40 People Who Experienced Psychosis Share The Most Terrifying Things They Saw And Felt

I started thinking this guy -- who was someone I knew from a professional context through a coworker slash friend -- was a crowned prince of France. I thought, of course he has his own security detail, which has set up a stake out operation in my apartment. I was madly in love with him, and, one day he just ghosted me. To my added brain, he was protecting my by separating himself from me, and we could communicate through the police, anyway. This meant photographers in the bushes, cameras in and all around the apartment, and my every move being watched. Even through two hospitalizations, I still believe this because it was part of my job, as a princess, to say nothing about my secret mission. I have a lot more to tell, if people are interested.

I was actively dying from a heart virus, was in so much pain i was on tramadol so i could get out of bed. The pain was so bad i accepted death and was waitingfor it to take me out, but i survived, and physically healthy today. The tramadol + stress + pain made me see shadow people when it was dark, i heard voices when it was quite but they were either whispers or when load it was not human. Its been a decade since i recovered but i still cant be left alone without audio stimuli or i fear the voices will return. I need complete darkness or im afraid i will see the shadows again. Still have some anxiety issues but funny enough, i have no problem sleeping in the woods by myself, its loud and completely dark so i dont get triggered. Haven’t seen or heard the shadows or voices in a decade but when your mind cracks like that, it doesnt really heal, it scars.

Also my bodies sense went out of wack, i do not feel my heartbeat anymore, like no matter how much cardio i do, i dont feel it. I have to use a tracker to make sure i dont get hurt. The only time i feel my heart is when i get stressed, then i have ptsd and feel the same chest pains i felt when i was dying. So thats not much fun

Overall 3/10 do not recommend, literally mentally scaring.

Adderall-induced psychosis. I had a psychotic break in middle school. I have religious trauma. I was having an episode where I literally climbing up the wall. My mom held me down and tried to perform an exorcism on me lol. I saw her face as a demon on a doorknob. I was like her face but every small wrinkle was deeper and black and her skin was white and c*****d kinda. I was convinced that the rapture was gonna happen at any moment so I would store food under my bed so that if my family didn’t go to heaven and we were stuck in my room, we would have food. I have struggled with thoughts like this a lot. I have OCD so it’s hard to decipher if some thoughts are intrusive or psychotic. An example was that on 4/20/Easter, I smoked pot and I didn’t pray that day. The Pope died and I was convinced that he died because of the “sinful” acts that I and the world committed that day. .

Every single night, auditory hallucinations keep waking me.

Just various voices constantly saying “hello? Hello, is anyone there? Hello? >my name< can you hear me? I need your help. Hello? Could you please help me? Come outside and help me! Hello? Are you there, >my name

I took adderall for a long time. That should explain enough.

I started ‘astral projecting’ into my own imagination and experiencing everything that happened as if I was actually there. That combined with the side effect of paranoia from the adderall basically made it so I would be literally living in my own nightmares sometimes.

Dont get me wrong, there was a LOT of cool s**t that I got to do and experience and feel, but the nightmares were BAD BAD BAD.

Imagine your imaginary friend calling you worthless, having giant maggots live inside of you while youre still alive, having rats burst out of you from inside, demons watching you staring into your eyes from an inch away just waiting.

S**t got hardcore.

My worst was my kids would be better off dead than alive. Through the power of the internet I managed to talk to some woman on the opposite side of the world . She told me to take the kids to a grandparent that was safe and leave them there. So I did. I told her if I kept them nobody would be alive because my brain was telling me lies.. after that I'm not 100% sure. Prior to this I had begged for help from literally every person I knew. Including the grandmother. Nobody could help. I quote " it was too inconvenient" . It's been 6 years. Everyone is safe now. But I don't speak to anyone who was too involved in their own lives, to even bother handing out a helping hand when I was drowning. F**k them . I had lost half my weight in 6 months. I was obviously sick sick. And nobody gave a d**n.

It went on for a solid year straight and was a gradual descent into full blown psychosis.

I was heavily abusing stimulants for a long time… well, any d**g really, but being who I am and how my brain is wired, stimulants gave me the best feeling comparatively.

I remember the first spark of the paranoia like it was yesterday. I was cleaning out my old apartment, having moved most of everything into the other one. By then I had graduated to smoking c*ke off of foil, then quickly went to cr*ck. Took a big hit like I had done so many times before, and suddenly something clicked in my head.

I stared out the window and thought, “Does that look like a cop?”

It was like someone else’s voice screamed it across some other dimension. Like an echo already bounced back a few times. Then it got louder and louder. Every time I took I hit I swore I could hear them. See them.

I started reading novels in my stucco-covered walls. I could see all of the awful things I’d done in my life written out in the patterns. Everything was critical, every word was harsh and packed with vitriol and disgust at my current state.

I could hear them tunneling through the walls. They were coming for me at all times. I would watch Apple Maps and truly SEE that it was a live feed of the police raid on my house. All of my neighbors were in on it. If they were outside, they had weapons and were ready to strike.

The trees spelled messages to me. All from the police. I would see helicopters flying above my apartment, ready to unleash hell. They were outside my studio’s door. They were waiting.

They had planted trackers in everything. I destroyed every book I owned, tore apart most of my clothes. Destroyed every electronic except my phone.

This isn’t even anywhere near all of it. And I remember it all.

I’d smoke a couple grams and be on the floor bawling, begging for my life from the nonexistent police that were about to break my door down.

All of this was about a year and a half before I even tried m**h. It got worse once I started shooting that s**t up. There’s so much more I can tell yall.

It's been a while since I had a manic episode, and I'm not sure it's exactly psychosis, but when I was an unmedicated teen I had more prolonged and consistent hallucinations.



I think the worst depends on how you interpret worst, I don't remember ever being scared of what was in my head, it was the lack of control, lack of ability to articulate my thoughts or communicate clearly, the unpredictability of other people and the situation, all of the external things were what was scary, and even then it was more frustrating and disorienting than scary.


The vast majority my hallucinations were audio so that might also be a factor, but if I was ever freaking out or panicking it was usually because I couldn't process information normally and was aware of that, like imagine your legs stopped working, whenever you moved the muscles or did the motions to move your legs they just floo around unexpectedly, but while you're in the middle of running for your life, it feels like that but for your mind.

Only experienced it once after withdrawing from DNRIs (buproprion).

I kept begging to be hospitalized because I was afraid I'd hurt somebody, and I even bolted out of the car at one point. I do not remember this incident. It was relayed to me after the fact.

I only remember the emotions I felt. I don't think I hallucinated but I was definitely out of it/delusional. I kept thinking I was gonna get better if I detransitioned and I remember considering myself filthy at the time. That's about it.

Ironically after quitting psych meds altogether I've not experienced anything remotely similar since. I feel normal-ish, despite the severe depression. I can at least accurately tell which of my thoughts are legitimate and which are hogwash, and my impulse control is a million times better.

I had a d**g induced psychosis around 10 years ago ( recovered since then, yay)

I think the worst ones for me were the sometimes very dark and violent thoughts. I had "visions" of brutally torturing my pets for example, and felt absolutely horrified and disgusted by even thinking anything like that.

The worst delusions were somewhat tame. For around a week I was convinced everyone around me could read my mind, so I got very paranoid about anyone noticing what I was going through.

Luckily it only lasted 2 weeks ish total. Left me with a nice panic disorder afterwards ( fully worked that one out too, yay).

Well as someone who is quite reasonable, and is put into unreasonable situations quite a lot.

I thought I was Hades, the god of the dead. I kinda just remember dressing in all black, and being super amped up. I came too in a psych ward with a busted up leg.

When my mental health is really bad i hallucinate corpses and detached limbs in my peripheral vision. like ill think i see a hand on the floor in the subway and have to do a double take and then i see that nothings there. sometimes when im walking down the sidewalk ill see bodies up in the trees. it’s really f*****g horrible because even though i can usually double take and realize im hallucinating, it still elicits the same primal immediate panic and can take some time for me to calm down.

When I was around 12 I started dealing with a lot of mental health issues. I dealt with psychosis for about a year. I would see what appeared to be a mostly faceless man in the shadows across the room when I went to bed many nights, it wasn’t sleep paralysis, I could still move, but I often would be petrified and cry myself to sleep. This was over a decade ago but definitely is a core part of my current sleep issues. There was other stuff, but nothing as interesting. I also no longer trust my own perception 100% on anything even though I’m much healthier now.

My worst one was that I was a prophet from God. I wrote “prophesies” and tried to spread them. All ends of the earth type stuff. I got out of it on my own though, thankfully. Didn’t really need help, just time to get over it.

It started when i was home playing some minecraft, just chilling, when i saw a spider on my hand. naturally i swiped it off as quickly as i could, but realized i didn't even feel it on my skin, though it was gone already. i went to the bathroom to wash my face and sat on the bed to calm down. i noticed in my peripheral vision a humanoid just staring at me, but when i focused on it it disappeared. several have appeared in the same way, just going through the average day. it would happen when i'm walking, in school, at home, anywhere. when i'd go to sleep i'd hear some unintelligible whispering coming from behind me, which would come from just behind me.

after i started losing my mind over it, i told my mom, who said that i should talk to my psychologist about it, who later prescribed me some antidepressants (i forgot the name) and the hallucinations went away after a while, yippie! got off of the meds later (which i now realize was a big mistake) and they never came back.

Parasites were by far my worst delusion. hallucinating worm shapes under my skin, “feeling” worms wriggling around in my brain, meticulously checking all my food. shook me up and made me feel violated + helpless medically in a way that makes other delusions pale by comparison. it’s what pushed me finally start taking antipsychotics.

It's been a couple of years since I've really dealt with this but around like 2020 I saw something that really kinda f****d me up for a bit, this was also during a really low point in my life. Just seeing that and also already having a really stressful time in my life I just went into psychosis. Seeing what I saw every time I closed my eyes eventually turned into thinking that my head was going to suddenly explode or something was going to suddenly cause my head to be obliterated the same exact way I saw happen. I had moments where the fear was so real that I'd stop what I was doing, curl up, hold my head like it was somehow going to keep everything in if I did and I'd cry because I was so scared. Even when I was at a friends house I'd be perfectly fine and then out of nowhere I can't focus on them because everything in my mind is screaming at me that my head would explode and my friends would be absolutely traumatized by seeing that and I was scared because I didn't want them to see that too. I became really paranoid too. I started worrying that my family was purposefully trying to poison me and ruin my life and I became very distrustful of them during this time. I also stopped being able to recognize myself in the mirror, I was just looking at a complete stranger, so I would take a sheet and cover up the bathroom mirror. I stayed in the hospital as a result of this psychosis for a couple of weeks. The hospital stay didn't really help tbh and neither did the therapy afterwards, but since then I've put a lot of work into myself to break out of it.

Alcohol induced psychosis: I was convinced a group of people were trying to break into my apartment and bedroom to m****r me.

I started thinking i was a clairvoyant and was able to hear thoughts. I was thinking people who were talking around only i was able to hear them because I had special powers.

I thought my computers were all hacked and someone is constantly watching me through hidden cameras even in my home.

I started thinking people were out to k**l me because I didn't mind or talk to a girl who i was deluded into thinking she liked me. And i started hearing voices some of which i still hear. I thought everyone in my family was betraying me and i cut my veins i couldn't cut vertically so i cut near wrists, lots of blood was gushing out, and was taken to hospital. Saw my mother crying. After a bit of talking i decided not to do something like this again. Even in the hospital i was feeling like there were people outside the hospital making noises and was there to k**l me.

After meds for some time , things subsided . After a year and half, in a new job i started feeling that they were plotting to kick me out of the job and i was a burden to the company, and started getting more and more anxious.

Six months or some later on corona lockdown i started thinking another girl working with me likes me. And i started having delusions about snakes like snakes were jumping at me trying to bite me, some dreams about snakes. I started overthinking, felt things like acid dropping down skin, one time my lungs were filled with smoke, i started feeling that the owner of my company was doing black magic to k**l me because I once c*****d a joke about them. Tried proposing to the girl, there was nothing from her side, started freezing during job hours literally would spend hours in thought s incapable of completing even smallest of tasks. Did few spiritual courses lost my sleep near completely after that

Started staying up to combat the voices, the voices started talking to me instead of two people talking. Some things changed after. Started feeling too sensitive to sexual content, after awhile felt too many sensations feelings like someone coming in me, whenever i think about something sexual it felt like people gathering around talking sexual innuendos all started feeling horrible, to this day I feel like some spiritual entity is harassing me, there were a lots of things happening in between I'm sorry I sped up at last so many things were going on in mind I can't even put them in right order or state all of the delusions or hallucinations.

Some good things too . One i was looking at my hands and I could see light on all sides with a rainbow coating. I would sometimes get the feeling some guru is showing me things, like the nervous system, healing techniques and other things. In a way i was lucky that I did not have full blown psychosis, that just by deciding or affirming most of what's happening is just delusions i was able to mow through it. Worst happened when I was alone at corona quarantine, but I'm now hopeful and I can manage most of the voices by calling cusswords. And doctor has confirmed that with 5 years of medication hallucinations will go away.

I actually have a 'delusion' where I feel like people are making fun of me or lying to me. It has SOME basis in past relationships, but it's made me suspicious and afraid to open up to people. I guard my heart with everything I have, well, normally.