I thought my brother was trying to steal my tax file number - and I was on the verge of changing it. I got suspicious of anything electronic. I thought the radio was talking directly to me, I thought that the powerpole lines were tracking my every movement, I thought that I was being tracked through anything showing an electronic time (ie. the microwave and the alarm clock). One day, I went for a walk on the Strand (our beach), and I saw the exact make and model of my car - so I assumed it was following me and that some people at uni plotted the car to follow me on that day. I then assumed that every single emergency vehicle (police, ambulance, fire brigade) was also following me - so I became quite scared of these. A friend of mine also had this problem in the past and he told me that you should not be scared of these vehicles because they can save your life one day. This statement deprogrammed my delusion about the emergency vehicles. If noone had told me that, I would most likely still be scared to this day.
The thoughts that I will mention now are probably the worst symptoms I have ever experienced with psychosis. Just after the crying started and stopped again, my mind was racing with thoughts. However, because I was so depressed, my thoughts turned into suicidal ones. Just about every minute of the day, every knife I saw, every cotton bud I saw, every power point I saw etc., I wanted to kill myself with them! Sometimes my hand even shot out to grab the killing device, but I had to physically grab my hand and pull it away! The only reason I did no kill myself during my psychosis was the fear of pain! If I didn't have any fear of pain, blood or death, I would not be here talking to you today! I couldn't control these thoughts at all - no wonder I was quite scared and depressed!
As you can tell, stress is a big contributor to psychosis. Because I was doing alot of different activities (refer to the fifth paragraph on this page), I couldn't cope with all the completely new and diverse undertakings I was doing! It was quite strange what happened to me musically during this period! I discovered that when I was psychotic, I was at my creative and imaginative peak! I could suddenly compose piano music, improvise on piano and trumpet, and (this is true), my mindset at this period was very similar to Beethoven's (perhaps he should have been diagnosed with schizophrenia). My piano piece Jazzy Rollin' was written without any mistakes and it only took an hour or so to write! At university, I started to jump onto a piano in my spare time, improvise for a while, and try to write down what I was playing. At this stage, I was thinking so fast and so creatively that anything could be possible! Now you can start to understand why great minds who are put on heavy medications need to stop taking them in order for them to 'think'. I realised at the time that I will not be able to think this creatively again in my entire life - so that was why I was so desperate to write music. I used my psychosis for a good thing, however it is sad that some people turn to other bad and horrible things with their psychotic thoughts.
So, after 6 weeks of trying the Music Degree, I just couldn't cope anymore and stopped attending class. Now I was still scared of using the internet, watching TV, as well as all the other crazy thoughts I had. Sometime during this week, my mother was nagging me about something, so I decided to sleep over my friend's place overnight. I was so protective of my paperwork (tax stuff, car rego etc.) that I put all of my paperwork in my bag and took it to my friend's place (who is still a friend of mine who was in my first year Engineering class). Anyway, I got to my friend's house, and on the tv there, he had turned the channel onto some Arabic channel (there was an arabic/Al Qaeda type symbol in the corner of the tv). From that channel, I assumed that my friend was a terrorist working for Osama Bin Laden, and then I assumed that all the other people I knew at uni who were friends of my friend were also terrorists! Later, my friend showed me a page of a computer magazine he had. This article said that in the future, (I) will only be a number and my identity will be stolen. I couldn't sleep that night because I was more concerned about my friend stealing my bag, finding my tax file number and hacking into my identity and so on. I did not get any sleep that night. Anyway, I left his room and went down the stairs. Suddenly I realised that my car was bombed and that it was going to blow up. I stood there for a good 10 minutes deciding whether I should open my car or ring a taxi. This is the weird part: I went to the carpark, and then I (saw) a couple of cars that had "No War In Iraq" signs on the back of the cars. Also, I (saw) that every single car's windscreen wipers were raised up.
