Psychosis and Virtual Reality
Updated: Jul 9, 2024
When writing about the mini-episodes during my extreme manic episode in 2018, I was able to recall a series of similar events and collect them into adventures, which I chose to describe as video or virtual reality games, board games, tv game shows, soap operas, plays, etc.
I was first introduced to virtual reality (VR) programming at a Supercomputing Conference in the early 1990s. I sat in a chair, put on a headset, and I became a red corpuscle traveling throughout a human body. I specifically remember being inside the heart. The experience was vivid, but static. I didn’t have control of my environment. This passive reality was much like the scenes I experience during a psychotic manic episode.
My most recent VR encounters have been playing games using my son’s HTC Vive system. It allows me to walk around with my headset and hand controllers and manipulate my virtual space. Sometimes I can move around between the rooms that make up my VR world. I feel like I’m “there,” sometimes in an expansive area, though I know I’m really within the physical confines of my 3D space. I might be walking out of a window of a tall skyscraper to pick up something at the end of a plank. It’s frightening, though my mind knows it’s not real. In the Google Earth VR game my body could be flying above the earth to any location, maybe to hover over my own house or go to Japan. You feel as if your body is actually flying at a high rate of speed. Frightening!
One difference between these VR experiences and a full blown manic episode is that though both the static and dynamic VR simulations seem real to me at the time, my mind soon tells me that the VR portrayals are not true. In both of these VR types I experience the emotions and reactions I would have if the adventures were actually happening to me.
In contrast, I liken a similar motif in my psychotic world to a dream-like state while I’m awake. It’s just like the dreams I have at night, in the sense that thoughts and experiences I’ve had before can sometimes be strung together randomly to form a new narrative. The difference between my dreams and psychotic sagas is that I don’t recall most of my night visions and dreams. And I don’t recall feelings and emotions from my psychotic sagas. I’m assuming I didn’t experience any. I was able to write this narrative memoir because I did so soon after my psychotic episode, while I remembered so many of the details. However, in some of the later intermediary stages of a psychotic episode, I don’t remember many of the details.
Quoting from the Prologue to When Brilliance and Madness Collide: Bipolar Disorder Without Boundaries (Ruth Manning, 2023), Deborah Steinberg says:
“I was fascinated to see how the imaginings/delusions during the psychotic episode sometimes mirror the types of make-believe games and stories that children make up (e.g., the author’s subdivision was Eden, or Heaven, or Jerusalem, and different places in the subdivision represented different places in these imaginings). It's almost as if the mind in a psychotic state taps into the person's childhood sense of reality, when make-believe could feel real, before the child's sense of "concrete reality" was fully formed. The author’s psychotic delusions also resemble dreams in their sense of "logic" and organization, as if, perhaps, the subconscious that is responsible for dreams takes over one's waking life during psychosis. The chapters that introduce and frame the psychotic episode allow readers to get to know the author, so we see how the delusions she experienced during the episode related to the rest of her life and interests. The creative way Ruth Ann has written about the experiences in these chapters allows a reader who doesn't suffer from bipolar disorder to relate in some way to the reality she was living in, since everyone dreams, and everyone remembers what it was like to be a child, when the border between reality and imagination was thinner—at least, I hope everyone remembers that feeling!"
--Deborah Steinberg (Steinberg Editorial)
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