hungryghosts | A Post-Unmortem of Acute Madness (Reply)

(Another Reddit post that got too long and might be refined into an essay at some point: this one gives Phosphor's perspective on the circumstances behind Lark taking primary front.)

(Context: a preceding comment by Lark, in response to someone asking if tulpamancy has ever caused psychosis)

[Lk.] I'm unsure if it's ever happened because of tulpamancy alone. Even the most infamous case in the community, that of Koomer and Oguigi, had confounding factors. (Koomer, the host, was taking drugs, and I believe that he was struggling and depressed in general.)

That being said, you may want to read Rethinking Madness by Paris Williams. It's a long, weighty read, but it establishes a few important points. First, that the boundary between "madness" and "sanity" is thinner than mainstream belief wishes to acknowledge. Mainstream belief divides the world into those who are predestined to experience psychosis and those who are not; this is not a useful distinction. Second, that recovery from psychosis is, in fact, possible. Mainstream belief holds the view that those who fall into psychosis never climb out, and that if they are functional, they are only barely so thanks to a cocktail of drugs that they must take for the rest of their lives. While I've no doubt that there are people who struggle for the long term, this is also not so.

(The actual comment by Phosphor)

(The Usual Guy here) So I want to add onto what [Lk.]'s already said, which is that I have personal experience with psychosis. Including a very recent personal experience, actually.

Context: my life's been a faulty pressure cooker for a while. On the outside, I look super successful, yeah? I pull a Lot of money where I work and I'm honestly in a much better place than many people out there. But the truth is, I hate my job, I'm frustrated with my company's decisions, I genuinely feel like my field is making the world a worse place. I like the people I work with and I find some of the tasks mentally stimulating, but that isn't enough to offset the moral injury. At the same time, I can't quit - the job market is horrible and I'm the primary breadwinner for a bunch of other queer disabled folks, including my household who are all unemployed or freelance. Leaving puts not only my survival on the line, but theirs. I've had times in my life where I was direly sick and chose not to see a doctor because I wouldn't be able to afford the bill, resigning myself to dying - I swore that I would do everything in my power to prevent those close to me from ever having to experience that.

Then last November's elections happened in the US, and everything went to shit even more, and my income became even more crucial even as my job security became more uncertain. That, and all the *waves hands* current events tipped me over. I held on for some time, but last month my mind finally imploded. I won't go into details on a public forum, but it was Bad, like some parts were out of a textbook Bad. The saving grace was that a shred of me remained rational and grounded enough to realize I was insane, and between that and reality-checking from headmates, had enough control to prevent me from actually acting on any of the insanity. On the outside, I looked like I was alternating between being extra distractible, crying uncontrollably, and sleeping a lot. Better than being overtly, blazingly mad, perhaps, but still in no condition to work or do any of the usual stuff needed for human functioning. [Lk.] ended up taking over daily life while I drew back to recover.

I am mostly better now, though still taking it slowly in case of a relapse. It really fucking sucked, but also, admittedly, it's kind of interesting to reflect on. The madness, the distorted thoughts, the hallucinations, a lot of them came out of a textbook, but how things ended up going down was very much not textbook. The belief that most would hold, including a bunch of plural people, is that plurality would have either been of no help or made it worse, that either my headmates would have also gotten swept under by the madness or become harbingers of madness themselves. And to be truthful, this probably does happen to some plural systems, but that wasn't the case for us - the others remained VERY sane throughout, if understandably distressed by what was going on, and helped that last shred of me hold onto sanity. When [Lk.] took over, it was a near-seamless transition and he took right to working our job and feeding our body and paying our bills and being a Functional Human while I was crying in the background. And, of course, I managed to get back out of that pit despite not having seen a psych or taken drugs for it.

(Obligatory note: this is not said to discourage people from seeing doctors or taking meds if you need it. We weighed the pros and cons of seeing one and decided to see how things progressed under [Lk.]'s control first, since we were no longer immediately in crisis. If it seemed we would lose control of the madness and become a hazard to ourselves or others, we would see someone. As it stands, we are still proceeding carefully.)

As for why it turned out well, all things considered, I think the following was part of it:

We have done so much work on ourselves as a system. We've been at this for over a decade, now. Internal communication, mutual trust, intentional switching, learning what it means to treat each other as people. All of these can be cultivated. Some stuff, we learned from the tulpa community, even. We spent a decade plus building a solid foundation and in retrospect I'm proud of how it held up.
We have a lot of experience with matters of mental health, both inside and outside. We already were kind of unfazed by Abnormal Brain Going-Ons given that our own brain was hardly typical, had done a lot of work figuring out our internals as part of PTSD recovery, met a bunch of diagnosed schizophrenics, hung around a bunch of old Mad Pride folks (hence why I casually refer to my own shit as "madness" and "insanity"), have been aware of the limits of the psychiatric system for a good while. That episode of acute madness sucked, but in a way, I never felt lost. I can only imagine that it would have been a lot worse if that last sane shred of myself had been eaten up with panic over Going Mad. (And yes, I do think that having read Rethinking Madness gave us context for what was going on and hope that we could make it out the other end.)
We have an absolutely solid support network of folks who have had their own mental health issues and aren't screamish about madness. When we disclosed the full extent of how Bad things had gotten, they didn't try to force me into a hospital or treat me as some kind of diseased thing. They were super sympathetic and offered to support all of us where they could, and thanked us for trusting them with the truth. Things would have been so much worse if we had to go it alone.

Again, we are only one data point, and I don't think we're totally out of the clear (the matter of our job remains unresolved) but I thought it was worth sharing.