A brave Irish woman has opened up on how taking a recreational drug led her to have visions and an accident that saw her break two legs.
Speaking on RTE Radio One's Brendan O'Connor Show, Hilda Hamilton told about her terrifying experience of drug-induced psychosis and how she has recovered from her ordeal.
After taking an ecstasy tablet, Mrs Hamilton began to feel paranoid and then proceeded to have strange visions.
She said: "I developed drug-induced psychosis from the ecstasy. It started firstly at the party getting really paranoid and then I remember listening to a tape in my room - Give Up Your Old Sins - and thinking I was getting messages from it us, and just feeling really agitated.
"Everything was heightened, my senses were heightened. I just was having a completely illogical thought process thinking things like my mum was being chased down by George Bush, you can laugh about it now, but at the moment it's quite frightening."
Despite having no previous mental issues, Hamilton then said that the episodes continued throughout the night after she returned home.
She added: "Unfortunately, it continued. And I remember seeing my father on a phone. I remember thinking at the time that he was in cahoots and trying to organise to get me to kill my mum or something. I then jumped out my bedroom window. Looking back now, as a parent myself I can only imagine how hard that was for my dad."
Both of Hilda's legs were broken following the incident but speaking with O'Connor she said that she's happy to speak about the incident because she feels it's "important that we destigmatise the shame and destigmatise mental illness"
Reflecting on this decision to jump out of the window, Hilda says that she still can't quite fathom the thought process involved as the drugs took over.
She said: "When I look back, it is something I think about a great deal. I wonder in my head when I was having these illogical thoughts. To be honest, I have no idea. I wasn't thinking, I was completely scrambled. I had no idea what my thought process was leading up to that."
After the incident, Hilda was admitted to St Vincent's and admitted to their psychiatric ward for further treatment and was on 24-hour watch for psychotic episodes.
She added: "The first step in this whole recovery process was to make sure I was safe and I couldn't do damage to myself, I was in my psychotic state. And then the second stage was the fact that drug-induced psychosis is obviously this chemical imbalance that took place in my brain. So, psychiatric doctors were trying to rectify that. So, they gave me anti-psychotic meds to get me down from that extreme high I guess."
During the interview, Hilda did say that prior to this incident, she took ecstasy before but this particular tablet was probably laced in something and that "whenever you take illegal drugs, it's like Russian roulette."
After spending two to three weeks in hospital, the outgoing hockey player said she was completely "broken", feeling "numb" and "introverted" - the opposite before she took the E tablet.
After a doctor said that she'd struggle to walk again, Hilda used this as a catalyst to get better and felt "quite determined to get back walking" but after achieving that goal, she assumed things would return to normal.
They didn't and that's when "depression and the suicidal thoughts started kicking in.
"I felt really lost, I felt such shame at what I done. I felt like I was such a burden on my family and my friends. I had some amazing friends that would call over bring me for a walk, bring me down the pier and I was just so vacant. I didn't really feel I was contributing anything to the friendships.
"I enrolled in a postgraduate course where I couldn't even stand up and say my name. It was a really, really hard time because I suppose, reality and perception are so key in striving and my reality is one thing and my perception on the reality was so skewed. I felt like a complete fly in the ointment in my family life and with my friends as well. For me, that was the hardest part."
After brave and admirable work with her psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Hilda has since managed to turn her life around.
Under a month ago, she set a land speed record of as the fastest woman to cycle from Mizen to Malin when she clocked in at under 23 hours, and 11 seconds.
