Perceived: Losing and Finding my Mind

EPISODE 2: PART 3

The next day, I ordered Uber Eats again, this time, a burrito. The nurses looked at me disapprovingly, and one said, “Priyanka, we don’t have time to keep collecting your food”. I did not take her too seriously. Food was the one comfort I had in this dungeon of a place where we had to ask permission and wait until a nurse was available to even go outside and sit in the sunlight. I was on a mental health treatment plan, I pretty much had no rights, like a criminal. My family was crazy, and might be feeding me Methamphetamines. There was no way in heck they were going to take my Uber Eats away from me.

That afternoon, Zoe got into a fight with one of the boys who would dance around with huge ear muffs. I found him quite odd, but Izzy told me he was just “feeling himself”. I thought this was fair enough. Zoe started to seem very aggressive, and I was actually scared to be there. But I thought I had powers, and remembered that Dan had told me to watch Tiktok videos when I was bored in hospital. I told Zoe to sit down and went to Tiktok on my phone and showed her a bunch of funny videos, which calmed her right down. This gave me a glimmer of hope, and I thought it was Dan’s way of reassuring me that everything would be okay.

I had been at the hospital a few days, and this pretty girl named Jane came in. She was so nice and normal, and I didn’t think she belonged in a psychiatric ward, much like myself. She was appointed to the adjoining room to my ‘jail cell’. We instantly hit it off as friends, because she was an extrovert and gave me a big hug and told me she would guard our rooms and protect us from the boys. Again, I thought Dan had sent someone to protect me, and I was so grateful. Now I could sleep at night. However, by this time I was getting desperate to get out of there. My mind was so tired from trying to decode things to get out of the hospital, and I had asked my parents to sign me out of the hospital, but they had refused to do so against the advice of my psychiatrist. In response to this, I had left them in a burst of rage and went for a nap in the jail cell. Later on, my dad told me that was one of the most horrible moments of his life, when I had walked off, and then they had to leave.

I did some scrapbooking and arts and crafts with Jane, and showed her some religious songs, which she politely said she really liked and downloaded on Spotify, and returned the favour by showing me some songs which made her calmer. She would say all the time, “We are ying and yang, baby”. I felt like this was Dan speaking to me through her, that we were perfect for each other, and that I just had to hang in there and be strong until we were reunited. I know this train of thought was so bizarre, because I barely knew him, but my mind had been taken over. I could see no reason. Jane then said she would help solve the mystery of who had drugged me. She wrote down the abbreviated symbol for Meth, “MDMA”, and as my brain was overstimulated and decoding everything, I decoded this to be an abbreviation for “M (my sister’s initial), my dad’s initial, D, my mum’s initial, M and my brother in-law’s initial, A”. This then meant, in my mind, that they were the ones who had drugged me.

I begged the nurses and hospital staff for a review each day, as I believed that there was nothing wrong with me. Each day, they would say, “maybe tomorrow”, and I would get so excited. I just wanted to get out of that place. I had called the hospital in-house lawyer and made handwritten notes of the advice he had given me. I then took a picture of these notes and sent them to my friends at the hospital to help them get out to, as I believed they were in there without having a need to.

In came a boy named Connor who was autistic. He sat me down, told me that he doesn’t want to get into a fight and is not racist, but just wanted to express his views. He then went on to tell me that he was very right-wing. I told him that if he was extremely right wing, he was heading in the direction of being an extremist. He got extremely defensive and told me he didn’t want to have a fist fight, which made me laugh internally, as he genuinely seemed scared that I would take him out. After a long discussion about left and right wing politics, Connor got up from his seat, said “I am autistic so I don’t usually like hugging people, but can I have a hug?” “Of course”, I said. And so he gave me a hug. After this he told me that he really felt like drinking canned soft drink. There was also a Brazilian patient who I thought at the time believed he was part of the Roman Empire, as he used to wear his Queensland Health bedsheets like a toga and walk around barefoot. For some reason, he gave me a disgusted look most of the time. I wondered why he did this. He would not eat, and he would not drink. Then, one day, he ran into me in the corridor. He looked so lost and desperate. He started typing something on his phone, and then showed me his screen. He had typed a Portuguese word into google translate, and it had come up as “soap”. He was asking me for soap. The look in his eyes were so vulnerable, that I could not refuse. I went back to my room and got the half-empty bottle of body wash mum had given me when I was at the private hospital. “Here, take this” I said. He looked so grateful, and he had tears in his eyes. “Thank you”, he mumbled.

Finally, the psychiatrists became available and it was the day of the review. I dressed really nicely, and wore my glasses to look more mature, as I wanted to make a good impression. There was a man typing out what everyone was saying and two psychiatrists were there to assess me. Mum and dad were waiting outside. After a long interview, the psychiatrists made a finding that I was fit to come off the mental health treatment order, and that I could go home. I was so relieved, but also scared, because at the time I believed that perhaps my family were drugging me.

When I got home, the first thing I did was run to Nala. I hugged her and kissed her and held her. She would protect me. She was my little lioness, and if anyone came into my room while I was sleeping, I knew she would protect me. Even small dogs could become vicious when they felt that they or their owner are threatened. So I slept with her in my room everyday. I am thankful for her, because it was the first time in a long time I had gotten some good rest.

I was still having some delusions, and I thought that in saving the world, I had to let my friends and family know what I was doing. I made a post on Facebook, saying:

We’ve all had a pretty rough run this year with Covid in the mix. However, this year has personally been one of the hardest. I had my first brief psychotic episode in 2018 that lasted two weeks. After that it took me approximately 2 years to regain my confidence whilst juggling work and uni at the same time. Just when I was about to be fully weaned off my medications, I had another brief psychotic episode last Thursday. After spending a week in various different hospitals…being transferred left right and centre, yet making amazing friends along the way, somehow I’ve recovered much quicker…this time in a matter of a week. While I was in hospital, at times I felt dehumanised and even humiliated, and I can say the same for a handful of my friends. And this is not anyone’s fault necessarily, it was the product of our circumstances. But during my time in hospital, I was inspired by those around me to think about thinking about others, and what I could do to help someone in an equally as rough or even rougher situation. So I decided to cut off 17cm of hair to donate my hair, and a piece of my identity, to someone in need.

On hindsight, I am so proud that although I was oversharing because I was a bit disinhibited, my heart was in the right place and I was trying my best to spin a negative situation into something positive.

My family then organised a holiday to the Sunshine Coast, which I wasn’t very excited about, as I still suspected they were drugging me. We ran into an old family friend while we were getting our morning coffees, and he invited us back to their house that day. We decided to walk there from our hotel room, and on the way there, I received a phone call from a private number. “Hello”? I said? The voice on the other end said something along the lines of, “Hi this is Dan, the director of the entertainment industry.” Relief engulfed my body. Dan was godly, and he had been watching everything…was he manipulating events with his powers to have a bit of a laugh at my expense? My relief quickly turned to annoyance. I had just been through so much and this guy was finding it all entertaining. Of course, that’s not what he had meant at all, he was just trying to make me laugh as my friend and see how I was going. But I was still a bit out of it mentally, and cooked some stuff up in my head. We enjoyed catching up with our family friends and enjoyed the rest of our trip, although I wouldn’t eat anything that my family gave me.