My level-headed daughter had an unfathomably random psychotic episode on her gap year. If it weren’t for a Facebook message from a stranger at 3am, we would’ve lost her

It was a gorgeous Saturday morning in August 2015 as Sarah Martin listened to the 8am speaker at the nurses’ conference.

She’d got up bright and early for this particular talk about postnatal depression – a harrowing topic, but one that didn’t dampen her spirits because, in her words, ‘everything was right in my world’.

Sipping her coffee, her mind drifted to her 21-year-old daughter Alice, a free-spirited girl who was on a gap year across Europe. She wondered where she might be.

Ping. Her phone lit up on the table. It was a Facebook message from a stranger called ‘Houssain’. She didn’t know any Houssains.

‘I immediately thought it was a scammer so I ignored it. Then it dings again and I thought – yep, a scammer. An hour or two passes by and I receive a Facebook friend request,’ Sarah, now 60, tells me.

She opened the message; it was in broken English. Her heart started to pound.

‘My name is Houssain, I’m a friend of your daughter’s. I think she’s having some sort of mental health concerns.’ 

Sarah, a perioperative nurse, felt her stomach twist in knots. Was this a scam – or was it something worse, like a kidnapping? Was her daughter even alive?

She viewed Houssain’s profile. This young man was not a stranger to her daughter – she remembered seeing a photo of them together on her social media only recently.

While Houssain’s message was starting to look more legitimate, Sarah was still struggling to comprehend that her daughter – adventurous, yes, but always level-headed – was having a mental health crisis overseas.

‘I was in disbelief and denial that mental health was the issue,’ she tells me from her home in Sydney, Australia.

‘I reminded myself there was no mental health in our family; Alice was fine.’

But Alice wasn’t fine; she was in great danger. As Sarah would soon find out, she was experiencing drug-induced psychosis in Istanbul. 

In that moment there was nothing Sarah could do. It was 3am in Turkey. All she knew is her beloved daughter was overseas alone and needed her help.

She tried calling her husband Shayne but he was played golf and didn’t pick up the phone. Next best bet was her son Jesse, who was living in Melbourne and had weeks earlier spent time with his sister in London. Breathlessly, Sarah told her son what was happening. They had to come up with a plan – and fast. 

‘We had this conversation of, do we trust him? Do we believe him? And ultimately, we did,’ Sarah says of that awful day.

They decided the most important thing was to check Houssain’s bona fides. Jesse called him and after several attempts the young man answered the phone and proceeded to explain what had happened to Alice.

After travelling to England, Spain and Italy, Alice had made it to Turkey where she found herself with no friends or travel companions. She soon met a group of about ten Syrians, including Houssain, who she was starting to get to know but were really still strangers to her.

Living in a hostel in an unfamiliar country, Alice began to have hallucinations. She couldn’t explain them – but they were exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.

On one occasion she went to the beach with her Syrian friends and believed she was swimming with dolphins and seals – yet her companions said there were no animals in the water. Another time she climbed up a cliff to do some yoga, where she looked to the sky and saw a flock of birds flying above, forming the outline of Australia.

When she returned to her friends at the hostel several hours later, they were angry she had been gone for so long. They feared she had fallen from a height or drowned. She thought she’d only been up there an hour.

Her sudden psychotic episode seemed unfathomably random to Alice at first, and she would only discover later that it was triggered by undiagnosed bipolar disorder. While rare, bipolar disorder – a mental illness characterised by mood swings – can cause psychosis, especially during extreme periods of depression or mania.

Alice would later compare her psychotic episode to watching the world around her become blurred yet sharp at the same time, as if she was existing in a fog full of sharp edges. One moment an overwhelming mania of positive emotions would wash over her, only for her mind to crash into confusion, paranoia and anxiousness. Time had no meaning. What seemed like minutes could be an entire day. She was hallucinating.

In the hours before Houssain sent the frantic text to Sarah, Alice took a pill at a nightclub. The person who gave it to her described it as a caffeine-like pill that would keep her awake. She had swallowed the psychoactive drug Captagon, which can keep you alert for days. Compounding her already fragile mental state, she soon descended into a full-blown drug-induced psychosis.

After Alice’s family reached Houssain by phone, Sarah asked to speak to her daughter. She didn’t sound distressed – that was a relief – but she was also clearly not herself, mumbling nonsense in a ‘very quiet and ethereal’ way.

There was no time to waste: within 24 hours, Jesse and Sarah were on a plane bound for Istanbul trying to find Alice. On the way, the family contacted the Australian embassy, whose only advice was to get her to a hospital.

‘We didn’t have a choice, we had to go. We hoped that when we arrived Alice would say to us, “I’m really glad you’re here. I’m having some problems but I’m okay now,” but that wasn’t the case,’ Sarah says.

While Sarah and Jesse were on the flight from Sydney to Istanbul, Alice was still in the grips of psychosis. The only saving grace was that she wasn’t alone: her Syrian friends were by her side, and would stay with her until her mum and brother arrived.

Despite being a nurse, Sarah admits her knowledge of complex mental health conditions was ‘zero’ at the time of Alice’s episode. ‘I’m great in operating theatres. I know about cancer, I know about diabetes, I know about chronic illnesses,’ she tells me. ‘But I’ve since learned poor mental health is another type of chronic illness and people forget that. At that stage with Alice, I just had no idea. I was lost.’

There were some signs something was wrong with Alice before she left for Europe. 

While she had no idea she was on the brink of mental collapse when she left Sydney Airport, she does remember feeling anxious.

‘Looking back there were prodromal symptoms [early signs of mental health concerns] trickling in that are only recognisable in hindsight,’ Alice, now 30, says. 

On one occasion, she was studying in her bedroom with her bedsheets up against the window blocking out the sunlight so she could focus on her final assignment, which was unusual for her. Later, she felt a surge of anxiety at a party thinking about going overseas. That sinking feeling returned on the flight.

Her trip had begun with a traditional goodbye photo in front of the departures  sign at Sydney Airport, where Sarah recalls feeling worried for her daughter but nonetheless excited for her to ‘dip her toes’ into adulthood.

London was the first stop, where Alice met her brother Jesse, his girlfriend and another friend, before they visited various European countries together. A few weeks later, the group parted ways and Alice travelled to Istanbul solo. 

‘It was a big vibrant city full of colour. I was excited to explore but a little scared too because it wasn’t entirely safe, especially for a young woman. Though once I got to my hostel and met a few people my anxiousness eased and the worries disappeared. I was in my element,’ Alice says. 

Five days prior, Alice sent six photos of her travels to her mum via WhatsApp. One picture in particular concerned Sarah: it was a selfie of Alice with black permanent marker drawn all over her face like a roadmap. 

‘It was 5:30am and I was in the sterile stock room of the operating theatres at work where everything is kept. My phone buzzed and I was full of pure joy seeing the notification that Alice had messaged me,’ Sarah tells me.

‘I opened it and the first picture I saw took my breath away. I was stunned and started to cry.’

Sarah tried calling and messaging her daughter but there was no reply for 24 hours. For Alice, this felt like 30 minutes.

Over the following days, Alice’s behaviour became increasingly erratic. She was acting impulsively and engaging in risky behaviour that was ‘out of character’ for her. While partying at a festival, she started randomly smashing glasses and ran away from her friends. She even rushed into the middle of the road in front of cars.  

By this time, she had moved out of the hostel and was staying with the Syrians she had met, including Houssain, who became her holiday boyfriend.

Houssain, alarmed by her behaviour and fearing she was putting herself and others in danger, then found Alice’s mother on Facebook and contacted her. 

The housemates became so worried for Alice that they kept her in their apartment, leaning a heavy mattress over the front door and sleeping in front of it to ensure she couldn’t leave. 

When Sarah and Jesse touched down in Istanbul, they hoped for the best but were expecting the worst. As they waited nervously at the airport, in the distance they saw a group of people walking towards them. They realised they were surrounding Alice, who looked awful.

She had a scarf wrapped around her hair and was wearing a dress with a skirt on top that was inside out. Her eyes were sunken and empty and her body was limp. She barely had the strength to carry herself.

‘It was like they were her blanket of love. They were protecting her every step of the way, but they looked exhausted after keeping her safe for the last few days,’ Sarah tells me. 

In that moment everyone breathed a sigh of relief and hugged one another. Sarah couldn’t believe the state her daughter was in, she was almost unrecognisable. She thanked her group of friends repeatedly, knowing their intervention had likely saved her daughter’s life.

The family didn’t waste any time; they caught the next available flight back to Australia. Two days, Alice was in a psychiatric emergency care unit.

‘I was so lucky. If they hadn’t contacted mum and dad when they did, I would probably still be there and have done something terrible. These people were so kind, and they saw that I was going through a mental health crisis, and they didn’t kick me out. Now I’m aware of my condition and that knowledge is power,’ Alice says of her ordeal nine years later. 

A year later in 2016, armed with her antipsychotic medication, headphones and backpack, Alice flew to Berlin for three weeks to meet Houssain.

Sadly, Alice would experience another psychotic episode in 2017 – also while overseas, but thankfully closer to home than Istanbul. It happened while on a retreat to Bali, but she was able to make it home after he father came her aid.

It was after this second ordeal that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder – the condition doctors believe triggered her psychosis. 

Today, Alice’s family is eternally grateful for the Syrian refugees who helped her. They believe that without them she most likely wouldn’t be alive today. 

‘They’re a part of our family now. These people were displaced from their own homes because of the war in Syria, and they protected our daughter when she needed it most,’ Sarah says.

While in Europe this year, Sarah and husband Shayne met with Houssain in Denmark, where he now lives. It was the first time Shayne met the man who saved his daughter because he hadn’t been there for the family’s mercy dash in 2015. He broke down in tears.

After what happened to her in Turkey, Sarah wrote a book about her daughter’s story in the hope of raising awareness of mental health disorders. 

Both Alice and Sarah are also peer ambassadors for SANE Australia – a not-for-profit organisation providing guidance, support, and resources for individuals aged 18+ struggling with complex mental health issues.

If you need support call SANE Australia on 1800 187 263 or Lifeline Australia on 13 11 14