Psychotic Catatonic Night Out: My Trip on Weed

So it was my second night in Amsterdam and after an embarrassing fake ‘hemp chocolate bar’ we decided to try the real thing and went to a coffee shop and ordered tea and a ‘space brownie.’

Waiting for the effects to begin was quite nerve wracking. I suddenly started to feel odd. I felt like everything was spinning and my girlfriend’s face was moving and blurry. It wasn’t like being drunk, it was like nothing I had ever felt before, and not in a good way. It didn’t chill me out, I wasn’t high I was psychotic. The last thing I remember before my episode began was clambering onto my girlfriend’s lap to feel safe. Then I spaced out. I didn’t speak for 6 hours. I took my clothes off in public and started touching myself inappropriately, I was talking to people who weren’t there, and whispering song lyrics. I was off my rocker. It was like I had taken cocaine, not cannabis.

I remember coming round in the hotel lobby with a plate of food under my nose. It was funny now I look back at it, but at the time it was terrifying. I remember feeling like my heart was racing so fast it would stop and talking to people in my head.

Not everyone reacts the same to drugs and weed did not chill me out. I have mental health issues and am on strong medication and it may have reacted to my meds but I can’t imagine what I’d be like on anything stronger than cannabis, considering even on alcohol I’m a demon.

BPD Stigma

Borderline personality disorder is misunderstood. People think we are attention seekers, bipolar, psychotic, selfish, incapable of healthy relationships when actually we are just humans struggling to cope with an overload of emotions in a messed up world with too many expectations and pressures. It can be alienating, exhausting, depressing and crippling living with BPD but we try our best.

Eleanor Longden

For those who do not hear voices, it can be hard to understand what it must be like to do so. Eleanor Longden, a talented university student and schizophrenia sufferer explains perfectly what it is like to hear voices. She was starting her first year at university when she began hearing a voice, and from then on her life changed forever. She was thrust into the deepest depths of hell. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and tossed aside by the psychiatrists.   
Now she is mostly recovered, not through medication but through therapy and self-belief and is raising awareness for those who hear voices.
Read this Daily Mail article on Eleanor Longden's psychosis.

Don't Call Me Crazy

So a new programme began this week. 'Don't Call Me Crazy' follows the lives of teenagers in an inpatient psychiatric hospital in the UK, suffering from various mental illnesses. The unit - The McGuinness unit, has now been replaced by a brand new modern unit called Junction 17.
After staying at one myself, for 2 weeks, I found this programme rather interesting, yet also sad. Sad because of the illnesses the young people have and sad because of the way they are treated.
My stay at a psychiatric unit was a rather positive experience.
The people there were not restrained in front of other young people, which they are in the McGuinness unit.
One of the patients who suffered from depression, anorexia and also self harmed, refused to be weighed and eat. At the unit I was at, the young people had to eat, and did. They were weighed. They were supervised a lot of the time to ensure they were not exercising and moving around, especially twitching and fidgeting slightly to burn off calories. They went to the toilet and were not allowed to flush the loo until the staff had checked there was not sick down the toilet, which is a way of purging (vomiting).
On the positive and motivational side, one of the patients who suffered with acute OCD told the camera how "OCD does not define her as a person."
The patients raised awareness of the stigma surrounding mental illness and shared personal insight into their minds. All in all it was a very worthwhile programme. It was widely talked about. I read this article in The Guardian which advertised and promoted the programme which raises awareness surrounding mental health.