Haunted or Hearing Voices?

The absolute worst period of my struggle with psychiatry, and my struggle with my self, took place during the summer of my 21st year.  The psychiatrist that had me check in once a month for 5 minutes was prescribing me 600mg of Effexor, 1200mg of Lithium, and 600mg of Seroquel, the Seroquel later replaced by a prescription for a “random” amount of Trazodone (the bottle said “take one to three pills” at bedtime).  Oh, plus a bunch of Clonazepam and Lorazepam – at this point we can just assume that benzos are always a part of my prescribed diet

I lived at my Father’s house for a month after I was released from the ward (hospitalization #3), and was so depressed that for an entire month I stayed in bed.  I had a large bottle of 25mg Seroquel pills, leftover from some other prescription, that I kept in my bedside drawer, and each time I woke up I would take another pill and fall back into nothingness – I say nothingness because the unconscious state that antipsychotics put you into cannot be called “sleep”, as it does not involve dreaming or waking up feeling anything close to “well rested”.  When dad said to me, “Do you think the hospital would be a better place for you right now?”, it was time to leave.  I entered a month-to-month tenancy with Evan*.  He had just lost his job because of his drug use and was in the process of trying to obtain Employment Insurance, and I was on Social Assistance (of the “disability” variety, meaning I got some extra bus tickets when I needed to see a doctor, as well as about another $40/mth more than other non-disabled recipients.  Oh boy!).

So we couldn’t afford much.  We ended up living in a ground floor suite in a very old building on Sherbrook St. in Winnipeg’s “West End”, quite far north of Portage Ave.  In Winnipeg, Portage Ave. is the dividing line between rich and poor, white and First Nations.  Of course there are some exceptions, but living “north of Portage”, the further north the worse, is generally seen as the mark of having failed at life somehow.

The suite was replete with bars on the windows, a distinct lack of hot water, and many little mouse friends (and their “droppings”.  At this point, I had definitely not been “compliant” in regard to taking the massive quantity of pills as prescribed.  I would take some Effexor or some Lithium at random every other day or so.  For about a week I did take the prescribed daily dosage of Lithium, but found that it slowed my brain down so much that I felt I was nearing brain death.  Our food diet definitely was not “healthy” by any stretch of the imagination, consisting of whatever items we managed to steal from the Safeway store at the end of the block.  I remember there being lots of popsicles.

And then the voices.  I had never “heard voices” before, and of course thought it meant that I was losing my mind completely, and that it would soon be lost forever.  As Evan slept I laid awake all night listening to a crowd conversing, although I could not make out any words.  The conversation always seemed to be “coming from” the wall on one side of the apartment.  I knew it “wasn’t real” but I couldn’t stop the noise.

This continued for some time before I started hearing a little girl’s voice at night, not coming from the wall, but crying into my right ear, “Daddy!”  I tried to psychoanalyze myself, not getting any help from the psychiatrist, and thought that perhaps it reflected the negative feelings I had about my own “Daddy” at the time, and that somewhere inside me there was a little girl calling out to her dad for help.

Then came the chanting, singing, and drumming, which I could not relate to any personal experience.  I had never listened to traditional Canadian First Nations’ music, but again these were the voices of children.  I felt like the sound was coming from an area in the living room near the television set, and often had to restrain myself from smashing the TV with a bat.

Evan was not all too concerned with these “voices” that I was hearing, and I was scared out of my mind.  Then, on a Friday night in September after attempting to go back to university, I was sitting on the couch in the living room and looked at the hardwood floor beneath me.  I saw something, for a split second, that I had not seen since I had lain in a coma that February (a result of the seizure my doc prescribed, which I’ve written about in previous posts).  It had something to do with the cycle of life, with birth and death and the Universe, and I wanted to figure it out.

Unfortunately, my visual revelation was apparently accompanied by “a crazy look in my eyes” that no one could stand.  I started to believe that I was dead again, and that Evan and anyone else I came into contact with was “carrying on a charade to convince me I was still alive”.  Thus, all of my energy was focused on trying to stop “acting/looking crazy” – I did not think about the vision again.  When Evan returned home about a week later with a crackpipe, and I immediately snatched it from his hand and smashed it against a wall, he was furious.  I decided it was time to leave this place, wherever I was, dead or alive.  I decided I would do this by taking a handful of Lithium pills, which ended in 5 days of blood dialysis and my fourth hospitalization at the psych ward.  By the time I reached the ward, my eyes evidently no longer emitted this “crazy look” that disturbed others so much.  I never went back to the apartment – my dad helped out by fetching the few things I had there before I was released (the furniture had all been Evan’s).

While in the hospital, I was put on the antipsychotic Clozapine, which is hardly ever prescribed because of the potential for very serious side-effects, the worst being a low white blood cell count that could render a sinus infection deadly.  For the two years that I was on this drug I had to go for bi-weekly blood tests.  It turned me into a drone, and perhaps that was what I needed to finish my B.A. degree.

But when I realized I would not complete my Honour’s Thesis on time if I kept taking Clozapine, which caused me to sleep for 15 hours if no alarm clock was set – again, when waking up from antipsychotic-induced sleep I did not feel at all rested – and made the choice to research how one is to taper off the drug and go about this myself, knowing that my psychopharmaceutical-loving psychiatrist would not be impressed with my decision to drop a med from my cocktail.  In the days after I took the last pill, I had the same vision.  However this time I was able to think about it without being afraid, and the “manic” period of sleeplessness and creativity that ensued resulted in an award for Best Thesis at my graduation

I now understand what the vision meant, although it is nearly impossible for me to try to describe it, using language, as it belonged to a realm where there are no such things as words.

I also started thinking more critically about the summer spent “hearing voices”, and spoke to a close friend and fellow psychiatric survivor about that time period.  She suggested that they may not have been “voices”, in the psychiatric sense (projecting one’s own consciousness and believing that one’s own inner voice belongs to someone else who is talking to them, ex/ telling them to do things such as hurt oneself), but the voices of spirits.

It was true that I had only heard the voices in that one space, the apartment on Sherbrook St.  The area had a huge history of social upheaval concerning Canada’s First Nations Peoples, when they were shipped off reserves and into the city.  I’m sure many little girls shouted for their Daddies on the ground where that apartment block stood, and the chanting and singing I heard was distinctively in the style of traditional Native Canadian ceremonial music, which I had not been listening to or thinking of – indeed, I had never heard this type of music before, but I knew what it was when I heard it.

Call me crazy, but I now find my experience with the “voices” easier to explain in terms of the “paranormal” than in psychiatric terms.  Yes, I believe that the spirits of this country’s ancestral children were singing to me, and that their intentions were absolutely benevolent – possibly that they were trying to heal me or sing me to sleep.  I do not believe that non-compliance with my medication regime was responsible, although perhaps there is a possibility that the chemicals in my brain that were being fucked with, when I took the pills on an irregular basis, allowed me to tap into some other plane of reality, just as naturally occurring, organic psychotropics, like the Ayahuasca that Alaryyk and I were going to experiment with Peru, enable extra-sensory perceptions, including aural and visual phenomena.

I have never again “heard voices”.