Stimulant Psychosis

[Rakaposhi]

I've been using Hexedrone for the last 2 years and have been hospitalised 3 times during that time whilst having psychotic breaks. I've been sectioned once and held in a psychotic ward after attempting to commit suicide by driving my car into a barrier on the motorway (note I didnt actually want to die, my delusions had led me to believe suicide was the least worst alternative at that time)

I started hearing voices about 3 months into my hexedrone use. I was really curious at the time and carried on my drug use whilst trying to understand what was happening by observation and by testing the limits of what the voices could do
eg I realised some voices took over your current internal monologue but added nothing to it. You could make them say whatever you chose to think
eg 2 I realised some voices were auditory hallucinations - if you had a noise source on eg a fan or a tap they would spring from that source. Turn the tap off and the voice would cease too. You could also replace whatever the voice was saying by thinking some different words. You'd hear them come from the tap instead.
eg 3 Your mood is important. Your fear your anxiety your paranoia will be heavily reflected in what you experience. Try to stay calm! Benzos are essential. Dont let the voices trick you into throwing them away like I did here

After 6 months of daily hexedrone use I was hospitalised with my first psychotic break. The voices had become overwhelming and I truly believed I was under siege by powerful external beings - who could read my mind and every thought. I was being punished for my sins. I fled my house after I heard the most awful music coming from the walls, the taps, the room next door. the ventilator fans - anything and everywhere along with two voices singing along and abusing me. It was a real house of horrors. I fled to my girlfriends but was hospitalised later that night after she called the emergency services. It hadnt got any better at hers.

I stopped taking Hexedrone for 6 months after that. Ive left out a lot of details but that night, the days leading up to it and the time in the hospital were a really brutal horrific wake up call to the dangers of living with psychosis for so long.

12 months in I returned to using hexedrone thinking that was long enough for my mind to recover. It wasn't - not really. The voices returned within a week or two and I went through 3 months of what I call boom and bust drug use. I'd buy a load of hex (and some benzos) then after a night or two of use flush them all away as the voices, delusions and panic descended on me again. Then a few days later I'd order some more and flush them away too not long after. I couldnt stop myself.

I was hospitalised again whilst psychotic. Slightly more savvy this time I managed to get out after a couple of days by holding myself together better. I was actually still psychotic (hearing voices and having delusions) when I was discharged - but I was better at inhabiting two versions of reality at the same time by then. The nursing staff thought I was normal.

I went back to drugs within a few weeks after falling out with my brother. I was kicked out of my home by my family and moved into a Premier Inn. I almost lost my job and was given a final warning. Any more unexplained absences and I would be fired. This was the lowest point of my life. I seriously contemplated letting things go and staying in the Premier Inn homeless and jobless taking drugs until my savings ran out. I was so fucked up and addicted to hexedrone that I seriously thought 3-4 months of getting obliterated on drugs before I killed myself was an attractive proposition.

Fortunately I came to my senses and decided I had to rebuild and fast. My relationships with other people were very poor. I had nowhere to live and I was barely clinging to my job. I had enough savings to keep me going for 3-4 months but no longer. I took a benzo every day to numb me and kept my thinking very small. One short term task at a time. Step 1 - Keep my Job. Step 2 - Find a new home. They were my only thoughts and only priorities. I wasnt able to cope with any bigger thoughts than those.

I moved into a new house after 3-4 weeks of living out of a suitcase. I'd realised that paranoia was causing a lot of my problems. The first voices Id heard were representations of the people around me - my family, the neighbours and so on. I thought that if I found somewhere very quiet, remote and safe to take drugs in that perhaps I wouldnt flip out quite so easily. I found a house which had a basement. Down in the basement it was so quiet and felt so very very safe.

6 months ago I started using Hexedrone (and benzos) again in the basement. I went in quite hard that first week as I was in a very safe environment and thought I had a lot of experience with psychosis at that point. That was a mistake. On my fifth day I was hospitalised again. This time I had driven my car into a motorway crash barrier at 100 mph whilst not wearing a seatbelt. Id tried to kill myself due to my delusions.

Somehow I walked away from that car crash with no serious injuries. The car was a write off however and I was sectioned at the hospital and sent to a psychotic ward. I was there for 2 weeks and it actually helped being able to talk to some of the other patients there. I realised the voices were not my friends or my enemies, nor were they powerful external beings and I did not have to fear talking about them. They were a part of my drug induced psychosis and my experiences were very much like the experiences so many other people had. I felt normal again and able to cope better now I had a rational take on things again

A week after I came out of the psychotic ward I ordered some more stimulants and benzos. Armed with my hard gained experience and knowledge of voices, delusions and hallucinations and with a very safe house to take drugs in - I finally felt capable of enjoying my spare time safely again.

Thats when the shadow people really started to visit.

 

[Rakaposhi]

I'd started to have visual hallucinations for the first time at the Premier Inn but it was still the auditory hallucinations that concerned me the most. The fear that someone or something could physically get to you was extremely alarming. I'd hear noises in the corridor or someone try the door and I'd never know if it was real or not. Cars would pull up outside the window and constantly stop and re-start the engine. I got to the point where I had to question every sound that I heard. Real or imagined? What actually was the difference? I could barely sleep due to the constant noise and this seemed to be something the voices wanted - to keep me awake and anxious.

I gave into a lot of voices demands at this point out of fear. I would sleep, eat bathe when they let me and basically do whatever they told me to do at that point (beyond harming others - I still knew who I was and had my moral compass) - to try and earn my redemption and freedom. Fortunately the voices pushed me so hard that I eventually collapsed exhausted. I'd hardly eaten or slept for days and no amount of threat could make me move. I realised at that point - physically they could not touch me and that changed things.

My suicide attempt had changed things as well. I'd tried fairly blindly going along with my delusions and listening to the voices and it hadn't worked out well for me. Nothing the voices could now say to me was going to be able to persuade me as much as it had done before. My mind knew that path had nearly led to my death. Whatever was happening to me I knew now I had to stay in control of my actions and keep control of my own destiny.

I had several rules for living with psychosis (voices) at this point

1. Stay true to yourself. If you're going to go down for your actions and opinions then make sure you go down for actions and opinions that represent the best of you

2. Live a life that you are happy with as much as you can. Keep your job, keep yourself and your house clean and keep your relationships up with other people as much as you can. Don't give the voices any ins to eat away at your self respect when you are coming down / struggling mentally

3. Keep calm and friendly as much as possible. Don't retaliate and don't lose your temper. This is your mind after all. Try and keep it a peaceful place. The last thing you want is to be raging against the wind in your own mind all day and night. A sturdy defence is acceptable when required.

4. Try not to leave the house - especially when you are delusional

In that first week in the new house Id started to have more visual hallcuinations as well. I'd seen a lot of shadow people orgies at that point all around my house, in the washing machine in piles of clothes and towels. Anywhere there was shadow and something to hallucinate off I'd see people, faces, people with multiple faces, multiple people, caterpillar ladies all having sex of some description. Finally I saw what looked like a very real man outside my back door threatening me.

I stopped watching porn whilst on stims and the hallucinations changed too. I now see shadow people walking and standing around - fairly normally. For me, its like looking at someone from a black and white film. They look like real people but I only see black white and shades of grey when I look at them. I have interacted with them. They do respond to gestures for instance I have waved at one man and he started waving back. They do mostly seem neutral and I think its probably like the voices. Whatever mood you are in and how you respond to them is going to dictate your experience with them.

At this point I'm trying to reduce my drug use and perhaps even quit completely. I'm certainly avoiding hexedrone for a while and have not touched anything for about 2 months.

 

[Rick_Johnson]

No one said anything about this? I'm RICK JOHNSON and I think your story is WILD! I'm glad my voices don't get that out of controll and I hope they never do fuck. ID BE SO FRIGHTENED IF THAT WAS ME

right now my voices are just muffled but I mean sometime I hear words. Like just now. Jesus. See my voices are out to kill me and home invade me. For past things that went down. But yes turning off fans and anything that really hums or pshhhhhh at you that's the best thing to do. I'm fucking scared and shook right now. ' we gotta kill him and get on the plane so I'm halfway around the world by the time they find him" like what the actual. Fuck meth bro. I'm LOOSING IT! I find turning on music helps a lot with the voices fuck me if I die you were the last one bud live ya

 

[finitelifeform]

Thanks for your story, man.
It sounds like you need to give that stuff up. It sounds like it's destroying now.
I had one brief psychotic episode with plain old speed. I was living in this run down flat (or apartment if you are American). Quite a crazy story actually about this apartment/flat, several months after I moved out the place blew up due to a gas leak and the guy was killed in there. The gas was leaking when I lived there but it wasn't really bad by then. The whole setup was messed up though and nothing was right in that place. It's crazy to think I would have probably been dead now if I had decided not to move on with my life and build a better life for myself.

Anyway, me and some old school friends got some speed and we went back to this f*cked up seedy little apartment I had. They didn't take any and plans changed so I had this speed all to myself. I took it and towards the end of the night something switched in my brain and I went into a psychosis although I had no idea at the time. I went out into the middle of the night looking for cars to pull over (or something) because I was now an undercover agent. I found a pedestrian crossing and started to press the button to make sure the cars stopped and then I just sat there watching them, or 'analyzing' them as I probably thought in my delusional state. I was so lucky because I didn't get pulled by the cops and because it was early morning no-one was around. I managed to shake myself out of this psychotic break somehow and I was embarrassed and ashamed and felt like I had lost my mind at this point having come to my senses. I then went back home and it all faded away. I must have taken close to a gram of speed to myself. Luckily not all at once though so my last dose was probably timed pretty well but it still sent me over the edge because of how much I had already had.

I will never take speed again. The amount of side effects I got from that drug is unreal. I feel it's such a fiendish drug. You either are all-in like a speed crazed maniac or not at all. I can remember one time having not slept all night from taking it trying to fall asleep to then be woke up by my friends kids getting up. So I scramble to get up off the sofa so they can sit down and watch TV and I felt what seemed like a muscle in my chest stretch, or my heart strain or something crazy. I felt this sinking feeling within me along with a huge shooting pain like I was dying. Luckily I kept myself in that position and didn't try to make it worse and then got up slowly to not rapidly affect any of my internals that clearly had taken a beating. It seriously felt like I had ruptured my heart or something. I was a wreck during that period of my life though. I just lived for speed on the weekend, or whenever we could get it. I barely ate anything during the day except for sandwiches with processed sh*tty chicken, toast and junk food basically. Must of have had at the most 1000-1500kcal daily. I was super skinny, spotty, unclean and unkempt. I had no respect myself really. Barely washed. I think I went weeks without a shower sometimes. All my clothes were dirty and smelly and I always got grilled for my socks stinking the house out, as well as my destroyed stinking shoes as well I used to leave laying around. Spent all my money on weed, beer and speed.

You gotta turn your life around when things get like that, man.
It's a downhill road and you are not stopping falling down that road until you choose to get up.
I hope you get there Just remember this is not who you really are right now. For whatever reason you assumed this role but it's not actually who you are deep down. You are worth so much more. For me I felt like sh*t, I had a whole suitcase full of baggage from my childhood that I had ran away from and taken out on everybody including myself, I was insecure, paranoid, anxious, suffering with mental and emotional issues. The friends I had around me didn't respect themselves but they were more free than I was so I looked up to them thinking if I could be more like them I would be happier. It was all about drugs and wasting away. I was just trying to escape and at that time that is all I thought I was worth. I didn't ever question whether there was more out there. Gradually I came into myself and built up the courage to move forward with my life and it was from around that time that everything in my life changed. I got away from those dark places and found new environments to challenge myself, to find myself, to find others, to change and deal with my sh*t. That was around 2008-10.

Best thing I ever did was move away from the area I lived in. All around me losing yourself and letting yourself go was encouraged and yet you were vilified if you did. The 'good' people were just as 'bad' as the 'bad' people even if they didn't take 'drugs'. Nobody was really going anywhere fast and everybody carried the weight of hard times on their shoulders that they had become numb to everything including things most personal to them. People were just surviving. And because where I came from is fairly rural (in the northern UK countryside) everybody and everything is isolated. Baring in mind this is before social media had really hit on and before larger awareness of the social issues had expanded out into the collective consciousness, or basically before it became known there was actually an outside world out there beyond the small town world you lived in that actually knew you existed and so people just assumed nobody gave a f*ck and we all had a tendency to attack the 'outsiders' even though nobody else was having a worse time than us, we were just so deluded and in denial we didn't want to and couldn't accept it. It was pretty lonely. All you could do was either be a 'normal' person but those people were just as f*cked up. Or, you could be a rebel and take drugs, hang about with the bad role models and at least get a kick out of the misery of your situation. All the 'good' people were just as small minded and angry and it seemed like the ones who said f*ck you to the system found solace in not being held down by the mold they were told to fit into. Essentially nobody knew what to do, nobody knew themselves, most had lost themselves a long time ago and were just getting by, just surviving. I moved away and everything changed. The same problems didn't exist and people were more open and less small-minded, less afflicted with the creature-like small town mentality like Medieval peasants. Best thing I ever did.

You can do it man