The Task

Twelve years ago, I stood alone in my university dorm room staring at the ceiling. Cannabis smoke drifted upward from my right arm. I did not know that I was transitioning from the prodromal phase of psychosis into an acute episode. I did not know that I would be sectioned the following morning.

Yet I found myself engaged in a sincere, one-sided conversation with God.

I explained that I could not shake the feeling that there was something I needed to do. I asked to be shown what that was.

At the time, I was a creative writing student. Mental health was not part of my wider awareness.

That night marked the beginning of a long project concerned with language, psychosis, and meaning in schizophrenia.

My first psychotic episode and subsequent admission left such an impression on me that I felt compelled to document it. Clinicians told me it was unusual for patients to remember their psychosis in vivid detail, let alone to reflect on it metacognitively. I felt an epistemic obligation to catalogue what had happened: how delusions formed and were rationalised, how misinterpretation and clinical care became intertwined, and what it felt like to emerge from a complete break with reality carrying a grief that few people could understand.

After finishing the book, I found work on an acute psychiatric admissions ward. For two years I worked as a support worker, learning about psychosis, schizophrenia, personality disorder, self-harm, suicide, clinical risk, and recovery.

At that time, services still prioritised one-to-one engagement. Much of my working life consisted of sitting with patients in side rooms, discussing their experiences of the ward, their hopes for discharge, and their fears about the future.

I loved the work.

Yet I was never entirely comfortable within the culture that surrounded it. Clinical teams often rely upon a clear distinction between those who are unwell and those responsible for their care. My own history complicated that distinction. I occupied both sides of the divide, and not everyone found that comfortable.

I eventually realised that I had taken the role as far as I reasonably could. Although I later trained as a control and restraint tutor, I found myself far more interested in communication and de-escalation than physical intervention. We spent considerable time preparing staff for confrontation and comparatively little time teaching them how to avoid it.

So I left and pursued a PhD.

Looking back, the decision appears straightforward. It was anything but. The project nearly collapsed several times. Securing support required months of negotiation, and there were understandable concerns about whether I could complete the work. In the end, the project survived through a combination of persistence, opportunity, and good fortune.

By the time I finished, I had changed considerably. Ideas that seemed self-evident to a twenty-five-year-old recovering from his first episode of psychosis no longer seemed so clear to a tired thirty-five-year-old researcher living with schizophrenia.

I briefly returned to clinical work afterwards and quickly realised how much services had changed. There was less time for meaningful engagement and a greater focus on managing incidents. The distance between services and the people they served felt wider than I remembered.

At the end of all this, I found myself returning to that conversation in the dorm room.

I have never been religious in any conventional sense, but I have always prayed.

For the first time, I felt that I had completed the task I had been given.

Take the experience of that first psychotic episode and transform it into something that might outlive you.

A book.

A thesis.

Articles.

Conversations.

Whether any of it ultimately matters is not mine to decide.

For a long time, I worried that I had failed. Stigma remains. Mental health services continue to struggle. Academia moves at its own pace, often unaware of work occurring beyond its immediate concerns.

Yet I am satisfied that I produced the work.

People often become anxious when someone with schizophrenia speaks about faith. In many cases, that caution is warranted. I have worked with people whose religious beliefs became inseparable from severe psychosis, sometimes with devastating consequences.

My own relationship with faith has always been different.

For me, faith is less about certainty than meaning. It is the possibility that effort matters, that intentions count for something, and that our lives form part of a larger story than we can fully see.

I cannot know whether the feeling I had that night in my dorm room came from God, from psychosis, or from somewhere in between.

What I do know is that I paid attention.

I followed the path that emerged from that experience as honestly as I could.

And, looking back over twelve years, I believe I did my best with the opportunities that followed.