THE paranoid delusions which took hold of Jordan Brodie Miller when he strangled his girlfriend to death in the early hours of June 20, 2020, were most likely brought on by a drug-induced psychosis, a jury has been told.
In his evidence on Monday, Professor David Greenberg, a highly qualified psychiatrist and professor of forensic psychiatry, said Mr Miller did not qualify for a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Professor Greenberg said that Mr Miller may qualify for that diagnosis in years to come, if he were to have another psychotic episode with lasting, residual effects, including a deterioration in his ability to function.
"In my opinions only with the passage of time can the diagnosis of schizophrenia be excluded," he said, but he did not currently, nor at the time of Ms Wardle's death two years ago, meet the diagnostic criteria.
The jury in the murder trial of Jordan Brodie Miller are being asked to determine what caused the then 20-year-old university student to lose touch with reality and, in a psychotic state, strangle his 18-year-old girlfriend to death at a home at Metford in 2020.
He has pleaded not guilty to murder. His case is that he was suffering his first episode of schizophrenia at the time making a defence of mental health impairment defence available to him.
Mr Miller had formed the belief his girlfriend, Emerald Wardle, was a "demon" who was "sucking the life out of him", the jury heard on Monday.
Mr Miller also thought he was trapped in a "coma or matrix" and the only way to save himself was to kill himself or kill Ms Wardle.
Mr Miller told Professor Greenberg that he was in an "acid psychosis" at the time of the incident, having taken an acid tab, or LSD, nine days earlier.
"I was stuck in this drug-affected state, I was in a paraoid state, over thinking about things, false things I thought were real," he said.
He believed he was in a matrix, that he had an "ego death experience", as well as thinking he had a chip in his head and would be blow up.
"I had paranoid thoughts that she was a demon and I thought I was killing a demon and I strangled her," he told the professor.
"She was just laying in bed ... all I can remember is strangling for a couple of minutes. I vomited in the toilet. I rang a number Benestar. I told them I killed a demon. They told me to ring the police." Following his arrest, Mr Miller said he continued to hear demonic voices speaking to him, and felt that Emerald, his former girlfriend and victim, was trying to communicate with him via the radio.
Two months later, however, those symptoms had fully dissipated and he had not reported any symptoms for two years since, Professor Greenberg said.
If he was in a drug-induced psychosis the disorganised thoughts would persist for a period of usually up to a month, or less, he said.
But if there was a primary mental illness the symptoms would persist for much longer periods of time, Professor Greenberg said.
"In this instance his symptoms ceased after a period of up to two months." The trial continues in the Newcastle Supreme Court.
