Relapse Real

It appears I suffer a serious relapse every two months – my psychiatrist knows this – and it takes about as long to recover from a relapse. I shall dissect a relapse for you:

I am utterly overwhelmed by life. I cry over laundry to be sorted. I abandon most daily tasks. I feel overstretched, over-extended, overloaded and generally teetering over the edge. The anxiety is astonishing.

I then go into a sort of drifting state: there are depressive symptoms, an apathetic boredom, a horrid listlessness. I hardly see another human being. I shuffle around. I want to get out of life even though I no longer feel real. It is much like being in an ever-stretching nightmare.



The auditory hallucinations become overruling in my existence. Sometimes I appear frantic and I have expansive thoughts, such as believing I saw and spoke to God in a tree across the road. I wonder if I am ill or if I am actually an unrecognised prophet.

I get very frightened, feeling I am going to be hunted down and killed. I can’t think to do anything for myself.

Slowly, I tend to crawl out of a relapse in the same way I went in – only in reverse order. The stages of relapse are called ‘decompensation’. In spite of a structured routine, and taking my medicines daily, I still happen to experience a complete mental collapse in a predictable fashion. I hope the addition of another antipsychotic will help in preventing a regular relapse.