"Horror Movie Hallucinations"

There is a second type of hallucination which one psychiatrist dubbed, "Horror Movie Hallucinations". These are visions that aren't actual hallucinations in the sense of seeing or hearing things that other people can't, or more precisely, that you think are there but other people don't.

Before I was diagnosed, I was having a bad day. I was very agitated and easily upset. I began screaming. I left and took the kids to school. Everything went well until I had just walked my youngest to his classroom. I saw myself ripping the spines out of kids and throwing them against the wall- blood and all. I shook it off. The visions went away. Then, a minute later, I went to get a drink of water at the fountain and had yet another vision of smashing skulls. I shook it off again. When I got back to my car, I called my psychiatrist. (Different one than now.) She was worried about what I was telling her, and told me to not drive anywhere. She called me in a prescription for Celexa . No mention of bipolar was made.

Four years earlier, when my youngest was born, I'd had similar "horror movie hallucinations", but this time it was while I was showering my 2-year-old daughter. I was washing her hair and it was as if someone turned on a movie on top of real life: I saw my hands on her head, crushing through her skull, fragments, crushing and blood everywhere! I reported this to my psychiatrist (same as above) and I was told to keep on my Zoloft. This is the same year that Andrea Yates killed her four or five kids! My Ob/Gyn picked up on this and we had a heart-to-heart conversation.

I have since asked my current psychiatrist why my former psych doc never caught on to my bipolar- she didn't really answer me.

Normal hallucinations just play out as if they were real. They might come and go, but they seem like real life happening, rather than something playing on top of reality. The horror movie hallucinations come on quickly, too. One second you're seeing life normally, and the next a horrible vision plays in your mind and is projected into your eyes. They are scary and unpredictable. They go away on their own- or in my case, maybe the antidepressants helped to get rid of them. I'm still kind of miffed that my bipolar wasn't diagnosed earlier than it was- but then again, if I were and I were medicated, I might not have experiences with which to diagnose me. :)