I looked through and so far nobody has said a psychotic episode. I have rapid cycling bipolar disorder and the transition from being a extremely privileged white male in college to being dumped in a psych ward where your simply another number and not a single person knows where you are because you cant communicate on account of being insane and the fact that nobody cares enough to talk to you. At this point I was totally isolated and was desperately trying to piece together what was real and what was a delusion. Its hard when I talk about this because most people have such a limited understanding of what insanity is. For me it wasn't as if I was going insane but rather reality as I knew it was changing around me. The fundamental essence of my person hood felt, while under extreme duress, still the same. Rather I was desperately trying to come to grips with my world literally tearing at the seams. Everything I knew and trusted was torn away in a matter of weeks not just on an emotional level but a rational level as well. There was only so much I could take until I just accepted that it wasn't me that was changing but rather the world around me. Again this concept is hard to articulate but at the end of the day all you really have is your own perception of events and stimuli of the world. Your entire life you've trusted your brain to interpret the world in a coherent way. When your brain then presents information to you in the exact same way that you've trusted your entire life, but happens to logically not make sense you try to use your rational faculties to understand why. But when again and again your assaulted by things that don't make sense your conscience brain starts to make connections to make sense of these things. Then you hear the sirens song. All of a sudden you can see clearly. Everyone else is simply operating on a plane beneath you, you're the creator of your reality and the prophet who will finally bring to light to secrets of the universe. After all who doesn't grow up secretly hoping to be the chosen one. The Luke Skywalker, Alexander the Great, Buddha every culture has their stories of men who have been given by destney the power to change the world. And really why not me. This part is hard to explain and takes a basic understanding of Solipsism but if reality is just constricted to you then it would make sense that your meant for something greater. And after all at this point your the only one that can see things as they truly are. Then comes the crash and burn. The paranoia that there are forces that don't want you to achieve your potential. I personally thought I and as an extension humanity/consciousnesses was Yin and the world was Yang and we were in an eternal struggle to decipher the meaning of the universe. And mind you it wasn't like I was entertaining these ideas to write a book. Rather this was my reality. Every thing had meaning. All of a sudden I was living in a book. I spent about a month in this state and to be perfectly honest it was pretty damn dope. Ya the paranoia sucked but I could normally meditate and get rid of it. However It was completely unsustainable as I raced down the rabbit hole searching for answers. I eventually broke down and was so absorbed by my environment that I ran away from everything I knew and was found by the police unable to speak. Then comes the psych ward. That fucking sucked. Nothing to do all day but question your sanity. My girlfriend, my parents, my friends had no idea where I was for almost 2 days. I thought I had died and was in purgatory. But of course I couldn't say this because I was being watched constantly. Any abnormal behavior was documented and evaluated. I would bet my ass that if you stuck a sane person in what was basically a cage for 2 weeks with a bunch of people who thought they were either god or had just tried to kill themselves feeding them about 12 different drugs with fucktons of side effects, they wouldn't be acting live fucking Martha Stewart. But I played the game and acted normal, mainly I just wrote and wrote and wrote and was able to express my insanity there instead of in my persona. Ya then comes the depression. Bipolar depression after a manic episode is supposed to be the worst their is and I'd have to agree. There was a solid 2 month period where I was out of school going to therapy daily and I have almost no memories from that time. It was like wandering through a desert and when you get the courage to look to the horizon there is just nothing but desolation. At the therapy session I was going to people around me were dropping like flies. They would look up see the hopelessness of their situation and just curl up in the desert and hope against hope that something would come along to kill them. For a while I tried to keep my head up staring at the horizon but after a time I just looked at my feet and put one in front of the other trying not to see everyone around me doing exactly what I want to do. Giving up and praying to die. I would walk my dog around the block occasionally in an attempt to distract myself and one time I looked at a lightpost. I just broke down sobbing. This light-post was a something so common place but the amount of work, creativity planning and determination that went into looked like mount Everest to me. I had to wake up 2 hours before I had to go anywhere simply to gather all the strength I had to get out of bed. And there were a lot of days where I simply didn't have enough. But to be a part of society I had to compete with a world where the tremendous amount of effort that went into lampposts was not even acknowledged. It was too much. But eventually I got some good meds and time passed and I got a little better. I went back to school and everything was just fake as hell. I mean I couldn't blame anybody but so few people even wanted to truly understand what I had gone through that I was just isolated. I just put on a happy face went to parties, drank, went to concerts with people I felt 20 years older than. But ya that part sucked. The possible worst part that sticks with me though is just this feeling that the world isn't what we make it out to be. Its like at any point I could jump right back into the storybook, a land where everything revolves around me and makes sense. But I can't because I have people who care about me. So I go to school, take my meds, and try not to listen to the sirens song.