Nobody knows what caused my psychosis. In 2016 I was going through a divorce with my first husband. He was military & cheated in terrible ways, I was young with a three&four year old. My little brother was very supportive to me at this time, he was my best friend. He died of an aneurism in July 2017. Nobody ever saw it coming, he had just got healthy & lost a bunch of weight. I had a job teaching swimming lessons to kids at the time & I spent a lot of time in highly chlorinated water. I don't really cope with emotions, I suppress them, & my family does not encourage communication about negative issues (so we never talked about my brother). At the end of 2017 I heard my first "conspiracy theory" when I saw a Q anon video on YT (yeah, it sounds so dumb now). I had never thought about these kind of ideas before (ideas like what if there was more to 9/11, things that don't add up to official narrative yadda yadda) & I found the distraction of losing myself in these ideas an almost panacea to my grief and problems at the time. "Qanon" was especially enticing to someone like me because it gave the impression that someone was going to put a stop to everything evil we looked at, if only we "believed" enough, almost. I got slowly more and more inundated, spent so much time on 8chan thinking if I missed any post I would miss something very important. People(?) on 8chan encouraged you to think in "numbers", for example if a post had a certain timestamp or correlated to a certain number it had some sort of special meaning. I think this is where I picked up the idea of numerical thinking (numerology? or is that different?) and I started applying it to my real life. It seemed the more small delusions I picked up the more large delusions I was able to accept. By summer 2018 I was believing that Q anon was my brother, that Google had sent out a hit on my brother with some kind of CIA heart attack gun because he was good at programming but a Republican, a bunch of shit like that. People were trying to push the idea of an "R" anon on 8ch who was supposed to complement Q through clues or some such bullshit. I felt that I recognized this as an operation to disenfranchise Q and so I assumed the role of this "R" on 8ch...someone made me my own /rresearch/ board there, as a joke, I think. But I just started writing and writing there after that. I started keeping journals during the day after that, writing down ideas like a crazy person in a movie...I can't describe it, but either way it's deleted now because 8ch was deleted after receiving pressure after some shooting in Texas or something like that.
Anyway, after that I really went downhill. By September 2018 Conspiracy based psychosis eventually seeped into my personal relationships and not just larger institutions. I stopped trusting my kids' school. I truly believed they were drawing their blood without my consent (reading about pizzagate and shit like that will fuck with you on a subconscious level.) I stopped trusting my current husband and went down to my parents' house 2 hours away with the kids thinking it was normal. My mom kept herself very distant & I left & drove East toward Chicago (I had visited there earlier in the Summer to visit my current husband's family and I wanted to take my child support & study at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. Haha. Maybe not wise to leave at midnight with nothing. I spent my only $400 on clothes for me & my kids at Fred Meyer because I didn't pack. I literally had nothing. I panhandled my way from WA to Chicago. With my kids. I hardly slept. I think I stopped in Utah the first night, at a hotel outside a military base. I looked at a map on the wall & imagined that the US stopped at Illinois, & the entire east coast was either a lie, or something like that. I stopped in a city called Washington, Kansas. I had no money for a hotel but two ladies let me sleep at theirs. There is a sign on the road in Washington, Kansas that says "See the man behind the Green Curtain." In the morning I turned at this sign. The kids said "where are we going?" I said "maybe somewhere we can live". "The man behind the green curtain" is, I'm guessing, an empty house where the mayor of munchkin land used to live. There is a picture on the window of all of the munchkins with Judy Garland. Anyway, long story short I went batshit. The less I slept and ate, the more I deteriorated. I remember four hotels, one in Illinois, so I'm guessing I got there in four days. I remember getting to a hotel in Chicago. I was looking at the clock in my car without the time change so I checked in way too early. There was a black preacher outside the hotel who told me he would buy me dinner at the restaraunt there if I came. I went to the restaraunt. I was way too far out of it but I'm really thankful he bought me dinner, even though I couldn't eat it, & let me call my mom. I felt nothing but fear, but I cannot describe it. I opened up my computer in the hotel. I thought maybe I would get some answers on 8ch. Fucking 8ch was just talking about politics. Q had made a post (wow! Q made a post! It much have so much meaning!) It said "God bless the Republican party". God bless the Republican party? I could not give two shakes of a lamb's tail about the republican fucking party. I snapped out of something at that point. The kids wanted to watch Wildkratts on TV. The TV kept glitching out. I found a squished skittle in my backpack. It represented abortion, somehow. The kids wanted to leave the hotel. I drove to a store, like a rite-aid I think. The kids wanted donuts. I couldn't count the change I had. I asked the clerk where the nearest hospital was. I have no idea to this day how I followed those directions and drove myself there. I checked myself in. They took the kids. Matt's mom drove down from northern Illinois to get them (Thank God). They put me in the upstairs of the mental hospital. The one in Harvey, that's named after Green Gables. I guess you only get to go there if you are special. Haha.
What caused it? Who can say. I see people going through some shit on the internet sometimes with their news sources. "mass formation psychosis" is a buzzword right now. Do I think that the internet can cause psychosis? Maybe, I don't know. Maybe if you put your whole belief system into it and make it dysfunctional. I definitely replaced God with the internet around that time.
I really think that things wouldn't have gotten so bad if it weren't for my copper IUD. I had it removed last July, and I feel like my brain doesn't make the "jumps" when it comes to certain lines of thinking that it used to. The support forums for copper IUDs have far more people in them than this support forum, though there are not a lot of examples of psychosis there (just depression , stomach pain , & irrational attitudes & thoughts). Wilson's disease is a thing. I'll never know if I had it.
I have never talked about some of this before, even to my therapist. Sometimes it's easier to write than to say out loud, although I don't know why I have the need to do this at this time (procrastinating from school, probably). Anyway, take care everyone.
I always really appreciate what you have to say.
