Psychosis, Borderline Personality Disorder and Psychic Gifts

Deep in the interiors of psych hospitals, long prior to the new generations of anti-psychotics, mood stabilizers and anti-depressants, many patients spent a great deal of time in active psychosis. This still happens, of course. Many people have simply had disrupted brain chemistry for so long they cannot return to anything like a normal and stable state. Also, 'treatment' facilities are not set up to resolve issues, but rather, to medicate them and reduce harm--thereby reducing liability to the facilities.

Interestingly, if you were to talk to the psychotic people who had been 'successfully treated', you would find that a great majority of them simply learned to keep certain things to themselves.

Many, many psychotic patients are medicated and functionally frozen in a deteriorated state and live there until they are discharged back to a lifestyle that will deteriorate them further and in other ways. Granted, there is more fluidity once non-compliant with medication or injured again from substance use, but even this florid psychosis cannot resolve as we have seen in a pure holding environment with good resources, proper structure and the permission to let the ego rebuild itself naturally. These luxuries--resolutions of a psyche that dismantled its incompetent self--are things of the past for most. True holistic psychiatric treatment is hard to come by. I doubt we are interested as a body politic in supplying the street people with it.

All of this is to say that quite strange things happened in those hospitals and with those patients. Not the least among them are the psychic experiences I witnessed. For example, I was late to a group one morning--only by a minute or 2--and came rushing in to meet my patients already gathered together for me by the psychiatric ICU nurse. We met daily at 8 a.m. Among my patients were those who were suicidal, delusional and hallucinating. Generally, we had a pretty good run of it. We kept it light and highly structured as well as short. Basically, it was a rather successful 20-30 minutes to start the day with as much orientation and grounding as possible.

So, this one particular day, the woman I had referred to as severely borderline and chronically suicidal said I am so glad you didn't die in that car crash this morning.

It had indeed been a car crash that had delayed me that morning, but I had not spoken of it to anyone. I was just a few cars behind a horrible crash at an intersection. I had started out unusually early that morning, wanting to take care of some lingering paperwork. My early start gave me just enough time to witness the crash and to be stranded by it for some time.

I thanked her for her expression of gratitude for my safety and we continued with group. Not far into it, however, she offered a second and surprisingly out of character statement. She said, Marie, I think I should slash my throat.

Other events that I think best described as 'psychic'--for lack of better explanations--have occurred through the years like that. Sometimes I was the recipient of the psychic information and many times it came from borderline patients. Once I felt a woman whispering in my ear. It was brief and very real in my perception. She said I'll see you soon. She did indeed. She was re-admitted to the hospital after several months of no contact following her previous admission.

Another time I dreamed that a teenage girl called me to say This is Shauna. I'll be there tomorrow morning. I didn't know Shauna, but she did indeed arrive in the flesh the next morning for her admission.