When a car braked on the road, Jonah Hoffman* interrupted himself in the middle of the sentence. Did that mean him? Was the braking an answer to what he had just said? He could not make a rhyme to it at first. A few days later, Hoffman talked with a fellow student from mathematics studies about an exam. The longer they spoke, the more clearly he recognized a covert message in it. This was no longer about an unfair math exam. Hoffman himself found himself in a single large exam situation everywhere and around the clock. A secret parallel society tested him, he thought-the way he related everything to himself, when his thoughts suddenly had no filter.
His steady girlfriend knew he was overworked. After a stressful last master’s semester, Hoffman began his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Munich. He felt the pressure of having to build a scientific career, and at the very beginning he came to a dead end in his research. That the stress let him talk about it was new, however, and his girlfriend no longer geheuer. She pressed the number of the Psychiatric crisis service into his hand before she escaped from the shared apartment. Later that same night, Hoffman stood on the mat with his parents, in the “intermediate realm of life and death,” as he thought at the time. He believed he had left the material world. Even his senses fooled him: he sat on his parents ‘ carpet, recognized a colorful galaxy nebula in it and played with the individual stars. “I was a demigod, but I was about to explode. So I imagine a lousy drug trip, ” he says today.
Treatment in milieu therapy
This night in the galaxy Nebula was the culmination of an acute psychosis suffered by Jonah Hoffman two and a half years ago. In addition to a genetic predisposition, major changes and new beginnings are among the possible triggers of this disorder. To this day, Hoffman regularly has long-term therapy to check whether he still stands with both legs in reality. He was recently allowed to discontinue his antipsychotics, which was not free of risk. Should psychosis return one day, his diagnosis could even be schizophrenia.
It all started with a good feeling. In higher mathematics, it is important to recognize patterns, think associatively, and open the mind to promptings. Hoffman was correspondingly enthusiastic when so many unusual ideas suddenly came to him. He took more notes than before and brought up a whole new energy for big questions. Presumably, his brain was already releasing more of the motivating messenger dopamine at this time than would have been good for him.
Not only between the numbers, but also between the lines, hidden meanings suddenly appeared in everyday life. People around him seemed to speak in metaphors when they were actually talking about the weather. Although this did not make him hostile, he nevertheless found it difficult to accept outside help: even at the psychiatric hospital where he was admitted, every detail still seemed suspicious to him. The names of the staff sounded like code words for people from his past. For three months, he was able to convince himself in inpatient treatment that they were in fact not double agents after all.
After a long sick leave back to the university
In the so-called milieu therapy, the patients and caregivers live together in a community as if they were a large family. They cook and clean together, are allowed to live free of stress, talk a lot with each other and think differently. “In the clinic, I had to learn to see coincidences again,” says Hoffman, ” I no longer take reality for granted, since I know that it can collapse in just one week.”When the symptoms finally subsided, he took out his math exercise sheets from earlier in the psychiatry and solved the easier tasks. He practiced a reality that had previously been lost to him.
