What it feels like when things go wrong

I have been having severe psychiatric symptoms and have been asked to describe them, and am finding it to be difficult.

Yesterday I told my husband that it felt like the emotional equivalent in intensity and horror to the pain I would feel if one of my eyelids had been pulled around my head, down to my neck, leaving behind my skinned, painful head, unable to see anything.

I know that is not physically happening to me, but it’s the emotions and the pain that I suspect I would feel if that happened to me that I am trying to encircle with words.

It’s really important that I describe it in a way that make sense so the doctors will know what kind of drugs to give me. I guess whether I need to keep taking anti-psychotics or switch to mood stabilizers.

There are at least two parts of this emotional crisis:

One is this emotional pain described above. Another way to describe it would be to compare it to how I might emotionally feel if my fingernails were being pulled out slowly, one-by-one, only worse.

So this is constantly going on, and it manifests as my own screams and shrieks filling my head. I want to go through the house screaming and shrieking out loud, but I hide myself away from everyone else and it feels like my head is going to explode with the constant suppression of the screams of emotional pain.

The other part of this crisis is like a cloudy, smoky feeling of doom that washes in and swirls about while the first part is going on. It does not use words, but it communicates to me that I cannot handle much more of the first part, but warns that it may never stop. In fact, it could get worse and I could spend my life trapped in the first part with the second part swirling around. And that adds more panic and hopelessness.

Since I have been in crisis, these two parts have always been actively going on but I notice that it is quieter and easier to tolerate in the morning. It gets louder and more painful and harder to bear throughout the day until the evening when I run up to my bedroom, strap on the bipap (sleep apnea) machine and take deep, deliberate breaths until I fall asleep.

I hope that this description, along with a doctor’s visit, will result in some new meds and an end to this crisis.