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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ca very real experience\u201d.<\/p>\n
Matthew Paris recounted his story in a documentary about mental health awareness.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, they\u2019re as real as a real person in front of me,\u201d Paris says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they come close to me, I can even smell them. And it\u2019s not like I can see through these people… if they\u2019re there, I have to walk around them, as if there\u2019s a real person.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paris is one of six men who shared their struggle with severe mental illness in a documentary called Mo\u0127\u0127i tal-\u0120enn, which was published on social media last week and will air on several TV stations in the coming days.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The man in the\u00a0exam hall<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis man would come next to me in the exam hall, shouting at me, saying I won\u2019t pass the exam, that what I was writing was not good enough,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe would sometimes even put his hand over the exam paper, and I wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t there anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
The man was not real, and this internal torment was, of course, entirely invisible to those around him.<\/p>\n
The talking dog<\/p>\n
Today, Paris\u2019s hallucinations take the form of three men, a woman, and a talking dog.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe dog talks a lot. He tires me. He just doesn\u2019t stop. He goes on and on,\u201d he explains, describing the relentless nature of the voices that inhabit his mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t switch them off, but I try to ignore them as much as I can.\u201d<\/p>\n
For those who don\u2019t understand, the temptation is to say, \u201cjust snap out of it\u201d, or \u201cit\u2019s not real\u201d. But as university lecturer Professor Paulann Grech explains, this is of no help.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s no use telling them it\u2019s not real, because to them it\u2019s as real as anything that is real in this world,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She describes the struggle as having to live in two realities at once.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile 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\u2019s like having a radio you cannot switch off,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome people with this condition hear the voices of 100 different people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Getting a new phone every five days<\/p>\n
Richmond Foundation CEO Daniela Calleja, who was also interviewed for the documentary, said another person who lives with the same condition \u201cchanges his mobile phone every five days\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s telephone conversations through his phone.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cshut them up\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes the hallucinations are so bad and aggressive I can\u2019t do anything for a whole day,\u201d Paris reveals.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes they\u2019ll 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\u2019s when you\u2019re playing with fire, and when I realise it, I speak up, and if need be, I go to hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n
He credits a support system and the courage to speak up for preventing him from following through.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Silent struggles<\/p>\n
But Paris\u2019s story is just one of six\u00a0featured in the powerful 50-minute documentary.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Also featured are Miguel Mifsud, a former footballer and drug addict who battled with paranoia and hallucinations of a \u201cscary monkey\u201d and police coming for him; Joe Abela, who recounts his brother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
If you feel you might need help, call the Mental Health Services 24-hour helpline on 1579.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Imagine being in a silent exam hall, surrounded by a hundred students sitting for an O Level or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[163,85,46,522,523],"class_list":{"0":"post-15756","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}