or not male.
I have Bipolar 1 disorder, my experiences of psychosis are rare indeed. So rare that until recently I did not know I was mentally ill at all. I put my psychotic experiences down to adulterated marijuana, until I had a psychotic experience nine years clean and sober. Even then it did not cross my mind that I was psychotic. I called it a panic attack and remained undiagnosed for some years.
The story of my most recent psychotic incident is that I was travelling in my car across Australia. I was clean and sober, and was making a journey to Port Hedland, Western Australia to make a general amends to the people and town. I had worked there 20 years earlier, and it was the place where my drinking had really got out of control. I had worked with Aboriginal people, and had been treated with great respect and acceptance. Some of my behaviour while drunk, and sometimes while not drunk, had been appalling. I wanted to go and look my past in the face.
I was feeling very spiritually connected when I set out. I drove through Trangie where I had had a remarkable spiritual experience a few moths earlier. (See my post called "The Death Of Sailesh Rajan") I camped at Nyngan and was eaten alive by mosquitoes. The Bogan River was in rare flood.
I had probably stopped thinking clearly already and did not do the sensible thing and stay in a motel. I spent the next few months worrying that I had caught Ross River virus.
I spent the next night in Port Augusta. Ten hour drives were what I was aiming for, and I was achieving it. I had camped in Port Augusta before , with my old mate Mark Zanker. The town then had filled me with fear and it did again. These remote towns do something to me. I had felt an edge of fear in Broken Hill, where I had stopped earlier in the day, but it was stronger in Port Augusta. I will describe the particular fears my psychosis entailed later, but I think the process, descent, had begun.
I was still feeling connected, at times, as well. I was very much up and down. I had no idea at that time about Bipolar disorder. I did not even consider I could be affected by depression, let alone Bipolar. But I was very interested, had been for years, in the phases of the moon and the progress of the seasons. The progress of the seasons is of particular importance in the management of Bipolar. Manic incidents are most common at the equinoxes, March 21, and September 21. It is to do with brain chemistry changes caused by rapid changes in the amount of daylight every day. Similarly travel across timezones can trigger mania, for the same reasons.
It was March 19 when I camped in Port Augusta. I had already crossed one timezone, and would cross another that day as I proceed into Western Australia. The ten hour drive on 20 March took me halfway across the Nullarbor plain to Eucla.
Australia is very sparsely populated except for the major cities. But the Nullarbor plain is something else again. There is a roadhouse every 100 kilometres or so, but that is all there is. Miles upon miles of flat featureless plain. Nullarbor means "no trees" in latin, and i kept repeating "No Trees" as a kind of mantra. And there are none.
Eucla is just on the Western Australia side of the border. At the border I had to throw out a potato sack filled with firewood that i had carried for months. You cannot take organic matter into WA.There is a checking station there.
Eucla is gradually being eaten up by sand, but there is camping ground there, and showers and toilets. It is not much fun camping there though. You pitch your tent in two inches of dust that covers rock hard earth underneath. I gave up on using tent pegs and secured my tent to the car and some rocks. Even worse though, is the sensation of the three sides of the continent pressing in on you. North, East and West. And to the South the sand and beyond it the hungry, cold Southern Ocean.
But I was tired. And I forgot to mention, it was dark of the moon that night. Dark of the moon, crossing timezones and Equinox. The Aces on the Poker Machine of my madness had lined up. And they had lined up in the loneliest place I had ever been. But none of this crossed my mind. I was bonecrushingly tired and after struggling to get my tent up, and cooking a meal on my portable gas cooker I was ready for a shower and bed. There was a code for the showers, to stop non paying guests from using it. I had forgotten the code and a fellow guest refused to tell me. So i waited. I was too tired to walk over to the office and get it. Pretty soon someone else came out and told me. It was just dark as I lay down in my tent closed the flap against the dust.
I remember waking up and feeling gritty and uncomfortable. I made the mistake of going outside to urinate. It was dark and frightening. I seemed to drag a bucket of dust back into the tent, but i managed some uncomfortable hours of sleep. Then I woke again. Bright-eyed and anxious. The dark of the moon and the Equinox registered on me then. I tried going back to sleep but it was useless. I had no idea of the time. I was unaware if my phone was on NSW, South Australian, or Western Australian time. It was dark though, and there was no sign of dawn. I used my portable stove to make coffee. I had three cups and still it was dark and quiet.
So I packed up the car as best I could in the total darkness and started driving west. After an hour light started appearing in the sky. I was driving away from the sun, but slowly I sensed light seeping into the darkness. As it became lighter i saw that there were clouds ahead. What were the chances of it raining in this barren, godforsaken corner of the world? Then as sun crossed the horizon, directly behind me, a beam of light lit up the cloud. Immediately it was broken into a rainbow. A vertical rainbow from the ground right into front of me reaching straight up for heaven. My heart sang. God was with me on this quest.
Almost instantaneously my feelings crashed. With my feeling crash came the realisation that this was not a vertical rainbow, but just one whose arc was so vast that it momentarily looked like it was straight. My crashing feelings started to hurtle downwards out of control. I knew I was a fraud. I started chanting, in my head my other mantra, that I had used in the past in incidents that seemed to be caused by marijuana, "Don't think, don't think". But just like in the past it didn't work. I was terrified. I had ideas of a rampant toddler god in nappies, firing thunderbolts at me. Are these hallucinations? I don't know, iI suspect not. But each time the madness has descended I have these or similar ideas I can't stop thinking.
I was too afraid to stop the car, in case it would not start again. Too afraid to turn around. Too afraid to slow down. So I kept driving west at 120 KPH. In despair. I passed several road hoses but was too afraid to stop, but eventually i had to stop. I managed to buy petrol and check if there was mobile phone coverage. There was not. I was unable to ask for help but i did manage to order scrambled eggs on toast and eat it in the restaurant. All the workers at the roadhouse looked like serial killers to me. I kept my presence small and got out of there as quick as i could. I considered asking to use a land line, but was too afraid.
From Eucla to Norseman, according to google maps is 7 hours. I drove the distance that day in utter terror.
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