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I was not yet 20 when my first psychosis emerged. I was convinced that we were on the verge of a world war. The public defense sirens were tested every first Monday of the month. To me, those sirens meant that the cruise missiles had already been launched. We had just minutes to do what had to be done: find each other and wait to die. Sometimes I could actually feel the radiation taking effect. I felt nauseous and believed that my hair was falling out. The rest of the world pretended to carry on as normal, but I could see that everyone was afraid. They knew that we were all about to suffer a slow, painful death, but nobody knew how to prepare for it. And so we all continued our daily lives with stolid determination. I experienced at the time that the world, including myself, began to move in slow motion. Although I could hear extremely well—I heard everything—my body moved very slowly. When I had the will to lift my arm, it took ages before that message reached my arm. It was as if I was in thick water and could only move in slow motion. It was the same for the movement around me: everything moved slower. The strange thing is that time did not exist for me in that situation. Time was also in thick water. It is a kind of vacuum, no-man’s-land. Not in real life, but also not dead. A psychosis is far-reaching and overwhelming. A psychosis involves a severe distortion of meaning. It renders the world unfamiliar, unrecognizable, a threat. Psychosis can turn life into a living hell. Just ‘‘being’’ can no longer be taken for granted.Nothing can be taken for granted. A psychosis is also accompanied by a sense of estrangement. What you have is often closely allied to who you are. The manifestations sometimes dominate your entire personality. The distinction between the individual and the condition is soon lost, and it is very difficult to regain. I have been my disorder for a very long time. I was not yet 20 when I developed severe psychotic complaints. They were accompanied by a lot of powerful noises inside my head and by an unlimited fear. To control both I became addicted to alcohol, drugs, and selfharm. In fact, I was trying not to hear and not to feel. The numbing effect was—although it sounds paradoxical—at the same time both a survival strategy and destruction. It was the intoxication that drew me out of reality. But it also allowed me to withdraw more and more into my own crazy world and to isolate myself from the world around me. One of the few things I can remember from this time is my fear and the smell of destruction that surrounded me. When I finally also stopped eating and moving, I had literally become a living dead. Now I know that traumatic experiences from my past haunted me. But then I was convinced that the inevitable was happening: I was the problem, and the problem had to be solved.

From Being a Disorder to Dealing With Life: An Experiential Exploration of the Association Between Trauma and Psychosis