What is it Like to Have Hallucinations? A Book and Some Personal Experience

Hey, Steemians—

Today I opened a book that I had put down quite some time ago for reasons I don’t remember. The book is called Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks, and it is a non-fiction account of a neurologist and his time spent studying clinical cases of patients experiencing hallucinations.

Now, I’m not going to use this time to review or recommend the book, but rather use it as a segway into an extremely personal subject—my own mental health. Many people will never know what it’s like to have auditory or visual hallucinations, whether due to mental health concerns or other health problems such as eye diseases or vision/hearing loss in any capacity. I want to share my experience with all of you.

I’ll start from the beginning:

I experienced trauma when I was 12 years old and around that time also developed severe anxiety and depression. I was put on antidepressant after antidepressant, as well as benzodiazepines to treat my panic attacks that were growing in frequency and severity week by week. The antidepressants all made my symptoms worse, and I became what I like to call “passively suicidal” (or suicidal ideation) as in I thought about death all the time but only occasionally exhibited suicidal behavior.

I was hospitalized more than once in my teen years and saw an outrageous number of mental health professionals, traveling from state to state to see specialists because no one could decipher what was wrong with me. It was around this time I began to exhibit signs of paranoid delusion—I isolated from my friends because they were all conspiring against me, I heard people laughing at me in the halls at school or even in stores while shopping with my parents, I began to suspect that the doctors I was so heavily medicated by were actually poisoning me, and I assumed that the reason I was having so much trouble in my life was because I was extraordinary (you know, smart, prodigal, somehow special).

These delusions began to get worse, and I would get so worked up by them that I started to experience dissociation and unreality. Suddenly I’d be left at home alone and I would begin hearing music that wasn’t playing, and it would be so LOUD, that it’s all I could think of. I was terrified. I began seeing shapes and colors (known as simple hallucinations) and I was confused often. As things progressed, I saw fully formed people in my home or outside of my window (often these hallucinations supported some other sort of delusion I was having at the time) and I would hear voices that would speak directly to me.

This experience was horrifying. Imagine having a horrible phobia, and because your brain hates you, it just shows you the subject of your phobia in your room at night. Yikes.

I’ll skip the boring points in between but in some sort of conclusion I’ve been more accurately diagnosed with Bipolar I Disorder, Panic Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and PTSD. I now take an antipsychotic medication in addition to a mood stabilizer medication that has all but completely rid me of full blown hallucinations. I take 3 medications for anxiety and panic, and I still have full blown panic attacks at least once a week. I still get hospitalized when I stop taking my medications because it’s almost completely inevitable that I go into a manic episode and either hurt myself unintentionally due to risky or dangerous behavior or I get so paranoid that I’m a danger to myself in my confusion.

Most importantly, I wanted to share this to shed some light on a pretty taboo topic even within the realm of mental health and related topics. I have gotten a lot of the help I needed by sharing my experience with others and I hope if there are others struggling out there, they can do the same.

Can you relate? Want to share your experience? Leave a comment here and don’t forget to follow me on my other accounts below.

Xoxo – Bee

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