Erica Crompton - The Beginners Guide to Sanity

The cops are hotly chasing you, about to whisk you off to high security prison. Youll have to face the media circus that is waiting outside your work an NHS centre for children in Stafford where you are a receptionist. You cant yet see them, but theyre there.

The signal you know this is about to happen is a technician who has come to record the ordeal by inserting cameras into the fax machine beside you. You feel pure terror. Its 2003; youve been following the Maxine Carr story in the newspapers and feel you are Britains next monster.

Your friends, along with a few celebrities, including pop star Rachel Stevens, are terrorists. They send messages to their victims through songs on the radio (such as Sweet Dreams my LA Ex) and subtly plant messages to you via storylines on TV programmes like EastEnders.

You are convinced you are a terrorist target. No one ever suggests you might be unwell, because you keep the thoughts to yourself. But every day you feel the panic and weight of being a wanted fugitive.

Youre just 23 years old, and shortly after the above takes place, you are referred to a psychiatrist. It is then you discover youre not a wanted fugitive at all. Instead, you have psychosis.

Psychosis can be a scary word, sometimes even for those diagnosed with it.

In The Beginners Guide to Sanity, Erica Crompton, a journalist xii with a history of paranoid schizophrenia, and Professor Stephen Lawrie, an academic psychiatrist, share what they know about psychosis. Whether youve just been diagnosed and are looking for relatable stories that will help you feel less alone, or are further into the course of your illness and wish to explore causes, diagnostics or why this might have happened to you we discuss what we know about this complex illness and what we can all do about it.

To start, we look at what psychosis actually is. Erica shares her experience of a first episode of the illness, before it turned into a full-blown schizophrenia diagnosis. And Stephen looks at the symptoms and illnesses that hes seen in his clinic during his career as a psychiatrist. Following on, in Chapter 2, Stephen goes into detail about each of the psychotic diagnoses what they are, and what each diagnosis means. Throughout, Erica provides quotes and colourful anecdotes from others and from her own direct experience of almost two decades of living with, and managing, psychosis.

If youre wondering why me? youre not alone. In this book we look at what causes psychosis and why people have this illness. We look at causation in Chapters 3 and 4, including all the main factors contributing to the development of psychosis. Erica also asks why me? and questions why she became ill. Chapter 5 then deals with what the chances are of different outcomes of psychosis.

So now, after reading those chapters, you have some idea why you or a loved one has psychosis, and what are you going to do about it. In Chapter 6, we look at how to manage someone who is acutely psychotic, and in Chapters 7 and 8 we discuss how treatment with medication and a whole host of other non-drug approaches can help to keep people well.

Chapter 9 deals with particular problems, largely from a psychiatrists perspective, which is followed in Chapter 10 by stuff about how to make the most of life in which Erica details xiii all the weird and wonderful treatments she has tried to manage her condition (from gardening to listening to hip hop!) and we both consider the other approaches you might try.

We finish off this journey through the psychotic mind and what can be done for it by looking at the books and films you can read or watch or recommend to family and friends to foster a greater understanding of what psychosis is and how it fits in the wider world today. We also recommend organisations that specialise in mental health to get in touch with if youre struggling many will have their own helplines that you can call in a crisis.

So, put the kettle on and lie back on the psychiatrists couch as Erica and Stephen start to relay everything they know about psychosis or, at least, everything we think you might want or need to know

Psychosis literally means out of touch with reality.

When mental health workers use the word psychosis, it is usually because the person they are seeing has one or more psychotic symptoms. These are usually delusions (bizarre beliefs) and/or auditory hallucinations (hearing voices). A diagnosis of a psychotic disorder (or condition) is usually only made if the symptoms are distressing or interfering with everyday life, but it often also means that the person does not realise that they are ill in other words, in psychiatric jargon, they lack insight that their experiences are products of their mind rather than real.

For Erica, psychosis is one of the worst things ever to happen to her, mostly because losing touch with reality almost cost her her life. She says:

It is the bizarre beliefs that Stephen describes which led me to A&E in the spring of 2009. Id been doing okay since 2003 but around this time I had stopped taking my medication for longer than a week and had started to believe I was a wanted criminal again. Back in that sunny springtime of 2009, I had no insight at all and I wasnt taking illegal substances just to get high. My poison was a bottle of bleach, to drink, in order to end my life. I did this at a time when my beliefs were fixated on my being a criminal and the psychosis really took hold after about seven months without medication, and after about two weeks of intense stress (moving house and being in debt).