I was sitting in my living room along with a social worker, mental health nurse and my baffled parents the day the doctor told me I was “psychotic”. It felt like a dream. Just a week before, suffering from anxiety and depression, I had taken leave from the training course I was on. A week of shuffling around the house followed.
Like many people, I was determined to “escape” my unhappiness in any way possible, but thankfully lacked the conviction to do anything about it. Soon I became convinced I had committed some sort of sin that I could never articulate: TV programmes and songs fed a narrative in my mind which was impossible to write down now – it simply made no sense. It involved God, the devil, my boss and the professionals around me, all of whom were part of some major conspiracy reminiscent of The Truman Show. These delusions were common signs of psychosis, a condition that can stem from deep depression.
During my own episode of psychosis I was, in medical terms, detached from reality. But that simple message was not what I heard in the stigma-ridden word, psychotic. It conjured up something very different, and very upsetting: serial killers and fictitious villains. Unsurprisingly, this added more weight to my own delusional and self-loathing narrative.
This was a life-changing moment for me. I didn’t realise it then, but I was experiencing for the first time the true impact of misused words. According to the NHS, somebody who is psychotic will “perceive things differently to those around them; this might involve hallucinations and delusions”. But the word with which “psychotic” is so regularly interchanged is “psychopathic”, defined as a “chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behaviour”.
The two are not linked, and they are certainly not the same. Yet a glance through any film review section, in any newspaper or magazine, will probably suggest something different. As the mental health charity Mind states on its website, “lots of people wrongly think that the word ‘psychotic’ means ‘dangerous’”. As I sat in my living room, being told I was psychotic, I interchanged the word with “dangerous” and felt myself spiral deeper into a delusion of guilt. “So I have done something wrong … maybe I am an evil person,” I thought.
I spent 10 days in a psychiatric hospital, silent and shy. Every patient was a character in my “story”, as were the nurses. I said very little and did even less, but my mind was racing. Like many psychotic patients, I was convinced the nurses were out to get me, and that I was being punished for something. My fantasies of having committed a great sin escalated as I was taunted by one patient who believed she was the devil, and offered salvation by another who sang religious songs and walked around the ward with arms outstretched. We were all orbiting “reality” in our own ways.
Like many people who experience any kind of deep depression I lacked hope, but my warped state of mind took that further
It wasn’t until I had taken the right drugs and rebalanced various chemicals in my brain that I began to listen to the professionals who were there to help me. I read up on psychosis and had several sessions with a community mental health nurse. Listening to my reflections on the negative associations of the word “psychotic”, he explained how common my feelings were in his clients. “That’s the media for you,” he said, brimming with frustration.
He’s right. Examples of journalists’ misuse of the word “psychotic” are everywhere. Trainspotting’s Begbie is described as “psychotic” in practically every review I have read; ranging from the Guardian to the Sun (the latter also describes Begbie as “psychopathic”, using the terms interchangeably). On the Huffington Post, you can find a countdown of The Most Psychotic Movie Villains of All Time, featuring everyone from Freddy Krueger to Norman Bates. A website called allthetests.com, billing itself as “an exciting exploration into your personality and IQ”, allows you to partake in a light-hearted quiz entitled Are You a Psychotic Killer?, claiming it will help you decide “whether or not you should be locked away forever to keep you from killing everyone!” Even if, after all this, you look for a definition of the word in the online dictionary Merriam-Webster, the context given is as follows: “the identity of the psychotic murderer known as the Zodiac Killer remains an intriguing puzzle”.
Meanwhile, Dictionary.com unhelpfully lists “psychopath” as a synonym. I have no doubt that I would have spiralled less, and experienced fewer delusions about my own morality and guilt, were it not for the way mental health terminology is misused.
My life has changed a lot since that day. I’ve returned to work and count myself lucky to be among those who love their job. Yet my life today seemed impossibly out of reach two years ago. Like many people who experience any kind of deep depression I lacked hope, but my warped state of mind took that further. Interpreting my psychotic thoughts with hindsight, I was convinced my future would consist of prison, some sort of pact with the devil and a showdown with lots of malevolent nurses.
Unless I’m in for a big surprise, none of this has or will turn out to be a reality. My mind played tricks on me; the truth was that I was going through an episode, and episodes pass. The life and happiness that felt so out of reach was, in reality, waiting for me just the other side of a hospital spell.
I am fortunate to have been free of psychotic episodes since 2014. But for many people these episodes come and go frequently. The misuse of the word is everywhere, and the associations it carries as a result will only help to escalate people’s symptoms. So please remember: psychotic does not mean psychopathic, violent or dangerous: it is about perceiving things differently to everyone else around you. With the help of the media, and the general public, we could all have a positive change in perception.
• Read about psychosis on the Mind website. The NHS explains many aspects on this page
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A moment that changed me: when the doctor told me I was psychotic | Anonymous
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