Hallucinations

Sarah made a comment asking, more or less, 'What are hallucinations?'. Id thought I'd expand my reply into a full post.

Hallucination are any fasr sensory input, hearing, seeing, smelling or feeling things that are not really there. But what have I experienced? Mostly voices but I have seen, smelled and felt things as well.

It first started about three years ago. I was extraordinarly depressed , stressed and self harming daily. I had recently started taking my first anti-depressant (prozac). The voices began simply as commands to die. They would sound as though they were being spoken by a person standing behind me. They worsened the commands to die, to hurt myself, descriptions of me as a fucker would occur almost every day. AS the symptoms worsened object such as dolls, and paintings, anything with a face, would begin to talk to me. They would talk to me in sentances, they would abuse me. I could nto be anywhere without something or someone telling me that I had to die. Ruth kept hiding away dolls from our house. Gradually the voice that I call my Devil appeared, she was different than the othersI could have a conversation with her, sometimes she would be comforting. She wanted me to kill myself but she diddnt abuse me as the others did. Eventually she became part of delusions that had me believing thta most people were demons disguised as humans that existed to torture me. She told me that she had been placed inside my head by the demons so that they could hear my thoughts and know how well their tortures were working. She told me that the only way I could escape from the tortures was to kill myself and even that would only grant me a few years of peace as I would be reborn in a differerent body.

I would hear continual crowd noises, a low level hub-bub of conversations that i beleived were those of the invisible demons that had not yet taken human form.

I remember once that the simpsons were on television and it took serveral moments for me to realise that homer simpson was telling me to kill myself.

The voices always sounded real, I can, mostly, distinguish them from reality but doing so requires conscious effort. Keeping myself behaving sane required unfathomably exhausting and constant effort on my part.

The first thing that I noticed when I began taking risperidone was just how quiet the world really was for I had grown used to the constant fin of noise in my life.

Its difficult to separate the experience of hallucinations from the delusional beliefs I developed. One afternoon my Devil was telling me that I had to decipher the message that was there for me in the Sky TV guide and by reading the guide I was convincved that I would not get better until I had travelled to Australia and found Aliens. It is also difficult to sperate what is a coincidence from what is really happening. I almost had major religous conversion when, in the middle of intoning "Why wont anyone help me" a Finding Faith In Christ advert came blaring out of the TV.

The experience of maddness (as described by Ruth) is being paraletically drunk at the first moment when you wake

The world, when I began taking risperidone, changed wonderfully. It ceased to be a crappy Hammer Horror and turned into the world or quiet normalcy.

I am so afraid of becomming unwell again.