- My name is Arthur P Frode and today I will be interviewing miss P. stanton on the newest mental health epidemic that has been ripping through the continent, Ms. stanton was among the first in her field to recognize this new disorder coined “Paranoid Metaphysic Schizophrenic Disorder” or P.M.S.D. for short,Miss. stanton-
- -Please call me psyche, i would prefer to be informal during this process
- Ah yes, miss psyche….
- -I understand most people have the same reaction to my first name, that’s what I get for coming from a family of neuroscientists.
- Really! Your whole family?
- -Yes, I used to say it runs in the family and that we could use the citation section of the dsm 13 as our family tree. *chuckles*
- wow…*ahem* anyways, amazement aside, miss psyche when did you first notice this new disorder emerging?
- -Well, I was working in an underprivileged area in an inpatient clinic. One that was in desperate need of an addiction counselor. A woman came in. I figured she was a run of the mill addict. She had tried the latest fashion drug-
- It wasn’t narzeprone was it?
- -It was. It was at the height of the epidemic, right before the shortage.
- Wow.
- -Well, we had started to ease her off of it, and I was able to do one on one therapy with her which was when I first noticed it.
- The delusion?
- -The start of it, yes. Delusions don’t start hard core. It’s helpful to think of them like a leak. A leak starts out as a little drip and slowly floods everything over time. Like a little itch at the back of your brain saying something isn’t right.
- Ah, I see.
- -At first she made comments about her dreams. About how she, even from a young age, had dreams that felt “more real”. As she slowly opened up more to me, she confided that at a certain point she lost track of which reality was the dream.
- She couldn’t just tell?
- -She said she had a gut feeling but wasn’t sure.
- How odd.
- -I agree. I tried reasoning with her. I brought up the fact that people often experience nonsensical things in their dreams. People see things, and hear things.
- What did she say?
- -She said that both realities were filled with nonsensical visions. She explained her hallucinations and how it started as small specs and shadows out the corners of her eyes and then later in life progressed to vivid and horrifying hallucinations.
- This was patient zero who lost their life right? Now knowing what we know now, do you think there was anything you could have done to save her?
- -I wish… I think about that often…. But, how can you explain to someone what is real and what is not? What proof can you give that this is reality? How can you prove that we’re not characters in a story, or someone’s twisted machinations?…. You can’t…. Not definitively.
- How did she pass? I tried doing my own research but I couldn’t find anything on it.
- -A heart attack. By the end of her life she was completely disconnected from reality. I tried to find new ways to prove that this was reality. I read her journal after, her last entry was 23 pages long. She couldn’t take the uncertainty of not knowing which was the true reality so she had plans to end everything. She said she would randomly choose one and if she woke up from dying she would know that was the real reality.
- And, what about the others? How did that start? Do we know what causes this disorder?
- -At first we thought that patient zero had told her delusions to others, thereby causing it to “pass” to others. However, we soon started to see this delusion pop up amongst others who couldn’t possibly have heard it from the others. We had cases pop up around the globe even before word got out here. We have a few theories but we are not sure what causes it. It can present vastly different for people and it can take a long time for people to start to realize they have it.
- How so?
- -Well, most patients experience in the early stages feeling like they sometimes have dreams that are hyper-realistic. Most write it off as a weird happenstance or coincidence. Then the dreams start bleeding together with reality via their delusions. Most feel like they’ve experienced things before or that certain events have happened in both “realities”, some say that they have read stories or watched movies about “characters” with said delusion. Some of them don’t believe in it at all and write it off as merely fictional.
- Really?! That’s astounding!
- -Yes, and typically there’s a period of denial from when they experience the first “stage” to the last. Often these patients will deny it until the hallucinations start.
- Do the hallucinations present differently as well?
- -Yes, however generally we see common things between them. Auditorily we see people claiming to hear people calling for them, or a low everpresent hum. For visual hallucinations they typically start with seeing shadows out of the corner of their eye that will move or disappear when looked directly at, or feeling like their reflection in the mirror is slightly off.
- And what would you say to someone just beginning to realize they might have this disorder?
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- Wake up, this isn’t real.