Again. Tell them again.
The conveyor belt slams to a halt and an alarm screams. People rush away and rush forward, dive to my right and hop to my left, and now smartphone camera lights are flashing. Then I am surrounded by security personnel.
The woman speaking is dressed as an airport official. But she’s part of the sex-trafficking ring I fled weeks before in LA. I just know.
What to do? Follow her to arrest, to interrogation? Or run? The guards flanking her are armed. They escort me, against my will, to a low-lit room where an injection is produced. A lethal injection.
As it turns out, the injection was not lethal. And I was not in fact an accidental terrorist with a bomb in my bag being pursued by an international sex-trafficking gang who wanted to impregnate me for their ring. Instead I was a grieving woman in the midst of a psychotic break.
Despite its prevalence — the charity Mind estimates as many as 1 in 100 people will experience psychosis in their lifetime — psychosis remains deeply misunderstood. Consisting of delusions and hallucinations that follow themes of persecution and surveillance among sufferers, psychosis is not a condition in and of itself such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia but sometimes a symptom of those conditions. You can also experience it as a result of not sleeping, from taking illegal drugs or after having a baby. And you also don’t need to have a family history of it. I didn’t, although I’d suffered anorexia as a teenager.
In my case it was a response to severe trauma — the death of my dad from a heart attack at the age of 67, a death I was informed about on the phone by the police. The funeral directors advised against viewing the body “on account of the decay”. It was late summer and he’d been gently rotting in his home for several days before a neighbour found him. As I was living in London at the time, I went to Yorkshire to arrange the funeral alone, and waited for my mum to fly over from Brisbane, Australia, where she and my brother live.
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Suddenly, at 31, I had no next of kin in the UK. I was in a one-sided “relationship” with a guy who lived in LA (he wouldn’t call it a relationship), and was spending most of my time and money flying back and forth between there and London, barely supporting myself with freelance journalism. In London I lived alone in a shabby rented flat, but I had regular work with Sky News and the BBC as a commentator and writer. In LA, where I did not have a work visa, I subsisted in a basement not far from where the Manson Family had committed some of their appalling murders. Occasionally I would see The Guy, but mostly I spent my days pitching for UK writing commissions while begging for crumbs of his attention.
Constantly jet-lagged, emotionally abandoned and now grieving, I started to unravel.
It began with paranoia about my relationship. Was the reason this guy was so unavailable because he was secretly seeing other women? I spent hours combing through social media, looking for clues. A trip to a conference in Vegas amped up the anxiety. He was working and too busy to see me most of the time, and I drifted about the airless casinos, deep in grief and burgeoning suspicion. I had also started taking the odd Adderall pill to combat the jet lag. Later I would be told by doctors that the Adderall had not caused my psychosis. But the drug, which contains amphetamine and is banned in the UK, had certainly not helped.
Every morning I woke with an increasing jolt of panic. Cortisol rushed through my body. Was I in denial about this crappy relationship? Or was there more going on?
As a journalist I am attuned to noticing inconsistencies. Why did that person say that? What is so-and-so hiding? And out of these inconsistencies I am always trying to stitch together the facts.
In this case the “facts” now rolled in thick and fast. A trip to NYC with a peculiar meeting in the Empire State Building? Must have been with the Mob. Prescription pills I didn’t recognise in The Guy’s bathroom? Must be antiretroviral medication. That’s it. That’s why he treats me so terribly. He is in fact gay, with HIV, and he is using me for some greater purpose I haven’t yet figured out.
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I don’t remember the moment I settled on it being because he was part of a sex-trafficking gang and trying to impregnate me “for the ring”. But I do remember one morning waking up so terrified that I simply caught the red-eye back to London without telling him and never returned.
In London, meanwhile, I became ever more convinced that I was in grave danger. I’d spent much of my career working on stories about male sexual depravity and the vulnerable women who “knew too much”. I was an expert here.
Suspicious of my therapist, I instead went to the GP, who listened to my story and said, “It sounds terrifying. You need to go to the police.”
I did go to the police. Several times. On the final occasion I explained yet again about the sex-trafficking ring, and about being a journalist and knowing too much, and about how they would now find me and kill me, all at breakneck psychotic speed. And then I froze. “Please don’t write that down!” I cried. “They’ll kill me!”
The police officer put his pen down and looked thoughtfully and then said, “OK, I won’t report this if you go round the corner [to the hospital] and get yourself checked out.”
“I left hospital feeling more terrified than when I had arrived”
LEONIE FREEMAN
At the hospital, when I told the doctor there my story, he merely offered me beta blockers. I was so paranoid that I refused them, at which point he became irritated and I was discharged. I was feeling more terrified than when I had arrived, and the nurses took pity on me and let me sleep in their private room until the morning. And then I was back in the world, on my own and still psychotic.
A few weeks later, petrified that I was going to be raped at a political party I’d been invited to, I pre-emptively took the morning-after pill. I made an appointment to write my will for my family’s sake, and decided to leave the UK.
And then I found out I was pregnant.
I told only one person about the abortion, and that was the close friend who accompanied me. I was barely speaking to my family by this point. Every morning I woke up with a new “realisation” about the Ring. Yet I was careful not to tell those I loved about these realisations. It would only endanger them.
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Meanwhile, Mum had begun to sense something was desperately wrong. She called family friends, who prepared to come and get me from London. But before they could collect me I had booked a flight to Brisbane. I needed to make it home.
Those 26 or so hours travelling to Australia while in the height of psychosis will remain some of the most traumatic of my life. It was at this point that I began to believe there was a bomb in my suitcase, somehow planted there by the sex traffickers I’d managed to escape. When I realised this I duly informed the plane’s flight attendants — already concerned about my mental health thanks to my distressed appearance — about the “traffickers”.
When we landed in Singapore to change planes I was approached by a medical escort who had been assigned to care for me. She gave me some kind of sedative tablet, which I slyly spat out, and I gave her the slip. I missed my connecting flight.
Some time later, when the staff, who were by now aware I was very unwell, had found a seat for me on another flight, I placed my suitcase on the security conveyor belt by the gate and screamed, “Bomb!”
Somehow the staff managed to get my mum on the phone. “Listen, love,” she said, her voice quavering, “you’ve got to get on the plane home.”
Did I trust her? I didn’t know. But something cut through in the moment. It was our mother-daughter bond. So I agreed.
By the time the plane prepared for landing, I was having full-on visual hallucinations. I became hysterical. “I want my mum!” I cried over and over. I was escorted off the plane and rushed through security. And there, waiting on the other side, was my mum. I fell into her arms, both of us weeping.
Once home, both my mum and my brother listened to my delusional stories. My brother began to cry silently. I was taken to my mum’s local GP. In the waiting room I started to smell burning flesh. I looked down. It was me. I was cooking from the inside. But there was no point explaining to my family, I decided.
Then I was called in to see the doctor. After listening to a minute of my story, without hesitation he diagnosed a psychotic break. I was given yet another injection to calm me. I collapsed and was then taken to Logan Hospital, where I was sectioned (“involuntary admission” it’s called in Australia) for six weeks.
***
Recovery from psychosis was terrifying. In hospital I still believed my extreme theories, only now I was being treated as “crazy” for simply telling the truth. The male patients were all potential rapists, I felt. But gradually, through a combination of antipsychotic medication and therapy, I began to realise some of what I thought didn’t make sense. Bit by bit, day by day, I began to return to my “sane” self. But now I had PTSD from my madcap adventures, and my body and brain were racked with fear. What’s more, my visa was running out. I had no choice but to leave my family and return to the UK.
After the psychotic high came the low. I was no longer “mad” but I was so depressed I was suicidal, and frequently had to take an extra step back from the Tube platform on my way to work. But with the help of an excellent NHS clinical psychologist, in time I got better.
Integrating back into my London life was tricky. I wanted to explain to the editors and producers I worked for what had happened, but I was wary of them thinking I was now mentally defunct, no longer a “trusted voice” on any of the things I’d spent years researching and writing about. I also knew I had an incredible story to tell but it was still so triggering and so painful to recount that I would not be able to do that for many years.
This month marks ten years since that experience, an experience that has permanently transformed my relationship with my mind. These days I have private therapy, don’t drink and keep a strict sleep schedule.
Most people take for granted their sanity. But what psychosis has taught me is that the line between reality and fantasy is much thinner than most of us realise, and anyone can become psychotic.
These days I don’t worry about entering psychosis again. For one, I’d recognise the symptoms, were it to return. But, more important, having fallen down the rabbit hole of my mind and clawed my way back up again, what is there to fear?