Imagine an MP3 player that has been surgically implanted with a power source that is ever lasting. No matter what you do this player keeps sending messages through out your brain and the harder you try to ignore it the louder it gets. A person sitting across from you could be telling a detailed story but in between their sentences the MP3 player is telling you what and how to perceive this new information.
The messages may have started small but over time they have grown more and more powerful until the point they have become your reality. Every trick in the book does nothing to lessen the voice from within. At times the voice may provide a perception of a situation that you may have never realized before and it may appear almost helpful but the true intent is to gain complete control over what you do. For some it becomes the voice of reasoning or the voice of God which must be followed or else bad things tend to happen. At first you fight and you fight for you know this is not rational but after the same message is repeated over a long enough time frame it begins to make complete sense and something that once seemed to be completely horrific now makes complete sense and becomes the right thing to do. This is severe psychosis and this is why some people do the horrific things that they do.
Psychosis has a very large scale and it can go from an annoyance to the level where the person has complete loss of rational thought. I have psychotic features attached to the major depressive disorder which basically means I heard a voice that was not my own where it encouraged negative behavior thinking. In my case it encouraged, never told me, to self harm or to take my own life for both would bring the peace that I was looking for.
When it first appeared it was an annoyance that I just shrugged off believing it was just a manifestation of my inner turmoil. The problem was it kept coming back with the same messages over and over until I would find myself arguing with it. Every single reason not to commit suicide was justified by this inner voice until I only had one left which the voice tried to justify but my brain couldn’t thankfully.
When it came to self harm the urges would be encouraged by the voice and the majority of time I would go in because it made sense and it would make the voice go away. The day my self harm behavior stopped I made a conscious decision to no longer participate in this behavior which is the right step but it was also the day that I started Seroquel an anti psychotic which probably had more to do with it then my good intentions. In my situation the medication does two main purposes (A) It keeps my brain from racing (B) It shuts up that damn voice.
This is why it is so important for people who are taking medication to stay on the medication for when it is gone there is a chance a psychotic state may happen where the person loses rational control and the rest of us read about it in the newspaper. Thankfully most psychotic episodes do not approach that level but while they may not be a danger to the community at large they may very well be a danger to themselves. Take care
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Wow, what a deep post. Never looked at it that way before.
You never cease to amaze me on how you word things. The MP3 analogy is perfect. I hear the voices in my head, and I do believe if I wasn’t medicated, I’d probably follow anything the voices tell me. With the medication, I do still have conversations with the voices, but they don’t really tell me to do anything.
It seems like more and more people are getting on mental health drugs and are being diagnosed with mental disorders. I hope my question will not offend you as I am not very familiar with the causes for mental illnesses. I’ve heard that there’s some type of chemical imbalance? Anyway, I do believe the mind is a powerful thing, do you think that most people who have thoughts of harming themselves need to be medicated or do you think each individual’s situation is different?
Thanks for the comments.
Every person with a mental illness needs to be approached on an individual basis, There are a lot of commonalities but at the same time there are a lot of differences. There are a wide variety of reasons why someone self harms or thinks of self harming. In my case medication stopped the voices which made the urges a lot worse but not everyone who self harms deals with psychosis. Medication is a route but in my opinion in most cases therapy would be a better approach when psychosis is not an issue. Take care
I immediately remembered Eckhart Tolle’s experience narrated in his book where he said that a time came when he couldn’t live with himself anymore. That was when he started thinking if he couldn’t live with himself, then there must be two of him. I remembered it when you mentioned the other voice inside your head, a voice you don’t want to live with anymore. I just hope that voices like that may indeed learn to just shut up and cooperate in our difficult search for peace.
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