1986, I was having some severe problems with personal relationships, lost some friends, and ultimately lost my best friend, who told me in parting that, in his judgement, I just wasn't a decent person.

At the same time I really felt that something just wasn't right. I didn't feel normal. I went to a medical doctor about it and he was sure I had "allergies". I'd had an allergy test years before that and wasn't allergic to anything. I tried some over the counter allergy meds that he'd recommended and they made me feel worse. I concluded that that doctor was an idiot. I still think so.

I was not doing a good job of making new friends, was really hurting emotionally from the loss of my old friends, and was severely running out of anyone willing to listen to my problems. I took EST (it had been re-named to something else at the time) and had a negative experience. I don't recommend it.

I started to think Christianity might be the answer. I started going to church and was enjoying it.

I started reading the Bible from a position of complete ignorance of what was in it. I started feeling really, really good, like a glowing, happy feeling. I thought "I guess this is what a religious conversion normally feels like."

I was praying. I started getting answers from an inner voice. Many Christians talk about praying and getting answers from God as an inner voice and somehow that totally works out for them, so I thought that was what was happening to me.

Eventually this got to where I went for 3 days without sleep.

The conversation was getting increasingly unpleasant.

Another thing I started doing was opening the Bible to random locations and reading great significance into wherever I landed. NEVER DO THIS! I landed on this awful verse about it being a good idea to cut your hand off and seriously believed that was what the almighty was telling me to do. Fortunately for me, my instincts of self-preservation were stronger than my 3-week-old faith in this religion. Fear is one of the best friends I've ever had. It is a highly underrated emotion.

At one point God said something, and I thought "Hey, doesn't that contradict what you said a while ago?" I don't remember what it was. And God said "I lied."

I hit the roof. I answered "IF YOU'RE LYING, YOU'RE NOT GOD!"

I realized at that point that this thing that I was conversing with was not a force for good. The smart thing to do would have been to quit the conversation. But I'd never been in a conversation like this before and had no idea how to disengage. And I'm a very combative person, and my instinct was to take this thing head on and defeat it.

But I'd been awake for 3 days and my thoughts were racing uncontrollably and I'd never felt like this before and my reasoning was impaired. I was no match for it.

It started accusing me of having done evil things in my life, of having wronged people. More and more it was kicking me around. Brutally. I was mess.

Eventually, I felt rejected by God and damned to hell with no hope of redemption. I wanted to kill myself, but by now my thoughts were racing so much I couldn't focus on a thought long enough to figure out a way. I tried hitting myself on the head with a big bottle full of spare change. It didn't even break. In desperation, I tried holding my breath until I died. Not a terribly effective suicide method. But if there'd been a gun in the house I'd definitely be dead. And none of my friends would have had any idea what had happened.

I went out in the street and was acting very strange and saying crazy things from the Bible to strangers. Someone must've called 911. I heard footsteps running from behind me and began running away. I was grabbed from behind and spun around, and I saw it was a cop. White or Asian, can't remember which. The next thing I knew I was face down on the asphalt with my hands cuffed behind my back (cops are really, really good at that). The cop was pressing his foot down in the middle of my back and he had his club out. They took my wallet out to see who I was and tried talking with me and I was obviously insane. They put me in the back of a squad car and started driving me away.

They probably thought I was freaked out on illegal drugs.

"Am I under arrest?" I asked. It was a reasonable question, because I hadn't done anything illegal. One of the cops said "Shut up or we'll lock you up on a trumped-up charge." I said "Hey, you don't have to make anything up. I've got some pot at home, I'll show you where it is. It doesn't have anything to do with what's going on right now, I haven't smoked any in six months." The both stared straight ahead, not saying anything. I said "I appreciate your silence." The cops said "We're taking you in on a 5150." "What's that?" I asked. They're said "We're taking you to a mental hospital." they answered.

That blew me away. This whole time it had never occurred to me that I was crazy! This opened the possibility of hope, the possibility that God didn't hate me, that I wasn't damned to hell. Maybe I would get to the mental hospital and the shrinks would have experience with other people who had gone crazy the same way, and they would know what to do about it. I said "That sounds like a really good idea." It was by far the best news I'd heard since the episode began.

When I got to the hospital and he was walking me in, the cop who'd threatened to lock me up on a trumped-up charge said "Cooperate with these people, they're going to try to help you." When the cops were taking the cuffs off, a nurse asked me if I could promise not to hit anybody. I said, apologetically, that I couldn't promise anything. They put a belt on me with padded cuffs that restrained my hands to being near my waist, which was much more comfortable that the metal police handcuffs (my wrists ached for most of the week afterward from the bruises from the police cuffs).

She asked what happened, and I told her the whole thing. One of the cops was still there. When I got to the part about wanting to cut my hand off, he was, like, "Wow!" I'll bet he was glad they hadn't locked me up on a trumped-up charge. The nurse thanked me for being "so honest".

They led me to a room where I sat down with a bunch of people. A guy in the room complimented my new Reebok sneakers. I figured I was going to spend the rest of my life indoors in the mental hospital, so I really didn't need them any more. I said "You like them? You can have them." and took them off with my feet and walked into another room where I was by myself.

I started to get worried. I felt that if anyone came to a position where they agreed with my point of view, God would hate them, too. And I literally wasn't wishing such a thing on my worst enemy. So I was really afraid to talk to anyone. If anyone came into the room I would start yelling "Don't trust me!" at them, afraid that if we had a conversation, I would drag them down with me.

One of the male nurses was pretty freaked out, I overheard him talking about me in the hall, he said I was acting like I was possessed by the devil. He was really spooked. I didn't think so, I had no particular affinity for the devil. I just felt that God personally hated me.

One of the staff members was Christian and she came in and helped me say a prayer, the "sinner's prayer" which helped me a lot. It was really nice of her to do that, above and beyond the call of duty, because it was a government hospital and that wasn't really allowed, due to the separation of church and state.

Another one of the staff brought a pill to me with a glass of water and said "Here, take this." I asked "What happens if I don't?" and he said "Then we'll strap you down and inject it into you." That didn't sound pleasant. I asked out loud "What have I got to lose?" Like seriously -- I didn't even have my soul!!! So I took the pill.

They shipped me (reunited with my Reeboks) 40 miles to a nice hospital in the country. The nurse in the ambulance said I had a big fan club at the hospital where I'd been for one hour, because I had freaked out so much because God had lied to me.

By the time we got to the hospital in the country, I was rational again and asking if they were sure that my health insurance would cover the cost of the visit, which was a very good sign because it was a rational thing to be concerned about.

The pill was an antipsychotic. It works on a wide variety of mental illnesses. So if you show up at a mental hospital and you're clearly out of your mind, they can give you some without having to figure out what's wrong with you. And it works quickly, within an hour. Instant sanity in pill form. Awesome.

The next day I was a wreck. There was no doubt in my mind that I'd gone stark, raving mad. A lot of mentally ill people deny that there's any problem, but that wasn't the case with me. I remember working on a coloring book with colored pencils. It took all my concentration to handle that level of activity, and I wasn't doing a very good job at it.

They weren't sure how to diagnose me. I felt that I had sensed something real and valid in the Christianity and wanted to pursue it further (though one of the nurses pointed out that Christianity had driven me to thoughts of self-harm, and there really are people who've cut off their hands because of that Bible verse, so maybe that wasn't such a great idea). When I got out of the hospital after a week or two, I began seeing a psychiatrist, but because they weren't sure what was wrong with me, I was not medicated.

I got along well with my new shrink, found him really interesting to talk with. I told him not to describe symptoms of different mental illnesses to me, to prevent me from psychosomatically bringing them on. I figured, "Let's just observe me until we're sure.".

I had one friend from college who was a psychology major and I met him for lunch and told him what had happened. He was pretty mad at me for having resorted to EST and Christianity before seeking therapy, and obviously wasn't interested in staying in touch.

I was going to two churches, a Methodist church and a Fundamentalist one. In the Methodist church, they had cards in the pews if you wanted to visit the pastor in person and have a visit with him one-on-one. The pastor did a really good sermon and I filled out the card. I saw him late at night, we were the only ones there. I complimented his sermon and told him what had happened and he clearly wanted nothing to do with me, barely making any pretense of being concerned for my well-being. I think he was physically scared of me.

After that I wasn't eager to talk with many more people about what had happened, not that I had many friends to discuss it with by that point.

I had a few friends with whom I was still in touch where the relationships were on really thin ice, but I just wasn't up to dealing with these delicate situations. I let those friendships slide away.

I continued going to Fundamentalist church and Bible studies, which by that point was my only social life outside of work.

At the same time, I started to get really seriously depressed for the first time. I'm a computer programmer, the first sign that I was depressed was that I started thinking that technical projects were infeasible and not a good idea. I had filed for a patent on a technique that I had invented, but once I got depressed I told the lawyers that I had concluded that the technique was worthless, so we dropped the application. Looking back on it, the technique was valid and useful and I should have pursued the patent. But I had never been that depressed before, and did not realize how my judgement was biased. When you're depressed, nearly everything sounds like a bad idea, when you're manic, too many things sound like good ideas.

At first I was hesitant to take antidepressants, but once the depression started to sink in, I wanted relief any way I could get it. When you take antidepressants, they usually don't work. You take one for a month, and then try to judge whether it's helping, and if it's not, you try the next one. There are lots of them to try.

I was reading the Bible a lot, but didn't like what I was finding, didn't approve of the way God acted in many cases. And I just felt, if God were going to write a book, he could have done a much better job. So I quit church, even though there wasn't much else going on in my life.

The depression got bad enough that I couldn't code at all. It takes imagination to be a software engineer, and the depression completely took away both my imagination and my sense of humor. Normally I'm joking all the time, but like Hamlet said when he was depressed "I have lost all mirth.". I felt terribly guilty, because I had obligations to society to write software and I just couldn't do it. My employer was very understanding, though, because I'd been a star performer before I got sick and it was pretty obvious that I was miserable about everything.

My shrink felt very strongly, and he was right, that it was important for a depressed person to get out and do things, so I signed up for a scuba diving class. This was one of the best moves I ever made, because I made a whole new set of friends in that class and a lot of those relationships lasted for years.

I had roommates, and one of them absolutely hated me because I had taken EST on his recommendation and then I hadn't liked it, and then I really, really offended him when I was insane. Anything I said he would take in the worst possible way. I've hardly ever had someone hate me so much. He was extremely unpleasant to be around and making the depression worse.

I moved out from my roommates and rented a new house and my mom moved in with me. It was weird living with my mom when I was 27 years old, but it was also very nice. When I was a kid, she was always trying to perfect me, so most conversations were about what was wrong with me. At 27 she accepted me as the finished product and appreciated me for how I was, which was a completely new experience for me. Furthermore, I appreciated her much more than I did as a kid. I'd come home to find she'd fixed me a dinner much nicer than anything I could cook myself and even done my laundry! When I was a kid I'd taken all that for granted, now I was really grateful.

The depression lifted, and I could code again. I was ecstatic to be able to do my job and worked really hard and was very productive. I was so happy and grateful that the depression had gone away (most people who are severely depressed for the first time have trouble believing that it will ever end). To this day I don't know if it had anything to do with the antidepressant I was trying at the time, but I stuck with those pills. My boss said "We should be paying your mother."