1. Make Me Psychotic

I bet you would never hurt anybody

I bet you wouldn’t dare to tell a lie

Bet you’d never try to make me psychotic

I bet you wouldn’t even harm a fly

BACKSTORY

As a person living with schizophrenia, I know what it’s like to experience psychosis and how confusing and scary it can get but, although it’s something that gets stuck with you once you’ve been through it, I’ve sort of learnt to navigate the illness by identifying the possible triggers in order not to slip into such a debilitating state of mind.

Each person’s experience of the illness is different. In my case, it happens when random situations align at the exact same time against me, and I know I’m in psychosis when I feel that abrupt separation between me and everything else around. It also has something to do with fear and loneliness, but I feel like there’s a common denominator for everyone, and it is vulnerability and loss of willingness. This thing clearly feeds on the person’s insecurities and makes them doubt the nature of their own intentions.

I’ve also learnt that it is not an isolated experience, but a communitarian one. It can happen to everyone and it’s not just a single “crazy person” thing. Everyone is schizophrenic to some degree because we are all different and equal at the same time, but no one can be a hundred per cent sure about what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes. But above all, what I’ve clearly noticed about this illness is that it can be induced through manipulation and systematically inflicted pain, which means that if you can create it, you can undo it as well and, therefore, it’s curable.  

Once you identify the patterns of some people’s behavior, you realize it wasn’t as innocent as they wanted you to believe. In these dangerous days, when we are slowly taking consciousness about mental health concepts in general such as narcissism or psychopathy, it is inevitable to find a correlation between what causes illnesses like schizophrenia and this lack of empathy we have been experiencing as a society. It could all be just theories based on personal beliefs, but what is clear here is that none of us is completely sane or balanced and yet we keep on turning the blind eye on certain attitudes while focusing on containing and putting the blame on schizophrenics instead of understanding them. Psychosis can be a mirror. Maybe there’s something to learn about that.

SONGWRITING

Based on this idea, that everyone is vulnerable to developing schizophrenia since it is something that can be induced, and partly inspired by the movie from the latest post, where even kids can be malignant enough to perceive and make use of such type of manipulation, I decided to write the first song for my new album, ”A Scream In The Night”.

The songwriting of this entire album has been inspired by horror movies and personal experiences linked to the main thesis and themes of these films. The process was simple. I would watch a horror movie and afterwards, with fresh emotions and sensations still in the body, I would record the melodies for the different structure parts of each song on my mobile phone, so later I could work on the music and lyrics more thoroughly with my computer.

Getting back to the song Make Me Psychotic, I am very content with the composition result. I feel like every word in it makes total sense and it is easily understandable and relatable, without being totally predictable, since it is told from a schizophrenic person’s experience, which is obviously something unusual. I am very proud of my improvement as a musician and songwriter as well, and I feel like this is the right and only way I can go.