A few months ago my friend went crazy. Now when I say crazy I don’t mean like fun- excited- let’s party- crazy, I 
mean like mental- hospital crazy. Yeah. Scary. She had been depressed for a few months, maybe closer to a year, so she decided to finally see a doctor and get some anti-depressants. Things seemed to improve, but then, after maybe a month, all of a sudden her depression was back and maybe worse then ever. She started texting me really scary things, like about killing herself. This had never happened to me in real life before. IN high school they always talk about what to do if this happens but it had never happened to me before. You think things like, what am I suppose to do? Is she serious or not? Should I contact her parents? Will that help or make things worse? I tried to talk to her and reason with her but it was pretty awful. I contacted her sister just to make sure she was aware of what was going on, but otherwise there was not too much I could do. I just hoped she was having some sort of depressive episode and in a day or two she would be better, but in a day or two things were worse. She started not making much sense anymore… telling me crazy things about her family that were stretching the limits of credibility, and was being impossible to reason with. It turns out her family was as worried as I was, and that night they checked her into a medical hospital. They said she as becoming incoherent. A few days later I visited her in the hospital, and she was worse than I could have anticipated. It was like she couldn’t focus her thoughts on something, just drifted in and out out of focus. She had basically lost it but still had the sense about her to know that she had lost it, a thought that obviously completely terrified her. Honestly, it terrified me too. I mean, how can you just… lose it? What if you don’t get better? Well, to not hold you in suspense, I am very happy to say that she did get better. In total she spent just under two weeks in the hospital, and is now back living at home. She said she is feeling a lot better, and is back to making sense again. But in the meantime she lost her place in her course (she had just begun law school) and will have to wait a whole year to begin again. Now she has a whole year she needs to find something do with.. and something to tell people when they ask her what happened. It was a crazy experience, seeing how someone’s life- how someone’s mind- can just fall apart. The doctors think that the antidepressants she was prescribed somehow aggravated rather than helped her condition, but still… that is something that could happen to anyone. I mean, if your mind just starts to rebel what can you do? This short brush with insanity was like a brief exposure to the scariness that some people have to live with everyday— it terrified me and I only experienced it second hand.
A field guide to growing up without growing apart
Being officially crazy as well, I can only say….I don’t know. My meds keep me on the straight and narrow (most of the time), and I have a loving and supportive family; but to be honest, the thing that really stops me constantly losing it is by being constantly creative. It’s the only way to paint what’s happening on the inside of my head – with words or photographs – for other people to see, even if they can’t understand it.
Like a lot of twenty-somethings, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, but constant creation fills the void like nothing else for me, I’d day it was the only thing keeping me sane, and even that sanity is seen as mad by some.