On Psychosis & Other Tricks

Disclaimer: Please note this is a personal reflection on my experiences and I am not a representative for anyone, except myself. I write about serious subjects, including suicide and my own experiences with my mental health and living as a Canadian Egyptian-Mauritian Muslim in North America.

The trickiest part of healing, at least for me, is dismantling the guard I’ve been steadily building and actually feel my emotions. I have always had this tendency to think and think and think until I think myself right into a gutter. There may be stars. I know there are scars and streetlights. I remember them well.

At some point, a river is just a river.

There are highs and lows to psychosis. My least favourite aspect of being formally diagnosed with bipolar disorder is registering that I don’t experience the world in the same way as everyone else. I hear voices. Sometimes they’re nice, sometimes they’re not. It is often confused as a spiral; I say confused because it only looks that way from the perspective of others who can’t make sense of what is going on.

There is no blame here, no shame either, only my perspective and what the truth is for me. Psychosis is a multifaceted experience. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are many factors that contribute to a person who seems to be losing their mind.

The desire to end my life stemmed from a pervasive sense that no matter what I did, I would never be able to run far away enough from myself to become someone else. When you are a high-functioning person who hears voices that aren’t there and experience fluctuations in mood, working on a mobile application and web platform called STABILISE AI can appear a little ironic. Ironic, but honest.

The loneliness. The sheerness of it at times. The complete inability to feel properly, to appear balanced, to work so hard, and to engage in a conversation only to realize that nobody’s there.

I suppose that is where my affection for John Nash comes from. Not affection, respect. When he was at MIT, he was referred to as “the phantom.” He would pace the halls, muttering to himself and scribbling with chalk on blackboards. He was solving problems nobody else could see. Perhaps because they weren’t real, but some of them were. At least they were real enough for him to win the Nobel Prize with two others in 1994.

What I truly respect about the Nobel Prize is that Alfred recognized that he had created a destructive force and understood the value of alternating currents long enough to level the forces, if you will. Yin and yang. Black and white.

When I am hurt incidentally, it is not merely a scratch, but a gaping wound that bleeds and bleeds until I realize there’s no blood. I’m crying about the world. I want to save it and when I say that, I mean, I may really want to save myself.

It took me a long time to understand that I have value. I don’t fully register it yet. What I do know is that I have an impact, the same influence I’ve read about others having. Sometimes cyanide, sometimes saline. Either way, it’s a slow drip. I appear to self-combust or destroy connections by pushing everybody away until I begin to resemble the metal of a shield.

At some point, something’s gotta give.

The truth of the matter is that building STABILISE AI did give me a reason to live. It offered me an opportunity to make a personal dream come true. It was only a seed at first, the inkling that I had to make the world a better place. I’m not sure if this was selfless or self-preserving. Medication did not help me. I have tried many. They gave me heart palpitations, vivid nightmares, sweaty palms, weight gain, job insecurity, poor self-control, brain fog, gambling problems. I gambled around $35,000 after being prescribed Abilify. I had never gambled before in my life — not with money, not in a casino, nothing like that ever before.

I used to spend hours playing in online casinos. It was devastating. I was out of control and every time, I clicked, Fit to Play, I had a sneaking suspicion I wasn’t, but my mother had died a month after I started taking Abilify (aripiprazole) and I needed something to do with my hands. I developed tremors in my legs, like a charley horse that wouldn’t end. I would self-exclude, join another casino, self-exclude, join another, and the cycle did not end until I decided to stop taking Abilify.

Consider this screenshot:

1172 third-party vendors. It becomes very serious when you consider what this means. If you are acquainted with cookies, then you understand that if you are not diligent about your online activity, you will be bombarded with targeted ads. Guess how many gambling ads I saw that would perpetuate a vicious cycle of gambling, losing, gambling, losing, gambling, losing.

I am grateful I stopped. I am grateful to be studying computer science, philosophy, and art now. I have no interest in speaking to a medical professional again because they did not warn me about well-known side effects, so well-known Abilify has been a part of numerous lawsuits for similar reasons related to the weakening of self-control in a genuinely destructive way. I am not saying it does not help others. Whether I’m pro- or anti-pharmaceutical industry is not what this is about.

What I am interested in is developing and designing STABILISE AI to the best of my ability and learning how to rest, how to distinguish between social media and life. The best advice I ever received was from a med school student who said, “Fatima, I don’t want to admit you. I don’t actually believe that you would benefit from being admitted. The patients here are truly sick and I fear they would make you worse. I think you should spend a little less time online and a little more time outside.”

He was right. I don’t have a good time on social media. Too much data at a high enough frequency is destructive because what being bipolar means is that I am prone to black-and-white thinking because I do not have the same mental salience filter as other people. Nobody explained this to me. I learned it through delusions and hallucinations that affected other people to the point where I was threatened with the prospect of law enforcement four times. I will write about this in another piece soon. That is not what this piece is about.

This is about me now. This is about something Maya Angelou said:

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I took the med school student’s advice. I cut off the internet. I walked around downtown Calgary, Alberta, Canada for hours on end. I stared at the Harry Hays building, a federal government building. I walked past law offices convinced that I was on the brink of losing my Canadian citizenship. That was the nature of my psychosis, the form that it took. I was convinced that the Canadian government was watching my every move, that my phone lines were tapped, that my neighbours were in on it, that I was being watched everywhere I went.

It was devastating. I showed up at my aunt’s house. There were helicopters overhead.

I thought to myself, This is it, this is when they’re going to bring me in.

It is difficult to say goodbye to past selves. Maybe because there’s goodbye, interrogation, and integration. What the latter requires is forward-thinking, an internal recognition that when I look towards the horizon, I am not looking at the past. There’s nobody here from there.

Featured image from Bob Ronald (Pexels).

https://www.mnp.ca/en/services/corporate-and-consumer-insolvency/class-action/abilify-settlement

Disclaimer: STABILISE AI is an iOS and Android app and web platform created by a researcher in collaboration with computer scientists. It is their goal to highlight the importance of developing critical thinking skills while raising self-awareness, encouraging self-exploration, and improving access to practical knowledge, strategies, and resources. STABILISE AI is designed to help you track your own moods, improve your emotional well-being, and build psychological resilience over time. For medical advice, please consult your doctor or a trusted mental health professional. If you are in immediate need of medical assistance, contact emergency services. To speak with a trained crisis responder in North America, please call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.