In this blog, Krystyna shares how it felt to experience voice-hearing for the first time. After receiving treatment from an Early Intervention team, her voice-hearing has lessened and she is in a much more positive place.

March 2020 is a date that would change my life in more ways than one. It wasn’t just that I was sent home from work feeling a little bit under the weather, or that I was to stay at home for the foreseeable future due to Covid, but it was the start of a journey deep into my own thoughts and how strongly they affected me.

At first, the time spent at home within its confines was pure bliss, especially when on a full wage and no work pressure. And I didn’t feel anything was going wrong until a few months in when I started to hear voices.

I was sensing my favourite tunes quietly lulling me to sleep at night – Genesis, Phil Collins, Gerry Raffety. But then the chanting began – slowly at first. Just comments about my lifestyle mumbled in song, quietly in the background. Maybe I was a little messy? Stayed up late, drank too much, could do with being a better neighbour. But it soon escalated to jibes about how I snored like a pig; how they had a curse put on me by voodoo worshippers; killing my cats as I was listening to their screeches outside.

I spent time curled up in a ball crying or huddled under the stairs usually at night, fearful of going out to face my ‘protagonists’. Once, through desperation, I dared to go out and ran across the road to a friend at four in the morning because my house was about to be ‘burned’ to the ground with me in it. Her children came down in the morning to find me still in my dressing gown, curled up asleep on the living room floor.

It came to a head when I couldn’t face going back home at night. I stayed out as much as I could until exhaustion began to catch up with me. My panic was eventually picked up by the doctor and I was put in touch with the Early Intervention Team in Manchester, who help with psychosis and mental illness.

They did just that and we began the long process of making things right again. Before I knew it, I was ushered into a meeting, placed on antipsychotic medication and a regular course of counselling. They totally understood what was going on! The noises in my head didn’t die down straight away, but they did start to ease up gradually over a period of months until they eventually disappeared altogether. This doesn’t stop me looking over my shoulder occasionally, but my time spent searching for bugging devices throughout the house has now stopped.