Imagine being in a silent exam hall, surrounded by a hundred students sitting for an O Level or A Level like you, only for a man to appear next to you, shouting that you will fail.
He is so real that he sometimes covers your exam paper with his hand, forcing you to wait, confused and desperate, or run to the bathroom to pray he is gone by the time you return.
This is the reality of Matthew Paris, who lives with psychosis, a mental condition that blurs the lines between what is real and what exists only in his mind. For Paris, the voices and individuals are not figments of his imagination; they are “a very real experience”.
Matthew Paris recounted his story in a documentary about mental health awareness.
“To me, they’re as real as a real person in front of me,” Paris says.
“If they come close to me, I can even smell them. And it’s not like I can see through these people… if they’re there, I have to walk around them, as if there’s a real person.”
Paris is one of six men who shared their struggle with severe mental illness in a documentary called Moħħi tal-Ġenn, which was published on social media last week and will air on several TV stations in the coming days.
It is part of an initiative to increase awareness about the more severe mental health illnesses that thousands of people grapple with in their daily lives.
The man in the exam hall
Paris has been seeing and hearing different people since he was a teenager, and he recounts a particularly difficult period during his O and A levels.
“This man would come next to me in the exam hall, shouting at me, saying I won’t pass the exam, that what I was writing was not good enough,” he said.
“He would sometimes even put his hand over the exam paper, and I wouldn’t be able to see or write. My only option was to either wait there, anxious and confused, or else go to the bathroom and try to shake it off and pray that when I go back to my desk he isn’t there anymore.”
The man was not real, and this internal torment was, of course, entirely invisible to those around him.
The talking dog
Today, Paris’s hallucinations take the form of three men, a woman, and a talking dog.
“The dog talks a lot. He tires me. He just doesn’t stop. He goes on and on,” he explains, describing the relentless nature of the voices that inhabit his mind.
“I can’t switch them off, but I try to ignore them as much as I can.”
For those who don’t understand, the temptation is to say, “just snap out of it”, or “it’s not real”. But as university lecturer Professor Paulann Grech explains, this is of no help.
“It’s no use telling them it’s not real, because to them it’s as real as anything that is real in this world,” she said.
She describes the struggle as having to live in two realities at once.
“While they grapple with the people in their heads, they also need to try to function normally in the other reality, which is the real world. It’s like having a radio you cannot switch off,” she said.
“Some people with this condition hear the voices of 100 different people.”
Getting a new phone every five days
Richmond Foundation CEO Daniela Calleja, who was also interviewed for the documentary, said another person who lives with the same condition “changes his mobile phone every five days”.
When he is unable to figure out where all the voices are coming from, he believes GO and Melita have mistakenly left all the lines open and he is hearing other people’s telephone conversations through his phone.
This constant battle can escalate to dangerous levels, Grech said, pushing the person to harm themselves, others or their surroundings. And sometimes the voices can be so persistent that a person might act on them just to “shut them up”.
“Sometimes the hallucinations are so bad and aggressive I can’t do anything for a whole day,” Paris reveals.
“Sometimes they’ll tell me to hurt myself or kill myself or run off and go live somewhere else. At one point I was close to attempting suicide. I felt it was the end of the world. That’s when you’re playing with fire, and when I realise it, I speak up, and if need be, I go to hospital.”
He credits a support system and the courage to speak up for preventing him from following through.
The documentary also interviewed psychiatrist Anton Grech, who said psychosis is when the brain thinks information is coming to it, when in fact, it is not, affecting all the senses. A person will feel someone touching them or hear someone speaking to them even when there is no one there, he said.
Professor Andrew Azzopardi added that scientific studies using brain scans confirm that the brain of a person with psychosis is indeed receiving and sending signals as if it were seeing and hearing real-life people.
Paris impressively and remarkably ploughed through the difficulties and pursued studies in psychology at university. Today he is a psychology graduate and works with Richmond Foundation to help people going through other mental health struggles.
Silent struggles
But Paris’s story is just one of six featured in the powerful 50-minute documentary.
The documentary also features Dion Pizzuto, who lives with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and struggles with repetitive rituals like tapping on many objects three times, believing it prevents bad luck from hitting him.
Comedian Daniel Chircop shares his experience with severe depression, a period during which he lost his ability to laugh, make people laugh or feel joy, feeling he had lost his very identity.
Also featured are Miguel Mifsud, a former footballer and drug addict who battled with paranoia and hallucinations of a “scary monkey” and police coming for him; Joe Abela, who recounts his brother’s struggle with bipolar disorder that tragically ended in suicide; and Albert McCarthy, who shares his own story of living with bipolar disorder, a condition that swings between bouts of manic highs and depressive lows.
The documentary serves as a stark reminder that mental health disorders are complex conditions, and that open conversation, understanding, and professional help are vital for those who are silently grappling with two realities.
The documentary was created by Professor Andrew Azzopardi, produced by Illallu Media and sponsored by ST Hotels as part of their corporate social responsibility efforts.
If you feel you might need help, call the Mental Health Services 24-hour helpline on 1579.