What has been your experience with psychosis and antipsychotics? I'm writing an article trying to give voice to people with first-hand experience.

My experience is that psychosis is really horrible and can even be painful. I can have an episode at any time during the day, but once they start at night they don’t stop until I pass out from my medication. Tonight has actually been mostly peaceful for a change. I’m spending time drawing with my daughter at the table and have only had to stop a couple of times. Usually by now I have to go upstairs to my room because I either see too many things or hear too many and I’m starting to react to them. I don’t like my babies having to see that happen.

But I hate that time with all my heart and I dread it every day. I feel like I get pulled under water. I’m present, and then they’re yelling at me and I no longer think in terms of real or not real. They are my real. And then it’s like they let go for a second and a feel like I’m gasping for air. My head feels pressured, like something is trying to push out. Then it’s loud and they just drown out everything. They scream, they curse. They hurl insults and they sound like my family and they hate me.

Sometimes I do see them. Those are the bad nights. They’re either shadows or charred corpses or brown with rot.

I do take antipsychotics which helped a lot for a few years. I thought my experience with them was overall good. It took a while with different types and doses, but my doctor finally got a really good cocktail. One of them was an atypical medication which was fairly free of side effects.

Most people sadly gain weight from the medication- it’s just part of the cost really. For me it’s been a struggle to actually keep on the weight because I’ve always had a very high metabolism- and even when I was feeling ok on the medication I didn’t enjoy eating that much.

My psychiatrist has me do routine panels to check my kidney function because these medications are so strong and I also take medication for hypertension.

This has been a really stressful year and i appear to be relapsing. They had hoped that once things settled that the medication would be more effective again but so far I seem to be getting worse. Apparently for men schizophrenia can get better with age but for women it gets worse. This was Late Onset for me that happened at 44 and now I’m just about 50.