Click here to view the video version of this post

For me, coming to grips with having a psychotic condition didn’t quite work like flicking a switch. It was more like a pendulum between a fully delusional state and one where I could see my illness for what it was.

This took place when I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital twenty years ago. Most of my first week was spent at the delusional end of the spectrum, which manifested itself as a strong conviction that I was a fraud.

I remember writing a note and handing it to one of the nurses because I was too ashamed to tell them myself. It basically said I had orchestrated my admission so that I could prey on vulnerable inpatients.

I expected to be taken away and locked up, never to see my family or friends again.

On another occasion, after playing a friendly game of pool with another inpatient, I withdrew to my room feeling deeply remorseful because I had acted in a friendly manner that in some inverted way must have been intended to cause him spiritual harm.

I recall my eldest brother Matthew phoning in to see how I was doing. Afterwards I asked my dad to suggest he doesn’t call again because I believed I could somehow cause harm to him, his wife and newborn baby simply by having a normal conversation with him over the phone.

I then shared with my dad that I was a fraud and not really ill. Just like the nurse a few days before, he gently acknowledged my point of view several times (I was very insistent) and said that for now, hospital was the best place for me to be.

Within a week of my hospital admission, my doctor put the pieces together. She said I was experiencing a double whammy of obsessive thoughts and severe depression that was causing the delusions.

She made a diagnosis of bipolar disorder type 1 and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

I don’t remember what my initial reaction was, but a day or two later in the hospital lounge I was reading a pamphlet about bipolar disorder and the back cover of a book about OCD called “When Perfect Isn’t Good Enough”. As I read the content it was like looking in a mirror.

I began to understand the past three years of my life in an entirely new light.

That same evening my brother Henry came to visit, and we chewed over the diagnosis of bipolar and I shared with him about reading the pamphlet. He said he also had been doing some reading and had wondered whether there had been something going awry with how my brain had been interacting with my conscience.

As is often the case in life, it took a relational moment like this one to cement in my own mind that I had indeed been suffering quite severely from a mental illness. After Henry left, I had a strong feeling of gratitude and knelt and prayed with a clear mind for the first time in months, knowing that my recovery was now underway.

From the point of first grasping my diagnosis, it would take another seven weeks for me to be stable enough to be ready for discharge.

Over this time, a lot of work had to be done to get me from that first glimpse of clarity to having a reasonable level of mental stability.

There were three aspects to my hospital treatment.

The first was finding the right types and levels of medication to counter the neurological problems that contributed to me being in the state I was.

The second was group and individual therapy sessions where I became educated about my illness and began learning the skills to bring it under control and function healthily.

The third aspect was the care of the hospital staff, visits from family and friends, and the company of other inpatients as I began to find my feet again.

Another breakthrough moment happened during week two or three of my stay. I had been learning about the concept of mindfulness which had been explained to me in some of the group therapy sessions.

I sat down to practise a simple exercise which involved being seated and focusing on my senses. I trained my attention on a series of five different objects in my field of vision, then five sounds to my ears, then five parts of my body, and cycled through the pattern again and again.

It had a remarkable circuit-breaking effect on my obsessive thoughts.

Through doing this exercise and others like it, I began to regain my sanity because I was training my mind to be fully in the present – something it had not done for months or perhaps years.

I liken the start of my recovery to the launch of a space shuttle. Tremendous amounts of energy go into getting it off the ground and its many parts need to be working together.

To continue with the space image, in the late 1970s NASA launched the space probe Voyager into the solar system to take pictures of the outer lying planets. To achieve the mission, it had a certain amount of power it could direct into changing course, but a key factor in its journey was the way it harnessed the gravity of the planets it visited along the way. They worked as a slingshot to propel the probe from planet to planet, and then into outer space where it continues its interstellar mission to this day.

We humans are not so different. We all need to leverage power external to ourselves to get where we want to go in life’s journey. The make-up of these power sources may differ according to one’s personality and needs, but they all apply to the three elements of body, mind and spirit that form my framework for a successful recovery.

1. Body

This is about taking care of my whole body, from head to toe. It starts with optimising what I call the “body basics” of nutrition, exercise and sleep. This maximises my energy levels and helps me to conserve, replenish and direct my physical and mental energy in order to recover properly from the breakdown and maintain my ongoing wellness.

2. Mind

This involves my key learnings from the years from therapy, reading I have done, and reflections from my life experience about how to improve my mindset and make it resilient during life’s inevitable difficulties. While there is plenty of overlap between the things that have helped me to counter depression and anxiety respectively, I break them down into those two areas to help show what has worked to resolve issues I’ve had with both of these difficulties.

3. Spirit

So much of what is out there about mental health fails to recognise a person’s spiritual needs, but the reality is that being aware of them and responsive to them has been central to my ability to overcome challenges. For me, this involves my Christian faith and I have plenty to say in this chapter about aspects of life such as relationships and means of enjoyment like music that aren’t typically categorised as spiritual but are nonetheless means of cultivating inner peace and motivation for living.

It can be daunting to know exactly where to start when embarking on a recovery, and I think it’s a case of keeping it simple and doing things one step at a time, which this blog is designed to help you with in very practical ways.

Sitting in my hospital room doing the mindfulness exercise, I realised that my starting point was to do whatever was needed to maintain a stable mood.

Everything else came second.

My hope is that as a fellow traveller, these meditations from my emergency can provide guidance for your own journey of recovery to better mental health.  

Check out my book Beating Hospital Grade Depression and Anxiety on Amazon or download the audiobook for free here!