When a car braked on the street, Jonah Hoffman * interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence. Did that mean him? Was the braking a response to what he'd just said? He couldn't figure it out at first. A few days later, Hoffman was talking to a fellow student from mathematics about an exam. The longer they spoke, the more clearly he saw a hidden message in it. This was no longer about an unfair math exam. Hoffman himself was in one big exam situation everywhere and around the clock. A secret parallel society was testing him, he thought - the way he related everything to himself when his thoughts suddenly had no filter any more.
His boyfriend knew he was overworked. After a stressful final master’s semester, Hoffman had started his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Munich. Feeling the pressure of building a scientific career, he ran into an impasse right from the start with his research. The fact that the stress made him talk confused was new and his girlfriend was no longer at ease. She gave him the number of the Psychiatric Crisis Service before escaping from the shared apartment. Later that night, Hoffman was on the mat with his parents, in the "intermediate realm of life and death," as he thought at the time. He believed he had left the material world. Even his senses fooled him: he was sitting on his parents' carpet,recognized a colorful galaxy nebula in it and played with the individual stars. “I was a demigod, but I was also about to explode. That's how I imagine a bad drug trip, ”he says today.
Treatment in milieu therapy
That night in the galaxy nebula was the culmination of an acute psychosis that Jonah Hoffman suffered two and a half years ago.
In addition to a genetic predisposition, major changes and new beginnings are possible triggers of this disorder.
To this day, Hoffman regularly has long-term therapy checked whether he is still standing with both feet in reality.
He was recently allowed to stop taking his antipsychotics, which was not risk-free.
If the psychosis returns one day, he could even be diagnosed with schizophrenia.
It all started with a good feeling. In advanced math, it is important to recognize patterns, think associatively, and open the mind to inspiration. Hoffman was accordingly enthusiastic when all of a sudden so many unusual ideas came to him. He took more notes than he used to and found a whole new level of energy for big questions. At this point in time, his brain was probably already pouring out more of the motivating messenger substance dopamine than would have been good for him.
Not just between the numbers, but also between the lines, hidden meanings suddenly emerged in everyday life.
People around him seemed to be talking in metaphors when they were actually talking about the weather.
Although that did not make him hostile, he still found it difficult to accept help from others: Even at the psychiatric clinic he was admitted to, every detail still struck him as suspicious.
The names of the staff sounded like code words for people from his past.
For three months, in inpatient treatment, he was able to convince himself that they weren't really double agents after all.
After a long sick leave back to the university
In so-called milieu therapy, the patients and caregivers live together in a community as if they were one big family. They cook and clean together, live free from stress, talk a lot with each other and get other thoughts. "In the clinic, I first had to learn how to see coincidences again," says Hoffman. "I no longer take reality for granted since I know that it can collapse within just a week." When the symptoms finally subsided, he took out his math exercise sheets from earlier in psychiatry and solved the easier tasks. He was practicing a reality that he had previously lost.
Hoffman got bored of this old reality and his field of study after his stay in the clinic. After all, the world had already been full of magic and fundamental knowledge for him. Otherwise, he had to learn to appreciate the little rewards of everyday life and get used to normal dopamine levels in his brain. Antidepressants helped him with this. Now and then he missed the psychosis, Hoffman admits, he still speaks with some fascination about this phase of his life: “I can still understand some of it. I like to imagine that there is an in-between world somewhere that resembles my fantasy world. "
He has reintegrated, has returned to the university after a long sick leave and has started a new doctoral project.
He was able to increase his workload hour by hour, pill by pill he was now allowed to sneak off the medication.
Since then he has been practicing with his therapist how to keep in touch with reality.
Above all, this includes critical thinking that is rigorous enough to question even the greatest spontaneous inspirations.
It is a skill that Hoffman will only use in mathematics - and a prerequisite for going through life as a free spirit.
* Name changed. The real name is known to the editors.
Victor Sattler (23 years old) is studying psychology and sociology at the University of Munich. But he gained real knowledge of human nature more as a waiter, bartender, tutor, at the theater and as a journalist.