4 hours ago
1 
When the medical team collected me from my mother’s house in January 2015, I was wearing my dead grandfather’s tasselled cowboy jacket with my bare torso exposed, a shoelace as a headband, and there was a smear of crimson blood across my forehead.
The blood was fake. The out-of-hours team had not been called for a physical health issue, but a psychological one.
I was 20 years old and had recently dropped out of the University of Brighton due to poor mental health.
Months of mania – fuelled partly by the stress of the perceived loss of my future and partly by an addiction to smoking enough cannabis to tranquilise Snoop Dogg’s dealer – followed.
After the mania came the madness.
A sudden proclivity for tribal face paint, a repeated impulse to send videos of myself crying to my favourite authors and an obsession with running half-naked around my town at midnight leaving £5 notes under plant pots meant that my ‘I’m not crazy – the rest of the world is!’ mantra had worn impossibly thin.
Like many who suffer from psychosis, I had convinced myself that I was a god. A divine being sent to earth to stop a planet-destroying meteor by – wait for it – mapping the stars in the sky against the moles on my forearm.
It was my plan to throw myself from the top of Stonehenge. Instead of falling, I’d sprout wings and fly off into the night sky to stop the imminent meteor, thus proving my recent deification and saving the planet in one fell swoop.
I was resolute in my godliness. If I could be as depressed as I was after leaving university, sick and penniless, and turn that depression into waking up every day blissful, then I must be a god.
I also blamed, in part, my recently adopted ritual of standing barefoot in the garden and staring directly at the sun for five seconds – a practice that I’d thought was a forgotten form of photosynthesis – for my perceived anointment (in reality, it was burning my corneas and I now have astigmatism).
In the end, it was the restorative power of friendship that saved me
Obviously, I hadn’t been anointed. I wasn’t happy, I was high on cannabis and psychosis-delivered dopamine.
But it’s a lot easier to cope with newfound divinity than with the truth: That I was unemployed, uneducated and having a very public mental breakdown.
My mother decided to call our local GP to inform them of my erratic behaviour. They arranged an immediate home visit. After an assessment, the medical team persuaded me to take anti-psychotics with the argument: ‘If what you’re experiencing is real, taking medicine won’t stop it, will it?’.
But it did stop it.
After taking my prescription, the descent back down to earth began with a slight gradient over the first few days, before plummeting harshly.
I became utterly sedate. Then bedbound. Then almost comatose.
I had experienced depression before, but this new version – the lowest low after the highest high – was a different beast entirely.
I lost the ability to perceive, think and feel. My internal monologue was silent, and, to add insult to injury, due to post-psychosis amnesia, a common side-effect of the illness, I had lost all of my memories, too
The only feeling that remained in the bleakness was a dull, underlying terror. Who was I? Would I ever know again?
I would play films on my laptop without watching them, so as not to feel alone with the silence of my mind.
Over the next three months, from dawn till dusk, The Devil Wears Prada played from a half-broken laptop screen to an audience of none.
In the end, it was the restorative power of friendship that saved me.
My friends reached out repeatedly, only for me to swat them away – but my best friend Ruby didn’t take no for an answer.
I winced when she came round and entered my den. I hadn’t showered or left bed in a week. The room was a tip – dirty plates and underwear mosaics littered the floor.
She, meanwhile, was pristine in her normality. Matching clothes. Clean hair. Makeup.
Without hesitation, she climbed into my pit next to me. She said she wanted to be there, that she missed me, and knew I’d be better soon. She tucked herself in underneath the dirty bedsheets and played old Sex and the City episodes on the laptop.
At first, I couldn’t enjoy her company; but she persisted.
After a couple of weeks, I laughed. She reminded me that, in my madness, I’d stolen a plasma ball from Home Bargains and was convinced I could use it as a communication device to chat with Nicki Minaj.
We howled. The absurdity of the situation overcame the devastation, and silliness began to eschew sadness.
This became routine; Ruby would come round, tuck herself into bed, and regale me with stories of my exploits, always with tenderness, kindness and humour.
Find out more about Cal
You can buy Cal Speet’s novel Spiralling here
Eventually, my brain started to repair. Bit by bit, my memories returned and my humanity trickled back.
I started showering. I reached out to all my other friends. I got a job.
Miraculously, not only did the intense post-psychosis depression dissipate, but so did the pre-psychosis, low-level depression that had haunted me since my teenage years.
There is a hard line in my life between who I was before and after this period. It left me bruised, confused, but with a new perspective. My worst fears had been realised: I had publicly humiliated myself and seemingly destroyed my future, but I had survived.
Ten years later, after eventually graduating from university in Manchester, my novel Spiralling is set in that same city, published with HarperNorth.
A relationship comedy, the story follows Gabriel: A young man who suffers an emotional trauma, and attempts to rebuild after losing everything except for that glittering constant that I clung to at my lowest ebb.
Having a laugh with a good friend.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing [email protected].
Share your views in the comments below.
Bengali (Bangladesh) · 
English (United States) ·