When I became unwell I was placed in a system of early intervention and given 18 months of high quality care, encouragement and support. I have been given different diagnoses at various times and it is difficult to classify the symptoms I have experienced into a single mental health disorder. It is my opinion that early intervention is an effective system that is independent of a particular illness and beneficial for people experiencing mental ill health across the board.

Growing up can be a painful experience, and I was never one to do things the easy way. Plenty of excuses come to mind and I admit I tried on a few. My family went through some rough times and I lost things that I felt were very important. For much of my early adolescence I was focused on a career in basketball and this goal was well on track after state selection and a tour around America. Then multiple sports injuries requiring surgery forced me to take stock and finally I gave up my dream. There were also issues in my family, which broke apart when I was fifteen, but when I look back now it seems that there was nothing entirely out of the ordinary to justify my anger at the world. Nothing that was not true for a lot of other people anyway.

I was angry and I made bad choices. Perhaps I lacked the foresight of age or the insight of maturity but I know in my heart that I had an urge to be destructive and I wanted to hurt myself. Maybe I just needed the world to see my pain.

Whatever the reason, my teenage years were an ever increasing cycle of self-destruction. Drugs and alcohol played a part but they were just the most readily available implements for the work of wreaking havoc on self. If no drugs had been available, I am sure I would have found something else. Whether it was relationships gone wrong, physical injury, legal consequences or horrible come downs, the results of bad choices were all fairly similar. They just bloody hurt.

You might wonder why someone would enter such a cycle. Why not just stop? I would like to be able to answer that question but I do not have an answer now just as I did not have then. Perhaps too many of the choices we make are on a level we do not have access to. Maybe we are subconsciously influenced by our relationship with ourselves, or maybe we just create situations that reflect the way we feel. I doubt I will ever really know. I have read a lot of theories on why people become self-destructive and how a negative self-image comes about. I wish we understood it in a way that we could discard unhelpful attitudes and stop creating unflattering and inaccurate ideas about ourselves. Personally I think that the issue of self-image is crucial, and where a constructive change can be most effective. A path that leads to pain, anguish and ill health has to begin somewhere.

As I destroyed my life I saw a lot of my friends take similar paths and I saw a reflection of my own anger and desire for self-destruction in their choices. The similarities drew us together and we pushed each other to ever-greater levels of chaos. We would consume any drugs we could find, get into fights and wreck whatever was in our way. Nothing justifies such terrible behaviour but perhaps we were trying to break the world in which we felt imprisoned. We were united by a desire to push until something shattered. Some of my friends are still at it and some are no longer around. Some found relationships and family or committed to jobs and careers. For me, I pushed until something shifted, but it was not the world that broke, it was my perceptions and reasoning and ultimately, my mind.

Amongst friends that often argued, trust was a fragile commodity. A slew of bad choices culminated in some major losses and I entered a downward spiral. Escalating levels of drug use and emotional turmoil felt like a weight dragging me down. I stopped doing anything that was remotely healthy. Eventually I even stopped eating and sleeping.

Pushing a brain and body beyond their limits can only end badly. My thinking became focused around ideas of the future and I felt that I was able to perceive things I had not previously been aware of.

I was living at one of the colleges of Melbourne University, by nature a very competitive environment. As I gradually became unwell, my declining rationalisation fabricated conspiracies involving the college community and I managed to enrol some of my friends and a few members of the staff into my agenda. One such conspiracy that I remember centred on one of the staff, who also happened to be the father of a friend. I came to believe that he was controlling the other staff by blackmailing them with secrets of terrible acts he had forced them to carry out. The delusions of an unwell mind can be incredibly elaborate in design and complex in detail. I am sure all of the people whom I believed I had convinced, in truth remained doubtful, but it is difficult to entirely disregard a passionate declaration of genuine conviction, no matter how bizarre the content. Of course at first, the theories I communicated were more unusual than inherently sinister, grandiose rather than conspiratorial, and we all love to be inspired.

The first stage of mania was an incredible feeling, like reaching the very pinnacle of joy and staying there, riding a wave. The incredible feeling eventually became an inflated sense of my own abilities and place in the world. Initially it was all very exciting but over time grandiose ideas became conspiratorial suspicions and my mind created elaborate stories with bizarre and complex causal relationships. In retrospect, there was a strong theme of control in my delusions and I became convinced that someone at my friend’s work was controlling everyone with some kind of supernatural force, because particular words had been used in conversations. I do not remember the particular words or why I believed they had a particular meaning. I think this is part of the illness, to make connections that no rational mind would make and to take them on as truth.

Most of my memories of that time are very blurry but I have flashes of extreme emotional turmoil and psychological pain. Perhaps my mind created an alternative reality to escape into. I was certainly at the centre of the delusions I created, frightening and bizarre as they were. It seems counterintuitive to construct an illusion that creates so much misery but mental illness never seems to make much sense.

My friends put up with my strange ideas and behaviour for as long as they could but eventually they agreed that the situation was more than they could deal with and contacted the local hospital.

I was couch surfing and moving around a bit but I had been spending a fair bit of time at one particular place. A friend owned a house in Melbourne and had seen other people become unwell with psychosis. He rang around and sorted out a Crisis Assessment Team (CAT) that included a psychiatric nurse and an occupational therapist. They came over and introduced themselves. I was in a very open state and told them everything they wanted to know. Perhaps it is contradictory but despite being unwell and delusional, on the whole I maintained a very truthful and candid manner throughout. Interestingly, I have found this to be true of many people I met who were struggling with their mental health.

I agreed to go for a ride and meet some new people. I am sure the CAT team had become very adept at using language that would create intrigue rather than suspicion and I do not see deception in the variation. I remember sitting in the back seat, feeling surrounded by nervous people. At one point I made a joke about the level of tension, which I did not understand and mistook as something others might have seen as fun, like we were playing a game and I had not been told the rules. The laughter was loud and sudden, like a release after a long period of suspense. I did not mean anyone any harm but I was aware that I no longer had any fear, which made people uncomfortable. We rode the rest of the way in silence and I watched the world slide by out of the window, no doubt in my mind that everything was as it should be.

The Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre (EPPIC) was described to my friends as a lovely facility overlooking the Melbourne Zoo. There was indeed a view. Through the bars of the cage that surrounded the balcony we were allowed to smoke on, you could see the external fence of the zoo in the distance. I am sure this exaggeration of the facts was a part of the overall strategy of getting someone who was very unwell into a facility where they could be appropriately treated and I harbour no ill will towards the staff who created the small deception. In all of my experiences in the treatment of psychosis, the ideal situation seemed very far from the reality, but the people involved have always been well intentioned. Psychosis is a horrific experience for everyone involved and I believe we make the best of a very difficult situation.

On arrival, I was interviewed by a psychiatrist with a group of people in tow. I do not remember much of the conversation but I remember being excited about the idea of living at EPPIC, which was described as a wonderful place full of interesting people. The latter part of the statement proved to be quite accurate. I was taken up to my room and then left to my own devices.

I can of course only relay what remains of my memory of the events and there may well be interactions and situations that I have simply forgotten.