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Alert and Oriented X3: A Snapshot of Severe Psychosis
This book explores mental illness in a way that few have ever seen it before. Through the use of poems, essays, clinical notes and blog entries from my website at www.edmontonwriter.com I detail what it was like to be the victim of a cruel joke of nature. A new, proven medication that had helped many people in their struggles with schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis was administered to me in late 2018 and for some odd reason it simply didn't work for me. The worst part was that there was a medication that did work excellently on my condition, but these were time-released medications and the newer medication that didn't work fought with the older, blocking its healing properties. I completely lost my mind and feared danger and humiliation from every corner, at one point thinking someone had come to kill me and my dad. By a stroke of luck that I wished I had sooner, I was put under the care of an exceptional young psychiatrist and wiled away my hours in the hospital writing poetry and later essays. This book, Alert and Oriented X3 (a term used by psychiatric nurses to explain that a patient isn't quite linked up with reality) is a collection of hand-written poems, ramblings of a person in psychosis, commentaries given after a release and recovery from the breakdown of mind and body, and the cold and impersonal words of professionals describing me in ways I myself had never imagined I came across as, is a journey into an old but hidden (until recently) world of the psychiatric ward and what goes on inside.
116 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 18, 2020
2 people want to read
About the author
Leif Gregersen
13 books31 followersI am currently working hard on getting my latest short story collection "Voted Off the Crew" into print. What excites me about this book is that it tells so many key stories of my own life growing up in this amazing place called Alberta. If you enjoy short stories, please sign up for my online book launch and also sign up for my giveaway. Check out my website for more information about me and my writing.
I was born in a small city that was full of life and opportunities to find happiness. I had a lot of love in my family, my parents were good to me, though as I grew older I started to slowly develop manic depression/Bipolar Disorder. If you don't know what bipolar is, just go back a while and look at Charlie Sheen. You can recover from an illness like bipolar, but it takes time, care, support and medication. I wrote my book, "Through The Withering Storm" to help people to understand more about my illness and maybe get some help themselves or for a person they care about. I also maintain a blog where I talk about mental health issues which can be found below
I was born in a small city that was full of life and opportunities to find happiness. I had a lot of love in my family, my parents were good to me, though as I grew older I started to slowly develop manic depression/Bipolar Disorder. If you don't know what bipolar is, just go back a while and look at Charlie Sheen. You can recover from an illness like bipolar, but it takes time, care, support and medication. I wrote my book, "Through The Withering Storm" to help people to understand more about my illness and maybe get some help themselves or for a person they care about. I also maintain a blog where I talk about mental health issues which can be found below
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April 16, 2025
When Leif Gregersen began 2018, he was stable on an antipsychotic injectable medication and was teaching poetry to inpatients at a psychiatric facility. The only problems he had were some typical side effects from this medication such as diabetes and his weight which he had to exercise hard to control.
He decided, under supervision with his psychiatrist, to try a different antipsychotic in injectable form also. This other antipsychotic was a well known alternative that many people do quite well on, so no dramatic changes were anticipated. This perfectly reasonable assumption turned out to be mistaken in Leif’s case.
For some reason, perhaps individual differences in tolerating certain drugs that vary from one person to another, or perhaps inflammation due to the effects of polypharmacy with the other drugs he was also prescribed, a missed appointment over Christmas, or just a bad reaction to this drug in particular, (and he will probably never know the reason for sure) Leif’s body and mind reacted really badly to the new medication and began to unravel.
Although they had gone into the trial of the new drug with eyes wide open, through no fault of anyone in particular, the effects on Leif were very damaging to his recovery, which had been 17 years in the making. He began one day as usual in one psychiatric hospital, teaching poetry, and ended it in another, convinced that many people around him were plotting against him or his friends and family, and talking about him in messages he thought he could discern through doors or via looks and gestures and other misreferenced signs and stimuli in his surroundings.
“Alert and oriented x3” is a phrase from his medical notes which Leif made into the title of his just over 100 page account of his experiences during this disastrous setback in his journey towards better mental health, which, though long and bumpy at times, had been on a progressively upward trajectory.
In it, he recounts his various diagnoses and treatment leading to relative stability beforehand, and details the drugs he was taking, and then the symptoms he started experiencing featuring delusional thoughts particularly, and the lack of stimulation in the hospital and his conflicted feelings about his care there.
In a chapter he calls a personal essay on the condition, he reflects on his vulnerabilities and how many people have tried to exploit him over the years, giving examples, so much so that his brother coined the term “sh*thead magnet” to describe the number of people who have taken advantage of him. I think this part of his story is particularly poignant and I’m touched by his courage in sharing it.
He also shares his sadness and struggles with feelings of loneliness and failure at not being well enough to hold a job down, something many people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder are all too familiar with, but the general population, who take their ability to cope with a full time job for granted, just don’t understand. Again, his bravery in talking about this openly and honestly will make other sufferers who have been through similar take heart that they are not alone.
The account also contains opening sections written by a good friend, his father, and his sister, as well as excerpts from his medical notes and some poetry. It’s a bit of a disjointed read, reflecting his state of mind and the sense of dislocation of a life interrupted that a major episode of psychosis creates. This makes it much more than a simple journal of his experience though, and anyone who has been through something similar will be able to relate to many of the things he recounts, and his main aim in writing his experiences down is to reduce stigma, humanise the condition and improve outcomes for others.
For more information about this and his other titles, check out Leif’s Substack, where you can read more about his life in recovery so far.
He decided, under supervision with his psychiatrist, to try a different antipsychotic in injectable form also. This other antipsychotic was a well known alternative that many people do quite well on, so no dramatic changes were anticipated. This perfectly reasonable assumption turned out to be mistaken in Leif’s case.
For some reason, perhaps individual differences in tolerating certain drugs that vary from one person to another, or perhaps inflammation due to the effects of polypharmacy with the other drugs he was also prescribed, a missed appointment over Christmas, or just a bad reaction to this drug in particular, (and he will probably never know the reason for sure) Leif’s body and mind reacted really badly to the new medication and began to unravel.
Although they had gone into the trial of the new drug with eyes wide open, through no fault of anyone in particular, the effects on Leif were very damaging to his recovery, which had been 17 years in the making. He began one day as usual in one psychiatric hospital, teaching poetry, and ended it in another, convinced that many people around him were plotting against him or his friends and family, and talking about him in messages he thought he could discern through doors or via looks and gestures and other misreferenced signs and stimuli in his surroundings.
“Alert and oriented x3” is a phrase from his medical notes which Leif made into the title of his just over 100 page account of his experiences during this disastrous setback in his journey towards better mental health, which, though long and bumpy at times, had been on a progressively upward trajectory.
In it, he recounts his various diagnoses and treatment leading to relative stability beforehand, and details the drugs he was taking, and then the symptoms he started experiencing featuring delusional thoughts particularly, and the lack of stimulation in the hospital and his conflicted feelings about his care there.
In a chapter he calls a personal essay on the condition, he reflects on his vulnerabilities and how many people have tried to exploit him over the years, giving examples, so much so that his brother coined the term “sh*thead magnet” to describe the number of people who have taken advantage of him. I think this part of his story is particularly poignant and I’m touched by his courage in sharing it.
He also shares his sadness and struggles with feelings of loneliness and failure at not being well enough to hold a job down, something many people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder are all too familiar with, but the general population, who take their ability to cope with a full time job for granted, just don’t understand. Again, his bravery in talking about this openly and honestly will make other sufferers who have been through similar take heart that they are not alone.
The account also contains opening sections written by a good friend, his father, and his sister, as well as excerpts from his medical notes and some poetry. It’s a bit of a disjointed read, reflecting his state of mind and the sense of dislocation of a life interrupted that a major episode of psychosis creates. This makes it much more than a simple journal of his experience though, and anyone who has been through something similar will be able to relate to many of the things he recounts, and his main aim in writing his experiences down is to reduce stigma, humanise the condition and improve outcomes for others.
For more information about this and his other titles, check out Leif’s Substack, where you can read more about his life in recovery so far.
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