About me – The trauma of a psychotic episode

I argued with my mother and demanded that she must take my sister away from us. I told her that Patricia was mental and that she might even try and murder us. My mother was obviously upset and told me to keep quiet. We waited in anticipation for Patricia to return home. I wanted to run away, but there was nowhere for me to go.

Patricia never returned home that afternoon and my mother was starting to panic. Patricia had made a new friend a couple of weeks back and her name was Roslyn. My mother had heard that Roslyn had recently been looked up in jail for petty theft and other minor offenses. She was a big woman in her mid-twenties and she was a bad influence on my sister in her current state of mind. My sister was only a teenager.  It was bad enough that Patricia was full-blown psychotic, now she was mixing with the unstable people as well.

The term psychotic tends to place fear into a person when they are not educated about mental illness. Usually when a person is gentle by nature, the worst that they do when they are mentally ill (psychotic) is become verbally abusive and violent. Violent meaning they may break things. Or they may overdose on tablets with the belief that they are invincible. A common occurrence with people that are schizophrenic or bipolar is that they may even develop the God complex during an extreme high. They believe that they are superhuman, and that way they become a danger to themselves. I am no expert on the topic; I only speak from personal experience.

My mother was desperate and searched the neighbourhood for my sister. After a couple of hours she spotted Patricia outside a small shopping complex up the road from us. She was sitting next to Roslyn and my mother could hear the swear words flying. My mother felt as though she was the enemy and called Patricia to come with her. Roslyn whispered something into her ear and they both grinned.

When Patricia arrived back home it went from a bad dream to a nightmare. She was extremely paranoid and afraid of us. Believe me we were much more afraid than she was. I was shaking with fear. She would scream and swear at us and smash her dinner plate against the wall. Then when she had had enough of us she charged out the front door. My mother screamed after her, demanding that she come back. My mother was desperate and did not know how to deal with her behaviour.

Patricia marched off to her friend Roslyn again, and this time my mother didn’t try and stop her. The next day we all went to work and school, my mother didn’t sleep at all the previous night, she was in a state of shock. We were all confused and did not know how to deal with things.

“Living a life of integrity is one of the greatest missions we can undertake.” Greg Anderson