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Coronavirus

Coronavirus: COVID-19 patient describes seeing visions of demons while listening to Pink Floyd

COVID-19 patients isolated in ICU units are suffering delirium, hallucinations and paranoia, according to reports.

And some who don't have the deadly virus are reporting psychotic 'delusions' associated with the disease, which has killed more than 325,000 people this year. 

New Yorker Josh Wortman, 45, was hospitalised in March. He'd been in the ICU for about a week, unable to see his family, when the nurses decided to make him feel at home by putting on some music, Yahoo reports.

They knew he liked Pink Floyd, so put on their 1973 classic The Dark Side of the Moon.

"At first I thought, 'cool music,'" he told Yahoo. "But then I was just in this delirium... this dystopian world."

Thinking the respirator was going to choke him to death, he ripped off his restraints and ripped the tube out. 

That was the culmination of a week of growing delusions, he said, during which he also experienced a battle with "demons" and being on a spaceship. 

Luckily, he was physically on the mend by that point. 

"There were alarms going off and 20 people in the room. I couldn't have done that day two and lived," he told news site RiverheadLOCAL. "I had already turned the corner. I just did not want to be on that respirator any more."

Wortman - who was healthy with no preexisting conditions - has since recovered. He and others told The Atlantic about their COVID-induced breakdowns.

"I woke up to something that I would never have imagined," one woman told the paper. "A nurse was standing over her hospital bed with a saw, cutting off her arms and legs."

Another described dying and attending his own funeral.

Doctors said such delusions can happen to patients in ICU, and isn't necessarily unique to those with COVID-19 - but the sheer length of time some COVID-19 patients have to spend on life support without seeing familiar faces like family and friends is making it more common.

In another case, a German man without COVID-19 was hospitalised after suffering delusions related to the pandemic.

"For approximately one week prior the patient had been hearing his neighbours' voices (both males and females) blaming him, as a former ambulanceman, for not taking sufficient care of his parents who could have died of a COVID-19," a new case report in journal Psychiatry Research said.

The voices "claimed that all of the neighbours could also have COVID-19 as a result of his negligence" and that he was immune after being infected through messaging service Whatsapp.

The patient, who'd been diagnosed previously with paranoid psychosis, suspected the voices weren't real. Still, he drove to his parents' house in the middle of the night, fearing they were dead. They took him to hospital, where he was treated. 

"It  is reasonable to expect that media coverage of exceptional circumstances will influence the content of delusional thoughts, especially in crises like infectious disease pandemics," the report read.

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