; MY CROSSROADS
I did not lose my mind all at once.
It went in stages—quietly, convincingly, with meaning attached to every symptom.
At first, it was insomnia. Then intensity. Thoughts arrived faster than I could evaluate them, each one feeling urgent, significant, revealed. I spoke rapidly, prayed longer, interpreted coincidences as instructions. When fear crept in, it was explained away as spiritual warfare. When grandiosity followed, it was called anointing.
By the time my family noticed I was no longer functioning, I had already been given a diagnosis—just not by a clinician.
They said I was chosen.
They said hospitals would “silence the Spirit.”
They said medication would block divine access.
From a psychiatric standpoint, the picture was becoming clearer, even if no psychiatrist had yet been involved. I was showing classic features: reduced need for sleep, pressured speech, expansive mood, impaired insight, emerging delusional beliefs with religious content. But inside that system, symptoms were reframed as virtues. Pathology was spiritualized. Deterioration was rebranded as depth.
When I finally encountered a mental health professional, it was not through insight but collapse. Exhaustion. Agitation. Fear. I remember the assessment room vividly—the deliberate calm, the structured questions, the way my answers wandered. The psychiatrist did not argue theology. He did not mock my beliefs. He listened for form, not content. That was the first time anyone separated my faith from my illness.
He explained, gently, that religion often becomes the language of psychosis, not its cause. That the brain, when dysregulated, borrows the most meaningful symbols available. That belief systems do not immunize against illness—and that illness does not invalidate belief.
This distinction mattered.
Treatment did not arrive as revelation; it arrived as routine. Mood stabilizers. Antipsychotics. Sleep. Psychoeducation. The slow return of insight—painful, humiliating, necessary. As the fog lifted, grief followed. I had to mourn decisions made while unwell. Opportunities lost. Relationships strained by certainty I could not defend anymore.
The hardest part was not abandoning religion. It was reclaiming agency. I had been taught that questioning was rebellion, that doubt was failure. Psychiatry asked something different: Can you observe your thoughts without obeying them? That question saved me.
Now, standing at the crossroad, I understand something important—something professionals understand well, but patients often learn the hard way:
Faith can coexist with treatment.
Spirituality can support recovery.
But when religion replaces clinical judgment, the patient pays the price.
My illness did not make me weak.
My faith did not make me delusional.
But deception—intentional or not—thrived in the space where expertise was rejected.
Recovery, for me, was not choosing science over belief. It was choosing care over certainty, evidence over charisma, and humility over interpretation.
That is the crossroad.
And once you see it clearly, you cannot unsee it.
My husband is coming to terms with this reality and realises it’s vital he listens to the psychiatrist point of view after all he is of the Christian religion as well
Account listened to, written and adapted by
Dr Owoeye Oluwatobi Ajibola
Resident Psychiatrist Doctor
08131860275
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