Wonderwall

Steps We Take

The next 60 days were difficult for Shawn. He had to confront and face his darkest thoughts and learn how to deal with the anxiety that constantly plagued him. He learned that his relationship with April was toxic and she gaslighted him for years and he never realized it. He knew that she made him feel badly about himself, but he realized he internalized all her negative comments as a reflection of himself.

When he finally worked all this out and sat down with his parents and therapist to tell them exactly what he'd been through, his mother was inconsolable. She  blamed herself for appointing April as his manager. She assumed that she was his family and she would look out for him in a way no one else would and she was wrong.

He also learned strategies to cope with his anxiety and what to do if he experience a bout of depression.

He wrote down as much as he could remember of his "dream" and it started to come together.

Everyone around him wanted him to fight and he remembered feeling so defeated and weak. He was tired of fighting. When he saw himself in the mirror in his dream, he realized that he'd been focused on how other people saw him and he never once looked outside of what his projected persona was. He also, realized, that he needed to learn to see himself the way others saw him. He suffered from imposter syndrome. Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a psychological pattern in which one doubts one's accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud". Shawn felt like the person he pretended to be was fake, because he was, indeed lying to the world and those closest to him. He cared to an extent what people thought of him and had trouble distinguishing the positive and negative comments that he constantly dealt with.

The first 30 days were difficult and he felt sick and nauseous and couldn't sleep. He assured his therapists that he did not take drugs and while they believed him, they had to give him a drug test as it was protocol.

When they drug tested him, they found the presence of  prescription drugs that Shawn did not recognize. He assured them he didn't knowingly take any drugs other than the antidepressant. He wracked his brain and then he suddenly remembered  that the only thing he drank before the show was tea that April had brought him.
The combination of the drugs had caused psychosis which led to his timely breakdown. Timely because the dosage of drugs coupled with the antidepressant was so high that it could have stopped his heart.  And it did, in the ambulance. He coded on the way to the hospital in the ambulance and they were barely able to bring him back.
Had Shawn not been in an ambulance, he could have gone to sleep and not woken up.

With a judge's court order, they got a warrant to search April's home and found prescriptions drugs, which she'd acquired in Shawn's name,the very prescriptions found in his system. Some of the drugs were "downers" to calm Shawn down and others were "uppers" to "stimulate" him so he could perform. The combination of the drugs and the antidepressant he had taken earlier that day was dangerous to say the least. It could have killed him. 

April confessed that she had drugged him that night so that he could perform. She'd put the drugs in his tea, and Shawn unknowingly took them.

She pleaded no contest and guilty to the charges against her with 45 years in prison with no possibility of early parole. At 30, she would be 75 if and when she was ever released.

When Camila heard she'd been arrested on charges, she felt sick. When Shawn learned he'd  been drugged, he had a  breakdown exactly 7 days into his treatment.

Shawn learned his breakdown the night he slit his wrist after his concert was caused by full blown psychosis which explained why he felt like he'd been in a dreamlike state the whole night and why he'd imploded. Coupled with the natural endorphins in his system from performing, it was a miracle he didn't collapse on stage.