‘ Eating a spiked brownie nearly destroyed me'

A student prank at a party led Ruth Poniarski to mental breakdowns and schizophrenia – a stigmatised and often-misunderstood illness

- SUSANNA GALTON

When Ruth Poniarski ate a spiked brownie as a student it drove her to the brink of insanity and caused a life-changing accident. Now an artist and mother of two, she is married to psychiatrist Richard and lives in New York.

Students often get up to mischief – they’re young and it’s the first time they’ve left home. But a college prank played on me when I was 20 was far too serious to shrug off the next day. In fact, it almost destroyed me.

It was back in 1977. I was studying for an architecture degree and had my whole future ahead of me. Then I got invited to a small end-of-term party. It wasn’t a wild affair – there were only about eight others there, all architecture graduates and physics Ph.D. students. Not the craziest bunch.

People had drunk a little wine but that was it. Everyone was heading home when a so-called friend, Joseph, produced some brownies and told me his professor’s wife had made them. I was hungry and naively didn’t think to question it, I just ate it.

ANGEL DUST

What I didn’t realise was the homemade cake had been laced with “angel dust”, the nickname for an anesthetic called PCP, which stops pain but can also cause hallucinations. I’d never heard of the drug before, but I now know it’s an animal tranquilizer.

Within minutes of eating it I started to “decompensate”, which medically means losing the ability to maintain my mental health. Everyone had left the party by now, and I think Joseph thought the drug would make me want to have sex with him, but I had no interest in that whatsoever.