Is it ever a good time to write about psychosis?

Because when you're a writer for a living, the urge to do so outweighs the risks...

When I first told close friends that I was launching this much-considered blog, their responses were coloured with caution.

Firstly, was I truly far enough away from the events that triggered my initial episode of psychosis?

Secondly, was I far enough away from the people - and kinds of people - that triggered my original episode?

Thirdly, could I manage to write about psychosis at all without a knock-on effect on my mental health?

Of late, I feel as though I’ve been peering around the corners of my mind. In fact, since I first began writing this particular post, I’ve realised that I’ve actually been staving off another psychotic episode, the initial prickles of which started to spike in Spring.

It’s fair to say that I’ve been experiencing some pretty gargantuan stresses during the past few months, situating themselves around the most substantial pillars of life - work, money, and family. Somebody from the past, somebody who was central to my first substantial psychotic episode, made a reappearance unexpectedly. There have been some acquaintances that have proved themselves to be untrustworthy, and leeching of my energy. And I have a little daughter now; a daughter who requires hours of care and eons of consideration and attention, and this is not conducive to rest, and rest is the number one thing required in order to stave off a psychotic episode.

Combine this with the fact I’ve just marked the 10th anniversary of my dad’s death - the event that commenced the original unravelment - and you’ll understand why several people in my life have urged caution when it comes to me turning upside life into wayward art.

But having already, truly, utterly lost my mind in the most concrete sense some nine years ago, it might sound odd to admit that I am far less afraid of losing it again.

In fact, I would even go so far as to say that there is something about psychosis as a kind of spiritual metamorphosis that makes it tempting to let oneself slide into it a second, third, fourth time, if only to find out what the new episode might reveal.

Several years ago, I considered whether you could become addicted to your own chemical highs. I dated someone with bipolar, someone who greatly resented the medication that stabilised and flattened him. At the time, I thought he was silly at best, selfish at worst. Why should the rest of us have to endure his erratic thinkings and doings just because he didn’t fancy feeling as humdrum as the majority of the human race? 

Today, in the way addicts chase the dove-tailed dragon of illegal stimulants, I wonder increasingly - can the memory of soaring to precarious mental heights no brain is safe to venture not just be another kind of Exploration? What makes the daredevil hiker’s cramponning of black ice any safer than the once-psychotic’s longing for the euphoria of madness? Shackleton, eat your amygdala out.

The more I think about it, it’s probably why so many people who experience psychosis often end up experimenting with drugs, if they never did before, or become extreme sports aficionados. Or find themselves in daredevil relationship after daredevil relationship. Because life after psychosis, once you’ve made it through the atrophying suicidal ideation months, is deadeningly dull, (at least for the first few years.) 

Post-psychosis, one is left with a hunger for the extreme edges of life. But having already been a professional dominatrix, and having spent the best part of 15 years arguing with others on live TV, what might be my next endorphinic misadventure?

Why, writing this blog of course…