I'll outline an episode for you. The first week I'm irritable and anxious. I don't feel like going out with friends. Sounds and colors are so bright and intense that I can't focus. I'm hyperaware, and won't sleep for 36 hours at a time. My mind feels sharp, but a bad kind of sharp. Like I'm too aware.
The second week, I start to hallucinate again, people that I thought were there are just poles, garbage cans, mailboxes when I turn my head. In the shower, I hear someone walking around my house, and the water ripples and turns and out of it emerges the voices of spectres or my thoughts read aloud.
On the train, I'll hear various people conversing, discussing, plotting my hospitalization, my restraint and forcible injection. At this point I know what is to come, but my mind is filled with so many strange ideas I can't keep my awareness. The voices want me to end up there. They want me to go catatonic for so long that I have to receive ECT (benzos don't work for me). They want me to be strapped down to a gurney and wheeled away.
By week three, hallucinations are overwhelming and dominate my sensory experience, it's hard to have conversations. My thoughts are scrambled, the sharpness isn't there anymore.
Week four, I no longer make sense when I talk. Poetic gibberish emerges from my lips when I try to speak. I become mute. I become catatonic and unable to move or speak, except to the hallucinations. Everything is dreamlike, nothing is real, reality erodes around me, I am completely surrounded by endless dreaming. Oneiroid syndrome.
I remain catatonic, imagined people come in and out of my room. I can only get up to go to the bathroom and shower. I feel like I'm drunk and high. I can't focus on what the doctor at the ER is saying. Why am I here? I'm not sick. The spirits took my soul. At the crisis stabilization unit, I am given a benzo because I can't stop pacing. When I'm done pacing I sit back down, stuporous. Benzos are supposed to be the first line treatment for catatonia, but it doesn't work. I pass out.
When I am awake I still cannot speak, but I can't pace either. When I try to stand I stumble. Thoughts are confusing me, so I sit back down and fall asleep. When the paramedics come to get me at 4 in the morning to take me to the hospital, I refuse. They strap me down the gurney. At the hospital I pace and am non-responsive, the nurses restrain me again to give me another Ativan injection. I am responsive again, but still pacing, despite the sedative. In group I get up and walk out 'I can't do this, I can't do this' I say quietly to the counselor. A nurse pesters me about going to group. 'This is fucking barbaric! Fuck off!' I shout. They put me in the Quiet Room. They force me to take my meds.
Back to planet earth.