M.J. Rose

It’s December. We all feel a little nutty this time of year. But not all of us experience real actual psychosis, and even fewer of us will ever experience the particular psychosis known as “Cotard’s delusion” — in which the patient believes that she is dead.

From The Toast,

Perdition Days: On Experiencing Psychosis

By Esmé Weijun Wang

“Let’s note that I write this while experiencing psychosis, and that much of this has been written during a strain of psychosis known as Cotard’s delusion, in which the patient believes that she is dead. What the writer’s confused state means to either of us is not beside the point, because it is the point. The point is that I am in here, somewhere: cogito ergo sum.

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In October 2013 I attended a speakers’ training at the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. As a new hire at the bureau, I would begin, in 2014, to deliver anti-stigma talks for schools, government agencies, and other organizations around the city. Part of this training included a lesson on appropriate language use — to say, “person with bipolar disorder,” or “person living with bipolar disorder,” or “person with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder,” instead of “bipolar” as predicate adjective. We speakers were told that we are not our disease, our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing, and the illness is another, just as a person with cancer is not a “cancer” herself, but a person who has had, through misfortune, a condition at the cellular level.
This hypothetical person with cancer is still the same person. This person with cancer will die or go into remission or be cured of the unwanted guest.

Of course, the unwanted guests are her own cells.

I had endured the longest period of psychosis of my life earlier that year, from February through August, and after trying every atypical, i.e. new-generation, antipsychotic on the market, I began taking Haldol, a vintage antipsychotic, which cleared my delusions until November 4th. On that morning, I looked at the antique sewing table in my office, seeing red wood without seeing it, and felt the old anxiety of unreality. The full delusion would not come until a day later, but I knew what this meant; to look at the table and suddenly realize that the past few weeks were not simply feeling “scattered,” as I repeatedly told others, but were pre-psychosis signals and warnings.

Such signals seem ordinary to other people, and were ordinary to myself…”

For the rest, click here.