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Ever since Jim Hargreaves was little he experienced things uniquely.

“When I was a kid,” Jim says, “I swore down that I could read books and see words moving or pictures forming on the page.”

As a teenager Jim would occasionally see crowds gathering, crowds that his friends apparently couldn’t see at all.

Soon these benign experiences started to take on a menacing edge.

Drinking in a pub with his mates, Jim would look up to see people running at him through the crowd, as if about to attack. Jim realised that he suffered from psychosis. He sees and hears things that are not there, but which are as real to him as the things that are.

Many sufferers of psychosis trace their condition back to childhood trauma, but Jim can recall no such experience from what he describes as a fairly normal upbringing. “Like most mental illnesses, it’s an individual thing to each person,” says Jim.

“What I see during the most intense attacks are gangs of people trying to attack me or kill me. ... Or hear people saying they’re going to kill me.”

Psychosis appears in media all the time – films, TV, games – but very rarely sympathetically.

‘Psychos’ are killers, evil people: think of films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Jim went into video game journalism as a career, and there he saw his condition depicted frequently. There were the comically murderous ‘Psychos’ of the Borderlands series, the terrifying psychiatric inmates of Outlast, and Scarecrow’s psychosis-inducing gas in Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Jim never saw psychosis portrayed as an illness rather than a character flaw. He felt shame about his condition, to the point that he had never revealed it to his parents.

“We’re close,” he says, “but there are some things I just wouldn’t want to share with them, just in case they worry about me, really.”

However, in 2017, Jim finally found a game that seemed to portray psychosis as he felt it.

Developed by Ninja Theory, creators of Heavenly Sword and Devil May Cry, Hellblade: Sensua’s Sacrifice follows a Pict warrior, Senua, as she makes a dangerous journey to save the soul of her dead lover.

Ever since I had an episode of psychosis myself, I wanted to do something meaningful with that

So far so standard. What makes the game different is that Senua hears voices that try to belittle her and misdirect her. The frightening mythical enemies she faces are implied to be psychotic manifestations of her inner anguish. It was a very conscious attempt by the team at Ninja Theory to make a realistic and sensitive depiction of psychosis.

“I had a friend who had a psychotic episode,” says Tameem Antoniades, the game’s director. “They would talk about how they could hear voices... and I realised I knew nothing about [psychosis]. The more I read about it, the more I was aghast and amazed by how powerful the experiences were. I thought, ‘Wow, this is something you could portray really well in a video game.”

That friend who’d had the psychotic episode was Melina Juergens, who went on to play Senua via motion-capture.

“Ever since I had an episode of psychosis myself, I wanted to do something meaningful with that,” says Juergens. “When Hellblade came along, I thought, ‘This is my opportunity.' ... With every scene I played, I tried to connect to my real life experiences to get those emotions across.”

Like Jim, Melina had struggled to explain the condition to her family. “It’s a topic that’s so difficult…but I really want to open up about it to help other people.” She won a BAFTA Games Award for her performance.

Tameem and his team put a lot of effort into making sure the depiction of psychosis was accurate, asking people who’d had psychotic episodes to help advise them.

“When we initially got the actors to record the voices [in Senua’s head]….we would play it back to the group and they said, ‘No, that’s not right at all,’” says Tameem. “We had a good voice and an evil voice. That was way too simple. ... They talked about how some voices are external and some are internal.”

So committed were they to accuracy, that they decided enjoyment was secondary to realism. “In the middle of development, we decided that we’re not going to make this fun,” says Tameem. “Games can be more than just games. They can be experiential simulations”.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice received universally positive reviews.

Jim wasn’t actively looking to relive his psychotic episodes through video games, which he considers his escape.

“I like to play games like Crash Team Racing,” he says. “I don’t want a game that picks into my mind. ... But I came to this as a Ninja Theory fan. I loaded up the game and... [straightaway] the voices are starting to come in”.

Jim was hooked.

“I was locked in,” he says. “There are people to whom I’ll say, ‘If you want to understand what I feel or see, have a go on this.’”

The game had such a deep impact on Jim that it gave him a way to talk about psychosis in a way he couldn’t before. He wrote an article, for the games website Kotaku, detailing what the game meant to him and how it helped him make sense of his own psychotic episodes.

It even made the prospect of talking to his parents less frightening.

“I’m now probably the most confident I’ve been in two years,” says Jim. “Maybe I could take a pizza round one night and make the big announcement.”

To hear the full story, listen to the episode Jim: Fight, Flight or Freeze on the This Game Changed My Life podcast.