My Beautiful Psychosis: Opening the Doors of Perception

Don’t miss your glimpse into Emma’s world;

When I had my first episode of so-called psychosis, aged 27 years old, the psychiatrist wanted to know if I had heard voices. She wasn’t asking out of interest, but to confirm her diagnosis. When I told her that I had, she wrote something in her notes and didn’t ask any more about it. She didn’t want to know that the voice was positive. She didn’t want to know that I had only heard it once. She didn’t want to know that the voice seemed to come from behind me and not in my head. She didn’t want to know that it had helped me rather than disturb me. It had said, ‘You are beautiful.’ None of this was of interest to her. She was focused on confirming that she had made the correct diagnosis. She would then be able to rest in peace knowing it was another job well done. She may have made the right call according to her training but as one human being to another she had utterly failed me.

I have been given the diagnosis of bipolar, schizophrenia and even paranoid schizophrenia, depending on who I speak to. I am none of these things. I experience what the mental health services call psychosis, or cyclical psychosis to be precise. This does not mean I have a condition or an illness. It means I am particularly susceptible to my ego disintegrating and the doors of perception opening to a non-ordinary state of consciousness.

The perception of psychosis as being out of touch with reality is at best arrogant and at worst, false. For a start, there is no way of knowing what ‘reality’ actually is. It is something the brain constructs. Cats see everything blue and green but that does not make them deluded. It makes them better hunters. There is no reason why consensus reality of humans is any more real than cats. It is simply the one that humans have evolved to perceive in order to best function in our world. Perhaps there is another animal that sees reality more clearly than us.

An experiment shows that people with schizophrenia, the condition involving repeated psychoses, are actually able to perceive more accurately than so called normal people. It uses the Hollow Mask Illusion and involves identifying whether an image of a mask is concave or convex. All the participants with schizophrenia could distinguish between the two types of photos, whereas control volunteers without the condition were fooled 99 per cent of the time. ‘Normal’ perception is not something we can even trust as accurate.

During my own personal experiences of psychosis, I was able to see auras around objects and people, in real life and onscreen. I knew about certain traumatic events from childhood that I had repressed and forgotten. I saw a sparkler of light appear and form a figure of eight shape, the infinity sign, before disappearing again. I had memories from past lives play out with certain people around me. I could hear incongruent thoughts that people were thinking but denied so, which I thought was coming to me from their unconscious mind.

Even in times when I was not experiencing psychosis, I have had some unusual experiences that would be interpreted by our modern material reductionist view as not being real. I saw a golden ribbon of light come from my belly button and attach itself to the duster that I was holding. I have also felt the energy of spirits inside my body communicating to me how they had died, by taking the shape of the weapon that had killed them. Each time I acknowledged their death, they sent love into my heart as thanks before moving on. I have also communicated with dolphins, psychically. There is no way we can prove that any of this in not real. Unfortunately the onus is on me to prove that it is and that is not possible either.

To say a person is out of touch with reality is to ignore the validity of the reality that they are in touch with. This is not only disempowering, it fails to celebrate the journey that the person is on, albeit in their alternate reality. It is also, more tragically, a missed opportunity.

I have been able to study psychosis, first hand, as someone with a degree in psychology. I have also been a professional shiatsu therapist for 10 years, which has given me an eastern perspective through which to view my experiences. I now believe that psychosis is actually an attempt by the psyche to heal.

Psychosis comes from the Greek word for ‘psyche’ meaning soul and ‘osis’ meaning process. So it can be seen as a soul process. On the highest level, it is the soul attempting to return to wholeness. It does this by first moving the ego out of the way. The ego is an identity that is constructed by the mind in order to survive as a social species. It doesn’t exist per se, as a physical organ, like the brain. It is simply the mind’s created idea of who it thinks it is. The ego provides a useful function: making sure we behave in a socially acceptable way so that we’re not banished from the tribe and made vulnerable to predators. The ego helps us survive by taking care of ourselves as a separate body. If we were to remain like a baby, feeling oneness and bliss gazing into faces and eyes, we’re likely to walk across a busy road and get splattered. But when it comes to the health of the soul and the spirit, the ego is not only unnecessary, it can be an obstruction.

So once the ego is offline, the soul can take over. It can re-connect with Oneness, Bliss, Peace and Love. This is the point at which some people mistake their own Christ Consciousness for being the actual Jesus. Without the ego to remember who it thinks it is, mistakes like this are easy to make.

Next all of the repressed psychological material that the ego banished to the basement of the subconscious comes up to join the party. The love actually attracts it out of hiding. This psychological material needs to be fully digested in order to re-integrate rejected parts of the self that were treated by the ego as socially unacceptable. To fully digest it would be to accept and welcome it. When that happens, it no longer causes problems. To label these as symptoms is to miss a unique opportunity. Psychosis is a moment in time in which we have privileged access to our repressed nature. It therefore holds the potential for transformation, if we know what to do with it.

We can see it like a broken clock that doesn’t work because there is too much dirt in the mechanism. The mental health service puts the clock on the shelf labeled ‘damaged’ and gives it a little oil so it feels less bothered about the fact that it doesn’t work properly. But there is nothing wrong with the mechanism: it just needs a good clean. Psychiatry could and should be doing just that. I believe that psychosis makes the ego disintegrate for a very important reason: in order to access the dirt that is clogging up the mechanism. This dirt is the trauma from childhood and even further back. What if psychiatry were to help clean this out?

It’s time to tell a new story about psychosis. One that shows how it is process that holds within it the potential for transformation. My Beautiful Psychosis describes the process of 7 episodes of psychosis as I try to make sense of them. It is published by Aeon Books.

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