we | What happened.

This is both an explanation and an apology. We ought to have written it sooner, but we weren't in the frame of mind to do so until now.

You're probably wondering what happened to us after we disappeared from this site several months ago. Our mental health started to deteriorate in late March. It was a harrowing, bewildering time, both for us and for everyone who had to observe it. We started showing symptoms of psychosis and mania: distractibility, delusions, rapid speech, distorted thoughts, tactile hallucinations, grandiose plans, hearing voices, seemingly prophetic visions, sleeplessness, never-ending conversation and impulsivity. What was once coherent and lucid was now mangled, nonsensical, warped.

Worst of all were the delusions, especially the persecutory delusions. It is these delusions that led us to falsely accuse people of being antisemites and racists, among other things. We sent angry messages to people we considered dear friends, thinking that we were being betrayed in favour of hardened racists who wanted to deprive us of our right to exist. We saw imagined references in people's posts (eg, spelling errors and nonstandard usage) that were somehow linked to shadowy agendas, even though no outsider could see the clues. We posted false warnings on our old account that we later removed. We thought that all the abusive, controlling or merely unpleasant systems we'd encountered online were somehow in league with each other to harm us and our friends. Of course, the lot of it was nonsense, but we sincerely believed it back then. When we think of what we said back then, we are mortified. We weren't in our right minds, but people were still hurt, and we ought to make amends anyway. We don't know whether people will forgive us, but explaining and apologising are the right things to do anyway.

It was the first time we'd experienced fully fledged psychosis. We had no idea how to handle it. We've been hypervigilant before and have worried about people's intentions, but those worries weren't unshakeable beliefs. We also thought we were on a mission from God, so we were a bit wary of seeking medical advice. We were worried that they'd minimise the cosmic importance of what we were feeling at the time. We reached out for help, but those requests for help were incoherent and delusional. I know we frightened and confused people, and they probably didn't know what to make of what we were saying.

We deleted our old account during the episode. We allowed it to be purged when we came back to our senses, since there were a lot of posts from March and April that we were ashamed of. We felt that it was 'tainted' by what we'd posted.

We don't remember everything that happened during the episode, since the mania made it more difficult than usual to form memories, but we know enough to piece things together and acknowledge the harm we did.

We don't want to share all the details publicly, but our condition was bad enough for us to stay on a psychiatric ward for a fortnight. On the ward, we were prescribed antipsychotics and mood stabilisers. After our discharge, our normal psychiatrist diagnosed us with bipolar disorder, type I. (Before, we just thought we had depression.) Over time, the delusions faded, and we fell back to earth. And it was a hard fall indeed: after we were discharged, we had to reconstruct our life from the bottom in many ways.

We are truly sorry for the pain we caused during our episode. We hope you can forgive us.

—Jack, for all of us

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From:

lb_lee

We accept and appreciate your apology. During that time, we were hurt and angry, but far more, we were terrified of what would happen to you. That you are alive and yourselves again is a huge weight off our minds.

We need time and space to deal with things on our end; our own health has been declining. When we are ready, we will let you know.

We love you, and we want you to be all right.

--Miranda

silk_dragon_zen

Thank you so much for this. We've — well mainly I — have had (medication-induced) manic psychosis four times in our life. It was back in the early 1990s and the episodes stopped after the medication issues were sorted out. But it was terrifying and I/we fell deep into a depressive space in the aftermath because of the shame and the trauma.

So we entirely forgive you for the things you said in the midst of the episode, especially because we know from experience that when it's the first time, one really can't see it coming and wouldn't know how to recognize the signs early enough to get help that feels genuinely safe.

💜

— Sage