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A thread on my first experience with full-blown mania and being hospitalized for the first time. Some of you will judge me but I don’t care. People need to know what we go through.
My first manic episode started with me dressing differently, feeling very happy and carefree (in extreme) and I was not eating or sleeping for a full week. All I did was smoke pot and journal in my room about theories I had.
I started to believe everyone was trying to kill me, even my own family. That they wanted to poison my food and watch me die. That the government replaced my real family with imposters. These were all delusions and I had slipped into psychosis.
It got so bad that I called the cops urging them to save me from being murdered. They came to my house and my parents spoke to them, that’s when the ambulance came to take me.
I only remember bits and pieces but it was in January 2017 and Trump was being inagurated on the tv in the hospital waiting room. I started to freak out and had hallucinations of him speaking to me and telling me to only trust the white people in the emergency room.
He told me to disregard all POC, only listen to white nurses and staff. I was being told to follow orders so I can prove myself. That the government was surveilling me and testing me to see how good I was. I thought that the military wanted me to be a soldier.
I was hearing voices telling me if I didn’t do what they told me, my whole family would be taken and put into “Muslim concentration camps”. So I started acting like a racist and told Hispanic staff to “speak English”. This haunts me to this day as I would never say this.
I started hallucinating that the cabinets in the hospital room said things like “military boots” and “rifles”. After a while of me saying racist stuff, hospital staff and security dragged me outside. At one point I kicked a nurse while trying to escape and she was Black.
She called the police and I was put in handcuffs. My parents got there to try to explain I was having an episode and was not in my right mind. When the nurse heard my parents speaking in Arabic she decided to drop assault charges.
By police order I was taken back into the hospital and was strapped into a gurney. They injected me with a tranquilizer and then taken to the mental ward. I don’t remember much of my visit there as I was drugged up the whole time and mainly slept.
I wanted to share this to shed light on the struggles we have with mental illness. Delusions and hallucinations are scary and they feel so real. What happens is the mind takes in outside information and interprets everything differently. All we want is some sympathy and kindness.
