Trusting Myself Again after Psychosis

That night in November 2015, I barreled down I-75 at 100 miles per hour. The moon hung in the sky, a pale sickle. The black sky was spangled bright with stars. 

I was on my way to meet the CIA. 

As I neared the Michigan-Ohio border, my mom called: “Honey, where are you?” 

Something about her voice, so filled with love, reached me. At that moment, I knew I could trust her. I began to cry. “Mom, I think I might be having a break with reality.”

It had been a long journey to this moment of crisis. I first became depressed as a teenager. I would come home from high school and lie in the long, late-afternoon light on the floor of my closet, sobbing. The depression accelerated as a college student. Though I had been accepted to an honors program at one of the top public universities in the country, I was struggling. 

My hygiene deteriorated. My freshman roommate, worried and trying to help, would tell me when I was beginning to smell and to take a shower. My days and nights were reversing. I would sleep all day, curled up in an armchair in the basement of the student union, among people experiencing homelessness who had come in to get warm. Suddenly, I was no longer able to read, instead scanning a page repeatedly, desperately trying to take it in. I had no idea how in the world I was going to complete my English degree with its heavy reading load. Though I aced some classes, I also dropped out of others. 

Now, I know I was experiencing prodromal schizophrenia, the early, pre-psychotic phase of the illness that appears in late adolescence and early adulthood. But at the time, I couldn’t understand my own behavior, what was happening to me, why I was transforming from a top-notch student athlete, a National Merit Finalist in high school, to this person I considered messed-up, a loser. 

I hated this—and wanted only to destroy her. 

In my sophomore year, I overdosed for the first time and was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit. This marked the true beginning of the skid: over and over, as the years passed, I overdosed. Prescription drugs and sedating over-the-counter medications were my method of choice. For weeks at a time as a sophomore, I would take tiny overdoses every night, unsure whether I would wake up the next morning. I found this Russian roulette exciting. It made me feel alive—and I felt so dead with sadness inside. 

My diagnosis, as with many people with a psychotic disorder, changed over the years. First, major depression; then, bipolar II; and at age twenty-six, bipolar I. But it wasn’t until age thirty when I went cold turkey off of an antipsychotic, frustrated with the massive weight gain, that  psychosis appeared. 

At first, I recognized that my strange thoughts didn’t reflect reality. But as time passed, I spiraled deeper into an alternate reality—that my phone was tapped, that my computer had been hacked, that people were following me. I believed that the CIA was recruiting me. 

That night in November 2015, days after my thirty-second birthday, I took off driving. At the time, I was working as a freelance reporter and desperately trying to hold my life together. A calendar reminder had appeared on my phone, a signal to make calls for an article on ACT testing. But I thought it was a message from the CIA, instructing me to drive to that center, hundreds of miles away, to meet agents. They would whisk me away to a faraway training center, deep under a mountain, where I would be transformed into the world-class spy I had always been destined to be. 

But my mom’s voice on the other end of the phone reached me: “Meggie, I think you’re having a break with reality, too. Please come home.” 

That night, she talked me home. The next day, she took me to a psychiatric emergency room.

Looking back, I’m not sure where my insight that night—that I was having a break with reality—came from. As my psychiatrist later told me, it’s highly unusual for a person with a psychotic disorder to be able to recognize that they are out of touch with reality. When we reflected on this moment in the years afterwards, my mom told me, “There was always some tiny part of you that remained sane, Meggie. A tiny, tiny part of you that wanted to be well. Your dad and I never lost you completely. You never lost yourself completely either.” My mom’s statement comforts me tremendously. 

I have always been myself and never will be anything but myself, future bouts of psychosis notwithstanding. In college, falling deep into depression, I would tell myself that the true Meg was with God, that God held her with him in Heaven. God was keeping her safe and would give her back to me when I was able to keep her safe myself. Perhaps, that night in the car, God gave a tiny part of the real Meg back to me, just enough so I could recognize the danger in which I stood. 

Still, it’s incredibly hard for me to confront this history of psychosis so traumatizing that I have difficulty even thinking about it a decade later. When my mind broke, I lost the ability to trust myself deeply and truly well. I still struggle with panic attacks on the highway, convinced I will take my hands off the wheel against my will. I don’t want to die now—but I might kill myself anyway. I’m a writer, but in the end, there are no words for the horror of psychosis, the reality of unreality beyond expression. 

There is saving in the trying, however. As I try to communicate psychosis, I’m reaching peers, mental health professionals, and the public—and redeeming the experience by helping others. I’m also regaining power, even integrity of mind. 

I’m stitching myself up with language. 

Days after that night on the highway, in a Detroit-area women’s psychiatric hospital, I had an episode of what I know now was schizophasia, speaking in a “word salad,” a meaningless mixture of words characteristic of schizophrenia. I thought I was a master linguist, my first language, French; second, ASL; third, English; fourth, Latin. I believed I had been a ballerina as a child and that I was regaining this ability. I dreamed of breaking out of the hospital and pirouetting across the world stage, acclaimed, a master spy, a master dancer. 

An emergency antipsychotic medication restored me. Overnight, the delusions disappeared. 

Later, because of my parents’ concerns about medication compliance, I was transferred to a group home. There, I spiraled into profound depression. My wonderful psychiatrist recognized this as a call for help. She encouraged my parents to allow me to move home with them. At that point, I was determined to change.

In the months that followed, I began walking my parents’ neighborhood, even volunteering at a local food bank. After I designed its annual report, I was offered a job as a part-time communications coordinator. 

Suddenly, I was building what therapists call “a life worth living.” I have never looked back from that early recovery. I haven’t attempted suicide since 2016. I’ve remained medication compliant and have had only one episode of psychosis, which my psychiatrist and I were able to manage at home. 

Supported by the right medication regimen, I have thrived—a master’s in writing, a home of my own, jobs as a copywriter and marketing manager, both full-time and part-time. I even have a loving and successful marriage. My husband and I will celebrate our seventh anniversary this year. In the last ten years, I’ve published extensively, both in literary journals and major mainstream magazines. Today, I work as a community journalist and am writing a memoir that I hope to publish someday. 

With proper health care and now medication adherence, I’ve been restored. I’m here to say a good life is possible for people with severe mental illness. This is what NSSC is fighting for—individuals like me who need psychiatric support to survive but, with it, are capable of happiness and success. 

Meg LeDuc is a journalist, editor, and author of the memoir-in-progress Big Desire: Madness and the Quest for Motherhood. Honored with three Hopwood Awards and a Michigan Press Association Award, her work appears in Brevity, Cleaver, and HuffPost. Meg holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a lead contributor to the MI Mental Health Series.

Her work with the Treatment Saves. Neglect Costs. campaign is deeply personal; it was access to timely, appropriate, and intensive treatment that allowed Meg to move from the depths of psychosis to a thriving, stable recovery. Today, she lives a wonderful life in Detroit, Michigan, with her husband and their rescue cats. Meg is a living testament to the fact that when we prioritize clinical treatment over systemic neglect, individuals with serious mental illness can reclaim their futures.

You can learn more about Meg’s writing and advocacy at megleduc.com.