Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Hecock.

This is an episode I've been wanting to do ever since season one,

but I only recently found the right person to tell the story.

I've been wanting to do a story on what it feels like to spiral into psychosis and then find a way back with the help of antipsychotics.

And our storyteller, Steve, does a beautiful job with this. Psychiatric meds so often get

demonized in the media, including in the podcast world. And yes, while psych meds are far from perfect

and often cause problematic side effects, they also literally save people's lives every single day.

I vividly remember a patient I saw many years ago during my residency,

late one night in the Rhode Island Hospital, ER.

I walked into this concrete, bare-walled psychiatric holding room,

and there was a 40-ish-year-old man.

His hospital, Johnny, was yanked up over his neck,

and he was licking the wall and

masturbating and making this bizarre sort of buzzing noise. And I tried to speak with him, but he couldn't

or wouldn't communicate with me. And then, fast forward 10 days, and I was starting a new

rotation at the intensive outpatient program at the same hospital. My first task was to do the discharge

interviews for that morning. And my very first patient was the man I had seen in the ER 10 days before.

At first, I didn't even recognize him. He was so professionally dressed and smiling and engaging,

so healthy seeming. I checked the chart, saw my admit note, and saw that he

had started on an antipsychotic right after admission. I remember saying to him, we met when you

came in. Do you remember? And he looked at me confused and he apologized and he said that that night was a really

frightening blur and he shook my hand and left and said that he planned to return later

...