Psychosis. What does this word mean to you? What feelings or thoughts does it evoke? Fear? Confusion? Ambivalence?

It is funny that these emotions are similar to the feelings that one experiences during an acute episode of psychosis. If it is such a negative and contradictory experience looking from the outside in, can you imagine how it must feel like to be in the midst of such a storm?

I am writing about psychosis because we need to talk more about this common but all too often misunderstood condition.

For me, it started gradually. This creeping disintegration of your mind is part of psychosis’s insidious nature. One moment, you are sane and in the final year of your Politics degree, applying for Master’s degrees and jobs. Next, you not only believe that the security services are monitoring your every text, call, or move but that they have installed cameras in your home because, by this stage, you have watched too many episodes of Homeland. My delusions reflected the anxieties of our age; social media, terrorism and hypochondria.

You might now be wondering what caused or, more aptly, what triggered my episode of psychosis. To attribute a causal effect to such a severe and complex condition is both reductive and unhelpful. However, in hindsight, my psychosis occurred after a period of intense stress during my early twenties. It is common for mental illness to develop during these formative years because your prefrontal cortex does not stop growing until you are at least twenty-five years old.

An internal war is what psychosis is, from my experience, at least. As in all conflicts, there are winners and losers and a certain amount of damage in between. The losses that accompany such a war of attrition — the grinding down of what is and isn’t real in your life — makes it such a complex condition to come to terms with. Losing your close friendships, losing your academic or professional life and most significantly losing your former, functioning, self-respecting self. The latter is the most challenging loss of all. How do you begin to reconcile your three selves — before, during and after — following the infinite blackness of this irrational, incongruous and insane beast? How do you find a resolution to this exhausting battle within your mind?

You come out of the fog of this war eventually, if you are lucky and have responded well to treatment; that is if you have even gained access to the proper treatment at the right time. However, winning the war with the help of an army of people — Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Psychologists and Psychiatrists, to name but a few — does not mean that peace will inevitably follow. Following remission of your illness, you enter recovery, the grieving process. You grieve for who you once were, grieve for who you could have been and grieve for all the people you have lost along the way.

This is where I have found the immense value of psychotherapy. Sure, I must take my daily medication to keep my brain chemically intact, but as any good psychiatrist will tell you, it is therapy that will help to heal your mind. Medicine can only take you so far, to the point where you can benefit from a competent therapist.

Truthfully, I was deeply sceptical of therapy for a long time. I felt as though I didn’t deserve it or that I had not been through enough in life to afford the privilege of speaking regularly to a professional about my inner-most thoughts and feelings. I was wrong. Everyone deserves to talk, psychotic or not. Furthermore, it is often easier talking about the shame and guilt of psychosis with a trained professional than to your nearest and dearest, who you do not want to worry or upset.

There may well be more storms in the future, more conflicts within my psyche, but for now, I am well. I am free. I am alive.