Photo: Jovelle Tamayo/The New York Times/Redux
Ivan Agerton thought people were listening to him through his cell phone, and he was convinced the police were watching him and monitoring his movements.
In November 2020, the documentary photographer returned home to Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, after two months working aboard a ship in Saudi Arabia. On Thanksgiving Day, he felt sick and decided to get a COVID test. He thinks he contracted the virus on the flight home.
He quarantined for two weeks away from his wife and three kids. His fourth day out of isolation, acute paranoid psychosis suddenly hit the former Marine, after he received a spam phone call.
“That just triggered this paranoia,” says Agerton, 51. “Who is it that’s calling me? Why are they calling me? When I got home, I just had this intense feeling that people were watching me, that they were surveilling the house, and that people were parked outside the front of our home and watching us.”
He downloaded a police scanner app on his phone. “I was convinced they were talking about me,” he says.
He stayed awake for 36 hours, pacing, looking out the bathroom window convinced he saw someone at the end of the street waiting and watching him. “It was terrifying,” he says. “I was really terrified.”
Convinced someone was listening through their cell phones, he asked his wife to leave her phone on the dresser, and he pulled her into their bedroom closet and told her what was happening.
“That scared the hell out of her,” he says. “But it was the only place I felt safe talking to her.”
His wife called a nurse practitioner friend who specializes in mental health. Her friend said to rush him to the ER.
At the ER, he was prescribed sleeping pills and sent home. But they didn’t help.
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The next morning, they went to the ER atSwedish Hospital in Seattle, and the short journey terrified him.
“I was convinced that the street that entered our little neighborhood, that there was going to be a roadblock there and that this is it. Someone’s going to get me,” he says. “While we were on the ferry, I was convinced that the car next to us, that that person was watching me. It was just this constant paranoia.”
“Driving to the hospital. As we pull up to the emergency room, I see this black unmarked police car at the end of the road. As soon as we stopped, they moved and went out of sight. And I was convinced that this is it. They’re going to get me here,” he says. “Everything that I would see, I would associate it with the ‘this coming to get me’ feeling that I had.”
He checked into the mental health ward. “That was like a bad movie,” he says. “They took shoelaces out of my shoes. One of the nurses there told me, ‘This facility that you’re in right now, it’s for the last resort people, people that are suicidal or homicidal,’ which I was neither. But it was the only place that they could put me. They had no other facility that would take me. That began my hospital adventure.”
After 9 days, the hospital released him new years day.
Ivan Agerton.Courtesy Ivan Agerton
A couple weeks later, he read an article about a police raid that triggered his paranoia again. “It just exploded back,” he says. “I told my wife that it was back and I needed to get back to the hospital. So I was readmitted for another seven days. I did not feel safe at home.”
His psychiatrist researched post-COVID acute psychosis and shared the medical articles she found with him.
“I had lost my sense of smell as well, so I just was concerned that this was going to last forever, and that I was done for, that this was my new normal. But I was assured that it was acute and through the MRI scans, they found some hyper-intense areas of infection. But they assured me that physically, that I seemed to be okay, and that I would get over this.”
He took a year off of work to rest and heal. He’s still taking medication, starting to work again and feeling better. If he has negative thoughts, he breathes and tells himself, “This is a brain trick … this isn’t reality.”
“My smell is coming back, and that was always the working theory, that because I had lost my smell, due to the brain infection of COVID, that once my smell started coming back, that would be a sign that my brain was healing,” he says.
He says his sense of smell is now about 50% back.
source: people.com
