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Here's a question. Does your mind ever play tricks on you? So you see a shadow outside your window

and you mistake it for a person lurking on the street. Or you convince yourself your friend

is mad at you when they really aren't.

These are fairly common delusions that are easy enough to talk yourself out of, but for some people,

like the artist Matt Otley, delusions aren't so harmless.

During a particularly bad episode I had, I thought I had something growing inside of me. The sense I had of it,

it was like mycelium, you know, it was like the root system of a mushroom. It was growing through

my body. This is one of many psychotic episodes. Matt has gone through. He not only experiences delusions, but powerful hallucinations and disordered thinking

that can be impossible to remedy with logic.

Everything makes sense within context, but nothing makes sense.

For those of us who've never gone through an episode of psychosis, it can be difficult to imagine

what it's like to lose control of your senses and your sense of reality.

So today, we're going to get an insight into what psychosis is like from an artist's perspective,

and get some sense of what might be going on in the brain during a psychotic episode.

What they seem to have is a failure to connect messages that get sent from one part of the brain

to another part of the brain.

This is All In The Mind. I'm Sona Kadar.

Producer Shelby Trainer has today's episode.

My mind is racing.

My thoughts are looping at a thousand miles an hour and I'm also really depressed.

When Matt Otley is in this mixed state of mental illness, meaning he's both manic and

...