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(NewsNation) — In 2022 an entire family disappeared and while they were found safe, they still question what led to a psychotic break that resulted in their disappearance.

The Cirigliano family disappears

Tony Cirigliano was calm when he called 911 just after midnight on a Sunday in October in 2022.

“It’s related to September 11 and people want to erase me from the face of the Earth,” he told the dispatcher. “I’m a Christian. I just need some help and then the U.S. government will take it from here.”

Just 24 hours after the 911 call, the Cirigliano family was gone. Tony, his wife Suzette and their sons Brandon and Noah were nowhere to be found. Suzette Cirigliano’s mother, who lived with them and has dementia, was found wandering in the neighborhood.

The mystery of the missing family captivated armchair detectives and the publicity led a gas station clerk in Michigan’s upper peninsula to recognize the family, 300 miles away from home.

Six hundred miles and six days later, a hotel clerk in Wisconsin recognized the family as well and police found them safe and unharmed.

Tony Cirigliano began having paranoid delusions

The case was closed. But for the family, memories remain.

“All I had in my mind was just to get away and head north,” Tony Cirigliano said.

He remembers the fear and confusion of those days most clearly.

“I thought maybe that somehow I was the devil, and I asked God, if I was the devil, to just burn me to a crisp right now. Yelling at the sky,” he said.

Cirigliano said he was crying out in pain, asking his wife if he was the devil.

“He was not in his right mind,” Suzette Cirigliano said. “He was not well.”

At the age of 51, Tony Cirigliano was experiencing a psychotic break for the first time.

“When your mind fails you, it’s kind of an odd thing. It wasn’t like I was hearing voices,” he said. “It seemed like my voice that I’m used to, the internal talking that you’re familiar with, but it was just saying crazy stuff.”

He thought the world was going to end by a meteor strike, something he says he can laugh about now. The family reached out to the media to tell their story to bring attention to the still-stigmatized issue of mental health.

But there is another factor as well.

Mad honey poisoning

A few months before the family disappeared, Cirigliano bought a jaw of raw honey off Amazon.

“When I ordered it off my mobile phone, I couldn’t really read the letters. It looked like something I had purchased before,” he said.

But it wasn’t. Cirigliano didn’t realize that right away and began adding the honey to his daily yogurt, a teaspoon or two each day.

“I didn’t feel very good,” Cirigliano said. “I was having heart palpitations, and I thought it might be the honey.”

That’s when he noticed that instead of his usual brand, the honey had a Russian label. He came across something online called “mad honey” when he looked into it.

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Mad honey is produced when bees feast on the toxic nectar from Rhododendron plants, mostly in Turkey and Nepal.

The honey is known and prized for its intoxicating effects as well as being used in traditional medicine. Social media also raised the profile of mad honey after a video of a super chill, honey-drunk bear in northern Turkey.

In people, mad honey poisoning is rarely fatal but causes symptoms ranging from low heart rate and blood pressure to confusion, agitation, vomiting, dizziness and, in very rare cases with high doses, hallucinations.

“I think it was about half empty before we dumped it out, so that’s how much I had of whatever it was,” Cirigliano said.

The honey he bought was not sold or labeled as mad honey and the New Jersey distributor told NewsNation affiliate WOOD that there’s no way its Russian-imported honey was contaminated with grayanotoxins, the poisonous compound in mad honey.

The FDA also said it has had no complaints against the distributor.

But the Ciriglianos are not convinced.

“That’s when the problem began,” Cirigliano said. “[I] started having a lot of unusual thoughts, vivid dreams, strange behaviors. My poor wife went through a lot.”

Suzette Cirigliano said her focus was on her husband.

“We were just trying to figure out the best way to get him help,” she said.

Seeking psychiatric help

When Tony Cirigliano called 911 to plead for help himself, police in Fremont, Michigan, did a welfare check and determined the family was not in imminent danger.

Cirigliano disagrees with that assessment.

“I was reading Revelation, which was pretty heavy stuff, and just misinterpreting,” he said.

He also believed people were trying to kill him because he knew something about 9/11.

In the middle of the night, just one day after the 911 call, Cirigliano woke his family.

“He turned, his eyes popped open, he looked right at me and said we need to leave and we need to leave now,” Suzette Cirigliano said.

Tony Cirigliano woke his sons, 21-year-old Brandon and 17-year-old Noah, as well. Suzette Cirigliano said she never felt threatened by her husband and neither did her sons.

When her mother, who had early dementia, refused to leave with the rest of the family, they reasoned she would be okay at home because Tony’s mother would be stopping by soon.

Cirigliano insisted his family leave their cell phones behind to prevent being tracked. That’s why Brandon Cirigliano tried to use a phone at the gas station where they were first spotted.

He wanted to call his grandmother because he missed her.

But the call didn’t go through because he didn’t know you had to press 1 before dialing the number.

A week after they fled, a Wisconsin hotel clerk recognized the family from the news. Suzette Cirigliano and the boys were relieved because they wanted to go back home.

They also wanted to get help for Tony Cirigliano, who ended up being institutionalized for about three weeks. He was put on anti-psychotic drugs and placed in six months of court-ordered outpatient therapy.

What happened to Tony Cirigliano?

In his discharge summary, Newaygo County Community Mental Health reported that Cirigliano had safely tapered off his medication, had no additional episodes and no longer met the criteria for severe, persistent mental illness.

The report also noted that he suffered what appeared to be a psychotic break triggered by over-consumption of mad honey, which contained brain-altering neurotoxins.

However, the psychiatric hospital where Cirigliano stayed had a different diagnosis, saying he had bipolar disorder.

Cirigliano notes that the hospital spent less time with him than the community mental health facility.

Dr. Bibhas Singla, a psychiatrist who was not part of Cirigliano’s treatment, said mental health diagnoses are complex and paranoid delusions are a common symptom of mania.

“A lot of bipolar can first present with mania and then mania has paranoid delusions as one of the symptoms as well,” Singla said.

The Ciriglianos said they will never know for sure what caused Tony Cirigliano’s psychosis.

They dumped the bottle of honey without having tested it after labs told them testing for toxins would cost thousands of dollars and might not work.

Now, Cirigliano is back to work full-time as an IT specialist, and everyone, including Suzette’s mother, is doing well.