A Path With Heart

Suicidal

2012-02-03T13:06:00.003Z

Oh yeah. Oh joy. Great stuff.

This isn't the desperation of intense pain and sickness that feels unendurable for one more second, so DO IT NOW (and I've been there, and the memory of somehow surviving each horrific moment sends fear shooting through me), it is calmer and more rational than that, and therefore almost scarier. I just don't want to live. It seems a logical and inevitable conclusion to everything I have experienced. I think clearly and unemotionally about having the cat put to sleep so he isn't left for someone else to deal with. I consider my options.

It's just that this illness, or whatever it is, has taken so much from me. It has taken everything that ever has or ever might give my life meaning. My creative inspiration and my cognitive function. All gone. Any plans I might have made, desire I had, or interest or pleasure or enjoyment, all disappear, all disappear into the distance. I am left feeling small and cold and blank.

My support worker thinks she can heal me with affirmations and angels. She tells me to repeat "I am love" and light a candle every day.

My psychologist (who doesn't really approve of support workers because he thinks they can infantilise people) relates it all to my childhood and experiences I had growing up. It sounds plausible while he is saying it but afterwards the logic of it deserts me. He says he will ask the crisis team to phone me.

The crisis team. They will phone me. Or I could of course call them. But the last three times I saw the crisis team I ended up in hospital under threat of section. And that just isn't an option right now. Somehow I must find a way to either get through this alone, at home, or I must make that final choice and carry it out.

I am just tired. I have been ill on and off my whole adult life and some extra, and the probability of my existence ending with suicide must be high. So why prolong it? That is how I am thinking. And I know that things can get much worse than this. Why wait around for that to happen? The civilisation is trying to kill me anyway, why not just comply? Maybe it is even meant to be this way?

Oh these trains of thought are so tempting and persuasive, taking me down into the depths where my death doesn't really matter, where indeed I might as well be already dead. Do I have the energy or will to fight? I just don't know. I suspect I will endure for the moment, because I'm not sure I have it in me to be decisive, but I make no promises beyond that.

Neutrality

2012-01-25T19:20:00.002Z

That's my state right now. I seem to have recovered from my episode of sickness, and I entirely blame the carbamazepine. It has made me question what I'm doing every day when I swallow down those sweet amti depressants and anti psychotics. Yet I still keep right on swallowing them. That's what fear will do to you.

I am nothing right now. I keep reassuring myself that at least I'm not creating bad karma. I mean, I'm not mired in negativity or doing any active harm to any person, and that includes myself. Apart from the inevitable harm I do as a member of this destructive civilisation.

And suddenly it hits me that it is all *real*. There is no safe place or person that makes it all all right. There is just me, and my thoughts, and my non-thoughts.

So I wait. I wait for this state to pass as I waited for the sickness (was it depression?) to pass. What comes next? Something will. I half hope it will be ecstacy. But know also how hard that can be to cope with.

I'm thinking about jacking in the conservation group. Because this is a group mostly of men and the conversatioin gets rowdy and crude and I don't like it. Maybe all these people have "experienced mental distress" but that doesn't mean they are like me.

And I'm ambivalent about the support worker. It was helpful when I felt so sick, but now I am better I question whether I actually want it. She takes me shopping, and my house is full of food now, but I still live on bread and cheese and fruit. It's my default setting, should I struggle to change it? People tell me I should do x or y - give up coffee and smoking, drink less wine, eat nutritiously - but I have done these things and noticed no impact on my mood. At one point this last summer I was taking loads of supplements, but I stopped taking them at some point and I got high, and the absence of them didn't bring me down. So what good were they doing? I've got high living the way I do and I've got low living the way I do. I'm not sure you can blame the substances.

I'm just chasing down this internal myth that somehow there is something I could be doing, some program I could be following, that could bring me real healing. And I have failed to find it.

My social worker always emphasises anxiety in her refelctions to me, because she's an anxious person. I'm sure she thinks I'm more anxious than I absoltuely am. My psycholotgist still insists there are triggers to my moods and argues that I'm intelligent enough to eventually work them out. My suppor worker pushes me to eat, beacuse that's her thing, she likes food. And what about me in all this?

I spoke to the psychologist about the electrodes,and he said maybe it's not so far from the truth,in that you can drasticallly effect children by how you treat them without the need for actual alien brain surgery.

And sometimes i feel rumblings of a sickness far and deeper. And rewheel back reluctantly to all my prevoius diagnoses of dissociative disorder. So many people thought I had DID. Yet so many of my sypmtoms have been controlled by medicaiton, and that shouldn't happen in the dissociative person. Or have I just been repressing all this time?

No, I may not qualify as *fine* right now, but I am OK. I just await the next adventure from the electrodes. I want to feel on fire, to be able to communicate, to be full of ideas and activities. Instead I spend my days on the sofa with a hot water bottle, barely thinking. ANd take my nightly overdose of sleeping tablets, and yes, at some point i'm going to have to address that, but it keeps me well, to sleep. And I want to stay well.

A rambling post. A rambling mind. I've taken those sleeping pills and soon I will be unconscious and I welcome that, I really do. It will be hard to give that certainty of sleep up, and unravel, as I do without sleep.

But I'm ok.

Even in sleep

2012-01-19T12:01:00.002Z

I still keep dreaming about being mad. It doesn't really make sense to dream you are hallucinating, because what is a dream anyway? But nonetheless I keep dreaming about the horror of a mind spinning out of control.

I'm not very well. I don't know if it is the residual effects of my encounter with carbamazepine or a more natural cycle, but my mood is low and my brain keeps playing tricks on me, turning noises into whispering words and words into noises. Waiting for a prescription in the pharmacy on Monday I craned forward, anxious I wouldn't recognise my own name when it was called. In the supermarket everyone looked like someone I knew and my vision kept distorting, wobbling and flickering and turning into particles. And I wouldn't have managed to go to either pharmacy or supermarket unless my support worker had taken me.

I have shut down. I can't think, or concentrate, I can't read. I am reduced to lying on the sofa, with the television playing programmes I can't follow. I am in survival mode. I feel genuinely disabled right now. And all I can do is list small achievements - I put the bin out, I cleaned my teeth, I brushed my hair - and wait for this state to pass. I see the psychologist tomorrow, maybe he will have some wisdom for me, though I suspect not, and I'm not sure I have the energy to talk.

Poisoned

2012-01-15T16:33:00.002Z

That's how carbamazepine made me feel. Brain fuzz. Head ache. Vomit. God I felt ill! It didn't seem to have a good effect on my mental state either, I felt on the edge of anxiety, incapacity, and guilt over all my perceived present and previous sins. Though whether that was an actual effect of the drug or a consequence of feeling so physically rough isn't clear. Mind and body are so connected I can't always figure out which cause is primary.

I still feel a bit queasy but so much better, there is that gratitude that comes with not-sickness after sickness, not-pain after pain, that sudden appreciation of an ordinary state.

It has made me feel incredibly wary of trying any more medicines. I think maybe I am lucky to have found two substances that my body can tolerate and that seem, at least to some degree, to help. Maybe I should just accept that there isn't much improvement to be had any more from the pharmaceutical route and learn to live with the episodes I do have. Suck it up, basically.

My support worker is going to see the real me tomorrow. The house is a tip again. I have been quite unable to function. Oh well, she'd better get used to it. This is going to happen periodically, whatever kind of sickness I come down with. I'll just ask her to help me get on top of it again. And then I'll get on top of the rest of my life, or try to. Just carry on and cope. What other option is there? But for tonight I am going to take some benzos and go to sleep. Unconsciousness. Bliss.

(Though even in sleep there are dreams . . . )

Comments

2012-01-12T07:15:00.003Z

Just a quick note to say that I know I haven't been answering or acknowledging comments lately, but I do appreciate each and every one of them. A big thank you to everyone who takes the time to say something, and I will endeavour to respond in future.

Clearer in the morning

2012-01-11T19:25:00.003Z

Except that last night I dreamed I was deeply psychotic. It was terrifying. And to think about dreams and the layers of meanings they contain, and the vividness and detailedness of the worlds the mind creates (or accesses?)opens a dark hole it is dangerous to go down. I am trying avoid things that make me feel feel too far out and crazy right now.

I worked out that the problem with the psychologist is that I understand how my childhood set me up for depression and psychosis, and I understand how events can trigger low moods, and thoughts can perpetuate them. My psychologist always says that depression is about a sense of powerlessness and I can see that. But I don't understand what triggers the high moods, the crazy weeks of elation and confusion and agitation that morph into fast fear and psychosis. That's where my electrodes theory comes in, and I cling to it stubbornly because it explains so much of my life. This is something to discuss with him.

I saw the consultant today, and I am to start on a mood stabiliser, carbamazepine. Just at a low dose for now. I would like to stay just about where I am mood wise, and go neither up nor down. At times I feel precarious, I had a day at the weekend I was definitly verging on too high, and I feared another episode was beginning. But I am ok now. I feel busy in my life, with many appointments, and some extra work I am doing at the stables, and my support worker coming. I have failed to do my homework, which was to wash the floor, because I just had to have a sleep this afternoon. I have not been busy for a normal person, only for me, and it makes me tired, mentally as much as anything. I need time to catch up with myself, I can't be on the go all the time, I need times of peace and rest.

Consultant appointments always make me realise how for them it is just a job, they have their lives and they come to work and see various people and prescribe medications for them, and then bye bye until the next time. For me this illness, and managing it and living with it and despite it, *is* my job. I never get away from it. I hope it is going to be a good 2012. I hope the drugs stop me going either too high or too low. I have plans and I hope I will achieve them. I hope I won't end up in hospital. I am glad I have the support worker, she is a new energy in my life, and I like her and the range of things I can talk to her about. I once said to my old support worker "my life is so empty" but it isn't empty now, it is almost too full. But at least I feel as though I am living, and as long as I don't think too hard about what dreaming means, hopefully I will be OK for a while.

Don't fuck around

2012-01-06T18:05:00.005Z

Shall be my new mantra. I'm back on 750mg amisulpride. I shall just take my medication as prescribed and see what happens. I was good over Christmas and New Year but then I could feel something slipping in my mind, subtle but definite. Now of course I think that the meds are making it worse because I feel all confused and agitated tonight. Then I want to stop taking them all. But no, I do quite enough fucking around with zopiclone and benzos, and yes, at some point I probably need to address that. But hey, I like to sleep. And I've made an appointment to see the nurse about stopping smoking. And I should probably cut down on caffeine too. And take vitamins, and do yoga and eat healthily all the time. Would that make me well? Wouldn't change the world I live in would it?

I'm sure seeing the psychologist shouldn't make me *more* confused. But it does. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's trying to fit these overwhelming episodes into his model of emotional reactions. I CAN'T FIGURE OUT THE TRIGGERS! He assures me they are there but I'm damned if I can find them. So I feel frustrated and inept. Maybe I was right when I thought I wasn't human. Maybe I was right when I thought I had electrodes in my head and they were causing the experiences. Because there seems no reason I can find why I went so high and crazy. I need to find an explanation of my life that makes sense to me, and enables me to move on with it. The psychologist doesn't seem to be helping me to do that. I think I want to stop seeing him, yet I'm scared to, because I know I'm lucky to have psychological support, and what if I get ill again?

Meanwhile I have this new support worker. She talks about reiki and angels and cleans my microwave and cooks me a meal. It's weird. Suddenly there is this new person in my life, and really *in my life*, making me clean my fridge and have a shower, giving me homework, taking me shopping. It's good, I think. I feel a sense of relief because I know whatever happens with my mental health the house won't become an overwhelming mess again.

With the increased medication I'm back to feeling sedated, but my mood was starting to drop and it seems better now. It's just that I feel like I don't know what the fuck is going on. Does anyone know what the fuck is going on? I have to figure out what to do about the psychologist, because somehow it just isn't working. Then I see the psychiatrist next week and she'll have a different perspective again. Maybe I just see too many people. Argh! I don't know what to do. And sometimes it just feels too difficult, trying to work out whose opinion I should trust, what I should do about medication, whether therapy is right for me. These are questions I'm not qualified to answer and yet no one else can answer them either. So I'll just argh some more and pace a little and zopiclone myself to sleep and maybe everything will be clearer in the morning.

A mixed up post, from a mixed up me. Welcome to 2012 in my world.

2011

2011-12-31T17:04:00.003Z

I started 2011 convinced I had recovered. I end it unconvinced that recovery is even possible, at least as I had previously conceived it, in that forever after kind of way.

I can clearly be well. I was well a year ago and I am well right now - my mood is normal and I have no other symptoms. I feel increasingly psychologically healthy, as though I have healed now from most of my childhood.

But I still have recurring problems with psychotic symptoms and my moods. I had two hospital admissions in 2011. Yes, this last time I didn't get sectioned and was allowed to leave after a few days, and that could be called a kind of progress, because I could have got myself sectioned so very very easily, and then I might still be there, which is a terrible and scary thought.

But we're still talking about illness severe enough to be hospitalised and/or sectioned for. That's what I'm dealing with here.

I shouldn't fuck around with my medication. That's something I've learned this year. It's an issue I struggle with, as my blog bears witness, because I'm probably philosophically inclined to be against medication. There's a huge debate about the nature of mental illness and the appropriate remedies for it, and my existence is lived in the territory of that debate. But experience has shown me that, however reluctantly I admit it, medication works for me. It's not a complete solution, but it helps. I demonstrated that quite clearly to myself this year when I stopped taking the amisulpride and within a couple of weeks I was struggling with the old problems with my thinking, getting all broken and disjointed, chanting and repetitive, unable to form words. Amisulpride takes that away.

Whether stopping the amisulpride and then, having reintroduced it, trying to reduce it, precipitated my most recent episode isn't clear. But I suspect it didn't help. I know that my extreme depression earlier in the year was almost certainly caused by citalopram withdrawal. It was as though every cell in my body was screaming for the drug. I don't even want to think about the implications of that, I just know that I never seriously contemplate coming off citalopram. And it's written in my notes now, that no matter how high I appear, my citalopram shouldn't be stopped. I just hope the doctors stick to that. It scares me, to be in the hands of doctors, like the hospital consultant who so recently increased the amisulpride to 750mg without a second thought, plunging me into deep sedation. I want to be more in control of my medication this year. I want to talk to my psychiatrist about having a flexible prescription, so that I can increase the dosage when things are dodgy and then reduce it again when things even out. And I'm still wondering whether it would be worth adding a mood stabliser. Not that I want to take more medication, but if it helps avoid some of that absolute losing-it-rapid-thoughts-ecstacy-and-agitation-cannot-function then it would be possibly worthwhile.

I've seen the psychologist in rather a stop-start fashion this year. I'm well - I stop seeing him - I'm ill - I start seeing him again. Has it helped? I don't know. I have this sense that there isn't much he can aid me with. As I said earlier, I feel I have healed from most of the wounds of my childhood. I am the person that I am - I'm naturally solitary and not subject to strong emotions - and I'm ok with that. I think I'm a good enough person. I have enough relationships for my needs, and my main priority is *being*, not *achieving*. I mean that I think I could live a good life without being brilliant at anything, without ever acquiring recognition, without ever even working, maybe even with having periods of instability and illness. And maybe that's the definition of recovery I've been searching for. So maybe I *am* recovering, even though I suspect I will again in the future find myself depressed or high or psychotic.

This came up recently because I had a letter from the psychotherapy service, informing me that I was still on their waiting list, which I didn't even know. Do I want therapy, should they consider me well enough now for therapy? I wonder what we'd talk about. I already sense the psychologist searching for explanations that aren't there. I wish they *were* there, because my illness seems a mystery to me, I am left facing an uncertain future with few weapons against whatever storms may come. But I suspect that most of my problems are existential, not psychological. My "psychosis" seems always to be about meanings, and the nature of things, and the insanity I see in the culture around me. It is deeply philosophical. It is nothing less than an examination of the question - how do I live my life?

How do I live my life? Well, for the moment I drink wine and take anti psychotics. Tomorrow I have to do some studying for my OU course, and visit a friend. Beyond that, I have absolutely no idea. Except I need a shower at some point. And my support worker is coming on Monday, and she's good, she's going to get me organised. And since I have found a reliable online source of zopiclone I won't be awake to see the new year in, so I wish everyone who reads this a good evening and a happy 2012. Take care!

Time

2011-12-27T12:20:00.002Z

My perception of time varies with my illness. When I was in the hell of depression and citalopram withdrawal, in hospital back in March, time seemed to hardly move at all and each moment seemed unendurable. I took to setting off the stopwatch on my mobile phone and staring at the seconds ticking away, reassuring myself that time *does* pass.

But when my thoughts are very fast and fragmented so is time. Days pass and I am so busy being driven here there and everywhere that there hardly seems enough time to do everything I'm moved to do. Or I am so busy surviving, swimming through the busy ocean of my thoughts, that it all goes very quickly. How is there time to shower or eat or tidy the house? I have to pace and rock and bang my head against the wall.

Then when I am well, as I seem to be right now, time passes smoothly but there suddenly seems to be a lot of it. Days expand, it becomes possible to *do* things. It leaves me a little bemused if I am honest, it is such an odd feeling.

Because I do seem to be well right now. I am certainly not depressed, as I feared I was becoming. Reducing the medication has taken away the problem of sedation, but I haven't got ill yet. If I do start getting more symptoms I shall increase the medication again, but only slightly, not to 750mg. I think that was just too much.

The psychologist said he thinks I'm recovering, but then he thought I had recovered this time a year ago, and would never need services again, so I don't entirely believe him. We talked about recovery. He said it had been turned into a model but really it was whatever you wanted it to be, whatever it meant to you personally. But my problem is that I don't trust my mind to stay well. I've had two major episodes this year, is it any wonder I doubt my long term stability?

But I have a shiny new new support worker now, so at least my house is going to be organised! She came in this morning and said, right let's start in this corner, and two hours later I almost don't recognise the place. I think she might be exactly what I need. So I plan to begin the new year with a glass of wine in a warm and tidy home and aim to keep it that way. That at least would be *something*.

Enough!

2011-12-22T18:13:00.002Z

You know when you've just that very moment woken up and you're not really awake yet. I feel like that ALL THE TIME! As though I'm thinking through fog, as though everything is very far away. I can't do it anymore.

I talked to my social worker about reducing the amisulpride. She said I shouldn't do it because I'd recently had an episode where my thoughts were unmanageable, and if they were manageable right now I should stick with it, especially with it being the Christmas period when there is less support available, but she'd spoken to the consultant and she wasn't against reducing the dose in the future (I see her in January). This of course is the safe approach but the language strikes me as odd. Are thoughts to be "managed"? Then who is the self that does the "managing"? What *are* thoughts anyway?

Meanwhile I'm getting myself in a muddle. Maybe my current fug isn't a side effect but the onset of depression. I don't think I'm psychologically or emotionally depressed right now - but if you looked at my life from the outside I'm not displaying much energy or goal oriented behaviour. I'm struggling to do much at all and I'm just scared this is the beginning of something, and reducing the medication won't make any difference anyway.

Oh I just exist in a plane of confusion. My brain does those crazy flip-flops. Ill, not ill. And sometimes I feel like I'm spinning out so far and fast I want to hold onto something. Life just doesn't make sense to me. None of it. Not chairs, not stars, not minds, not houses, not infinity, not Christmas, not time. I could just sit in one place and rock and bang my head against the wall. IT'S ALL TOO MUCH. I feel both excitable and overwhelmed. Give me a quiet room and I will rest, and resist the crazy pull of energy. But then there are things I want to do, really, actually, and in *this* world. How do I do it? How do I walk this razor's edge?

In other news I met a new new support worker. She seemed a more likely fit than the previous effort. At least she had some spark to her. She's coming back on Saturday to take me shopping as a trial run to see if we can work with each other. I've decided that I'm going to go with it for at least six weeks and see how it feels. It may be that that much support is just too intrusive for me, but at the same time I would dearly love to live in a more organised environment. I just think it would be easier for me to "manage" my thoughts and all if everything were a bit cleaner and less cluttered.

I didn't take the full dose of amisulpride tonight. I just need to see what happens, I can always start taking it again. This is how I reassure myself, but I can already feel myself falling into the never-ending stream of images and ideas. There is some kind of bubbling over. I'm losing it. I've been losing it for weeks now and I haven't yet got it back. I see the psychologist tomorrow. He will ask me how I am and I haven't a clue how I will answer.

Dopey Dope

2011-12-17T16:25:00.002Z

The consultant at the hospital increased my amisulpride from 500mg to 750mg. I thought that seemed like a big increase, and it sure FEELS like a big increase. I've never noticed amisulpride being particularly sedating before, but at this dose I'm sleepy and dozey. Oh I don't feel *bad*, I feel quite nice really, all warm and fuzzy. Fine in its place. But kind of getting in the way of my plans to save the world and all that stuff.

Seriously, I have things I want and need to be doing. I don't want to spend my life on the sofa drifting through dreams, not really able to grasp hold of any thoughts. I'm contemplating reducing the drug down again, but of course that brings with it the fear of being ill, when I've just recently demonstrated how fragile my mental state can be. But it bothers me that the doctors only ever put anti psychotic doses UP. And I'd got over the worst of my crisis BEFORE the increase. So is it really necessary? I just don't know. It was so easy for that doctor to decide to put the dose up, and scribble it on the medication card, and then forget all about it, but this is my *life* we're talking about here. The very nature and quality of it.

What I *should* be doing tonight is studying for my Open University course. What I shall probably be doing is sleeping in front of the television. I can feel it now, the velvety temptation to just curl up for a little while and close my eyes. My whole existence could pass this way. And that should scare me, if I could rouse myself to be scared.

The Afterwards

2011-12-13T13:05:00.002Z

I am in the strange place that is the afterwards of a severe episode. I have only vague memories of the last six weeks or so. I feel confused, bewildered, as though I have washed up on a strange shore. I am not entirely sure what to do with myself. I know I am OK. My mood is OK, my thoughts are OK, I am no longer having strange experiences, I can no longer feel the electrodes in my head (*do* I have electrodes in my head, or is that just part of the illness?), I am no longer doing battle with the entire civilisation. I am just me, ordinary, human, feeling ill from a cold I picked up on the ward, but no longer consumed by either elation or fear. And I feel like I need to untangle it all but I don't where to start.

I don't know why I got ill, though probably messing around with my medication didn't help, and I don't know why I got better. I think maybe hospital *was* useful for me this time, though I hate to admit that, it gave me a small space away from my world and my responsibilities, it got me eating and sleeping again. I have been back there this morning to be officially discharged. I have to go again tomorrow, because I have an outpatients appointment with my consultant. I don't know what to say to her. I don't know how to explain what has happened. I don't know how to explain my life, that is the problem.

Well I fell off

2011-12-08T18:39:00.002Z

that tightrope I was walking. I have been in hospital for the last few days.

My memory does strange things, it becomes hard to have any clarity about what has been going on for me lately or how things got to where they are. I ended up in the hospital day room, doing a jigsaw I had done twice before on previous admissions, and the hospital is full of such memories for me, but I had no real sense of how I had come to be where I was.

On Monday the crisis team called and then came to visit. They must have been concerned about me from the phone call because I learned later they had already provionally booked a bed. They wanted me to go into hospital. I argued as hard and as well as I could. They phoned the consultant for advice, and it was very odd to hear myself described as "really quite deluded at present". It became clear that they were going to have me sectioned if I didn't go voluntarily, so I eventually agreed to go.

Once at the hospital I had to wait a long time to be admitted. The doctor who did the admission looked about twelve, but he didn't blink when I told him I had electrodes in my head. I eventually got to my bed, they gave me zopiclone but I didn't sleep, and consequently my mood was elevated the next day. Which eventually morphed into a confusing dream-like half sleeping half waking state. I was ready to leave on several occasions, having the urge just to run, but I knew there was a high chance I would be sectioned if I did, and I was really trying to avoid that. To be sectioned again would really screw my life up.

On Wednesday I felt scared and shaky but I did manage to eat something, which helped. I asked for discharge, arguing that although I knew I wasn't very well at present I would be much better coping with it in my own home. I saw a doctor who was very nice, very rational and persuasive, but the message was the same. I had to stay, and if I refused I would be assessed under the MHA. I wasn't sure I was detainable, but it was a huge risk to take. So I agreed to stay another night and a very good nurse said she would put my case to the consultant the next day, because I was being rational and cooperative and working with them.

That was today. The consultant agreed to let me go home if the community teams were happy to support me. So I have come home on leave. I am under strict instructions to eat, drink, sleep and engage with the crisis team and I have to return to the hospital on Monday for review. Depending on how things have gone over the weekend I will either be given more leave or have to go back in.

So I'd better make sure that things go well. I have so much in my life to fight for, and I know that hospital is not the right place for me long term though I do think it has helped this time. I have been eating and sleeping again. The overwhelming fear has left me. My mood is bouncing back to good, verging on elated tonight.

I just still have a lot to figure out. I don't know what happened really, to bring me to such a state. I don't know how I became so ill that I ended up in hospital again, and that I could have got myself sectioned so easily, that scares me. And I still hate that they have all the power, that they can lock you up if you don't comply. I still think the civilisation is trying to kill me but I feel determined to hang on to my soul. I am fighting, and fighting hard.

Tightrope

2011-12-03T09:41:00.002Z

Amonst the multiplicity of futures that extend from this present moment there must be at least *one* that doesn't end with me in hospital. I have a sinking sense of inevitability but I am trying to fight it.

I spoke to my social worker yesterday. She said she would tell the crisis team I would be phoning them. I said I was scared of going into hospital. She said that that might happen anyway and that working with the crisis team might actually make it less likely. I haven't phoned them. My social worker brought her appointment with me forward to Monday and I keep thinking I can wait until then. Have benzos, will survive.

I am also thinking about preparing an "emergency kit" just in case I do get taken into hospital. Cigarettes, coffee (they only have decaff on the ward), a decent jigsaw, a few books, and the clothes I would want washed and dried. And I'm pushing myself to do the things I would like to finish before an admission. An assignment for the OU course I'm doing, a pastel portrait of a dog for friends, the pot I'm making. And tidy the house so I don't then have to come home to a cold depressing mess. This is also a kind of reverse pyschology, because if the fear of hospital can push me to manage these things then clearly I am coping and don't need hospital. I'm really hoping this trick works.

Meanwhile it would be good if I could get more than three hours sleep without industrial quantities of zopiclone. And if I could shake this sickness that I feel as much in my body as my mind.

Fighting Delusions

2011-11-30T15:50:00.002Z

My brain keeps doing this confusing flip-flop - I'm enlightened/I'm ill/I'm enlightened/I'm ill. I had a moment of clarity this morning, smoking out the door in the dark as the stars still shone, when I saw that I am losing it quite badly at the moment. I banged my head against the wall and felt afraid.

The electrodes in my head are controlling my thoughts and sending me epiphany after epiphany. I am experiencing reality as holographic, this means that everything happens everywhere, so even the smallest event is a message, and equally I can influence the universe with my mind. I was talking to my cat this morning, telling him I loved him and please could he live a long life, and I became scared that I was therefore going to kill him with my thoughts. That's just one example.

I don't understand why this is happening. My anti-psychotic has only recently been increased. My mood is back to normal now, why am I feeling so crazy?

I feel I can see the many futures and I am trying to tread the path that keeps me out of hospital. I cling to the horse and the cat. I HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF THEM. As long as I am taking care of them everything else can go hang. I stare at the card with the crisis numbers on it. I contemplate phoning. I am just so scared of what might happen. And yet at some level - and this just shows how bad things are - it would be such a relief for someone to take away the responsibility for the horse and the cat, just for a while. And I hate myself for saying that.

In the battle

2011-11-28T14:32:00.002Z

between my mood and medication I have no idea who is winning. The amisulpride is trying to push me down and my brain is fighting back. This makes life very confusing.

Last night I decided I didn't want to be part of this world any more. The electrodes in my head were playing up and though my mood was good it just seemed that the best thing is to die. This morning I was tired, thick-headed, slow-thunk, even my bones ached. This is it, I thought, the crash has come. I left a message for my social worker because I realised that I didn't have the numbers for the helpline or the crisis team. I was actually contemplating using them, though I walk a terrible line between wanting help and not wanting hospital.

Now I seem to be perking up. Perhaps it was because my new support worker was quite so bloody useless I realised I would make a better support worker for myself than her. Oh, she's sweet enough, but she's not going to be right for me. I would have to tell her to tell me to have a shower, in which case I might as well tell myself. I kicked her out after an hour, she was supposed to stay for two.

I still don't think I want to be part of this world, that huge problem remains, and I'm still secretly nuturing a suicide plan, but I feel strangely cheerful now. Moods are just odd damn things. It's hard to integrate the extremes because they are each impossible to fully imagine or remember when in the opposite. And yet they're so definite and real, and I can't seem to talk myself into or out of them. Hell, I wish I could.

Should I drop the amiusulpride back down to 500mg? What will happen to my mood next? I really really don't want to get depressed, this morning was quite enough of a taste of that, but am I fooling anyone if I think I can avoid it? Oh to be able to just *function* in some kind of consistent way.

Weirdness

2011-11-24T17:16:00.002Z

. . . Werehorse experiences mood swings, which includes periods of extreme low mood and elation or "high energy". Werehorse has also experienced psychotic symptoms and dissociative episodes. Currently Werehorse is reasonably well at the moment but does require ongoing support to motivate and encourage her to maintain and develop her recovery and prevent relapse . . . her sleep pattern is erratic . . . Werehorse has become socially isolated . . . Werehorse has little experience of positive relationships outside of contact with the mental health services . . . Werehorse finds it difficult to organise daily household tasks and at times she struggles to carry out basic tasks . . . Werehorse's support needs are around encouragement and support to complete household tasks and to get out and about in the community, also encouragement to cook, eat and attend to her personal hygiene needs when she feels unwell.

It is always weird to read about yourself. How can I be the person depicted here, who needs all this support and also me as I experience myself, reading books, making art, thinking about meanings and the destructiveness of civilisation? Somehow I am both.

This is from my new file of support plans and timesheets. I finally met my new support worker today and she starts working with me on Monday. I will be seeing her for seven hours a week. That's a lot of time. I hope it is ok. She seemed nice, though rather young, but I have no idea what it will feel like to have that much support. And will she be able to deal with me? I did point out that there were times when I was unlikely to be quite so very chatty.

Having navigated the meeting rather well, I thought, seeing as just a little while earlier I'd been pacing up and down chanting "I'm losing it, I'm losing it", I then had my last visit from my old support worker. She told me to have a glass of wine and to remember not to even mention sleep at my next CPA. Ah, I do like her. I am sorry not to be seeing her anymore.

So, no, the crash hasn't happened yet. I've been overwhelmed by agitation and elation and struggling to function. These last couple of days have *not* been productive, though I have come up with a plan for the future of the planet, which, I guess, is something.

Up, down, sideways?

2011-11-22T17:11:00.003Z

How am I supposed to track my mood when I don't always know what my mood is, when it doesn't always fit into neat little boxes?

It's been fairly straightforward lately - high, or very high, nice and simple. But today, today I don't have a clue. Agitation, check, euphoria, some, suicidal thoughts, yes, some of those as well. So where do I put the dot for today?

I become obsessed with the best way of graphically representing my mood. I dream of squared paper and coloured codes and categories. It frustrates me that I can't solve this problem. This is the kind of project I could spend all night on. And what for? So the consultant can glance at it and put it to one side? But it's in my head now, and my brain is niggling away at it. Maybe a bar system could encompass a mixed state, maybe a separate line for the psychotic-type symptoms to see if they correlate with mood, could I use different symbols, and oh I need more than two dimensions . . . My categories are breaking down and I'm in mood tracker induced crisis!

But I am definitely coming down, even if I sometimes seem to be going up as well. I didn't do much today, I had little energy or desire for activity. My room is scattered with started projects. I suspect I will finish none of them. Now I'm jigging and fizzing but can't seem to function. I don't know what to do with myself tonight, sleep seems the best option, sleeping pill abuse may be the healthiest solution. Maybe tomorrow everything will be clearer.

I think I'm going to stop taking the increased dose of amisulpride, let's see if that can bring me back to happiness. But I doubt it. The rules of gravity apply to me too, and I fear I am heading for an almighty crash. I don't know if I can bear it. Yes, I confess I love euphoria, but it never lasts, and I am tired, so tired of dealing with this mood disorder.

Coming Down?

2011-11-19T18:50:00.003Z

I thought I was. Now I'm not so sure. Now I feel I have discovered the secret of human happiness. And the answer, of course, is wine! I don't get hang-overs anymore, I get high-overs.

Anyway. I saw my social worker on Wednesday. There has been some almighty fuck-up which means I need a *new* new support worker, so it's not happening yet. I start to doubt it ever really is. I mean, we have been talking about this since February at least. Am I ever going to get my eight hours a week?

But my social worker phoned my consultant to discuss the extent of my hallucinations, and my consultant recommended a small increase to my amisulpride. I don't know why I went along with this, must have been feeling compliant, though to be honest, when you start becoming unable to read because the words are lifting off the page and twisting through the air, things are getting bad. I have just spent much money on amazon and want to be able to actually read the books! They are important books! About civilisation and all that!

So I've been taking the increased dose and at first I thought it was bringing me down. I had two days where my mood could only be rated as "good". Indeed I even, through physical factors, felt mildy crappy yesterday. Now though I seem to be arcing upwards into space again.

I was scared of crashing. I am still scared of crashing. Of course, if I listen to my social worker I can avoid crashing entirely simply by deliberately believing that I will not crash. So maybe I *have* discovered the secret of human happiness and will stay like this for ever and ever. But experience and human intuition doubts the truth of this.

My appointment with the psychologist was cancelled because he was ill. I'm not sorry. I simply don't seem to understand what therapy is for. I had a crappy childhood and I'm over it. I have some generic problems in living and periodic alterations in mood, but I do NOT need extended lectures on sleep hygiene. There's so much wrong with sleep hygiene I don't even know where to start. I don't sleep in a bed. So what?! Does it really matter? Why does it seem to matter such a lot to the powers that be?

My social worker also told me that my current *official* diagnosis, ie the one that gets written on letters is unspecified mood disorder. This is ok. This is something I can live with. I still don't fully understand why I don't get a bipolar diagnosis seeing as I do experience such euphoria, but I also know that my peculiar personality makes me in many ways atypical. I once talked to a nurse in hospital who said "it almost sounds like bipolar except you don't spend lots of money". No, and I don't get hypersexual, and I talk more than normal *for me* but still not outside the normal range. So who knows really? And I don't want a bipolar diagnosis because then they might take away my driving license and that would really screw my life up.

Was this a boring post? It feels like it was. But I have taken wine and zopiclone so I won't care anyway for quite a while. Goodnight, everyone.

Heart paths

2011-11-15T17:49:00.003Z

I want to write about mysteries.

I want to write about the forces I perceive in the universe.

I have always felt I had a destiny.

Now I wonder if I am to be a prophet.

Something brought me to this house, to this space and time, and it wasn't me. It just carried me along. Mostly I got in the way. I have a history of making mistakes, getting the path wrong. Getting lost.

At the moment I am seeing depression and self-hatred as political. So many theories locate the problem in the individual. It is the chemicals in your brain, or it is the way you think. And the solution is to adjust you somehow, by drugs or therapy. But our society is insane, destroying the environment in search of economic growth and profit, that doesn't bring happiness anyway, or only to a few. And our society inculcates us with self-hatred, teaches us to view ourselves as objects, who can acquire skills and achievements, and can conversely also fail.

But what of the soul? Or if you don't want to sound religious, what of the simple life inside your body, that breathes and moves and feels? The true revolution must come from within, in the assertion that we and our subjective experience have value.

Take everything I say with a pinch of salt. I'm a mental patient. I've been hospitalised six times and sectioned three. I could be in hospital right now if I'd agreed to see the crisis team and told them what I'm thinking. I am a complete failure in terms of the social world, that is called "real", I am potential-destroyed-by-mental-illness personified. And I'm high right now. I'm struggling to function in the land of every day because of the surges and pulses from the electrodes in my head. But I believe they are messages that come from beings who wish to hasten human evolution. I have too often been overwhelmed by them, now I am attempting to rise to the challenge of speaking what they show me. And I feel I am on the right path.

But oh, what do I know? Tomorrow I meet my new support worker, who will spend eight hours a week with me, reminding me to shower, making sure I eat. How do I reconcile that version of myself with the esctacy that soars within me. I feel I am connected to the energy of the universe and it threatens to fry me. So I write, because I feel a need to express some of this stuff. Because the social worker tells me to write lists and tackle one job at a time and all this other advice, that is so eminently sensible and yet I want to reject it, I want to fly, I want to be on fire. I don't sleep normally, and I don't eat normally, I don't damn *live* normally, but does it matter?

I am sick of seeing myself through the lens of illness. Right now many of my concerns regarding diagnosis seem irrelevant, I wonder why I worried so much about what the system thought. I feel I am approaching enlightenment.

And yet I also know - though how can it seem so easy to forget? - that in the past this kind of elation has been followed by depression. By dumb despairing agony, by absence of anything resembling well-being, by endurance of moments that seem unendurable. I feel right now like I can fly forever, but I have been fooled before. And then will all I have said seem foolish pronouncements, when I can barely rouse myself from the sofa, when I feel lumpen and heavy, when I can stare at colour and not feel it, listen to music and not hear it?

There is something wrong with my brain all right, that it does this to me. I am tempted to go the GP again and ask for brain scans, but last time I did that it took me straight to hospital, do not pass go.

So I go on, wondering how long this episode, if it is an episode, will last, worrying what comes next.

And I still think I will kill myself, one way or another, in the end. Suicide is over-determined. There are too many thought processes that lead inevitably to that event. It is a strange thing to be euphoric and elated, with electricity blossoming in my blood and yet still be feeling I should die, but it is true. It is so clearly utterly irrational for me to continue to live. And the voices whisper that it will save the world, and who could resist such an imperative?

Am I very ill, or have I never been ill at all?

Me and medication

2011-11-11T18:13:00.004Z

I did it to myself and therefore deserve no sympathy even when I am dancing with the suicide demon. Maybe I'm just the stereotypical patient who stops taking meds and makes themselves ill. I stopped taking the amisulpride, then when I had started taking it again I began reducing it. I hadn't had a psychotic symptom for months. Now I am hallucinating like fuck.

But, and it is a very big BUT, an enormous awe-inspiring BUT, I feel alive again. Seriously, this summer I felt dead. Maybe that was depression, maybe that was the medication. How can I ever know? Oh, I had better days within it, but I spent an awful lot of time on the sofa doing nothing. I had minimal confusion and a brain that *could* think, in a rational way that I now struggle with, but NOTHING to think about. I became this dumb-headed consumer, just looking for ways to pass the time. It was horrendous.

Now I live in amazement and confusion and I FEEL things. My perceptions are acute, my thoughts whirl and overwhelm me but they are *interesting*. I feel IMPORTANT. Grandiosity? Maybe. But while I am not deluded that I am important in the so-called "real world" being in many ways the ultimate fuck-up who has never achieved anything, I feel that my struggles are important for the UNIVERSE.

So what is "recovery" anyway? I feel I am beyond and above the standard societal measures of achievement. I am away in ecstacy somewhere.

Now I'm back on the full prescribed dose of amisulpride will it bring me down again, will it turn me dull again? It doesn't seem to be doing so so far, maybe it will be like quetiapine which once reinstated after I had stopped it had minimal effect (and yes, I sense a pattern here. Obviously, it's all my own fault). But I was taking amisulpride throughout the last episode that landed me in hospital anyway. It's not licensed as a mood stabliser and I don't think it operates as such.

I'm scared of crashing of course. But last time I crashed so spectacularly because they abruptedly stopped my citalopram and I went into withdrawal. That was a hell I never want to revisit. Maybe this time it will be different. Maybe I'll have a few months at least of feeling good. That seems to have been the pattern in the past.

So here I am feeling guilty because I'm kind of mental but I'm liking it. The other worlds are real again and life without them seems meaningless. But I feel that I *should* want to be sane and stable and pursue the goals that other people find so important. Because as I am I'm unlikely to be able to hold down a job. But as I am on medication I'm unlikely to survive because the drabness kills my soul. The government should euthanise me. That would be the obvious solution, since I am unable to fit within the mould prescribed. I wouldn't object. My organs could be donated to those who desperately want to survive.

And yet at the CPA I said I wanted to try mood-stablisers. Do I really? This is all part of my confusion. The whole am I/aren't I ill, which my brain flip-flops over with astonishing rapidity. I wish someone had an answer, but my treatment team seem reluctant to give me any answers at all. I told my support worker that I would find it easier to reconcile myself to taking medication if I was actually diagnosed with a mental illness. Or I am beyond even psychiatric classification? I *like* that idea.

Meanwhile I drink red wine and wear a black shawl and feel ridiculously happy, even though I shouldn't be happy, because I am so obviously a failure in every way. To be happy anyway is a radical act. Maybe. And I'm not in hospital, which I could so easily be, it is a fine line I am walking. And I'm sure that deserves another glass of wine.

Two responses

2011-11-11T06:58:00.002Z

I said to my social worker "I keep thinking I need to die to save the world". "Mmm," she said, "that sounds like a difficult thought to have."

I said the same to my support worker and she said "That's not good. You need someone to come and see you."

Guess which response made me feel better?

I got angry and desperate with my social worker. I was trying to tell her I was in trouble RIGHT NOW, she tried to remind me that I have been doing more cooking.

My support worker is better in a crisis. She came, we had a direct conversation about whether I needed to be in hospital. She said I was poorly, she persuaded me to reincrease the medication I have been reducing, she reminded me to eat and helped me come up with a plan for the evening. I was calmer by the time she left.

Am I ill? I have been feeling ill, I have been feeling fragile, excruciatingly sensitive to all the noise and the chaos of the world, broken often by my own thoughts which will not march in straight lines and leave me unable to communicate.

I have turned down the crisis team for now. I do not think it would help to have near strangers come into my house and ask their clumsy questions and offer their frequently unhelpful advice. And I cannot go into hospital. I feel in my bones that hospital would be toxic for me right now. But I wish there was an alternative to hospital. A place of sanctuary, of warmth and healing, with activities to do if I felt the need to discharge energy, with people who would listen to my crazy rambling without immediately pushing me to distract myself from it.

It doesn't exist, so I must try to create it at home, I must find my own way. I need help but mostly that help does not exist. My support worker is sadly the exception to the rule.

I'M NOT ILL!

2011-11-07T14:09:00.002Z

I'm having some trouble organising my thoughts. I'm very high and hallucinating. Or I'm just seeing the world truly. If this is pyschosis why does it return the same way, the recurrence suggests some element of deep truth to me. I keep thinking I need to kill myself to save the world. Because I saw some reference to a study of recovery, and the measure of recovery was "working and having an active social life". And so I am pushed again into questioning what society perceives of as sane, which is in fact insanity multiplied and magnified. So maybe I'm not ill. Or I'm very ill. Maybe it's the time of year. I am having similar thoughts and experiences to this time last year. I am excited and ecstatic and exhausted. I have no idea how to live my life and I think I will never fit within this world. I have been suicidal through sheer pain but this is different, that is because it seems impossible to endure one more moment, this appears rational. In that it scares me. Do I phone the crisis team? But they will have one of two responses. It will be either take a walk and have a cup of tea, distract, distract, distract, when it is distraction I am sick of, or it will be hospital. I think I need to have a conversation with someone, but there is no one I can think of who would be able to hear me.

Do I really want a label?

2011-11-04T16:56:00.002Z

I had a CPA this morning. I had written a document in preparation for it, with a summary of my symptoms and a list of what I wanted. Was anything addressed? No, of course it wasn't! My questions remain.

Instead I got treated to a lecture on sleep hygiene. Yes, my current mood is elevated, no, I don't go to bed in a darkened room with a milky drink, but seriously, what about my deep philosophical concerns? What about my issues with diagnosis? Oh, apparently we can talk about them at my next CPA, which will be sometime next year. Do these people not understand that these questions and confusions are REAL for me, that they surround me and dramatically influence how I feel about my life and my self, that I live on shifting and uncertain ground and I need to discuss it?

I feel frustrated. I have an appointment with the psychologist next week and I fear he might be treated to a rant. My appointment with the psychiatrist has been brought forward to December, to discuss medication. I have said I want to try a mood stabiliser. I have mixed feelings about this, in so many ways I don't want to be any more medication, but at the same time my mood is often problematic, and those who see me regularly, such as my support worker, recognise this.

Perhaps more than not wanting to be on medication I don't want to be the one asking for it. I'd kind of like to be told I have a diagnosis and need medication for it. That's a confession, and I'm not proud of it.

I'm just trying to work out what I really want, what I hoped for from the CPA and why I felt very much alone with my experience after it. The psychiatrist said something that bothered me a lot - she said that she felt I was looking for a magic bullet medication. Am I? I don't think I am, I think I'm looking for a way to live a deep and inhabited life. And I'm still trying to work out whether I need medication to do this, or medication impedes it. I know that when I came off amisulpride the symptoms that came back were very hard to handle. Maybe I need to man up and handle them, maybe the only real way forward is through. I just don't know. Last time I saw the psychiatrist she said that it was all about costs and benefits and maybe the price of being able to be rational and communicate was a loss of creativity. And I guess that is exactly the question I'm asking - exactly what is sanity worth? And is there a better deal to be found than the one I currently have?

But what I want more than anything is to know whether what I experience could be called psychosis. Because it changes everything you see. If it *is* psychosis then I can say to myself "it's psychosis" and I can choose how to deal with it, whether by medication or alternative ways and understandings. But if it's not psychosis - and I've been told it's not - then WHY DO I EXPERIENCE WHAT I DO?! There must be a reason! This is why I asked (again!) for brain scans. This is why I am slipping in and out of believing I have electrodes in my head controlled by beings from another reality.

Or do I have BPD and what I really need to do is learn to accept that? That's another of the questions I asked. Because I know that there are groups and services for personality disorders that I could access if it were appropriate. But is it? I don't recognise anything of myself in what I read about BPD, but maybe I'm wrong? Again, this is an idea that changes *everything* about how I see myself and how I should approach my life.

And that's why I'm so hung up on diagnosis!

Mush

2011-11-03T19:54:00.003Z

My thoughts are so fast they are almost only energy.

I understand everything and nothing, sense only the pulsing and surging.

Tomorrow I have a CPA. It seems such a bizarre idea, that all these people should gather in a small room to discuss me and my life. How did I become this?

Current status:

2011-10-28T12:22:00.002+01:00

Immensely confused, with a rising mood.

Thanks for the comments on the last post. I feel it is time to update on where I am.

I am back on the amisulpride *for now*.

Initially I felt good when I came off it, my perceptions seemed more acute and my mind began to wake up and think about things. Unfortunately it woke to huge confusion about the whole issue of mental illness and medication. Still, I was alive.

Then the sickness and the headaches hit. More worryingly I began to have difficulties with the process of thinking, with my thoughts breaking into chaos and leaving me wordless. Then I started to hear voices. And have strange ideas about experiments and electrodes. All immensely familiar symptoms.

In the midst of all this I had a hastily arranged appointment with the psychologist and he suggested that I reinstate the amisulpride and then attempt to reduce it slowly. He said medication wasn't an either/or and it may be that I couldn't come off it completely but could find a balance at a lower dose that would control the symptoms and yet leave me a little less blank and unmotivated. So this is what I am doing. I am currently taking 450mg instead of 500.

And I feel quite good. I have been cleaning this morning. Yes, cleaning! I have energy and I have been able to act. But is this just because my mood is rising? What if the flat lack of motivation is not anything to do with the drugs but part of my illness? If I am indeed ill.

Soul-loss

2011-09-22T19:22:00.003+01:00

Still I cannot shake the sense that I have lost my soul. I don't think I can live this medicated life any more. It has too little meaning.

Creativity in some form or another has always been central to my experience of my self. This time last year I was in hospital, and I remember taking over one of the tables in the dayroom, making collages with magazines and glue, using the tin of wax crayons to draw picture after picture, painting canvases in the art group, wild and full of colour. I don't think I can live without creativity in my life. I don't think I can live without my deepest self.

I have lost so much in gaining sanity. So much that I contemplate suicide, not because I am in pain, but because meaning seems absent from life. I think it is time to stop taking the anti psychotics.

I'm aware it is risky. That the question remains open as to whether I can do this without requiring crisis teams and hospitals. But this is a good time. I am about to enter a period where I will have more support than I have ever had. I met with someone from the agency that will be working with me today, and I will have eight hours of support a week. Support to manage my house, to shower, to shop and cook and eat. Maybe with that support, and with my improved psychological health, I can do it this time. Be more myself, live with my own peculiar experience, and yet still manage not to fall into crisis. That will be the challenge of the journey.

I sense a moral issue. If I stay on anti psychotics I am more likely to be able to work. But if I feel like it is killing me? Because I do. And another moral issue - I fear that somehow in rejecting the central tenet of medication I forfeit my right to other support. Because I have, in a sense, chosen madness. But if this is really about choice and what an individual needs? Then maybe I am ok.

Anyone who reads this blog will be aware that my views on medication are varied and changeable, that I have veered from being afraid to stop taking them, grateful for my sanity, to wanting to test if I really even need them. But I had a defining moment the other day, when I realised how much I feel I have lost my soul, everything that makes me me.

So I think I am ready to voyage out into the unknown. I don't know how it will be. Maybe I will be fine. Maybe things will stay the same. That fear does plague me. I keep asking, is the way I am because of the anti psychotics, or would I be like this anyway? I have been like this before, I experienced months without creativity or meaning or joy. But that was when I was first on quetiapine, before I was switched onto the extended release version, when it seriously sedated me. Afterwards I had a relatively severe whizzy episode for a few weeks, and then things were mixed. Quetiapine never seemed an entirely effective anti-psychotic for me, though a thorougly effective sedative.

It is too late anyway. I have already stopped taking the amisulpride. I just could not bear it, the yawning emptiness of the days, the lack of anything that felt important or exciting or even real, present and vivid. I need to live more than anything else, I need to feel alive.

The conversation I DIDN'T have

2011-09-16T15:41:00.003+01:00

with my support worker, in which she DIDN'T point out that I could probably buy zopiclone online, which of course I HAVEN'T done!

And a curious moment. I went to a sculpture course last night. Well, I tried to, it didn't happen and it's not going to run, because only one other person turned up. Which is a shame because it sounded fun. But the tutor was talking to me about funding and class sizes and courses he had taught and he said he had run a course for people with mental health difficulties and at first he was scared but they all turned out to be sound people. And this of course was my moment to point out that people with mental health difficulties aren't a separate dangerous species to be wary of, but are ordinary everyday people struggling with particular issues and in fact the person he was talking to right then had mental health difficulties. But I didn't. And when he spoke about getting a mixed group together and asked if I would have a problem working with people with mental health issues, I just smiled and said "no", though I think my eyes flickered.

I was left feeling uncomfortable and uneasy. I was cast in this conversation on the other side, as one of the "normal" people. I felt a mixture of relief that I can now pass as such and a sense that I was being fraudulent.

Other than that I have had appointments with my social worker and the consultant. Seeing the consultant was fine, though I still hate going to the hospital and being recognised by the nurses from the ward. I was having a particularly jiggy and bouncy day, which we decided was hopefully a blip like the one I had in July. She said that even with medication people could still have mild episodes. We talked about all the positive things that are going on in my life and discussed a possible trade off between increased creativity on the one hand and the ability to think and communicate on the other. She said she would be reluctant to reduce my medication because I had in the past become really quite unwell and I agreed with this, for the moment. All good, except that instead of giving me zopiclone she gave me a handout on sleep hygiene, hence the non-conversation with my support worker.

I am meeting next week with someone from the agency who will be providing my personal budget support package. Which means that it is actually, after all this time, going to happen. I am slightly apprehensive, it means saying goodbye to my current support worker, which is a shame, and I just don't know what it will be like to have that much support. And I question whether I really need or deserve yet more money spent on me. I have muddled along by myself for so long and I have more or less managed. It's true that I still struggle with very basic life stuff, but I'm not ill now in the way I was.

I had a major fail today. After a poor night's sleep I didn't make it to my conservation group. I feel flat and tired and a little as though I am standing at the top of a very slippery slope. But my support worker has taught me to keep fighting back and to let a bad day just be a bad day and not the beginning of the end, so I will write today off, and make sure I go next week. It is probably the counter reaction to having been jiggy and bouncy and buzzy and fast. I am learning that there is a definite rhythm to my moods, even though they don't swing wildly any more. It is something I must learn to live with.

Thought

2011-09-13T08:24:00.001+01:00

Maybe I am actually a Sim controlled by someone who's just not very good at the game.

Balance

2011-09-10T08:47:00.002+01:00

I'm being silly. I am thoroughly romanticising my illness. I am forgetting all the bad bits, the confusion, the depression, the dreadful agitation.

I didn't expect this really, this sense of mourning the past, for recovery to contain this particular challenge. Maybe it's because I am rapidly approaching an anniversary of hospitalisation, that I am thinking about it, remembering it, and almost wanting it. Because there *was* something amazing in it. Because I haven't been properly high for a long time now, and I miss ecstacy, I miss bliss bubbling in my blood. Who wouldn't?

But I need to be balanced, I need to remember the whole. I need to continue to get used to the self I am now. And somehow find meaning in the life I am living. It's just more difficult and taking longer than I thought.

Horror

2011-09-09T19:59:00.002+01:00

My god - wasn't that last post boring?! Let's be honest, recovery is boring. At least, it's boring for me.

I am craving madness right now. I want to be on fire. I want to feel alive. I drink wine and I wish for wildness. Instead I have boring, I have "fine", which really is fine, except that I feel I'm lacking something. Some spark inside me, some version of experience which is powerful, it's gone. Gone!

I am a stable, rational being. I am the same every day. And I'm bored of it! That's my confession, that's my current truth. That today I remembered being unable to think, battling with the intensity of my perceptions, and I wished I was like that. So submerged I didn't ponder ultimate purpose. Intent on surviving, convinced that life had meaning. Laughing. Mysteries sparkling.

I would even go back to the involuntary movements in supermarkets and the suchlike. To the flapping arms and twisting mouth. I would go back to lying on the library floor, laughing. Because I was so excited about the books that I believed that some mysterious organising force was bringing me. Now I hardly read.

Now I am boring. Now I am dull, dull, dull. There has to be something more than this. More than this dull stability, more than this cursed recovery. Yes, I can think, but there is nothing exciting to think about. I have paints and don't use them. I have a garden and don't tend it. I bought myself a DS and I spend my time solving puzzles. Yes, yes, this is my reality right now. When once I felt I was doing something important, now I play games. It passes the time.

But I am just a consumer! I have become the perfect consumer, watching dvd's, listening to music, playing games. And once I felt I was connected to the earth, I felt the joy and pain of growth and pollution, I felt intense, I felt alive, I felt my life meant something.

Now it means nothing.

Do others face these quandaries, do others find that achieving stability means giving up magic? I don't know what to do. In one mind I throw out the drugs and embrace a more vital life. Was it even illness anyway? I thought I was a prophet, now I'm ordinary. Now I'm medicated.

I haven't found enough yet here, in this reality, to make me want to stay in it. It's odds on at the moment what I do, whether the fear wins and keeps me here, or whether I set sail for a more vibrant and difficult life.

Another Recovery

2011-09-09T19:15:00.002+01:00

Somewhere along the way lately I appear to have lost my eating disorder. This is strange and perplexing. I'm not sure how it happened. I've had an eating disorder - bulimia mostly - for a *long* time. It has waxed and waned in intensity, and maybe this is just a waning, but it feels different.

I would speculate that the supplements I've been taking have somehow balanced my brain and body chemistry so that I no longer feel the compulsion to binge. Or maybe it's more psychological? Except that the mystifying thing is that it has involved no work, no active seeking of improvement, no battle with urges. I just don't do it any longer.

And out of this new situation have emerged some new beliefs. I now believe that I can eat what I want, when I want, and that my weight will stabilise at a level suitable for my body. These beliefs are being proved right so far. It might be possible to argue that the beliefs came first, but it doesn't feel that way. Certainly I doubt I could be so relaxed about my intake if I was still binging and purging and therefore almost inevitably gaining weight.

It feels rather odd. There is a space where my eating disorder used to be. Oh sometimes it still grumbles that I am not thin enough, but I am not willing any longer to be miserable about the few pounds that I am more than I might ideally like to be. And since my weight is going down at the moment, I suspect I may end up close to that anyway. So there was a decision in there somewhere, a decision to accept my body as it was. The next step is to sort out my clothes and keep only those that fit me as I am now, and feel good to wear.

I'm still wary of this new headspace. It is so fundamentally different. I've decided I'll give it till Christmas, and if it is still maintaining itself then I can be confident I have wished that part of my life good bye.

Christmas has become a goal for me. It means nothing as a day, since I spend it alone, but it has acquired meaning in my life. Because I am starting a new class, and hopefully another group at the centre where I do my conservation group. That makes three activities a week and I hope to attend them consistently until Christmas. Then I should have support work three times a week, which I want to use to improve my "self care" and housekeeping skills. And if I manage to achieve all this then after Christmas I shall look for some voluntary work. That's my plan.

Because in the past I have failed, and failed again. I started going to a ceramics workshop. Then I became ill and couldn't attend. I went back. Again I became ill, I was in hospital once more, and I missed it. That has been my pattern. This is why just *going* to things is important to me. I need to prove to myself that I can do it. I have already attended my Ecominds group six weeks in a row, which is something of a record for me. So Christmas it is.

I saw my psychologist today, and he mentioned Christmas as well. He was talking again about me reducing the amisulpride, because he thinks it may help me regain my creativity, and he said I could try it now, or I could maybe wait until Christmas. I'm left not knowing what to think. As is documented here I am often tempted to stop taking amisulpride, there are things I have lost through taking it as well as gained. The psychologist doesn't believe it has had as much effect as I credit it with, but I'm the one who remembers what I was like before.

And it hasn't been that long. A year ago I was heading rapidly towards a hospital admission and the most intense, insane experience of my life. Six months ago I was just out of hospital again and feeling desperately unwell. I don't quite know where my recovery has come from and I'm not entirely sure I trust it yet.

But I sense that this is something I must do at some point, reduce the amisulpride and see what happens, monitor my state carefully. I'm not seeing the psychologist anyomre, apart from a follow up appointment in December, because we seem to have reached a natural end of what to talk about, but he said that if I did reduce the medication and suffered symptoms we could start meeting again and find ways of managing them.

Dilemmas! Do I choose what I have now, settle for life as it currently is, or do I risk going back into that chaos? Sometimes I feel the pull of madness, I feel desire for it, some parts of it were truly beautiful and made life feel dense with meaning. But I also like stability. So I don't know what to do. My support worker thinks I should continue with the medication. I have an appointment with the consultant next week, I guess I should discuss it with her.

More Thoughts

2011-08-31T20:09:00.002+01:00

Part of my problem is that I never really grew up. I've been ill on and off since I was a teenager and it has impacted normal development. Yes, I eventually managed to get a university degree but I have only worked sporadically, and never near the level I should theoretically be capable of. Most people my age have a career and/or a family. I have a cat. Seriously.

And now I've finally found drugs that work. I haven't plunged into the depths since I've been on citalopram, except when they took me off it. And I've spoken before about the miracle that amisulpride has been for me. It's a miracle I may be ambivalent about but I have to acknowledge it nonetheless. So I find myself emerging into an altered world with an altered self, free from the chaos that previously consumed me. Is it any wonder I don't know exactly what to do?

I used to dream that I would be brilliant at something. There was always this sense that future brilliance might be compensation for present difficulty. Yes I might be crazy, but hey I might also be a genius. That dream lives no longer. For one thing, I've seen through the illusion, and know that *nothing* could be compensation for the suffering I've experienced, nothing could be worth it. For another, I have been entirely lacking inspiration these last few months. I suspect I might write reasonably well but I have no idea what I might want to write about. I don't even know what to paint or make. Brilliance hasn't happened yet and I suspect it never will.

So I continue to face the problem of my life, as an ordinary person in an ordinary world. To go back to illness, to return to disorder, would occupy me for sure, but it would be a backwards step, I want something *real*. I'm just not sure how to find it. If this is recovery it sure is strange. And I still have doubts about the whole thing. On some level I still believe I will end up in hospital again, at some point. My whole experience argues to that end. But maybe I won't. So I have to plan for that life too. I don't know how to live with such uncertainty. I envy my cat, who never questions how he lives, or what the future holds.

And meanwhile I'm aware of just how much I'm costing everyone else. I get benefits, I get free prescriptions, free dental treatment. I got a free digibox for my television, I am about to get free insulation in my loft. And I am not by any rating a valuable member of society. I keep thinking I should work. But I don't even know what I could do, or if I would stay well enough to do it.

I guess this *is* a crossroads. And I still don't know which way I will go. But after a week or so of rather low mood my mercury is rising and my excitement building. I have a feeling I might soon do something really rather risky and foolish, but maybe I should, maybe it will be the best thing I ever did, there's no way of telling. I guess at least my moods are predicatable now.

Rapture and Torture

2011-08-31T11:47:00.002+01:00

That was how my social worker described my previous existence. It's an accurate description.

So why am I even contemplating going back to it? I've been thinking of coming off the amisulpride. I feel as though I've reached some sorts of crossroads.

I am mostly sane now. I am still dealing with some residual symptoms of mood states, seeming to have a mild and minor cycle of a few days sparkly and then a few days tired and darker. But my head is quiet and I live in an ordinary world. And this is part of the problem. I used to live in a world that could veer between ominous and joyous, but it was always intense. Perceptions were vivid, music was overwhelming, colours were fierce magic, and stones had souls. Thoughts exploded from me, ideas seethed within me, I seemed always to be dealing with Important Things, the real meat of life. Sometimes I might be paralysed but other times I was furiously creative.

And all that is gone. I haven't done anything artistic for months. I have become a consumer. TV programmes, computer games, lurking on twitter. I pass the time, and I pass it tolerably, but I miss a sense of greater meaning. All my activities are distractions, they are something to do, but serve no real purpose. I need something more in my life. And I don't know what, or how to find it.

My social worker suggested leaving it a few months until things were more settled and I was more stable and then we could maybe discuss gradually reducing the medication. Because my support package should then be in place and working and who knows what difference that will make. Maybe that will give me a better platform to find some purpose and meaning in the real world.

Because there's no doubt that the support worker I currently have has made a substantial difference to my life. She visited yesterday. I had been slightly derailed by having a mild virus and the house was a tip again. (Depression manifests for me so much in my body that I can't always tell if I am mentally or physically unwell, and the episode threw me.) So we cleaned it up, and she told me off for subsisting on rice cakes and wine and promised to get me some zopiclone. So I am more or less back on track again.

But the questions continue to haunt me - what should I do with my life and how do I live now, in the afterwards of illness?

Wine & other supplements

2011-08-20T19:26:00.002+01:00

I'm drinking a nice glass of red wine right now. Despite warnings from the psychologist and other workers I continue to drink wine. I don't see any downsides other than the price. I don't drink every night and I don't drink in a negative way, to block things out, and I don't drink increasing amounts. I drink just enough to feel pleasantly drunk and to sleep long and easy. Far from having even a whisper of a hangover or suffering any depressant effect, I tend to feel superb the morning after wine, rested and resplendent. So I continue to use it as medicine.

Because sleep continues to be a problem for me. I can usually get to sleep, but I wake up. At midnight, at two, at three, at four. Ping! Wide awake! And whatever sleep I get after that is of the shallow half-dreaming half-waking variety. Which leaves me physically tired and struggling to be active the next day. My support worker thinks I should be given zopiclone. I thought I had arranged this with the consultant but she failed to explicitly mention it in the letter to the GP. So when I went to the GP she was very very reluctant to give me any at all, let alone a repeat prescription. So now I have a measly 4 to last me until my next appointment with the consultant. I have just bought some valerian and I hope that will be magic, but otherwise wine it will be.

Aside from the wine, and the untried valerian, I am taking a stonking load of supplements right now. Honestly, the amount of pills I take! I take 3g of fish oil and a multivitamin and extra magnesium ("nature's mood stabliser). I take extra b vitamins in the morning and I just started taking SAMe and, as of yesterday, rhodiola rosea. Rhodiola is a herbal adaptogen that is supposed to increase resistance to stress and energy levels. SAMe is something I need to be careful of. It actually says on the box that it is to be avoided if you have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I don't have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder so technically I'm ok, but I'm aware I have at least tendencies that way. So far, no problem. I've been taking it for nearly a week and I just feel GREAT! I'm more active and I have this bubbling undercurrent of GREAT FEELINGS! I like it! If I start to soar too much I intend to stop taking it and save it for times when I am definitely depressed, but right now I'm just enjoying feeling HAPPY AND ALIVE!

Seriously, I feel so well, it's hard to remember I was ever ill. I'm starting to subscribe to the psychologist's view that I was never *really* ill and that I can stay well for ever and ever. That fights with my memory of four months ago, and the dire state I found myself in then. And leaves me with a quandary. Because I want to forget about illness and enjoy my life. But I can't help but be aware that I felt exactly like this before and then things ended up out of control - I was in hospital soaring with supreme feelings and electricity in my brain, and then I was in the badlands, in some area that had been thorougly poisoned, by bombs or toxins, and struggling even to breathe. Do I still need to be careful or can I relax? The only real way to trust stability is to stay stable for an extended period. I'm still at the beginning of that - so how can I trust?

I saw the psychologist yesterday. I feel I have finally understood how to use psychology, and that is to bring to it not current mood swings that seem untriggered by anything in particular, but the areas of the past that are difficult to think about, the relationships that have haunted you, the events that are hard to understand, the exact things that discussion can help. I feel I have done that, I have brought to him the things that remain problematic for me, and I sense a natural end to our work. I should see him next week and I think, unless anything else has come up, that I will stop our appointments then. Until something else disturbs my surface there seems little purpose, I have discussed most of the things that I feel I need to. I am at some deep level at peace. I don't entirely believe this will prevent my mood swings, but I saw evidence of the validity of his approach this last fortnight. Because I heard back from my mother, who I had contacted, and that had the capacity to upset me greatly, and yet somehow it didn't. And I unexpectedly bumped into someone from that period of my life on Thursday, and though it jangled me, it hasn't derailed me.

Oh I just feel so well! I was a recovery sceptic, a few months ago, fresh from an episode. Now I feel like I have a future, I look forward to it. I feel spangly and sparkly and great! I'm sure I have become boring in this, but I don't even care! Just let me stay like this and I will live my life and be happy! And I won't care if I never blog again!

In the System

2011-08-12T20:21:00.002+01:00

Today I realised how thoroughly "in the system" I am. I went to my new group, Ecominds. This is a project run by a wildlife trust at a large local nature reserve. It is for people with mental health problems and it involves activities right there on the reserve and on other reserves in the area. Today we were making a bug hotel. So far I like it, it seems an easy environment to be in, and I have always enjoyed being outside, doing things, and being around nature.

But amongst the "clients" were three people I recognised - two from various times on the ward and one from my stint at the day unit. It was a reminder that for many people "severe and enduring" mental illness is just that - severe and *enduring*. For many people the ideal of recovering and no longer needing services is just that - an ideal. It doesn't happen. Many people will be involved with services in their various forms for a long time - maybe for life. That might be true of me, too.

I have been involved with services in the area I currently live since soon after I moved here. I was persuaded by friends to go to the GP to get some help. I was prescribed fluoxetine and given a CPN. Shortly after that I had my first encounter with the crisis team in January 2007, the CPN referred me to psychiatry, and then I was admitted for the first time. After that I was handed over to the Recovery and Rehabilitation team and I have been with them ever since. Right now I have a social worker, a support worker and a psychologist. I am quite well at the moment but I don't know if I can imagine life without this support. And sometimes it suddenly hits me, that I am a patient, with a social worker and a support worker and a psychologist. That however well I feel or seem I am thoroughly embedded in the system and that it is part of my life. This illness, or fear of illness, or possibility of illness. I live on benefits, for fuck's sake. That's not normal.

I was with my friends the other day, and they were joking. Because there was this idea I could go on a long journey, and they laughed and said "Werehorse will never manage that - she'd have to take 30 tablets to cope and then she'd have side effects!" And I laughed too. But part of me shrank from the realisation that, however kind they are, however much they have helped me, this is how they see me, as someone who can't cope with things, who takes tablets, who has various workers, who sometimes ends up in hospital. It's true, so I can't really mind, but I don't know how I can ever get away from that identity.

I spent a long time firmly outside the system. From 1997 to late 2006 I didn't take any medication, I didn't even see any doctors. I coped alone. But I wasn't well. When I look back now, I shudder. I coped with so much, I kept so much to myself. I got through it, and I got through it without support, but it cost me a lot. Sometimes I wonder, if I could do it then, why can't I do it now? Well, I probably *could*. But I wouldn't call what I was doing then *living*. I even worked at various points, but most of my time had the quality of a nightmare. Which was why I finally agreed, when I'd moved, to go to the doctor. And now I'm in the system. I have a history of crisis team referrals and hospital admissions. I am a psych patient, through and through.

I just find it hard to come to terms with. I feel a bit better and I want to forget all about this part of my life. I start to think of myself as normal, as well. But then I saw the support worker yesterday and she said she thought the personal budget would be really good for me, because I'm not quite well enough to maintain things between her interventions. And that's true. I'm still struggling to live what I think of in my head as a good life, a productive life. I'm still struggling with regular showering, and keeping my house tidy, and doing something more creative than lying on the sofa. Even though I have felt much more well lately than I have been for a while.

So I don't know. The psychologist has this idea that I can move beyond services entirely, be well, have a career even. I should be glad of this hopeful perspective, and embrace it. But I'm still wary. I still remember how I felt in March this year, in April, I still shiver at the memory. I deeply hope it doesn't happen again, it was truly dreadful, but I don't know if I can avoid it. I take my medication and my fish oil, do my yoga, listen to uplifting music, write out affirmations about the reality of the present. But I don't really trust. I have lived too long in this particular mind to believe that anything can be truly healed. And it's a horrible future to face, the possibility of further illness. Sometimes it fills me with an agitation and dread so great I can hardly bear to tend to this moment. I keep repeating, I am better that I was, my situation is a million miles better than it was, when I still lived with family. Psychologically, I am greatly improved. But I don't trust that that is enough. I don't believe, in my soul, that it is all psychological. Maybe I should pray that it is, because then I *can* stay well.

But of course, I am doing well right now, so it is possible. With each day that passes and that I mark on my mood diary as a 0, or maybe a 1 or -0.5, I believe a little more strongly that I am doing well, that I am not going to fly into the stratosphere, on fire with ecstacy, or drop into the depths, dreading every moment, and I believe that these interventions I am making are helping, are worth something. Still I have the fear, the fear of another episode, and I think it will take time, considerable time spent here, in the middle, to really quash that fear. But I can do it,right?

So for the moment I will willingly stay in the system. Because it helps. This group I go to helps, my social worker helps, my support worker helps. They all improve my quality of life, and so I will accept them. The future is the future and I can't know what it holds, so I will accept the help I'm currently offered and try to implement the advice I'm given. And just take that leap of faith that it will all be worth it.

And into the abyss . . .

2011-08-05T19:53:00.003+01:00

I had an early appointment with the psychologist this morning. I thought it was going well. We were discussing the situation I was in with my family, because I am having vivid dreams that I am back in that situation, that jolt me awake with the strength of their anger and upset. We agreed that this may have been triggered by the fact that I finally wrote my mother a letter telling her my new address, a year after I moved here. The psychologist says that the old/subconscious part of the brain needs to warn the conscious part of danger. This makes sense. I have reinitiated contact and my subconscious is leaping up and down and saying "but remember what it was like!".

The psychologist said that to hopefully stop the dreams I should spend some time each day consciously reflecting on the situation and the way I escaped it, and remind myself that it is not happening *now*. I am going to try this. The fairly similar advice he gave me for dealing with flashbacks of early trauma was remarkably effective. I am no longer troubled by intrusive fragments of memory in the way I once was.

So I felt it was a good session, productive, useful. I felt he grasped the dynamics of the situtation I was once in and how it had affected me (I am not being deliberately cagey, there are no dramatic secrets, it is merely an unremarkable story of a thoroughly dysfunctional family, that I don't currently have the urge or energy to describe. Besides, I'm sure it would be tedious.) I felt understood.

Then he ruined it all by saying something like "then you could be free of illness or the fear of relapse". And I go down the rabbit hole again, into the swirling abyss of attitudes and opinions on what is mental illness, what causes it, and whether meds can help or only hinder.

I don't deny the importance of psychological factors. I grew up in one messed up family and have spent most of my adult life untangling the consequences and unlearning the lessons they taught me. I clearly still have some psychological issues or I wouldn't have the difficulties I do in starting new things and meeting new people, and that is something I want to change.

But I found this book in the library - "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life". The blurb from the back cover reads, in part: . . . you'll see scientific evidence that your anxiety, depression, anger, obsessiveness, or impulsiveness could be related to how specific structures in your brain work. Pioneering neuropsychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen provides convincing evidence that many problems formerly considered psychological . . .actually have a biological basis."

So obviously this doctor believes in medication, though he also offers a range of cognitive "prescriptions" for each particular area of the brain.

Well, when I read the section on the temporal lobe I was stunned. I recognised myself. Dark or violent thoughts, sensitivity to slights, mild paranoia, word-finding problems, auditory processing problems, reading difficulties, emotional instablity, memory problems, anxiety or fear for no particular reason, abnormal sensory perceptions, visual or auditory distortions, feelings of deja vu or jamais vu, periods of spaciness or confusion, religious or moral preoccupation. Here were most of the symptoms of my "psychosis" that wasn't really psychosis. Could it be that my brain was just mis-firing? In that context my conviction when ill that I have electrodes in my brain pulsing me with sensations could be a mangled version of the truth.

I think the amisulpride saved me from many of those symptoms. The psychologist would probably argue that I have "grown" psychologically. I know he would support a reduction of my medication. Unfortunately the only way to test this out, to see whether I do have a brain problem regulated by drugs, or whether the drugs are unnecessary, is to stop taking the drugs and see what happens.

And I'm scared of that. Because remember I am only three months past a severe episode that nearly destroyed me. Remember that before that episode hit I felt well, and was convinced I could stay well. I thought I had this thing licked. Remember that.

But then would I have gone so high if I hadn't been triggered by aripiprazole? Would I have crashed so low if I hadn't had my citalopram abruptedly stopped? So nothing is simple.

And then I read articles about the dangers of psychiatric medications, and how anti-depressants are no better than placebos but have more consequences. And I know the medication I take affects my body, affects my health. I no longer have periods, and this has long-term implications. And that is just one obvious result of taking these chemicals.

And I read about all the psychological and spiritual explanations for depression, and I read about people who healed themselves through vitamins, or meditation or something, and I wonder what I am doing. The drugs have effectively "normalised" me, but is this a good thing? Am I just conforming to the illusions of a corrupt and dysfunctional society that has no room for the likes of the un-medicated me?

Except here's my confession - I *like* feeling normal. I *like* no longer feeling that I am so lost in thoughts of mysteries and strange experiences that I am barely on the edges of the human world. I *like* living in human time, with human concerns, able to function as a human, able to - yes - do something so simple as watch tv and enjoy it. Is that wrong? I just don't think I want to go back to the place I once was.

And yes, if my moods continue to be a problem and I am offered mood stablisers, which apparently is a possibility my consultant is considering, I would probably take them. Because I like feeling well, and I am scared of it all falling apart, I am scared of getting high and I am scared of getting low. I want to stay in the middle and build myself a life here. And if that is weakness, so be it.

Meanwhile I continue my broad-spectrum approach to health. I take my vitamins and I do my yoga. The book I talked about cited various prescriptions for the temporal lobes besides taking medication, such as singing, moving rhythmically, and listening to classical music, and I will incorporate these into my routine. And I will do the psychological work too. And just hope that it all adds up to continued wellness.

But right now I drink wine and I wonder - do others find this whole arena of debate as confusing as I do? Do you?

Better

2011-07-28T13:26:00.002+01:00

I think my support worker possess magical powers. She came on Tuesday. I had done nothing all day yet I was exhausted, I was starting to feel hopeless. I felt ashamed of the state of my house and wished she wasn't coming. But she came in and she didn't chastise me, she just said "ok, so you've gone back a couple of steps but it doesn't undo all your hard work", she said "you can't let this illness run your life", she said "come on, let's clean your kitchen so you can cook a meal tonight". She started tidying up and I found myself helping her, picking up clutter, sweeping the floor. She left me with a cleaner house and a somewhat clearer mind. I just felt better.

I've never had this kind of ongoing practical support before, and I find it so powerful. Amazingly simple, not requiring advanced psychology degrees or anything other than a dose of compassion and an encouraging attitude, but it *works*, it *helps*.

Then yesterday I saw my social worker. Now sometimes my social worker waffles a little too much, she can be slightly too fond of analogies that don't always quite work, but I still find it helpful to have someone to talk to about my illness and how it affects me and how I can manage it. She made slightly too much of the lifestyle changes I discussed with the psychologist, and their affect on my mood, when really I have done little more than slightly moderate some of my behaviour and stop taking things to excess, but I finished the conversation feeling more positive. Because basically I have had a mild mood episode, but it *has* been mild, it hasn't gone to extremes, it hasn't taken me into hospital, it hasn't lasted very long. After going a little too high it was inevitable that I should have a slight slump. That's the pattern. That's the nature of the beast. But it doesn't have to be prolonged or severe.

So maybe all the things I am doing - eating well, taking vitamins, doing yoga etc *are* having an effect. The problem with me is that I'm always hoping for a cure, hoping that I will find the thing that will get me well and keep me well forever and ever, but that is unrealistic. Right now, I accept this. And if I can manage my mood, if I can keep it within reasonable bounds, if I can used to riding it out, I can stop being quite so scared of losing control.

What I realised talking to my social worker was how much better I am than I was a year ago, or two years ago, or three. I still have problems with my mood but I no longer have such difficulties with my thoughts and perceptions, and so I can communicate with my support team, and so I can *think* about my moods, perceive patterns, gain some insight, and hopefully find ways to minimise the impact they have. This is actually a really positive thing. Admittedly I was very ill earlier this year, but even then I didn't get as *lost* as I have done in the past. Amisulpride, for all my occasional rebellion against the tyranny of taking it, has been a very effective medicine for me. It has almost entirely removed a whole layer of my problems.

And I start to see what a complicated thing recovery is, how many complex interactions there are between thought and feeling and behaviour. Medication is one part of it for me right now, but there are also many things I can do for myself. And yes, sometimes I resent *having* to be careful how I live, but I have this illness and so I must make the best of things.

For now I am just intensely relieved that the black shadow of depression has receded. It made me panic, and catastrophise, but I feel ok again, not fantastic, not completely well, but not exhausted either, not hopeless and bowed under the weight of the way I'm feeling. Maybe I am finally learning (with help) the tricky art of balance.

Back on earth

2011-07-26T13:13:00.002+01:00

Actually, deep down in it. Sinking in mud, mired in particularly sticky clay that is slowing my body and clogging my thoughts.

I just can't move. It's ridiculous. I know it's ridiculous, but it exists as an incontrovertible fact. I can't move, I can't act, I can't get myself going. My brain feels increasingly divorced from my body as all my "motivational self-talk" comes to nothing. I sleep. I rest. I lie on the sofa. I don't tidy, I don't clean, I don't create.

And it is only faced with this seemingly intractable physical reality, this absence of energy and well-being, that my mood really starts to drop, and my thoughts start to turn on the impossibility of living like this, living with this.

And I don't know what to do except wait it out, give up trying to motivate myself because that only leads to despair, accept that for now I am lumpen and useless and simply endure through time until something changes. But I am *so* tired of struggling with this, I am *so* exhausted with being like this, I just don't think I want a life like this anymore.

But I like wine!

2011-07-24T12:21:00.002+01:00

I had a psycholoy session on Friday. My mood change is apparently because of a perceived threat that has caused a "flight into excitability". Since I was entirely unable to identify said threat the hour became little more than an extended lesson on how to live sanely.

So take control! Rely less on medication and self-medication - less wine, less cigarettes, less coffee, less sleeping tablets. Make lists of tasks and use them to focus the energy instead of flitting around from one thing to another. Introduce relaxation sessions every day. Practise sleep hygiene etc etc etc

It's all so very sensible. And yet part of me has been in a grump about it ever since. Part of me wants to stop being so damn sensible and drink as much wine as I want. Part of me, I'll confess, doesn't really want to recover if recovery means being boring, if recovery means giving up all the enchanting excitable feelings, managing them, taking control of them. Part of me wants to be wild and free and isn't actually at all grown up.

It's as though on some level I still believe, despite all evidence and experience to the contrary, that I can have the good stuff without the consequences, the wine without the hangover, the excitement without the agitation, the esctacy without the electrodes that turn my thoughts to mush, the bliss without the suicidal thoughts it ends up laced with. Then I remember how uncomfortable and exhausting it all is, and how dreadful the depression that follows and I know I would be mad not to do everything I can to avoid it.

But on a deeper level I think I'm just mad that I have to think like this at all, that I have to be aware of my mood and take steps to contain it, that I have to monitor myself and try to manage, that I have to work so hard just to stay relatively stable. I'd like to just live damn it and never have to think about mental health at all.

But I have just been to buy some decaffienated coffee. This is a symbol of my willingness to adjust my lifestyle and attempt recovery. It doesn't stop the whole situation pissing me off, it doesn't ease my current agitation and irritation with the whole pace of life, but it is *something*. I'll have to hope it is enough.

Agitation and confusion

2011-07-19T20:54:00.003+01:00

In which Werehorse is frustrated because she can't comment on a blog post or email the writer and she wanted to! Except that lately I've been thinking that everything is somehow meant or destined, so maybe this is too. Though that I don't understand why!

I don't want this blog to be all about tiny perturbations in my life, to be all I'm a little bit this, and a little bit that, because I can be a little bit all sorts of things that never turn into anything *serious*. I feel I should reserve comment on symptoms until they have become huge and undeniable. And everything is deniable for a very long time. At least if you have enough wine!

I saw my support worker this morning and she said she was going to speak to the consultant or to one of the crisis team doctors. I thought this was probably overkill, because I'M FINE! I'm suffering from a little bit of agitation and confusion. The agitation is just frustrating because it seems to have bypassed the productive stage and just be in the "bounce up and down on your bed and clap your hands pointlessly" stage. But I can live with it, yes I can, I can, I can. And it's not going to get worse, no it's not, it's not, it's not.

The confusion is like waking up from a very vivid dream, and for a while you aren't sure which is true, the dream or reality. Except that this dream is illness, and my whole history of crisis teams and hospitalisations and sections. And I don't know what the reality I am reaching for is. Something other, certainly.

I'm just not sure how to live with this. Then, now, the future. I'm just not sure how to make sense of it or how to survive it. I WON'T BECOME UNWELL. I SAY NO! I REFUSE! Will that be enough to save me? I think I'm scared.

Labels

2011-07-16T19:58:00.005+01:00

My social worker said something the other day that I have been thinking about. She said "it's more important to you than it is to us". She was talking about diagnosis. Because I asked if I could redo the personality disorder test and show the results to the consultant. Because I asked about having a CPA, because the consultant said we could discuss diagnosis further at the next one.

I sense a rebuke in there. Somehow, diagnosis shouldn't be important to me, and yet it is. Why do I want a label? Shouldn't I be rebelling against labels and moving beyond them, asserting that I am more than a label?

I *am* more than a label. It's just that somehow it seems important that I have one I can live with. Then maybe I will be able to let go of this issue. You see, regardless of what my social worker says about the person being more important than the label, labels DO exist, and I DO have them, and I just want them to feel appropriate.

Perhaps it's because I had the wrong label for a while. I had a label of borderline personality disorder, and maybe anyone who says labels aren't important should have that label and see how services treat them then. Oh, you can say that services shouldn't treat you differently but they do. You can talk grand talk about labels not mattering, but when I had that label I encountered prejudice and stigma, negative attitudes, and assumptions about what kind of person I was and what motivated me. It made me feel slightly desperate and frantic and as though I was going mad.

I still feel that desperation. Because people persist in assuming that borderline personality disorder is the root of my problems. It engages me in pernicious self-doubt. Am I entirely wrong about myself? Have I completely misunderstood my personality? It makes me question my whole reality. That is the power of a label.

I have to have labels, in this game of mental health services and benefits. There isn't a category for generally rather odd and unable to function in the normal world. So I want those labels to be ones that I look at and think yeah, ok, that describes something true about me and my life. I KNOW that psychiatric diagnoses are inevitably vague and inaccurate and subject to dispute. But I want the closest approximation possible, I want something that I can identify with. Not so I can over-identify with it, and cling to it, and use it to explain everything about me and my experience, but so that I can move beyond it. I've read that in order to let go of the ego you need a healthy ego to start with. And I need a healthy label. That's what fuels my current quest to get a diagnosis.

And what labels do I want? Well, it's not what I want exactly, but I could live with a diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder. It seems to fit some fundamental truths about myself, I recognise myself in the descriptions. And it might communicate to other people some of the things I find alien and struggle with. Because that is something that labels do, they act as a kind of shorthand for difficulties and symptoms, that is why it is important to have ones that are at least vaguely right. Or you end up with the situation I had, where a worker is telling me "you've got to stop cutting and taking overdoses". When I don't cut, and I don't take overdoses. And that is just one example. Feeling so misunderstood is *not* conducive to mental health.

And I could also live with a diagnosis of mood disorder. Actually I'd like a diagnosis of bipolar 2. I feel odd about saying that, I shouldn't *want* that label, I feel that if you *want* that label you automatically don't actually have it. But again, it seems to reflect something basic about my experience. I have problems with my mood, and I have as many problems with my mood going too high as I do with it being low. There is a cycle to my moods that seems unrelated to my environment or psychology. I just want that recognised. Having it recognised doesn't alter the reality that I have to live with it, it doesn't change anything really. Except it does make it easier to communicate what is happening. At the moment I have to avoid the words hypomania and mania, because I don't have that diagnosis so can't claim the language. And yet there are times I fit the symptom list, and yet every online test for I fill in for bipolar comes back positive.

Though sometimes I think I just want someone to say "no, you're not borderline".

I'm not borderline. I can't see any way that I'm borderline. Nothing about that diagnosis corresponds to patterns in my life. I was given it because I was a female and I was in distress. And I've had to fight it ever since.

And if services did acknowledge that no, I wasn't borderline? If services did give me the diagnoses of schizoid and bipolar? *Then* I feel I could let the issue rest, then I could stop fighting services, *then* I feel I could just get on working with the support I have to manage my life. *Then* I might be on the road to recovery. And that's why labels are important to me.

Sensible Head

2011-07-13T14:17:00.002+01:00

:werehorseputsoneon:

OK, I need to take myself in hand. I have had great fun spending lots of money on lovely things, but it needs to STOP NOW. If I stop now, then there isn't too much damage, because most of the things I have bought are things I have been thinking I need for a while, or things I promised myself I would buy when I had paid off my debt. I've slightly set back the schedule for paying off the debt, that is all. And ok so I didn't really need a case of wine, but it was a bargain, and it won't go to waste, believe me.

And I need to SLEEP. Yes, sleep, that strange and elusive thing. I took four times the recommended dose of Nightcalm last night and I barely got two hours. The scary thing is that I'm not even tired. But I know my sense of reality rapidly starts to fray round the edges when I go without sleep and luckily my social worker brought me some zopiclone, so tonight I will have a couple of glasses of wine and a tablet and get some rest.

I also need to EAT. Food is good and grounding.

I could also, rather than bounce around being excited by ideas, actually DO something, put this increased energy to good use. Give the house a thorough clean maybe.

I am enjoying the way I am feeling. After three months of more or less depression it is glorious to feel happy, to have energy, to feel positive and creative. But there is a balance to be struck between just going with the flow and keeping one eye on the situation. My support worker said maybe I was just moving into a good period of my life, and that I deserved one. My social worker reiterated the idea that by being worried about a mood state you can make it worse. I'm not worried right now, I think I'm just happy, but I'm the one who went through the last episode, and this is exactly how it started, so I think it is reasonable to be slightly cautious and want to avoid that. Still, I can phone the social worker if I need to and I see both the support worker and the psychologist next week, so I have a safety net in place. That reassures me. And in the meantime I shall just have some fun!

Pyjamas!

2011-07-11T12:41:00.002+01:00

I have become obsessed with buying pyjamas. I bought one set, but the trousers are too short and they just don't feel right. Now I have moved onto men's pyjamas in hope of getting the length and bagginess I'm seeking. I'm really excited about having some new pyjamas! For someone who has spent months at a time sleeping in her clothes this is quite a departure.

I've been buying other things as well - boots, jeans, dining tables . . . It seems suddenly very easy to spend money. And it's fun.

I am having trouble sleeping. Zopiclone hasn't come up on my repeat prescription yet, so I am resorting to Nightcalm and Sominex, which don't work that well. I tried taking a double dose of Sominex but I still woke up at three, it's just that I then fell over while trying to get out of bed. Not so good. Maybe this could be a medical reason to drink wine every night?

This afternoon the engineer is coming to switch the tv in my bedroom over to digital. It is a free service because I qualify as disabled. I'm not sure what I think about that, but I'm still excited. It makes me clap my hands. In fact whenever a thought or a purchase pleases me I'm clapping my hands.

So I think I could probably say that my mood has lifted. I know what the psychologist would say but I can't find any trigger, except that I started taking vitamins and omega-3. Could it be that? It would be very good if it was, because then I could simply keep taking them and all my problems would be magically sorted.

But moods fascinate me. Because they can be hard to define and yet at the same time are so definite. When I am flat and low, it is so hard to imagine being happy and spangly. I know a better mood will return some day, but it is intellectual knowledge, not something I really believe. Then when I am like this it is hard to grasp what it is like to be depressed. Surely I just wasn't trying hard enough? Ah, it's mysterious. And how do the changes happen? I have noticed gradual, subtle improvements in my state over the last couple of weeks, shifts in my energy levels, in my percpetions, in my ability to act. I actually feel physically different. So who knows, really? But for now I feel quite happy, so all is good.

The Hospital Diaries pt 4

2011-07-09T19:44:00.003+01:00

I'm sure this is quite boring to read, if anyone even is reading it, but for some reason I feel the need to transcribe and publish these diaries, as though that is my way of paying my respects to experiences that were at the time overwhelmingly real and intense.

Thursday 7th October 2010

It's the talking, all the talking, that drives me distracted. And then I hear my own talking, which has been flowing from me lately in a manner that makes me exhausted, and I know despair. This isn't me, I said, and cried.

So now what?

Later

So now moss. Deep communion in the garden. It is the most beautiful thing. When the other worlds invade they won't come in spaceships, they'll come as green spores, they'll grow quietly, patiently, almost unnoticed. Until the world is green again, until the cities have gone. Until there is a chance again for love and sanity and mystery, for the unprovable yet deeply felt, for the unverifiable but absolutely real. I have seen the future, it is covered in moss.

Friday 8th October 2010

Sometimes writing arrives or arises and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I have no words at all, or so few I can barely think, let alone speak. That scares me.

The brokenness came, as I knew it would, and I stared at the world and it made no sense and my mind flapped like a fish on the deck of a boat and my mouth contorted and my words repeated themselves again and again.

Later

It was the fish. The fish were dying and I felt it and it hurt. Because I am not a human, I am an earthkeeper and I feel the earth's energy, I am directly connected to it. Which is why sometimes I feel ecstacy and sometimes I feel exhausted and in pain. And since the only way for the earth to be saved, to be restored to balance, is for this civilisation to dies, I have to lead the way and die first. It is the only way to resolve my situation. This feels so true that I am convinced I am not ill and should not be in this crazy hospital. But I took the lorazepam they offered me, which was a sign of my weakness. Because that is what people do, they drug themselves, deaden themselves, in one way or another. And if they didn't, if they woke up and came alive they wouldn't behave the way they do, they wouldn't cause the harm they do, because they would feel the world as part of them and wouldn't be able to bear it.

Saturday 9th October 2010

I feel so strange today.

And I'd paint the garden in the evening: the three trees lit from underneath by the round lamp, the long shadow of the locked gate, and the lights on the hill blurred by the twigs of the screen on the fence.

Beyond that, I don't even know what.

Later

Frazzled, frazzled, frazzled.

I had problems with my vision all day. It kept flickering and vibrating and filling all the surfaces of the world with faces.

Then the noise. The doors banging, the chairs scraping, the inane conversations of other patients.

I need music. I need to be able to leave, and since I can't leave physically I need to be able to leave mentally. I need to feel I can control my environment.

Oh it doesn't make sense, this, being here, being detained here, living this strange life here. I don't understand what has happened.

Sunday 10th October 2010

The earth is exhausted. The earth is mad. The earth spins in space and longs to rest. The earth cannot help but throw forth life, patterns and colours and rhythms and growth and the earth is ecstatic. But the earth is also sick. The earth is driven insane by the destructive creatures that breed upon its surface, and pick at it and poison it and imprison it in concrete and cut down all the glorious jungles and kill all the wild and vivid creatures. So there is no balance, so balance has been lost and now the earth spins desperately and feels the depths of space around it as darkness and the earth wants to die.

Later

I am the earth and everything that's in it. I am the swirling of the clouds, I am the restlesness of oceans, I am the budding trees, I am the singing birds, I am both the rivers and the land the rivers shape. The itchy twitchiness of growth is pulsing in me. It is torment. It is joy.

Sometimes I feel quite certain that I am about to die.

Tuesday 12th October 2010

Do I have words this morning, or only noise? Noise that won't resolve into sense. Noise that torments.

I don't want to go. I don't want to go back to the old life. I know all that is good about it but I don't want to go. I don't want to be here, but I don't want to go. It means too much pretending, it means too much talking in someone else's voice. I don't want to search for things I can say that don't sound strange. I don't want to go. Isn't that awful?

Later

The world teems with invisible meanings. And words are inhabited with energy that is rich and real and pulsing. This is the truth I feel and know.

There are details I don't feel the need to write, the surface of the strange life here, the people who populate it and have no meaning for me, the routines and activities that pass the time. There is something beyond that, the realm I have entered and cannot return from. And today I feel the earth's energy and ecstacy, the flinging forth of greenness and movement and colour, the great glory of life. It burns through my brain, it fills my blood. And I am not fully human, I only pretend here to be part of things while alone and in secret and in my real life, my vital life, my pulsing life, I am the earth, the spinning of it, the turning of it, the weather that flowers in its atmosphere and the crystals forming in its core, bright threads, pockets of compressed light, waiting there in the darkness, being created by chemical reactions, slowly refined by intense pressure, a pressure I feel and know.

Wednesday 13th October 2010

Where does it come from, the joy that makes me skip and leap? ANd where does it go? I feel it so strongly in my body, it is so physical and real. When it's there, it's there. I can't command it.

Of course most people aren't connected to their bodies, let alone the earth. Which is why I see the madness that I do. And hear it too.

Spinning and dancing.

Plunging and zinging and winging and singing and flinging forth growth. Oh the flower feels bliss as it opens, oh the tree feels joy as it unfurls its leaves, oh the earth feels ecstacy as it turns into the light.

I don't believe I'm Jesus, but some kind of prophet, yes, for sure, I think that. Being gifted teachings that I must transmit.

So why am I in hospital? In hospital, in hospital. Locked up, shut down, not allowed to leave. Do you know what that's like, to have to stay in a space, stay in a world, not allowed to leave? When there is nothing you can say or do to change that, when the force that imprisons you is implacable, impervious to pleas or demands.

Later

Try to communicate, he said. [The psychologist told me that when I was broken I should try to write or draw so that I might make some sense of it later] Try to communicate. Try to communicate. Bang on the walls when nothing makes sense. I can feel the shivering and breaking. I can feel the jerking in my body. The brokenness is coming. The brokenness is coming. And there is a terrible sorrow in narrative. And then a lurching back. From time spent elsewhere. I don't like it. Does it matter that I leave out the details? Does it matter that I live deep below the surface? I don't want my life, I know that. What will change that? What if nothing does? If you put it all together, add the ecstacy to the brokenness, I don't want it. Even though I do feel bliss. And people talk too much. Of that I'm certain. So this is me communicating, this is me tapping on the wall of the cave. But I'm not sure anyone will find me. I'm not sure anyone is looking.

Later

Broken, broken, broken. Bang, bang, bang. The river, the river, the river. Go, go, go.

Tiredness

2011-07-08T11:24:00.002+01:00

Tiredness is my companion these days. I get ridiculously tired. It feels rather pathetic but paradoxically I achieve more when I accept it and allow myself to take regular rests.

Sometimes I wonder if there is something physically wrong, but I'm sure that if I went to the GP it would be ascribed to my mental health. They'd probably be right, and it is a residual symptom. I was very ill only three months ago and that isn't a long time in terms of depression.

But I am getting better. I know I'm getting better because I can *act* again. I can *move*. Where once movement was a mountain to climb, now it seems easy. I am quite naturally, without effort, without the need to shout at myself or motivate myself, tidying up the house. It is a distinct difference, and I am making a lot of it because it is clear to me right now that I am not just lazy, that avolition is a symptom of an illness not an innate characteristic. And I need to remember this.

In fact I realised that the severity of the crash I experienced earlier this year gave me a gift. Because that self-doubt, that suspicion that maybe you are just an inadequate person and that's why you are struggling, was kind of blown out of the water. I was in the grips of something fundamental and physical and it was all I could do to get through it. It didn't go away whatever I did, so it made no sense to talk about distraction or coping strategies. I wasn't thinking the wrong thoughts, or allowing myself to ruminate on negative things, or any of those ideas that imply that somehow you are creating or maintaining your mental state yourself and could just stop it if you tried a little harder. No, all those ideas were exposed for the sufferer-blaming twaddle that they are. I don't understand depression but it is nonetheless *real*, it is a fierce beast that descends without invitation.

Ah, it is nice to be able to act again, to be able to have a thought and then find that thought carried out by your body, instead of feeling as though that fundamental link is broken. I know I am getting better because I bought some boots. I have owned the boots I am wearing since 1997, and it shows. They may still be functional but they are distinctly scruffy. And I have been thinking about getting some new ones for *months*. And yesterday I did! And it was easy! I found the ones I wanted online, and ordered them. Really, what was so hard about that? Why wasn't I able to do it before?

My support worker took me to the Involvement Centre yesterday. I feel a bit baffled and confused about it, I am still not entirely sure what I would end up doing, but I am keeping an open mind and going back on Tuesday to attend a meeting about a recovery education initiative. But oh how I like having a support worker, because without me having to justify or explain myself, she understood that I would find it hard to turn up there by myself, and has arranged to meet me in town. Then I will follow her to the centre and she will get me through the door. So I guess I'll see what happens and what it is like. I think it would be good for me to get used to interacting with other people again, and it is a safe, supported atmosphere.

:bangshead:

2011-07-01T14:23:00.002+01:00

I've been wondering if it is possible for illness to function as a kind of trauma. Last night I was remembering being ill and I felt touched again by horror and terror. It was torture to go through it. I am amazed I survived, and it is perhaps unsurprising that I still have this deep fear of being returned to that state, that I still feel battered and broken on some fundamental level by it.

That I did survive, that I not only survived but am here, three months later, trying once more to build a life, thinking about what I can change, what I can do, seems a testament to something resilient in the human spirit. Or perhaps to a foolish optimism.

I saw the psychologist today. I tried to convey my fear that I cannot fully recover. I tried to impress on him how it is not just that I don't know to form relationships, but I don't even know how to want them, and how that feels like part of me.

We discussed how after the experience of overwhelming ecstacy ordinary life can seem dull, we talked about how I need to build a life, how I am pretty much starting from scratch, many years behind most people, we touched on my current lack of goals and dreams. And we talked about medication. He found a copy of the BNF and looked up my current tablets. He thinks that I may be on too high a dose of citalopram, that it may be contributing to my emotional flatness. And he doesn't understand at all why I am on amisulpride. So he is going to talk to the consultant, and he suggested that we organise a CPA and discuss reducing my medication.

And I just don't know what to think. Maybe if I had more confidence that he had helped me identify what triggers my mood changes I would be keen on this idea. After all I am not exactly enamoured with medication in general, and I frequently go back and forth on the issue of whether I actually need to take it. But I'm scared that he's wrong. I'm scared that I am going to be plunged again into the cycling of moods, that I'm going to end up unable to think clearly, my thoughts breaking and dividing and being stolen from me, that I will once more be pressed against the pillows on a hospital bed, praying for mercy, praying for time and the unbearable to pass.

Sometimes I wish mental illness was more like physical illness, that someone could say definitively this is what is wrong, and this is how we treat it. Instead there is a swirling mass of different theories and opinions and approaches. And I must choose who to trust, who to believe. It is a choice I feel ill-equipped to make.

Good Things

2011-06-28T18:53:00.003+01:00

I've been a bit glum lately, so I thought I would write a post about the good things in my life.

First and most fundamental has to be my house. I lived with family for years and used to long for my own space, for my own door I could shut against the world and everyone in it. I have that now. This house is my safety and sanctuary.

I live in an old cottage. The outside is white with black beams and there are beams in the ceilings inside. The walls aren't straight and the floors aren't flat, and so it somehow fits my rather wonky self. I feel at home here.

It's very small. There is a room downstairs, with a kitchen area at the back, and a room upstairs with a tiny bathroom tucked in the corner. That's the only thing I'd change, that there isn't even room for a bath. Sometimes I miss having a soak in the bath. And it does get cold in the winter, and this last winter the water kept freezing. There isn't really central heating as such, just an electric heater and an open fire, which will heat a radiator upstairs if you build it high enough. During the winter I drape myself in duvets and am permanently attached to a hot water bottle.

But the house feels friendly. There are many windows and the sun pours in the back in the mornings and through the front in the evenings. And it's quiet, really quiet. Where I lived before there was the constant noise of cars and I was always aware of the neighbours. Here I hardly notice the neighbours and because I live in a quiet village, which isn't on the way to anywhere else, there is minimal traffic. Mostly, I hear birds, sparrows scuffling on the roof or chirping on the telephone wires. I can hear birds now. I can always hear birds. I love birds.

And this place, which suits my soul in so many ways, which gives me the peace and quiet my mind needs to adequately function, is cheap to rent. I was so lucky to find it. The only other houses that are as cheap as this are in distinctly dodgy areas of town. It's so cheap I actually make a profit on my housing benefit. Yes, I agree that is probably morally wrong, but I didn't have the energy to challenge the decision. The council know how much my rent is, they still give me more than I need.

And that's another good thing. My financial situation. I don't expect it to last, with all the talk of cuts, and I fear being called for another medical assessment, and I am already scared about reapplying for DLA, which doesn't happen until 2014, but for now I am financially comfortable, and I am immensely grateful not to have to worry about the essentials. The benefits I get - income support with the severe disability premium, DLA - high rate care and low rate mobility, and housing benefit - are more than adequate for my needs. I am not much of a shopper, I live fairly basically, and so right now I do not have to budget or worry. I have even managed recently to pay most of my debt off. When I have finished paying it off I may buy some new clothes - I am still wearing jeans and boots I have had for well over ten years, nearer fifteen. And I may start some savings for the future, which seems likely to be less secure.

And no list of good things would be complete without a mention of my cat. My lovely, lovely cat, who is so cuddly, who is such a good companion, who curls up beside me and makes me feel happy and safe. I look at his life and I think I would like to be a cat.

I am doing quite well right now. I am drinking wine and watching Wimbledon, and feeling vaguely positive about the future. I spoke to the coordinator for the exercise on referral programme and she is going to contact the Ecominds people, who do the conservation work for those with mental health problems, and she also suggested some gym sessions that are supported by the local Mind. And my support worker is going to make me an appointment at an "involvement centre" for service users, to see what they are running. And I have been looking at courses I might be able to start in September. And I found out that because I have been detained under section 3 of the MHA I don't need to be financially assessed for a personal budget, I am not expected to make a contribution, it will be paid for.

So I am feeling fairly good, and trying to take advice on board. Because my support worker said I should trust that a good mood could be just a good mood, and not the start of an "episode", and my social worker said that anxiety over whether it might become an "episode" could help to create an "episode". And although I don't really understand all their talk about triggers and emotions, and although I look rather blankly at them when they speak about developing friendships, I am trying to believe them.

And I have zopiclone, and wine. How can things be bad?

Discussing Diagnosis

2011-06-24T20:22:00.003+01:00

I took the amisulpride last night. I swallowed it down with the wine my support worker suggested I buy. She thought it might help me sleep. It did. It also reminded me how much I like wine, which may not be entirely a good thing.

I took the amisulpride because the confusion and brokenness was creeping back in, because the voices were starting up again and the consequent twisting doubt in my own experience. And I don't think I want that. If I plunged deep into that world, of problems with thoughts and perceptual disturbances, it would undoubtably keep me so busy and distracted that I would hardly notice I didn't have much of a real life. But I want a real life! Or I think I do.

I also took it because I had an appointment with the consultant this morning and I wanted to be able to actually speak to her, and not just be stuttering and lost. There is something inevitably problematic about psychiatric appointments I feel. In order to get the best out of them you need to be able to be articulate about what you are experiencing, you need to have some insight and be able to communicate it. And yet the very fact that you are able to have insight and communicate it leaves you open to the view that therefore your problems cannot be that serious. For example, when I am very broken I can't form thoughts or sentences, but to be able to describe that to a psychiatrist I have to be able to form sentences which in itself undermines the veracity of what I am saying. This was a particular issue with my previous consultant who seemed to be suspicious of everything I said and see it as her job to disbelieve it and try to disprove it. Ah, I could rant about my previous consultant! Maybe I *should* one day.

So I went to the appointment. It was mostly taken up with a discussion about diagnosis, an issue I brought up. I brought it up because when I was on the ward in February they gave me a folder which contained information about the medication I was taking and Mind booklets about depression, anxiety and personality disorders. I didn't think I still had a diagnosis of personality disorder and I wanted to know if in fact I did. (I have some paranoia regarding this issue because when I was first given the borderline diagnosis it was deliberately withheld from me - I knew I had it because of the way people were treating me but it took a long time for it to come out into the open, despite me directly asking.) (The anxiety is a whole other thing, and I didn't even address that today, but again I was surprised to receive a booklet about it because it doesn't seem to be a major factor in my life. I do experience some anxiety, social anxiety in particular, but I really don't think it is enough to qualify as a disorder.)

So, we had quite a long conversation. The consultant said that when she first came into psychiatry they were quite quick to give people diagnoses, but now there is more awareness that there are grey areas and people can often be complex. She said when she took on my care she was happy to run with what my current diagnoses are. But I have a diagnosis of reccurent depressive disorder and possible dissociative disorder. I don't feel depression quite covers it, and to have a "possible" diagnosis lacks clarity. I mean, if I had a definite diagnosis I could fight for specialist treatment, but a possible one just leaves me hanging.

So we discussed emtionally unstable personality disorder and how I don't feel I have it. I *do* have the voices/psychotic-type symptoms that she said can be present in the borderline type, but the rest - no, I really can't see how it relates to my experience, particularly in normal life. To be fair, if you saw me around the time I was sectioned last time, when I was banging my head on walls, and throwing bins, and crying, you could certainly say I was "emotionally disregulated" that day - but then I moved into pretty solid depression, and the gradual climb out it, and I have been throughout my ususal stable non-emotional self. I told her that when my social worker did an assessment test on me, that they use in the most local therapeutic community, I didn't qualify for emotionally unstable personality disorder, and she said, well, that kinds of puts that issue to bed. I also told her that what I actually scored high for was schizoid and schizotypal. She made a note and said that that ok, people can have these traits and there was a difference between socially isolating because of a low mood and just being a naturally solitary person and if that was the case people wouldn't push me to be different. Which is a relief, because I do feel that this is what the psychologist is pushing me to do with his insistence on the importance of relationships. (And interestingly, a symptom of schizotypal personality disorder is perceptual disturbances, which would fit)

As far as the dissociative issue goes, dissociation has been a major factor in my life and my history with diagnoses of dissociatve disorders probably needs a post of it's own, but I said that at the moment it doesn't seem to be an issue. The counsellor I had for a year thought I had a form of PTSD. My take on it is that I probably did and that it is now mostly resolved, but I am still having problems with mood.

She said there is another diagnosis she sometimes gives people of mood disorder not otherwise specified and I could have that if I wanted, and to think about it. Then we moved on to discuss whether I could have bipolar. She drew a graph ranging from depressed to elated/ecstatic and asked me to draw a line showing how my mood changes. I said it didn't change hour to hour or even day to day. I have periods of normality, then my mood climbs up, that lasts for a few weeks, then I crash and am depressed and then my mood slowly returns to normal. So bipolar is on the table, and we can discuss it further at my next CPA, which must be due soon, I haven't had one for ages.

I think what I'd really like is for her to see me when I am high and then she can decide whether it actually is hypomania/mania. Just a shame I can't summon up such moods on will, or trigger myself into them. It nearly happened in February, that she saw me high, but then I was diverted to the crisis team and saw their consultant instead. And the diagnosis the crisis team gave me on my discharge form was mood disorder not otherwise specified. If the bipolar diagnosis comes to nothing I think I will take that, it is very vague, but it is also truthful, and I could live with it.

Discussing these issues with my support worker the day before the appointment, she said I certainly didn't seem typical bipolar. No, I'm not, because my moods are still filtered through my basic personality. I might become much more talkative than normal, but because I am naturally so quiet, people who don't know me don't notice this. And once a nurse in hospital told me that it almost sounded like bipolar, except I didn't spend loads of money. But I'm just not naturally impulsive, or that interested in shopping. The support worker and I also talked about whether it could be a personality disorder and she gave me a booklet about a service for those with personality disorder. There is a group program locally, that you attend for about eighteen months. I am in a place where I am prepared to try anything, so I have looked at it. It says it is for people who have "difficulties with emotions and relationships". I'm not sure that really includes me, but it may be worth being referred to them anyway, to see what their assessment of me is, and whether they think it would help me. So I shall talk to my social worker about it.

At the end of the appointment I asked if I could have an ongoing prescription for zopiclone, and this was no problem. She gave me some there and then and said she would write to my GP to say I could have it on repeat prescription. This is Very Good Indeed. The ability to manage my sleep, to take zopiclone when I need it or when I know I have a hard day ahead is very useful to me.

So it was a good appointment. I like this consultant. She listens, and she talks to me like I am an intelligent adult. I wish she had been my consultant from the beginning, I might have had less problems and a better experience of services.

Phew! That was long!

Self-stigma and stopping meds

2011-06-23T12:02:00.003+01:00

I went out yesterday. This is a rare occurence for me. I went to a big county show with some friends. There were displays and stalls and swarms of people. I found it hard dealing with the assault on my perceptions, all the faces, all the voices, all the noise. I found it hard managing "normal" conversation for that long. I felt deeply, uncomfortably aware of my old and scruffy clothes and my jobless benefit-scrounging status.

There were two moments that felt particularly awkward for me. At one point we were waiting for someone and my friend K was tapping his foot. His wife J told him to stop and he said "Werehorse taps!". "Yes" said J, "but Werehorse taps because of her illness. You're just impatient." Then later we went into a hospitality tent where they were handing out drinks. The others had Pimms, I had coffee. I was coping with enough without adding alcohol to the mix. "Are you sure you don't want some?" they said, and then, "oh, of course, you're on tablets."

There is no one stigmatising me in these situations except myself. With the way I feel ashamed, uncomfortable, worth less than others, with the way I wish that no one knew I was ill or had ever been in hospital. With the sudden sickening suspicion that maybe this is why they are so kind to me, because I am seen as vulnerable and in need of friendship. If I had some other kind of illness, and had been hospitalised for it, and was on medication for it, I wouldn't feel ashamed like this. I still don't think I would publicise it, but I almost certainly wouldn't feel it affected my value as a person.

But here of course is the big question, here is the confusion, here is the reason - or one of the several reasons, I mentioned two others in my last post - that I am not taking the anti-psychotics at the moment. Because am I actually ill? And what is the nature of that illness? Even the professionals don't agree.

If I can think of myself as ill then I can be compassionate towards myself, I can view my illness as something I have to manage, yes, but something that does not change who I am. I can work to take care of myself and build a life within the limitations that illness brings. I can accept support and I can take medication.

But if it is all psychological, if it is all about triggers and emotions and reactions, then it is not something I have to live with, it is something I can change and overcome, and I should be striving towards that goal, and the fact that I am not achieving it *does* imply something about my character. Maybe my thinking is flawed but that is how it seems right now.

The psychologist doesn't believe in medication, though he acknowledges it can be helpful in the short-term. He thinks I can fully recover and live without either services or medication. This idea is floating around within my current reluctance to take the tablets. It's as though I'm trying to test whether I actually need them, it's as though I want a reminder of what life was like without them, so I can work out whether I really am ill or not.

Then there's the attitude of my ex-consultant, who prescribed the amisulpride in the first place. She didn't really want to give me anti psychotics because she didn't believe I was "genuinely psychotic". In fact she said that people who were genuinely psychotic weren't willing to take anti psychotics. And I was. Because I was confused and chaotic and overwhelmed by my thoughts and perceptions, because she had taken me off quetiapine and things had only got worse. She said that giving me amisulpride was "meeting me halfway". So I keep thinking that I shouldn't really be on them anyway. I keep thinking that my "illness" is in fact an elaborate lie, that I am choosing to deceive myself and others and could just stop it, that for some twisted reason I must be *wanting* to appear "ill". Maybe I am, as she always seemed to secretly believe, a nasty borderline just trying to manipulate people. (And "yes, OF COURSE you are a fraud and a fake and a liar" shout the voices and "you don't *really* hear voices" shout the voices. And I wriggle and writhe like an insect pinned to a board.)

I am feeling increasingly confused. I am having some of the old trouble with my thinking processes, losing my language, finding words repeating and repeating in my mind. It has taken tremendous effort to write this post, to summon up clarity, to form sentences and lay them down one after the other in some semblance of sense, to bring order to my experience and the clouds of ideas that keep floating in and out of focus. It would have been so much easier not to, to slip down into that brokenness and silence that is so familiar. But I *have* written it, so I can't be ill, right?

Sorry, no fluffy rainbows here

2011-06-21T15:40:00.003+01:00

I realised the other day that I censor myself. I've imbibed so much positive thinking and cbt-type stuff that I don't really allow myself to think or feel negatively. I wonder if this is why my depression manifests so physically? Because I seriously cannot tell sometimes if I am mentally or physically unwell. Also I wonder if it is actually healthy? Maybe that's why I seem to be so emotion-less, to struggle to feel anything? Maybe being grumpy could actually be a good thing?

And I do feel grumpy. Life recently has been so dull and drab. Although I have been 'stable' it has been a rubbish kind of stability - I am not enjoying anything, and not interested in anything. The days go by and the days go by and the days go by. That's how it feels, and although I wouldn't say I was suicidal, which implies a desperation, I have been thinking about suicide, in that very detached and rational-seeming way.

And the obstacles I face in any attempt to 'get a life' may be internal and invisible but they are not therefore any less real or any less daunting. I just seem unable to change things, and I don't know why, and that is frustrating and distressing. And I really don't think the psychologist has grasped the extent of my difficulties. At the last appointment he started talking about post-graduate courses. That is so far away from my reality that it is laughable - maybe he was mocking me?

My support worker came today. I am always torn between my desire to be a 'good' patient and my need to tell the truth. I lied to her about my medication but I told her the truth about my eating. (I am not taking all my medication at the moment because of a mixture of fearing that it contributes to my fatness, and a sense that if what I have been experiencing lately is sanity then I don't want it. Which is stupid and reckless, and I am likely to come to regret it, but that's just the way things are right now.) She made me eat something and tried to give me a pep talk. Except I alreay KNOW that things won't change by themselves, that it's only me that can do it, etc and etc and etc and GRR. Still, I think it is actually a relief to have someone else to do the positive bit, instead of always having to divide myself within myself and use part of my brain to try and motivate and activate the rest, which is rather like trying to lift up a chair that you yourself are sitting on.

She left saying that she wasn't about to give up on me. I'm meeting her on Thursday to go shopping and she's going to come to my appointment with my social worker next week. I DO want to do these things and make changes, but some of my problems and behaviours are entrenched, and it's not as simple as having someone, however nice, tell me I need to shower every day and hey presto, I can shower every day. If it was that simple I'd have sorted it out by now. Except of course, it *should* be that simple, surely? I just don't understand why I am seemingly so unable to live like a normal human being.

One of the problems this week was this whole business of volunteering. Now this voluntary work is something I've thought for at least a couple of years that I would like to be able to do, but I seemed utterly incapable of sending the necessary email about it and I didn't understand why. But I think I have untangled it a little now. First there are my huge fears about being around PEOPLE. Fear that I'm going to act weird, or say something weird, or somehow reveal my mentalness. That's a huge block. Then there's the fact that it goes on all day, which makes it daunting, a huge long time to try to act normally. And because it goes on all day it involves lunch, and what do I do about that? It would look weird not to eat, so I would have to eat, and oh there are just all sorts of problems with that. So perhaps it makes sense that I found the idea just a bit too much?

But I got my information through about the "exercise on referral" scheme, which I *have* managed to sign up for, and I saw that there is a group at the same place, doing much the same thing (conservation work) but designed for those with mental health problems, so maybe that would be a better option to begin with? And I know part of the idea was that I move away from services and from the mental health world and mix with the wider community, but I think I would feel more comfortable being with other mental people. It feels less pressured somehow, as though I am more able to relax and be myself.

Except that the whole "exercise on referral" thing itself brings up the long shadow of failure. Because I was referred to it before, back in 2009. I was whizzy as hell then, and had so much energy that I didn't know what to do with it, and it seemed like an absolutely excellent idea to go to a gym. Except then I crashed and I never went. You see folks, my feeling that I am a failure is not distorted thinking, it is rational and EVIDENCE-BASED!

Oh, I don't know. I just know for sure that I won't, without help, be able to succeed at these things. Me left by myself - well, I just don't think it's going to happen. So I guess I'll see what happens with this personal budget. Which, by the way, seems to be taking an AGE - we started talking about it before I ended up in hospital. It's not really my social worker's fault, it's just taking her a long time because it is such a new thing and it's the first one she's done.

Oh, and the support worker asked if I needed to be back in hospital. I bet you can guess what I said!

Love, GRUMPY

The Hospital Diaries pt 3

2011-06-18T11:59:00.003+01:00

Saturday 25th September

It's the leaving, it's the running, it's the going, it's the being on the way to somewhere else. The desire for that possesses me like lust.

If it's not like that then what's it like? No, no, too much talking, too much telling, too many words.

Sunday 26th September

The structure of thought is so deeply flawed, and the movement in my body is too much.

How did it happen, how, how, how?

No, it's not like that, no it's not like that. They approach me, holding out the selves they want to shape me into. It's not like that.

Eyes judder, eyes stare. At the bank of windows and a reflected chair, certain there is meaning there.

How did it come to this? How did it come to this? Oh, I don't want to go back, not like this, and I don't want to stay. The structure is so flawed, see.

Monday 27th September

Who, who, who? How, how, how? Echoing, echoing. Yes, the twitching and the tension is the worst, the grim endurance. I don't believe in that narrating, observing voice, that is the problem. Or the problem is that the narrating, observing voice is absent. And the voices love the section, because it's an excellent opportunity to torment me more. *She*, *Her*, what *she* does and all her dishonourable motivations. So strangely loopy yet I can't find the knot to cut.

Tuesday 28th September

There's no space, I feel caged, I pace, I want to run, I long to be gone. On the way elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere. Somewhere other. But am barred. But am walled. But am kept. And it feels like forever.

If I had a camera, then: the moss outlining the brick paving, green with rain; the tree outside the dayroom window, red and green; the clump of pampas grass, further distant; the patients ranged in chairs, slumped, dazed, staring; and the pattern on the curtains.

How am I to save the world, stuck in here?

Maybe I have an anti-psychosis. As the group discusses fixed beliefs and gathering evidence and further information, my mind spins off in a thousand interpretations, a cascade of plausible realities, all seeming as likely as any other.

But I am peaceful now, the agitation easing for a while, and so content to sit and wait and watch the birds feast on fallen plums in the the hospital garden and listen to traffic and watch time pass. I am still on intermittent observations.

Wednesday 29th September

NO. NO. NO. IT IS NOT LIKE THAT. NO.

There are forcefields and honesties and other realities and I will shield myself from hidden communications.

I'm seeing the world again as a series of squares and other shapes. I'm immersed in visual rhythms.

Oh, it's rubbish. To be like this, with ele-fucking-tricity in the networks of my brain and ecstacy and movement in my body.

And now I see that the voices do not tell the truth, because I did not choose this, now, it is there, simply there.

Later

The river. I want the river. I want to leave the ward and walk into town and catch a bus and then another and make my way to the river. I feel it like a hunger, to be walking into the water and away from this confusion.

Thursday 30th September

It was the weather. I wanted to lie on the wet stones where the rain became circles of light and let it soak me. And the river was pulling me, I could feel how my jeans would become heavy with water, as I moved deeper and then went under.

It all seems so clear and logical at the time. Then later people say this and say that and events become confusing.

I hear snatches of my own voice, but it's not my voice, and it scares me.

Hyper-reality infuses each and every perception with intensity

Friday 1st October

WHY ARE PEOPLE SO BORING? THEY TALK AND THEY TALK AND IT'S ALL SO BORING.

NOW THE FIZZING.

AS I DO A JIGSAW I HAVE DONE BEFORE, ON THIS WARD TWO YEARS AGO, AND REMEMBER IT AND MEMORIES COLLIDE AND TIME BOTH COALESCES AND FRAGMENTS, I WATCH HANDS THAT AREN'T MINE SLOT PIECES INTO PLACE AND AM AWARE OF OTHER PRESENCES WITHIN ME AND IT'S WEIRD.

Later

Broken language. Fragments. Words. With a thousands associations, with a thousand connections. But no directions. No sentences that begin at the beginning and proceed to the end. So, I suddenly see, it is about time as well as language.

Saturday 2nd October

Morning in the dayroom. Television news. I must remember to collect my wind-up torch. If I go home. If I ever go home. Tai Chi and Qi Gong fried my brain. Heat between my hands, heat moving over my skull. And thoughts so fast and joyous they had no time to be more than flashes. And I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the world and the mystery of living.

Sunday 3rd October

Disorientated. Don't like it. I'm in a hospital. That seems so strange and scary.

I used up a lot of black yesterday. In paint and crayon. Writing, drawing, cutting pictures for a collage. Nothing careful about it, none of that meditative measured colouring. Wild scribbles, shapes and energy.

It's still dark and the lamps by the roadways are little moons, hanging lows. I slept five and a half hours. Today I could start my timeline. Today I need some glue.

So I drink coffee and watch the news and in the back of my mind are layered all the many mornings I've spent here, going up and down to the garden and back. And my hands remember the jigsaw.

And I'm a talker. The boring people seem less boring, or I have simply become boring too.

Prickling in my skull. And sometimes it is as though someone has lifted off the bone and exposed the membranes of my brain directly to experience, my perceptions no longer modulated by the senses of the body which act as filters as much as channels.

And the voices are back.

Later

Pulsing me so much today my mind has turned to mush. Too many ideas, too many thoughts, too many flashes and pulses and surges.

Earlier I understood everything. And it's why I have so often struggled to keep my house clean.

Yes, it's too much

Monday 4th October

Thoughts too fast for words. Pulsing, pulsing, pulsing.

Tuesday 5th October

I was shown a picture of an angel. I decided to make a picture of an angel. Then there was a barn owl on the television and I said "I want to make an owl". So I made a being that was half an owl and half an angel. That's what I mean about magic.

Because the first time I saw a barn owl, flying in the half-dark, over the rough grass, I thought it was an angel.

But I don't want to go home. I'm scared of walking round my house with my mind this wild. At least here there is a structure of shift changes and meal times and bed times and med times. I do not think I can go amongst people, people of the ordinary world, and pretend to be other than I currently am.

I gave my word. That I will not leave, that I will go on general observations and I will not leave, I will ask for help if I am struggling. And this scares me, scares me, scares me. Because my word is my word and so I am bound by it, but I'm not sure, I'm just not entirely sure, that I'm ready to make such a commitment to living.

Wednesday 6th October

Because of gravity.

I'm losing my language.

The plants in the garden are talking.

I don't know what I dreamed about but I woke up to the words "archetypal symbolism" and the echo of laughter.

As I sort the pieces of a jigsaw, as my eyes search for colour and my hands search for shape, my mind tries to sort the pieces of my current reality. And fails. Hospital, hospital, hospital. I'm in hospital, and does that make sense? What and how and why?

Flying. Soaring and spinning. Singing and winging. Arcing upwards into space. And sometimes I feel the earth below me, deep, deep, deep, and I feel the sky above me, stretching into infinity, that huge space. And I lie on a bench in the garden and feel like I need to hold on.

Later

I EXIST IN TREMBLING BLISS! MAGICAL, MAGICAL, MAGICAL! THE WORLD VIBRATES WITH MEANING AND BEAUTY. THERE ARE WORDS AND PICTURES EVERYWHERE THAT I KNOW COULD INFUSE ME WITH MORE ENERGY THAN MY BODY COULD CONTAIN.

Later still

I've gone through into that other realm again. It feels peaceful and warm. I am sure I'm going to die soon, and that's fine, it's all fine. It's time.

There is too much noise here. I can't leave because I gave back my keys, but that's what I'd like. To leave, to be alone. Because the brokenness came and will return. And I wonder if it is possible to die from overwhelming bliss

I need help

2011-06-15T16:13:00.003+01:00

No, I'm not in crisis. This is more of a chronic situation.

When I was seventeen I saw my first psychiatrist, I was prescribed Prozac and assigned a CPN. I told the CPN I didn't want to see her, because the shame of being mental was so great. The internet didn't exist back then and I didn't know anyone else who had my kind of problems. Instead I resolved to deal with my difficulties myself. I went to the library and found a couple of self-help books, though they didn't proliferate the way they do now. I did some basic thought challenging and activity-setting, but really what I decided was most important was to hide how I felt, and I worked really hard at it.

When I was psychotic in my early twenties, it was the same thing. I worked incredibly hard to contain the craziness and present a relatively normal front. Behind that front I tried frantically to fix myself.

And this has basically been my strategy ever since. For years I believed I could cure myself, sort myself out, try harder, strive more. I hid the madness and I hatched plans to change my life. I have had so many plans. I have been so determined. I have signed up for so many courses, made so many promises to myself. Sometimes I look at that and all I see is the failure and defeat, but I also see that I have never given up, I have always eventually bounced back with more commitment, more determination, new plans.

It's just that maybe it is time to try doing things another way, to finally admit that I can't do this all by myself. I need help. When my social worker first talked about a personal budget I was ambivalent, still caught up in my old thinking that really I could and should be able to do all these things on my own, but now I find myself hoping that it works out. Because it has the potential to really change my life. And I want that. So somehow I have to put aside my shame and accept support.

Support work vs Psychology

2011-06-10T13:17:00.002+01:00

I feel like I should apologise for my last post. I don't usually get so downbeat and glum. It's just hard sometimes to accept where I am. But despite everything my life is better than it used to be, so I just have to keep trying. I can't avoid doing things because I'm scared of becoming ill and not being able to cope, I have to somehow make a start anyway and deal with a relapse if and when it happens.

And my support worker is helping me do this. It's very practical, the work we do. A lot of it is basic life-skills, looking after myself and the house, it's have you put some washing on? have you eaten? have you had a shower? kind of stuff. It's looking at my whole life and seeing what can be improved and then changing it. So we went on Wednesday to a nature reserve run by the local Wildlife Trust and asked about volunteering. So I made an appointment today to see the nurse at the GP's in order to get a referral to the leisure centre. So I will on Monday phone the dentist. These are all things I might think are a good idea, or know I should do, but I'm not very good at breaking them down into steps and actually doing them. And it really helps having someone to encourage, and occasionally prod, me into action.

But if the support work seems to be exactly the kind of help I need right now, I'll be honest and say I'm not so convinced about psychology. Can sitting in a room and talking about things for an hour actually effect change? After all, I've always been aware of what I need to do, I've always been able to talk about it, it's doing it, and continuing to do it, that is the problem.

Then there's the issue of "illness", because the psychologist believes there is always a psychological trigger for my moods and that I can learn to identify triggers and therefore avoid moods. I'm just not quite sure about this. Sometimes his interpretations and explanations of what has happened just don't feel right or true, and I feel as though he is presenting me with a self that I don't recognise. And it *does* feel to me like an illness. Is it? Isn't it? Who should I believe? Or perhaps the question should be which is the most helpful belief to hold? I only know that to believe the psychologist makes me feel slightly desperate, as though I will always be stumbling in the dark, trying to locate triggers and reasons that I have no awareness of, striving for a psychological explanation even when it feels like I am making that explanation up.

We also have rather a fundamental disconnect about the necessity of relationships. The psychologist said today that it is relationships that heal. He wants me to develop more relationships. But I am a solitary person. Is that part of my nature, my character, or is it a symptom of ill health? If I had more friends would I be better? Should I endeavour to be more social? Would it be "good" for me? But that feels exhausting and false, trying to be something I'm not.

So I don't know. I've made an appointment to see him again in three weeks time, but I'm not convinced it's really helping. I feel like the support worker is actually much more useful to me right now.

Limbo

2011-06-08T12:11:00.003+01:00

I'm in an odd place right now. I'm not really ill, but I'm not really well either. And the reality is that my life is organised to have minimal stress and commitments and though that is necessary and good when I'm really ill, when I'm not that ill it's empty. And boring.

I feel as though mental illness has devestated my life, dominated it, wrecked it. But I also feel ambivalent about the treatment. It seems to me that the amisulpride, while giving me back my ability to think also took away any interesting thoughts. So I don't have that brokenness of thought, that chanting repeating punning jumble, but I don't really have any inspiration either.

So I stop taking the anti psychotics. Then I start again. I go backwards and forwards, I waver, I prevaricate, I can't decide, I can't commit to recovery either way. The idea of trying to recover seems exhausting, it would require so much positivity, so much commitment to change, to be different. And I'm not really sure it would come to anything anyway.

Besides, recovery is the wrong word when it comes to me. Because I have had mental health problems for so long I have no life or sense of self to recover. I would have to build from the beginning. I try to remember what I was like before I took anti-psychotics. I was on fluoxetine and I wasn't very well. And before I was on fluoxetine I wasn't very well either.

I read about bloggers managing to juggle mental illness and work, and relationships, and social lives. And I feel inadequate. I feel old and washed up, I feel like a failure. I have none of these things. My psychologist makes references to my "potential" but really I'm far too old to have potential. I know I'm intelligent, I know I am at least moderately talented at various things, but because of my illness I have never achieved anything.

You see sometimes I want to walk away from services, from social workers and psychiatrists, I want to cast off the label and identity of being ill, but I am trapped. It is only because I am judged to be ill that I can live, that I have a place to stay and food to eat. If I walk away from that I have to work. And leaving aside the very real problem of who on earth would employ me, and what on earth I could do, could I cope with working? I might just about right now, but I defintely couldn't three months ago. And in three months time, who knows.

I don't know, maybe I am still a little depressed. I'm not physically slowed down, I don't have bad feelings choking me, I can hear music and see colour, so I don't really count it as depression, but happy, expansive and positive I am not. Then again, these are facts about my life, not just negative thoughts, they are truths, realities. I am only seeing and stating the situation clearly.

I have to go and meet the support worker this afternoon. We are going shopping, and then tomorrow she will come to my house and help me cook. I don't want this to happen, because it involves food, it means eating, and I am busy restricting my intake and half-starving myself because at least that's something I can do, because I can't bear to be fat as well as everything else. No, it's not healthy, and I know it's not healthy, but I don't have the motivation or energy to be healthy right now. "Healthy" feels like something I only ever pretend to be, a pose that it takes enormous energy to maintain.

The Hospital Diaries pt 2

2011-06-03T15:54:00.003+01:00

I don't remember much about that first week in hospital. Only that though I didn't want to be in hospital nor did I wish to return to my life. The following entry sums the situation up:

Wednesday 22nd September

Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. And each day confirms that only more. As promises are made that won't be kept, as voices torment me, as I stare at the world and cannot name it, as thoughts vanish before I can shape them or speak them, as the wretched energy tries to dance me around like a doll. And there is nothing anymore I wish to fight for.

That was Wednesday. On Thursday I ran away from the hospital. Whether it was planned or impulsive I'm not sure, only that I was told on Thursday morning that I had been taken off obs and within ten minutes I was gone. I walked down into the town and waited for a bus. Then I had to catch another bus to the village I live in. My neighbours had my house key so I walked to the river and back, and then I sat outside my house and began drafting a suicide note. When my neighbours returned I smiled as I collected my key from them, sounding cheerful - yes, I was home now, and I was much better thank you - and then I went inside and began making preparations to kill myself.

I live in an old cottage with beams in the ceiling. In one of these beams there is a very sturdy hook which had become the focus of all my suicidal thoughts. I brought in a stool from the garden and put it beneath the hook. I took all the quetiapine tablets I could find and put them in a glass ready to swallow. I went upstairs and started writing out my suicide note on the computer.

Then my phone rang. That I answered it suggests there was some ambivalence in me about my plan. Had it not rung at that moment would I have gone through with hanging myself? I can't know for sure, it seems likely, I was certainly set on it, but maybe something within me would have intervened. Anyway it was the hospital. They asked where I was, and I told them. Things get blurry here, I was beginning to dissociate, everything seemed to be happening at a distance.

The police arrived. They took photographs of my set-up, the stool and the hook, they confiscated the glass of pills, and then they drove me back to the hospital. (The photographs are in my notes now.)In the car my eyes started rolling and my head hanging forward and I remember the policeman sitting next to me getting worried, and switching on the light and lifting up my chin to look at me. I think they thought I had already taken something, but I hadn't. It was just my response to the extreme nature of the situation.

Back at the hospital it all seemed very noisy and I was tired. There must have been conversations about what had happened. There were mentions of blood tests because they still thought I had taken something, even though I told them I hadn't. I don't think they believed me because at first they didn't want to give me my medication. Eventually they relented and I was able to get some zopiclone-assisted sleep.

I woke at four the next morning. I felt wild and all over the place. I paced the corridors. The consultant came to see me first thing. I don't know what I said but she told me she was detaining me. Then the ward put me on high obs and oh I hated that.

I had my MHA assessment around lunchtime. It was over very quickly, and the social worker didn't even ask me any questions. I guess my actions of the previous day were all they needed. And so I found myself once more on a section 3.

The Hospital Diaries pt 1

2011-05-29T13:06:00.004+01:00

This might be a slightly dangerous endeavour, because I am venturing back into territories I have not yet revisited. But I want to tell the story of what happened to me last year. I need to somehow make sense of it. So, with the aid of my diaries from the time, incomplete and sometimes confusing as they are, I am going to attempt to impose a narrative structure on experiences that were both intense and bewildering.

I went a little crazy last summer. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when, because I was barely writing at the time. I seemed to be beyond words, words became a huge problem to me, and I had times when all thought seemed to stop. I know things felt strange, that *I* felt strange, that I had the sense of an immense pressure building in my psyche. I had moved house in the July and my surroundings seemed vivid to me, the white walls and crooked beams, the light through the many windows, the stars that I stared up at as I sat outside and smoked at night, all of it seemed to pulse with some meaning I couldn't quite comprehend.

I stopped taking my quetiapine. Again it is hard to identify my reasons for this, but I know I felt fired up, vibrant and alive, and unwilling any longer to sedate myself, to drug my perceptions out of existence. I started mildly hallucinating, text and pictures kept lifting off the pages of books. All my senses felt fully tuned and sensitive. Music was exquisite. Colour was intoxicating. I became obsessed with cleaning my little white house. I played loud music and paced or danced.

On the 28th August I wrote:

Moon in the sky.

Earth. Air. Rain. Time.

Transformation.

Patterns move through me. I have passed through some boundary into a different realm that was always destined to be mine. I saw the perfection of it and it made me laugh. Later, my whole body hurt.

And on the 30th:

Morning. Moon. Patterns of leaves. Sounds of flight. Light through the windows. Dreams I don't remember. Paintings by Matisse.

So the mind seeks something. Something. Something. Something. Without being able to name it. Without being able to catch it. Without being able to approach it directly.

This is my world. This is my life.

And then on the 1st September I wrote:

Break, break, break, it all breaks. Stories, sentences, sense - it all breaks, it all breaks, it all breaks.
And I live broken.
Do you not hear the voices distort?
Do you not hear the distance?
As it breaks, as it breaks, as it breaks.

Things were falling apart. I became attacked again by thoughts of suicide, and by the nasty twisty voices that sometimes plague me, most often when I am otherwise giddy and ecstatic. I became convinced I had electrodes in my head, and felt angry that no one had ever listened to me on this point. I had told my social worker over and over about this, I had requested brain scans and investigations many times, but nothing had ever been done.

(I feel lost. I need to think. I can't seem to think.)

(Dark, dark, dark, I have to go into the dark alone.)

(There's a kind of tension which is almost twitching in my body)

I decided to be decisive, positive and proactive. I made an appointment to see a GP. I dont' know what I was expecting but it didn't go as planned.

I hadn't seen this particular doctor before. She was very young, and very kind. When I went in I was dishevelled and shaking. I couldn't immediately speak. She offered me water or coffee, she touched my knee, she radiated concern. This took me by surprise, I wasn't used to it. I asked her to refer me for brain scans. Very gently she explained to me that she didn't think, as my doctor, that they would find anything. Very gently, she began asking questions about my state of mind, and I found myself telling her about the voices and the suicidal thoughts. She then phoned the crisis team, and I heard her say to them "I think she's very high risk". Another doctor, my actual GP, came in. I hadn't seen him since he'd sectioned me two years before and the memory made me unable to look at him. He asked if I needed to be in hospital, and said that it would be much easier if I went in voluntarily.

It was arranged that the crisis team would come to the surgery and I was ushered into another room to wait with a nurse who tried to talk to me about ordinary things while I rocked back and forth, moving between dissociating and trying desperately to catch up with what was happening. Eventually the crisis team arrived. I was lucky, it was the two members of the team I most liked, who I had found to be the most compassionate and understanding. They asked me if I wanted to go into hospital and I said no. They asked me if I could keep myself safe and I said I wasn't sure. They said I looked tired. They took me back to my house - one of them drove my car - and made me a cup of coffee. I sat on the sofa, feeling impossibly exhausted. They said they thought I needed to be in hospital, and the man gently pointed out that he was in fact an AMHP. I was so tired that I agreed to go. (I hadn't been in hospital for two years at this point and time had blurred my memory of it, I didn't have the horror of it that I do now).

And so, on the 15th September, I was admitted as a voluntary patient to hospital.

Dreams

2011-05-27T11:53:00.003+01:00

Last night I dreamed that I was in a hospital and becoming psychotic. I was throwing things at the psychiatrist and then I was given medication that heavily sedated me, put me into a dull, blank state. It was the kind of dream that leaves a hangover, both from the experience of sedation and the sense of foreboding it brought me.

Because I cannot shake an abiding sense that dreams in some way shape or know the future. Earlier this year, before I had any idea that I would even be in hospital again, let alone sectioned, I dreamed I was in hospital and about to be sectioned. Dreams about madness, about being manic or massively dissociated, often seem to precede mental disintegration. Yes, I can argue with myself, tell myself that rationally dreams will of course reflect experiences I've had or am concerned about. But it still bothers me, it still disturbs me.

I am still somewhat scrambled, have the beginnings of buzzings and bouncings in my body. But sometimes I think that my real problem is that on some fundamental level I can't accept things others take for granted or just don't think about. My mind is too often stuttering with amazement or confusion at the realities we live in. Thoughts and dreams. Minds and memories. Houses and towns. *Time*. A planet spinning in space. Stars. The way things grow. Just life, just living, seems to be a bit too much for me to take.

Insomnia and Incoherence

2011-05-25T13:05:00.003+01:00

I write this more for the sake of writing a post than because I have anything to say. I am scared of losing my ability to write, I am scared of the silence rising up and drowning me as it did for so long.

Maybe it's because I am tired. I jerk awake several times a night, ready for anything. I routinely see one o'clock, three o'clock, four, five . . . I don't know what makes me wake, maybe it's my dreams. I know they are vivid but I can't quite remember them. I wish the doctors surgery would make a mistake again and give me zopiclone on repeat prescription. That would make me happy. That would help me sleep.

So it's probably because I am tired. I've been having some trouble with my thoughts. More precisely, I've been having some trouble with thinking. There's a certain swirling brokenness in my mind. I keep passing through into that other realm, where I have lived before, I remember now, but can't imagine when I am away from it. I struggle for words. As I once sought to describe it, the self who speaks in sentences is gone. And it's frustrating. I have stories to tell and opinions to voice. I have Important Thoughts to think about!

Yet I also feel just on the brink of a grand enlightenment, a realisation about myself and the world that will alter my life.

Meanwhile I see social workers and support workers and am taken shopping and taught to cook.

How I got sectioned

2011-05-20T09:55:00.002+01:00

So I was seeing the crisis team for "mood elation". I was taking diazepam but I wasn't getting better. I couldn't sit still. I was jigging and fizzing. I was simultaneously energetic and exhausted. I thought I had electrodes in my head.

Then that Friday I woke up feeling suddenly utterly clear-headed and ultra rational. Obviously, I should kill myself. I had had enough of the electrodes and the sensations they kept pulsing me with. I couldn't cope any longer with this crazy cycling of moods. The crisis team came and I informed them of my decision. They said I needed to be in hospital. I said no. They said, are you going to come with us now or are you going to make us detain you? Do you really want social workers and ambulances here? I said I wouldn't go to hospital but I would give my word not to hurt myself that night. They went outside to make some phone calls. I sat on the floor in a state of shock. When they came back in they told me the consultant had decided to accept my word. I got through the rest of that day with extra diazepam.

The next day the crisis team came again. I was running on the spot as I opened the door. They kept saying, stop rocking, can you keep your feet still. I could hardly speak, my words were a stuttering stumbling rapid mess. I had decided during the night that I would agree to go to hospital, I desperately wanted to avoid being sectioned and this way I could stay in control. So they took me back with them.

The doctor who admitted me took one look at me and said ok, manic presentation. He discontinued my citalopram and prescribed lorazepam three times a day. The lorazepam toned down the physical agitation and left me floating in a bubble of bliss. Everything was glorious and perfect. But I still wanted to die. That, I believed, would be perfect and glorious too.

I made it through the weekend, then on Monday I decided I wanted to go home. A doctor saw me and said I should wait until ward round on the Tuesday. We're not going to keep you here, he said. In ward round the lorazepam was stopped and I was prescribed propranolol. I was also invited to stay for another seven days. I lasted for one. On Wednesday I said again I wanted to go home. I was persuaded by the nurses to go on leave rather than discharge myself. So I went home on leave, with no intention of returning.

This is where things get fuzzy and it is hard to explain what happened. I know I didn't sleep that night, I had no zopiclone and the propranolol put me in a strange half-waking, half-dreaming, disturbing state. I still had an enormous energy swirling through me, but it was turning darker now. I felt chaotic and wild. I felt insane. I was hearing voices. A voice kept shouting I AM THE DRAGON AND YOU'RE GOING TO DIE. It was cold, so I lit a fire and crouched beside it. I could feel my face contorting. In fear and desperation I texted a friend and told him I was having a breakdown. He came to see me and told me he was taking me back to the hospital. I went with him, and this, of course, was my mistake. I should have found a way to cope, if only I could have found a way to cope - But I was scared.

I don't know how I got through that night at the hospital. I know I was banging my head against the wall and swearing at the voices. Then I was told off for making noises and threatening people. The woman in the bed next door had become scared of me. So I had to try to keep quiet. I know I spent some time sitting in a chair in the nurses' office, hopelessly confused, not knowing what had happened or was happening. Eventually I must have slept.

The next day I remember standing in the door to the office, banging my head on the frame. A nurse took me into another room. She kept telling me, what you are saying doesn't make sense. She told me that I couldn't be psychotic because I didn't have a diagnosis of psychosis. I threw the bin across the room. She said that if I was destructive they would call the police and have me charged.

And then what? I don't know, I was in a daze, I felt so broken and confused. I think I dissociated because there is a blank space. At some point I went down to the garden for a cigarette, I went by myself even though I was on obs. An HCA came to fetch me and I told her I wanted to go home. She took me back to the nurse and again I said I wanted to go home. I kept repeating it, I just want to go home, I just want to go home. The nurse was irritated and impatient. Stop saying that! she said, you can't go home because I'm detaining you. Then she told me that I couldn't go for any more cigarettes either, because she didn't trust me not to run away and she wasn't having her staff put in that position.

More blank space. Drifting in and out of awareness I tried to believe I could avoid being sectioned if I just said the right things. But what were the right things? I was called for the assessment. I don't remember much. I think I denied being suicidal but they said I was contradicting myself. I think I said I just wanted to go home.

Some time later I went to the office and asked if I could *please* go for a cigarette. The HCA said to the nurse, well if she's going down there'd better be two of us. I felt like a criminal, I felt like I was being punished, as though I had deliberately misbehaved. But I had my cigarette. Coming back up I asked what had happened with the assessment, because nobody had told me, and I found out I was on a section 2. I had to ask several times over the next few days, because I kept getting confused, had I really been sectioned? Eventually they gave me the necessary paperwork. Yes, I had been sectioned.

And I don't even want to think about what happened next, because the following week , once the left over flurries of energy had died out, I crashed thoroughly and utterly, into a dreadful state that felt like continual torture. I can't bear to remember it, but it haunts me still.

Avolition

2011-05-18T11:29:00.003+01:00

Avolition is a psychological state characterized by general lack of desire, drive, or motivation to pursue meaningful goals. A person may show little participation in work or have little interest in socializing. They may sit still for long periods of time . . .

Literally, poverty of movement, it is a restriction in initiation and production of goal directed behavior . . .

Yeah, that sounds like me right now. I'd love to report that I am zinging and bouncing but the little tremors have turned into nothing except a slight feeling of weirdness. Instead I am doing nothing. Seriously. I do nothing all day and then in the evening I do some more nothing. I would say that I am struggling to get myself going, but there is no struggle, there is no "me" to get "myself" going. I'm not suffering, I don't feel bad, I don't have negative thoughts, I just feel and think . . . nothing.

I can't explain how consuming this nothingness is. I'm sure it looks like laziness, but my psychologist is adamant that I'm not lazy. I'm not sure. I know there are many times when I'm definitely *not* lazy, but the way I'm acting at the moment - or, rather, not-acting - is hard to justify. It's like paralysis. I literally cannot stir myself from the sofa. There are things I should be doing, things I could be doing, things that in another state I would enjoy doing, and yet I continue to do nothing. And I just can't care.

I have the support worker coming in a little while. I vaguely thought I would clear up before she came, but I haven't done it. I've had loads of time to do it, but I haven't done it. I just can't. Which is ridiculous. How can you just not be able to move? How can you just let time pass and do nothing and not be bored, and not be anything? I wish she wasn't coming. I want to tell them all to just leave me alone, leave me be.

*****

The support worker came. She did some cleaning and then she made me cook - well, she started cooking and then I did join in. So a few things got done which needed doing, and I guess I should be pleased by that. But the whole time I felt like a face pasted over nothingness, making the right noises but secretly hoping she would go away soon.

I don't know how to be different, I don't know how to be better. I guess I am waiting for energy to arrive from somewhere, for my mood (though I'm not sure I even have a mood right now I'm so full of nothing) to change. And in the meantime my sofa is calling.

Ambivalence

2011-05-15T09:42:00.002+01:00

Well I started taking the tablets again. I do this every so often, stop for a few days, usually because I get fed up of this life of medications and appointments, because I want to cast off this identity, this narrative of illness, I want to be myself, I want to be alive, I want to be free. Then I give in, then I get scared I'm being stupid. And when I kept going, all fired up, and didn't take my quetiapine for some length of time, I ended up at the GP's asking to be referred for brain scans, and that was a fast track to the hospital. So perhaps it's safer to be dull and bland on medication, but oh -

So I'm ambivalent about medication and I'm also ambivalent about illness. I'm terrified of it, I don't want it. But oh I want it too. Just a little bit. I just want to be a little bit high, who wouldn't? To feel energetic and elated, to have heightened perceptions, to have a great tumbling stream of inspiration and ideas, to be convinced you can do anything. Of course I'd like that, of course sometimes I wish for it. I just don't want it to go too far, too fast, too out of control, to become exhausting, to feel that I am being danced around by some relentless master. I don't want to be convinced I have electrodes in my brain, to be incapacitated by the surges of electricity and sensation they are sending me. I don't want the whole inanimate world to become conscious and communicating so I have to apologise to the sofa for sitting on it. I don't want to end up convinced I should kill myself, having to deal with crisis teams and hospital admissions. I just want the beginning. Why isn't it possible to just have the beginning? To just have the beginning and to stay there, to say, and believe, that I am just a high-energy person, to forget the depression, the great lethargy that often overwhelms me. As though that is the real me, that cheerful vibrant energetic person, and the rest is imaginary, the rest is false.

The rest is as real as anything else. The rest is as much a part of me and my experience as the bright colourful vibrating times. I am often slow and stupid. And it is easy to blame the medication for that. When I am struggling to manage simple tasks, when my house slides into chaos and disorder, when days pass when I don't do anything, anything at all, I want to blame the medication. So I am tempted to stop taking it. And the cycle starts again.

I am a little on the edge at the moment, and I am guilty of hoping it goes a bit further. I have had little feelings of excitement inside me, a fizzing in my brain, a bubbling in my body, an agitation in my limbs. It's nothing, it's minor, but I almost want it to be more. My social worker suggested I take propranolol to see if that helps, and if it doesn't the consultant will send a prescription for increased amisulpride. I'm impressed at how quickly my social worker reacts - she is phoning on Monday to see if the propranolol worked over the weekend - but I also feel guilty, because I am not being fully honest with her about the depth of my ambivalence. I'm not convinced I want to control this. Or not yet anyway.

Confession & Consultant

2011-05-11T16:48:00.005+01:00

I stopped taking the anti-psychotics. I know, I know, - it's the daftest thing, when I'm so scared of becoming ill again, to do something that actually invites it. And I don't even really know why. There seemed to be a force-field round the tablets, preventing me from taking them. Oh I could talk about adverse health effects and raised prolactin levels but really I think it's a compulsion to check whether I'm still crazy, like picking at a scab, like dancing with the devil. Or maybe I'm like an alcoholic, convinced that this time I'll be able to have just the one drink, I'll stay in control.

I did take a tablet this morning though. I had an appointment with the consultant in the afternoon and found myself full of fear and spiralling into confusion and I just thought - don't be so fucking stupid, take the tablets damn you! So I took one. Whether I will take one this evening, whether I will return to taking them regularly, I just don't know, I can't tell you yet. I'm being pulled in all sorts of directions.

I went to see the consultant and oh was I anxious about being back in the hospital. It seemed that everywhere I looked I saw a doctor who had at some point sectioned me. But I do like the consultant, she says that I'm the expert, that I know myself better than she does. I told her how scared I was, how I could feel my energy was rising and it scared me, and I couldn't end up back in hospital because another stint would kill me. She asked me what had helped in the past, and I told her that when the GP's accidentally put zopiclone on repeat prescription I was able to use that to regulate myself a bit, and when I was on quetiapine I used to take extra bits and pieces here and there to kind of weigh myself down. So she offered me a choice between 2 weeks worth of zopiclone or increasing the amisulpride. I chose the zopiclone. And no, I didn't tell her I hadn't been taking the amisulpride, bad Werehorse, bad! But I'm not sure whether I'm *really* not taking it or I'm just having a temporary mind storm. Basically I don't know what I'm doing, or why, I just seem to be playing some dangerous game.

Then we had a brief discussion about the prolactin issue. She said it isn't that dangerous to have raised prolactin and it was a case of weighing costs and benefits. (This confuses me, because when my prolactin levels shot up due to risperidone my then consultant took me off it immediately, as though it *was* a problem). But really - and this is why I am being stupid - amisulpride has been a good drug for me, it's been far more effective than quetiapine ever was. I don't have that brokenness of thought, those repeating, chanting, punning voices, I don't have those sensations like needles stimulating strange parts of my brain, I don't have the problems with my vision that plagued me so much. So officially at least I'm to stay on it. (And do I really want those experiences again? Because I can feel them building, little tremors in my sense of reality. So what the fuck am I doing then?)

Afterwards the support worker, who took me to the appointment, took me to the leisure centre to pick up a timetable, and to a different supermarket, in the hope of encouraging me to eat a wider variety of food. Next week we're going to do cooking. I feel like a bit of a fraud though, because while I nod along with her plans of shopping and showering and attending activities, and while I say that yes, I can see that routines are useful, I mostly go home and carry on as before. I seem to do my homework at the last minute and in my heart I don't believe that things can change. You could say I'm not really trying, and I don't know why. Don't I want to live normally and be well? I'm not acting like I do right now, that's for sure.

On being restrained

2011-05-08T11:20:00.004+01:00

Being in hospital is like a nightmare for me. I'm a quiet, solitary person. I need space, I need peace. In hospital there is none of either. There are people everywhere and you are trapped. You can draw the curtain round your bed, but you can't get away from the noise. You can sit in the dayroom, but the chairs are uncomfortable, and there is rarely anything on television that you would choose to watch, and even if there was there is usually too much noise to follow it. You can pace the corridor. If you smoke, you can go down to the garden for a few minutes. (Is it any wonder that having not smoked for four years I started again while in hospital?)

During that admission, in 2008, I took to waking up early (but not too early because the kitchen and the garden didn't open until six) making myself a cup of coffee and going to sit in the garden. Those times, smoking in the early morning, relaxing into the quiet, were the only times I was alone and could begin to deal with what was going on inside me. Or there was a little room where they held ward round and sometimes if it was empty in the evenings I would go in there. I got told off for that though, told off for hiding myself away so the staff couldn't monitor how I was. But perhaps that was the point, perhaps I just wanted some time where I wasn't being monitored and observed for once.

This one evening I went into my dorm and sat down on the floor by my bed. I can't remember how I was feeling, but I suspect I was tense and scared and probably despairing. I had a cup of hot chocolate and I was trying to read a book. Then someone switched the light off. They didn't check whether anyone was in the dorm and needed the light, they just switched it off. Because that was another thing you couldn't control. There were no lights by the beds so you couldn't choose to have the light on or not and if you couldn't sleep you just had to lie in the darkness (because you weren't allowed in the dayroom or the kitchen at night). When I was there in 2010 this was discussed in one of the community meetings, and we were told it had been discussed before and there was a plan to provide everyone with bed lights, but when I was there this year it still hadn't happened.

So I sat in the darkness for a while, still holding my book open, feeling trapped and hopeless. Then the lights went back on and the staff came in to do headcount. They pulled back my curtain and ticked me off on the list. I said "I want to go home". And this nurse, a woman who had not an ounce of warmth and compassion in her, said "You can't go home, you're on a section". I lost it. I threw my hot chocolate at the wall and then I started picking objects up from the top of my bedside cabinet and throwing them at the staff. They didn't take this too seriously, they just laughed and moved onto the next dorm. I stood there for a moment, my heart pounding, then I headed for the exit. I don't know where I thought I would go at that time of night, but I just had to get out of there. I heard a voice behind me say "She's leaving" and I started to run. They caught up with me halfway down the stairs. I fought as hard as I could but there were four of them and they're trained to subdue people. My ribs got bruised against the wall in the struggle but before long I was pinned down on the floor. And I just gave up then. I froze, I dissociated, I couldn't think or speak, I was shaking. Eventually they let me up. My named nurse took me down for a cigarette and then she changed the sheets on my bed where the hot chocolate had splashed. The nurse in charge came and told me that I needed to start being careful because the next step was a locked ward and they didn't treat people very well there.

The next day they increased my medication, both the anti psychotic and the lorazepam I was given PRN. To give them their due they did also move me into a side room for a few days, which was a huge relief. (But then they moved me back again, and I sat for a while staring at the curtains until the claustrophobia overwhelmed me and I tried again to run away. This time I got further, I got all the way home, and after being trapped on the ward for so long, and forced to be inactive, the way it felt to be out in the air and actually moving was glorious, a glory that was almost worth the repercussions that followed.) And one of the HCA's, bless her, brought me in a book light that I could clip to the headboard so at least I could read at night, at least I could control one little thing about the world I found myself in.

Until now the main feeling I have had about this incident is shame. Because I behaved so out of character. I am usually a quiet, even-tempered person, not given to violence or rages. But put me in an environment I find stressful, at a time when I am struggling anyway with what I experience, and sometimes I lose it. I don't think it is any coincidence that the only times in recent years that I have lost it to any degree - slammed doors, or thrown things - have been when I was in hospital. (And then of course they try to use it as evidence that you are personality-disordered and "emotionally unstable", but that's a whole other post!).

I realise that I have in a way seen hospital as punishment - appropriate punishment, because if you get yourself sectioned what else do you deserve? I have seen the things that have happened as my own fault, and I have felt guilty and ashamed. But now I see, maybe, that that is not the case. Psychiatric hospitals as they are currently constituted are not designed to help or treat people, however many personal development groups they run, however kind individual members of staff are. They are places to contain and constrain people, by doors and rules and restraints and medications. (And I am tempted to say that they are places that seem designed to drive mad people madder).

I never want to go into hospital again, and I definitely never again want to find myself pinned down, utterly powerless, on the floor.

More appointments

2011-05-06T21:51:00.004+01:00

Social worker Wednesday, support worker yesterday, psychologist today . . . how to feel like a headcase.

I've been very disconnected and I can feel the brokenness coming back, so I went in a bit of a daze to today's appointment. When I got there I realised I was half an hour early, but it's better than being half an hour late, and the good thing about the disconnected state is that time just disappears. I went in and we started to talk about what was going on. My eyes were flickering and I could hear I was talking slowly. So we went back in time, how long had I felt like this, when did it start, what had I been doing, who had I seen. I was all fuzzy and struggling to remember, but we established that this began in earnest on Wednesday. So what happened on Wednesday? I saw my social worker. What did we talk about? And I remembered that she had said something that made feel infinitely depressed. I was talking about not wanting to go back into hospital and she said something about yes, that was a good aim, but another aim would be maybe to go into hospital but not be sectioned. And oh - how that made me feel, it kind of lodged in me, as though that was my future. So the pyschologist said that there was literature that being sectioned can be traumatic in itself, and we talked about how scared I am of hospital and how the fear was valid, because it has happened, but by getting frozen in the fear and spiralling into brokenness it is actually more likely that I will be hospitalised so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And he thinks that if I remain in touch with my core values I can avoid going into hospital again. I'm not sure I believe him but I did feel rather more with it by the end of the appointment.

The thing is I know my social worker had good intentions, and was probably trying to reassure me that hospital wouldn't necessarily mean failure. She keeps trying to get me to see that though I have been hospitalised several times there is still in some ways progress. When she came to see me on the ward she said "you may feel terrible, but at least you are able to articulate how you feel now, I remember you curled on the floor unable to speak". And she talks a lot about how I work better with services these days, and engage with them and accept help and how with this latest episode I retained a greater degree of insight (well, until I lost it at least).

The problem is that insight is a double-edged sword, because it is involved with memory. When my mood started to get too fast and high I knew it wasn't right, because I still remembered being well, I knew that the thoughts I was having I had had before but I hadn't had them when I was well. Whereas once I would have been rapidly been taken over by the mood and believed I could remain energetic and euphoric forever this time I mostly knew that it wouldn't last, and that it was likely to get all mixed up and end up in trouble (which of course was proved to be true). But now I also know that my current state, which isn't great but is ok, probably won't last, or it never has in the past. I remember too much.

I keep going on about the same thing, this fear of illness. But I'm in a funk about it. I keep having flashbacks to things that happened in my various hospital admissions, and when I think about them I just have this knot of fear and sickness in my stomach. I don't know what to do.

Confusion

2011-05-01T15:58:00.002+01:00

I find seeing the psychologist strange. Sometimes I worry that I'm not sure what to talk about, that maybe I'm somehow doing it wrong. Sometimes it seems difficult and uncomfortable and I don't really know if it's helping or not. The psychologist doesn't really believe in mental illness as such, i.e. he is of the school that sees "illness" as a reaction to trauma and stress and life situations.

This is where it gets confusing for me. Even within services you meet such different approaches to mental illness and the people who suffer from it. Widen the field further to include books and the internet and you have a multitude of attitudes and answers, from those passionately anti-psychiatry to the more traditional ideas that illness is to do with chemical imbalance and needs to be managed. Or maybe it's your negative thought patterns. Or maybe you're not taking the right vitamins. Or maybe it's actually all a form of spiritual growth. I get boggled and baffled just by the titles of the self-help books out there. For someone just trying to make sense of my own experience and find ways to live with it, it's very hard to sort through all the different paradigms and work out what attitude to take to myself, and how best to care for myself. Should I for instance, try to bully or cajole myself into action, or should I be kind to myself and accept the apathy when that seems to be all there is? (Lately I have been following the latter path, lying on the sofa waiting and trusting that motivation will arise again. And it seems to have worked, because my mood has lifted a little bit now, and I have at least avoided that sense of powerlessness and despair that comes from trying to make myself do things when I don't feel I can cope with anything.)

I want to believe the psychologist, I want to embrace his perspective. Because that means I can become well and stay well and am not doomed forever to this cycle. But I'm scared. This latest episode knocked the confidence right out of me, because I thought I had recovered, was recovering, wouldn't become ill again. I am trying to reassure myself that it was mostly medication related, that the agitation and elation was triggered by the aripiprazole and the horrendous nature of the crash that followed can at least in part be attributed, I believe, to an abrupt withdrawal from citalopram. But I'm still scared. As I said, my mood has lifted, and I should be pleased, and I am, but I'm also scared. I'm scared that it won't stop there, that my mood will lift too much, too far, too high. I'm scared the energy will sweep in and seize me and start to dance me fast and faster until I'm jittery and jigging and unable to function. And then it will drop me back into the depths and I will have to crawl my way out again. I've done it too many times now. I don't think I can keep on doing it.

So I just don't know. I don't know what I think about what I have experienced, and I don't know what the future holds and I don't know who to trust. I really hope the pyschologist is right and I don't have to continue becoming unwell, and I really hope he can help me find that balance.

Appointments

2011-04-20T16:01:00.003+01:00

I feel like my life is dominated by MH appointments at the moment. I saw my social worker this morning, have the support worker tomorrow, the psychologist on Tuesday and then the psychiatrist on the 11th May.

The social worker brought a student with her. It didn't matter, because it wasn't the kind of appointment where we talk about things, instead we were filling in the second part of the Personal Budget/Self-Directed Support assessment, which is a plan of the envisaged support. Basically the idea is that someone would come in every day to "improve my self-care" - making sure I shower, helping me manage the house, and plan and prepare a meal etc. And also support me to attend groups and activities to get me involved "with the wider community". I can't really believe this will actually happen and I can't imagine what it will be like if it does. I have a feeling I'll probably hate it, but the truth is that left to my own devices I don't get very far with any of these things.

I've been very disconnected the last few days, in that state where my eyes start staring and I struggle to make them move, never mind the rest of me. Today, though, I feel rather sore and sad. I am still trying and mostly failing to come to terms with having had this latest episode. It seems my life is littered with half starts and hopeful beginnings that have to be abandoned when illness intervenes. I am always determined that things are going to be different, yet somehow they never are. I feel that I have lost and wasted so much, and so much time. If there is a lesson in it all I'm not managing to learn it. And I can't help feeling it is somehow a moral failure, that I must be in some way a bad person, lazy and worthless, to prove so repeatedly unable to change or improve my life, to be brought so low over and over again.

Shame & stuff

2011-04-15T10:07:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I was visited by a support worker who helped me begin to get my house into rather less of a state. She's left me with "homework" including having a shower every evening, and thinking about meals I could eat so we can plan some menus. This is "reablement" in action, apparently. Meanwhile my social worker is putting together an application for a personal budget so I can have this kind of support regularly.

How do I begin to describe the shame involved? But this is the reality of my life. In my current condition I struggle to do even the most basic everyday tasks. I forget to shower, I sleep in my clothes, I eat randomly and the house rapidly deteriorates. Everything just becomes so overwhelming I barely function.

People keep telling me I look better. That's because I'm no longer tensed against the constant ominous thrum of sickness and dread. I can speak normally. I can even smile. But I'm still on the long plodding road out of depression. I'm still flat, lethargic, unmotivated and suffering from anhedonia. I'm struck once again by how intractable my moods seem. I can't gee myself up or talk myself into feeling better, and believe me, I have tried. But this is the way I am right now and I just have to live with it. I know that if I wait long enough I will become elated again to some degree. My perceptions will be intense, I will be excited and inspired and full of energy and everything will speed up and I will have so many thoughts I can barely keep up with myself. It seems unlikely right now, I can hardly remember how that state feels, but it is a truth I hold onto. And I think maybe the way my moods impact my memory is merciful, because it is also almost impossible for me to really grasp how bad things were just a few weeks ago.

So for now, I plod on.

Rocks and hard places

2011-04-02T16:00:00.002+01:00

I'm struggling to write anything. I start a post and then interest and concentration leaves and I delete it. I am often without words entirely. I was discharged from hospital on Thursday. I requested discharge because I didn't want to be there any longer, grimly getting through time. I don't much want to be at home right now either, and I'm not sure I'm well enough to be here, but then I don't want to be anywhere. And I think I'm more relaxed here, though "relaxed" sounds far too positive a word to be applied to my current state. I am less damnably tense, less jammed up, less obsessed with watching the clock, staring at its slow progress towards medtime and bedtime, the highlight of my life. I am profoundly depressed at the moment, in that bone aching, soul sucking way that finds a complete absence of anything resembling well-being or pleasure anywhere in anything. Oh I am better than I was, but then I was reduced to lying on a hospital bed whimpering slightly, begging the staff to somehow help me, unable to do anything other than pray, over and over, for release. So I have been to hell, and I am grateful, yes I am, not to be feeling quite that level of out-and-out badness, but I wish I could feel something. I feel walled off from music, colour, meaning, everything. The days seem very long, and time is something to be endured until I can sleep, with the hope that I might somehow wake up feeling better. I have such a hunger for sleep, I wish I could sleep all the time, but I can barely sleep at night. I persuaded the doctor to give me some zopiclone to bring home but what I shall do when it is finished I have no idea. That seemed the only argument for staying in hospital, that they give you zopiclone every night. It nearly swayed me. But oh, the terrible slow march of time there. I couldn't bear it. I am struggling to distract myself at home because my concentration is shot and I have no interest in anything anyway, but it is easier than being in hospital. This post is one long moan. Sorry. I'm just not very well at the moment. And I feel very small and rather defeated, because I was so sure recovery was within my grasp, I was so determined to stay well and it's very hard to accept that I once more ended up in hospital, that I was sectioned yet again. And I don't understand how that happened so I am left feeling powerless in the face of this illness, and utterly lacking in confidence in my ability to manage it.

Big Fat Fail

2011-03-16T16:57:00.002Z

So let's see - come home from hospital on leave, begin to have meltdown, go back to hospital, continue having meltdown, get sectioned (yes, AGAIN), then crash into the worst kind of agitated depression. Nice one, Werehorse. You really excelled yourself this time.

I'm home on overnight leave now and I feel all on edge and I'm finding it hard to settle. I need to remember that it is always like this, making the transition between hospital and home, and it will get better. I was ready to die last week, I don't know if I have ever felt so desperate, but I have recovered before and will recover again. The only positive I can wring from recent events is that I seem to have got back on track rather sooner than in previous episodes. I'm just tired right now. And it was only a section 2. In my screwy world this is progress.

Sodding Side Effects

2011-03-03T06:22:00.002Z

Silly me, I had this idea that if they were giving a medication to calm me down it might also make me drowsy in a good way and enable me to get some delicious and much needed sleep. But a google search shows that a common side effect of propranolol is disturbed sleep and it's sure disturbing mine. I don't think I've had two hours tonight and even that not all at once as I spent most of the night either not sleeping or drifting on the border of dreaming and waking where realities are layered and overlapped. This is definitely not good for my mental health. Sorry, not an interesting post, I am just rather frustrated right now because I have been thoroughly awake since three o clock and I feel both tired and wired.

Deja Vu

2011-03-02T19:56:00.002Z

And so I found myself on the same ward, in the same bed, with the same woman talking to herself in the corner, walking down the same stairs to the same garden to have a smoke, eating the same uninspired food in the dining room . . . and I veered between being horrified I was back and wondering if I had ever actually been anywhere else and I was agitated beyond bearability and sometimes flying and sometimes broken, but I was very good and didn't run away. They took me off citalopram completely, and fed me lorazepam for three days and then I saw the ward consultant and he has given me propranolol, which is a beta-blocker, and the dreadful restlessness has eased a little and I have come home on leave with instructions that I should return at any time if I can't cope. And today I saw the psychologist and I am to start a diary with mood ratings and thoughts and events so we can see if we can work out what is triggering my mood swings. It's the not-knowing, it's the not-understanding, it's the feeling out of control, at the mercy of my own brain that drives me to thoughts of suicide. It's finding myself back in hospital when I was so sure I would never need to return that knocks my confidence in my ability to manage my mind and my life. So I feel shaky and uncertain, but I am sitting now in the peace of my own little house catching up on blogs and then I will watch television curled up with my cat and then maybe, hopefully, please, I will be able to sleep.

Quoting myself

2011-02-26T07:38:00.002Z

. . . it is this state, when it goes a little further and gets all mixed up and confused that has sometimes ended up in hospital . . .

And that's where I am now. Fuck. Bugger. I was so scared this would happen and here I am. Again. Oh it was horrible yesterday with the crisis team sitting there on my sofa saying, are you going to come with us to hospital now or are you going to make us organise an assessment? With my thoughts all breaking up and interfered with, and this dread building because I really thought I was going to be taken away. And I don't know if I can avoid it today. If I refuse to see them, will they have me assessed? And I don't honestly think I can give my word I'll keep myself safe tonight. I only got through last night by taking six diazepam which means I only have four left. I'm not depressed, I have plenty of energy, I can see all the good in my life, but it's this illness that's killing me. I am tired of these moods, I am tired of these experiences and thoughts. Who would want to live like this, with crisis teams and hospitalisations? It seems so utterly rational to kill myself.

Rationality

2011-02-25T13:39:00.003Z

I woke up feeling exceptionally rational today. I recognise the place I am, the problems with my vision, the electrodes in my brain interfering with my thoughts, the connection with the turning earth. I know how things go from here and I don't want to go there. I won't go through it again. I know I got better before but I got a whole lot worse first.

The crisis team threatened me with a MHA assessment, but then they spoke to the consultant and the consultant accepted my word, because I had offered my word that I wouldn't kill myself tonight, so I avoided hospital. I'm not going to see the crisis team again because I am not going into hospital ever again, that is an absolute. I have taken two diazepam so I will get through today, and will take more later if I need to, even though I'm not supposed to. Sometimes needs must, and if I do anything I keep my word. That is enough for now. Things might look different tomorrow or they might not. I'll wait and see.

Not so much GRR today

2011-02-23T14:45:00.002Z

More flying. Flapping and soaring. Though the incessant urge to move is still there. It's like this - try to watch television, no good, have to move, get out the jigsaw, slot in a couple of pieces, no good, have to move, get out some artwork, no good, have to move . . . and so it goes on. I was about ready to hang myself yesterday just to make it stop, because I didn't think I could bear it. But today I am more tolerant and just letting myself pace and dance.

I saw the crisis team consultant again. I am to stop the aripiprazole and we will see what happens. As he said, it doesn't make sense to give me aripiprazole because of a side effect of the amisulpride, and then give me more drugs because of the side effects of the aripiprazole. And the diazepam is going down to twice a day, which I'm a little concerned about, though really it wasn't making a dramatic difference. I did query what happened if I then crashed, because I'm now taking a much lower dose of citalopram but he said we would deal with that if it happened. So I'm to see the crisis team tomorrow and Saturday and then the consultant will come out again on Monday. I'm really hoping I can get back a little closer to normality, and that stopping the aripiprazole will help.

Generally I'm having a good experience with the crisis team this time around. Maybe because my mood has been high so they're not trying to prod or CBT me out of depression, which never works and probably makes them as frustrated as it does me.

Frustration

2011-02-21T17:57:00.003Z

I'm getting increasingly pissed off because I can't drive. On a deeper level I'm pissed off that illness is having such an impact on my life. And while you could say it is good to be bouncing and full of energy I can't actually concentrate on anything. And I'm fed up of waking at three or four and ping, I'm awake and I'm pacing and dancing. The crisis team took me shopping today so at least I have something other than toast to eat, but all they can tell me is to give it time, and things will settle, and it's better than being in hospital. Which it undoubtably is, but hell, I just want to be normal, to be well. And considering how I am even on the diazepam I dread to think what I'd be like without it. And what if I really crash from this, that could be very nasty. And basically just GRR!

The existence of illness

2011-02-20T08:13:00.002Z

I lead a double life online. While I mostly read the blogs of those who like me are in the system I also sometimes make forays into the world of anti-psychiatry, anti-medication, psychosis as misunderstood spiritual experience type sites. I find these approaches tempting. I start wanting to throw my tablets in the river and embrace my experience however out of the ordinary it may be. What if it isn't illness but has some kind of truth to it? After all isn't it possible that there *are* wiser beings in another reality who are trying to hasten the process of human evolution and I am one of their experiments? Couldn't I really be a gifted genuis? Some people are. (Of course my current status in this ordinary human world, living on benefits, struggling to shower regularly because either I'm too depressed or there are too many other exciting things to think about and under the care of mental health services seems to argue against this, but that is just one level of appearances, in other realms things could be quite different!)

Amongst these kind of websites there is generally a scepticism about theories that mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. And in some ways they have a point. When someone has suffered trauma and lives in difficult circumstances does it make sense to treat their depression with tablets? But grasping back my rational stable self the idea does seem to have some cogency. At least, it is one plausible way of making sense of how things feel. If I say that sometimes the chemicals in my brain implicated in motivation or pleasure are lacking or absent and sometimes in overdrive that is definitely how it feels. Because I wake up and the state is there, though nothing else has changed and it doesn't seem to follow from anything that has happened or that I have been thinking about. Which is why I say it feels physical. And since recreational drugs can have such profound effects on perceptions and emotions why shouldn't the brain's own chemicals sometimes run amok and cause these symptoms? (Of course it also feels like I have electrodes in my brain that are pulsing me with sensations and interfering with my thoughts, and that in another reality a scientist is probing my mind with a needle just to see what happens, but I am trying to be rational here)

I have had trauma in my life and my early experiences and the family I grew up in affected my development, there's no question of that. But what I am finding interesting at the moment is that I currently feel really quite psychologically healthy. My post-traumatic symptoms have mostly gone, my personality is stable, and my self-esteem is good. Yet I am still having these mood changes and experiences that affect my body as well as my mind and are undeniably real. So I am inclined to the view that mental illness *does* exist, and I suffer from it, whatever other people argue. Whether psychiatric medications are the best way to deal with that or whether there are other, more holistic approaches is another question, but somehow I don't think this is going to go away. Recovery as in an absence of symptoms may never be possible for me, maybe all I can hope for is to better learn to manage it, and to make the most of the times I am well.

Is medication worth it?

2011-02-18T16:09:00.003Z

I saw the crisis team consultant today. He wanted me to go into hospital "for a week" but I said no. I don't want to go back to hospital and I don't really trust that it would only be a week. So we negotiated that I could stay at home and see the crisis team on condition I don't drive because I'm on diazepam. I had one while he was here and I do feel much calmer.

He thinks this has been caused by the aripiprazole, apparently this can happen, because of the way aripiprazole works on dopamine it can initially make symptoms worse and it also causes agitation. I did suggest I stop taking it, but instead I'm to have diazepam 3 times a day for the next few days and then I'll see him again next week.

I'm not sure it makes sense. Amisulpride is messing with my hormones, aripiprazole is sending me loopy. Maybe I'd be better off just being me and dealing with it? Sometimes I think I've been worse since I've been on medication. Then again I've also been better.

But in some ways I'm a bit happier (though that might just be the diazepam!) because this morning I really thought I was losing it. There's a certain fascination in watching a mind slip into psychosis. Then you realise that it's your mind and the fascination turns to fear. But if it's down to medication, if it's a side effect, it's easier to separate myself from it and believe that it will pass.

Crisis Team

2011-02-17T11:09:00.002Z

HOW DID I BECOME THIS UNWELL AGAIN?

But see this is what I mean about support. I saw my social worker yesterday and she spoke to the consultant, organised an appointment with the psychologist and referred me to the crisis team. They just visited to assess me. I can't stop jigging, I'm stumbling over my words, my thoughts are either very fast or broken up and I'm just beginning to hear voices again. What I don't understand is that my thoughts when they're there are very positive and expansive (I LOVE MY CAT!) but the voices are nasty, twisty and accusatory. That doesn't make sense to me. Oh it's hard work to type, it keeps coming out mangled. BUT I am aware that it is mangled and I am able to go back and unmangle it, even if I'm having to do so for almost every word. So that is something. I'm trying so hard here to hang onto my memory of wellness, and to trust that this will pass.

Support and Stuff

2011-02-15T16:59:00.003Z

So I was going to write a post about the support I have, only I found it boring. It was just that I'm aware that many bloggers are finding services to be lacking, absent or useless at the moment, and it made me realise that what I have right now is actually quite good. I've had the same social worker for three years and I do trust her. She tries to help me in various ways - when I was struggling with my previous consultant she arranged for me to see a different doctor at home, when I was in hospital she took me out and she lent me a CD player so I could listen to audio books because I couldn't read etc. I see her every fortnight but when things are tricky, as they are now, she tries to fit me in weekly, and of course I can phone her. And I will actually phone her sometimes which is a sign of how much I trust her. Then there's my new consultant. She doesn't speak to me like I'm a child, she isn't automatically suspicious of anything I say as though I'm inevitably exaggerating and lying, she is respectful, explains things and gives me options. It's been a revelation! There's also the psychologist. I'm not seeing him at the moment but if I want an appointment I only have to ask. And there's also the crisis team. I may not like them much but I have access to them, I can self-refer if I want to, however unlikely that may be. And some of them are all right really, I think it's just that because you only see them when things are very difficult interactions with them often seem difficult too. I just wish everyone had a similar level of support, it doesn't seem like it should be that hard to provide, but I know from previous experience that apparently it is. (see, I said it was boring!)

Meanwhile I am trying to remain a detached observer of my mood. As I watched myself this morning talking loudly to myself and seized by sudden urges to leap and bounce (not such a smart idea as I forgot about the big beam that bisects my ceiling and banged my head and have a bruise) I have to admit that I don't think I'm entirely well right now. I recognise some of the thoughts I'm having and while they feel like reality I still remember that reality doesn't always feel like this. That's called insight and I am gripping rather grimly to it. I have this idea that if I can channel all this physical and psychic energy into creative projects I can somehow earth it and prevent it burning me to a crisp. But I'm not sure, and I'm a little scared, because it is this state, when it goes a little further and gets all mixed up and confused, that has sometimes ended up in hospital. I can't go that far out again. I really can't face picking up the pieces and finding my way back another time. So I have to manage this, have to. And while in many ways I feel amazing and I would swear I am a multi-talented genius I am also mournful for normality, for that good solid ordinary feeling, that is sometimes cheerful and sometimes uninspired but mostly balanced and stable. Will I ever be able to actually stay there?

The other scale

2011-02-09T12:24:00.002Z

Mood has lifted. Mood is lifting. Please don't lift too far, too high, I don't like it.

I am now on the other scale. My head is singing at me, it's a struggle to sit still and I am becoming increasingly sensitive to colour. Soon I shall starting wanting to throw my arms wide and shout that colour is enough! colour is compensation for all suffering! Oh dear.

Interestingly this scale can lead to an outward appearance similar to extreme brokenness, which is me on the sofa with my eyes closed. It's just that in one scenario I am sick and paralysed and exhausted and in the other I am incapacitated by the surges of bliss in my blood. In one state I can't even start the washing up, in the other I can't finish it because I keep having to stop to jump round the room.

It's nowhere near that bad now, and hopefully won't go much further. I am just a little jittery and spangly and there are a few odd shifts in reality. It isn't entirely comfortable and although in some ways I feel good I still don't think I like it.

I saw my social worker yesterday. She took me to the library and we talked in the car. No need to look for subtle triggers for this mood change, it seems an obvious result of the increased medication. When we got back she phoned the consultant, who said that aripiprazole can cause restlessness and if it's that it should settle, and since aripiprazole is used for mania it should keep a lid on it anyway, and I can drop the citalopram back down to 30mg. My social worker felt I had good insight. I feel like I have just realised I have a mood disorder. I have a mood disorder! But that, I think, is a whole other post.

The scale of brokenness

2011-02-05T12:48:00.002Z

I'm a little bit better. At any rate, I'm not paralysed. I can move again, I can act again, I can think of something and do it. I'm flat as a flat thing, uninspired, unexcited, unable to recognise beauty, unable to think of anything I want to do, but this is mild on the scale because it doesn't interfere with my ability to function.

I think being in the middle of the scale is the worst. When things are bad I feel completely broken, I am unable even to think. I remember trying to explain this to the crisis team, but of course at those times I am trying to explain it while also experiencing it, so explanations inevitably fail. But I can almost completely lack the capacity to have a thought. So I can't think of coping strategies and activities because I just can't think. I am just not able to decide to do a jigsaw or wash up or whatever because my thoughts fall at the first hurdle, dissolve into nonsense. This, while dreadful in a way, is not particularly painful, because it just is, and I just am. I just exist in a broken state.

No, the middle of the scale is the worst. Where I can feel things beginning to fall apart, where I am losing the ability to act, as though the connection between my mind and my body is broken, but I am still aware of my state. To look around at a mess of a life, to know you are sinking yet seem unable to change anything, can't lift a hand to reach out and alter what is happening. To be paralysed, exhausted and unable to move but still able to be scared by that. Yes, that is the worst.

Appointments and acceptance

2011-02-02T13:06:00.003Z

I keep trying to write something but I'm struggling to organise my thoughts. So this may be distinctly uninspired.

Appointments first. I saw my social worker yesterday. We spent most of the time going through the form for a personal budget. My social worker is a great believer in triggers, she seems to think that any mood change must have been caused by something, however subtle, and even if I can't see it. She suggested that maybe my mood had dropped because I was anxious on some level about the appointment with the consultant today. It's possible I suppose, though it doesn't feel true.

Then today I had an appointment with the consultant, because the blood test I had last time showed that my prolactin levels were too high. We could have changed medication completely, but instead I am to stay on the amisulpride and add a small dose of aripiprazole. I don't fully understand this bit, but apparently although also an anti-psychotic aripiprazole stimulates dopamine in some areas of the brain. There's a herbal medicine that might help as well so I'm going to look that up. She also increased the citalopram to 40mg and I asked for some zopiclone, so at least I might get a reasonable amount of sleep for a few days, which can only help. I have another appointment in 3 weeks.

Now acceptance. It hit me really hard to feel my mood sink and slip again. Because I had felt so well, and it had seemed it would be easy to stay well. So I felt ashamed, and as though I had failed in some way. I wrote about abandoning this blog, because it felt wrong to have a blog inevitably focused on dysfunction, and because I felt so well it really seemed possible I could leave all my difficulties behind. But though there is more to me than my illness, my illness is a part of me. It's there, wherever I look. It's shaped my history, governed where I live, it's why I don't work, why I have a social worker and appointments with a psychiatrist. It's been with me for a long time and maybe it always will be. Maybe I will always have times of feeling well and times of feeling not so well, maybe I will always have episodes of both depression and elevated mood and experiences that are are outside the normal range. Maybe sometimes I will be able to act and think and plan and sometimes I won't. And maybe this is ok. I'd love to believe in recovery, but I don't think I can. Believe me, if there was a solution to this I would have found it by now. I can't just change things, whatever the self-help books would have me believe. But I can at least be gentle with myself and live as well as possible this peculiar life I have been given. (Which means of course that right now I am not living well at all because I am exhausted and struggling to complete the simplest tasks. But maybe, instead of feeling guilty and ashamed about that I can accept it, and for the moment rest. Maybe.)

Fraud

2011-01-28T13:47:00.005Z

Thank you for the responses on my last post. I'm tempted just to leave things there, maintain the illusion that I have recovered and that is that, for ever and ever. Real life is not so simple and I currently feel uneasy about that post, and rather foolish. Because I no longer feel so well. The world has shifted and my mood has slipped. Nothing has happened to trigger this change. I wish something had, because that would make sense. I could curse this illness, that so many people have competing explanations for, but that feels to me as I experience it so random and so physical. That keeps laying me low so that I wonder just how many times someone can go through this.

Really Rather Boring

2011-01-14T12:50:00.003Z

I haven't posted for ages. Because there isn't much to say. In the terms of this blog my life is pretty boring right now. No voices, no visual disturbances, no brokenness, no whirling whizziness and ecstacy, no agitation, no anxiety, no depression, nothing. I feel stable and I feel ordinary. I will confess that occasionally I miss the feelings of intense bliss, the deliciously heightened perceptions, the laughing and the leaping, but I don't miss the rest. So mostly it's good. Strange, but good. I can read, I can think, I can sleep, I can concentrate on the things that are important to me. And that's what I'm doing, managing my daily life and working consistently at my writing and my art. I even have a few long term aims and am starting to believe I may be able to pursue them without being tossed about and disturbed and overwhelmed and thrown off course by symptoms and experiences.

I saw my new consultant on Wednesday. I liked her, I wish I had changed consultants years ago. I wanted to, but I always feared it would make me appear "difficult". Now a restructuring in the department has meant a change anyway. We discussed where I was and what happened last year. She wanted to know what had led to my detainment "for future reference". This gave me pause, as I would like to think that I will never end up in hospital again. But I suppose that given my history many people would consider another episode of illness likely. That possibility, and the uncertainty about whether I can avoid it is something I have to live with right now. We discussed medication. There is one possible problem ahead because the amisulpride has stopped my periods, so I had to have a blood test, and then we will decide what to do. I really don't want to change medication right now, I'm scared of that, really really scared. I like where I am and how I feel, and I don't want to go back to confusion and darkness. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Today I saw the psychologist. I haven't seen him since I was discharged, what with Christmas and the snow. He was quite positive about my ability to maintain this wellness and said he saw no reason I should end up in hospital again. We talked about how things were and agreed that it wasn't necessary for me to see him at the moment. If things get difficult or issues arise that I need to talk through I can contact him through my social worker and he will make me an appointment.

So there we are. I'm not quite ready to officially close this blog, but it's possible it may have a limited future. I do think sometimes about writing in more detail about what happened last year, maybe putting together some extracts from my diary, as though that would somehow help me make deeper sense of it, but I'm not sure I'm ready to do that either. I guess I will if/when it's right. For now I'll just enjoy being able to think in straight lines and not feeling that there are electrodes in my head, or that I'm a new prophet, or that the moss and the birds are imparting secrets to me, or that I have to die because it is the only solution.

Why oh why

2010-12-09T18:59:00.002Z

can't anything about benefits be simple? Really, it should be straightforward. Because I was in hospital longer than 28 days my DLA was stopped, when I was discharged it should have been reinstated. I phoned them the next day to tell them. But I managed to check my bank account today and they aren't paying me. I'm not surprised, this is a pattern I've noticed before, that it is very easy to get benefits stopped, but never easy to get them back. Last time I was released from hospital it took months to get my money straight, and I had a tenancy support worker helping me then. I also had a letter from DLA today, which with a typical lack of clarity tells me that they recently relooked at a decision they'd made and have decided not to change their decision. No clue as to what that decision actually was, of course.

So tomorrow I have to phone them and try to sort it out, which is the kind of thing that makes me stressed and anxious. I'm struggling a little at the moment. It's nothing major, nothing to panic about, I know what has happened. I've been helping a friend this week and so I've been busy and I've got tired, and tiredness is a trigger for me. In order to keep my head straight I seem to need quite a lot of time to rest and recharge and attend to my thoughts. How this will ever be compatible with working for a living I don't know, and it does worry me. Keeping myself well seems to be a job in itself.

But in better news, I have running water again! I live in a lovely old cottage, but it doesn't have much in the way of central heating and my water has been frozen since Monday.

Snowed in and snowed off

2010-12-02T09:12:00.002Z

Snow, snow, snow, and more of it falling. I woke up yesterday to an even whiter world than Tuesday. There was no way my little car was going anywhere and I thought I was going to have to go through an unplanned withdrawal from my medication because I needed a prescription. But my friends who have a 4x4 said they were going into town and would take me. They were worried, they said, they didn't want me to get poorly again (ouch). Except I nearly didn't get a prescription anyway because the hospital have yet to write to my GP. As ever, NHS efficiency amazes me. So once I'd told him my dosage the doctor issued me a prescription. Which was slightly mortifying as last time I saw him he was telling me how much easier it would be if I went into hospital voluntarily, and really I was just hoping to avoid seeing him again for oh, about five years. I also saw the nurse who back in September was assigned to sit with me until the crisis team arrived. I could have done without that as well.

Meanwhile everything is cancelled. I didn't see my social worker this week because of the weather, today's appointment with the psychologist isn't happening, and I don't see myself getting to my new support/activity group tomorrow either. And the snow seems to have got into my brain and turned it into lots of falling, whirling, fuzzy white bits.

On medication

2010-11-21T14:05:00.004Z

While I was in hospital my medication was changed from quetiapine to amisulpride. My consultant's idea of a gradual taper from quetiapine was to go from 700mg to 300mg for four nights and then nothing. Strangely enough this coincided with my worst time.

Then I started the amisulpride. Initially it made me very hazy and drowsy, I was tired but somehow couldn't sleep. I was also very itchy and tore a few holes in my skin scratching. These effects wore off after a week to ten days and now I feel fine, I'm sleeping well and eating well and as a nice bonus I seem to have naturally lost a bit of weight. I was fat on quetiapine and didn't like it.

But it bothers me to be taking medication. I'm taking a chemical that affects how my brain functions, and does anyone really understand what it does and why and how that translates into a reduction of symptoms, if it does? Wikipedia tells me that amisulpride functions primarily as a D2 and D3 receptor antagonist and bind[s] to and activate[s] the GHB receptor . . . [which] is known to inhibit the release of dopamine. But how does this change the nature of experience as I live it? Does anybody actually know? I came across this quote by Voltaire the other day: Doctors pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into human beings of whom they know nothing. It seems particularly apt for psychiatric medication.

The problem with the quetiapine was that the dose kept going up. It seemed to work for a while, and then I would have another crisis and it would be increased and seem to work for a while . . . I don't want the same thing to happen with amisulpride. In fact, I'd like to stop taking it as soon as possible. I'm not going to do it yet, and when I do it I'm going to do it very slowly and carefully, but I don't want to be taking medication for the rest of my life.

One of the things that becomes very clear when you spend any length of time on a pysch ward and meet other patients is how many factors are involved with any kind of mental illness. People have past traumas and current difficulties that are real and pressing and it becomes very hard to see medication as an entirely satisfactory answer.

I guess I'm back to the same questions. What happened that led to my hospital admission, what caused my recovery, and how can I maintain that recovery and prevent it happening again? What role did medication play and does it have a place in my future?

And meanwhile I'm suffering from shame. There's a horrid processing going on where I remember something and I wonder did I really say that? did I really do that? did I really think that? And I know I was unwell and I know the nurses will have seen people in far worse states, but oh it's mortifying.

Hospital

2010-11-17T11:21:00.005Z

I've been discharged. It was strange to go back to the hospital, I felt as though I had been away for much longer than a week, but there were the same corridors and the same staff and the same patients, and I know that in that place the days would have all slid together and the weeks turned into new weeks. Time does strange things in hospital, and in your memory of it afterwards. When I was very unwell I didn't notice time so much, I was immersed in my experience and overwhelmed by it and now I can barely remember those first weeks. But as I got better boredom began to weigh on me and there was an art to getting through the days and persuading the clock to move. Hospital is boring, there is no doubt about that. And noisy. And smelly.

The ward I was on was the "Assessment, Treatment and Therapy ward" for my area. There were grand statements on the wall about how the staff believed in individuals and their ability to recover. There was a huge stack of "recovery packs" in the office and they were handed out to everyone (I ended up with two).

There was a programme of groups and activities, though they weren't especially inspiring. On Monday afternoons someone came in from a lottery-funded organisation to run a crafts group. It might be painting mugs, or flower-arranging, or the session before Halloween we carved pumpkins. On Tuesday there was a Thinking Skills group in the morning, downstairs in what used to be the Day Unit but is now mostly offices. This group was ok. At least, it didn't last too long. We looked at things like jumping to conclusions, how we make decisions and how we learn/remember.

On Tuesday afternoons there was another crafts session. On Wednesday mornings there was allegedly a Recovery Group, working through the recovery pack, but I think it only happened once. Other times the staff would try to bully us into playing word games and at one point they pulled out a karaoke machine (I hid). On Thursday afternoons there was a Personal Development group. This was the activity I had the most aversion to, having no desire, well or unwell, to sit in a small room discussing stress management or negative beliefs or the true meaning of success. The organiser of these groups could be most persistent in persuading you to attend, hammering over and over at your resolve, saying things like "It's part of your treatment, it's important, there could be something in this group that helps you recover, don't you want to recover?" Thankfully, she eventually accepted that while I wasn't unwilling to participate in activities in general this particular group did nothing for me.

On Friday mornings there was a Tai Chi class, run in conjunction with the continuing education department at the council. I think it was a new thing, an experiment. I went to this when I could because it was good to actually do something active, though all the talk about energy channels initially sent my mind too fast to bear, and it was hard to concentrate. Friday afternoons volunteers from the local Mind branch ran a games group. I played dominoes, I played bingo, but I did draw the line at seated bowls.

Every afternoon was QUIET - Quality Uninterupted Intervention and Engagement Time. A sign would go up outside the ward, there were supposed to be no visitors and the staff didn't have to answer the phone. I can't say I noticed more interventions happening during this time, but I do think as wards go the nurses were fairly good about interacting with patients. I had several long conversations with various nurses when I was struggling and some of them were quite helpful, even if they did usually end by recommending I take some medication.

Because in the predictable perversity that is often services, those who frequently asked for PRN medication were told they were becoming dependent on it and needed to develop other coping skills, but because I expressed reluctance I was actually encouraged to take it. I fairly soon made a decision not to take haloperidol. For me it is a drug of evil, effectively knocking out the strange thoughts (and all thoughts) but leaving me with a terrible akathisia. I had quite enough agitation of my own. After that they gave me 2mg lorazepam which calmed me down and usually sent me to sleep. As I became better it was tempting to ask for it even when I didn't really need it, simply because it made a few hours slide by quite tolerably, but I was strict with myself about it. I fell into that trap during my last admission, having meds most days, and then suffering withdrawal when I was discharged and didn't have access to them. So I went from having 2mg lorazepam twice a day when things were bad, to once a day, to every other day, and then I didn't need it.

I was praised for being a good patient. Because I do have coping skills, and use them, because I do use activities to distract and occupy myself. I was also congratulated for having stayed out of hospital for two years. I don't know what I think about this, it seems to run counter to all the talk about recovery, with its assumption that someone who has been in hospital will most likely need it again and is doing well not to be admitted. But I guess this time I was a "good patient" because I was desperately unwell and needed support and medication and then I got better and didn't need those things and was keen to leave. It was a better experience than my last admission, and I think, given the inevitable horridness of being an inpatient, and the foulness of being unwell, it was as good as an experience of hospital is likely to get.

On being sectioned

2010-11-15T07:40:00.004Z

I now have the dubious distinction of having been detained under section 3 of the Mental Health Act twice.

I think your history counts against you and if you have been sectioned once it is easier to be sectioned again. This time it was written into my care plan from the start: If Werehorse tries to leave the ward or leaves the ward and refuses to return the MHA will be used.

The assessment was over very quickly. My GP wasn't present this time, there was my consultant, a doctor who works for her and a social worker. The social worker didn't even ask any questions. I know other bloggers have had MHA assessments and not been detained. But both my assessments have happened in hospital and I suspect that the decision of allowing or not allowing someone who is already an inpatient to leave feels different to that of insisting that someone who is still "at large" comes into hospital.

I did almost immediately appeal my section, but the machinery of administration works so slowly that as it turns out I will most likely be discharged a fortnight before the initial hearing.

As for being sectioned, is there any other experience short of being in prison which so comprehensively removes your liberty? There you are, and it doesn't matter what you say or do, you can't leave, and if you try to leave the staff have the right to restrain you. That's the law. It's kind of hard to get your head around. I found the physical confinement hard to bear. The few times I did get out - my social worker took me to the library a couple of times, once or twice I went to a nearby shop when there were enough staff to escort me - it felt so good to be outside, to be somewhere else, walking, moving, covering the ground.

It was even worse when you were "on obs" because then you literally couldn't leave the ward, even to go down to the dining room or the garden, without a member of staff. The first morning I was taken off obs I went down for a smoke and I remember revelling in the sense of freedom. Because if I woke up at half past seven and wanted a cigarette I could have a cigarette instead of having to wait until eight. Such a tiny freedom, but it felt glorious. And if I finished my meal I could go back up to the ward instead of having to wait until everyone was ready. Amazing! But it made me happy.

I was very briefly on high obs, the morning before the assessment, and that is even worse. Someone sits with you and watches you ALL the time. You can't even go to the toilet in private.

I never want to be sectioned again. I never want to be in hospital again. So I keep returning to the thorny problem of why I became ill and why I became well. Because if I can just figure it out maybe I can prevent this ever happening again.

Reflections

2010-11-12T14:08:00.003Z

Thank you for the comments on the last post. I am at home, on leave, and I will be discharged on Tuesday all being well. And it will be well, I am determined of that.

I am working quite hard to stay in touch with reality, grounding myself in the details of my life. At the same time part of me is trying to understand what has happened. I was in hospital for eight weeks and I'm still officially a patient. How did I become so unwell and, perhaps more importantly, how did I become better? Was it the medication, the psychologist, my own desire, or do these processes have a natural lifespan and eventually burn themselves out? Or all of the above?

I'm calling what happened "extreme states" because I don't really have another name. In the opinion of the psychologist while what I was experiencing had "the flavour of psychosis" (and certainly other ominous terms such as "thought disorder" and "delusional" were used at various times) it was essentially dissociative in nature. I think I agree with this hence the frequent grounding etc

But how do I write about things that I can see now sound odd but at the time were so real and vivid and seemed the absolute truth? I thought I wasn't a human being but an "earthkeeper", and that the very planet was communicating with me. At times this was an experience of bliss, at times of terror. Then there was an event I can only describe as a psychic death, I felt that I was full of corpses, I felt like my actual self had died. That was very black and I was visited by a dreadful and absolute agitation that seemed unbearable. Then slowly, like weeds seeding themselves over a blackened, fire-bombed ruin, something of life returned. There was a kind of renewal. I found myself wanting for the first time in weeks to return to reality, to my actual and ordinary life, to my little house and my cat. And gradually the voices calling from the hillside receded and I needed less and less lorazepam to get through the day.

And now here I am, shaking a little, hallucinating a little, but quite definitely human and quite definitely alive. I feel changed by what has happened but I'm not sure exactly how, and where I go from here I have no idea. For the moment I'm contenting myself with all those boring-yet-true platitudes of taking it one day at a time and being kind to yourself etc etc

Slinking back in . . .

2010-11-06T14:39:00.002Z

. . . and possibly slinking back out again fairly fast. I just don't know what I think about blogging at the moment.

But for the moment I am back, on a night's home leave, my first since I was admitted on 15th September and sectioned on the 24th. I want out of hospital now but I have to play their game, play by the rules, or I won't be going anywhere.

I don't know how to tell the story of what happened. I have journeyed through some extreme states, and a lot of it seems pretty foreign to me now. I am much better, a little on edge, but that is probably to be expected, it is always hard to adjust to being at home. And oh how I just want to be at home. I am going to ask for discharge at ward round on Tuesday. It's possible I won't get it immediately but hopefully soon. The hospital has done its job, it kept me safe when I wasn't capable of doing that myself, but I'm coping much better now, I'm sure I'm well enough to come home.

Do not pass go

2010-10-05T11:03:00.003+01:00

Just a flying visit, while I am home to get some things, since I have somehow managed to end up in hospital. Take care everyone, I'll catch up when I can x x x

Prickly Thickets

2010-09-14T16:37:00.005+01:00

of thoughts, of course. And a resurgence of the voices, the nasty, twisty ones that turn every single thing about you into something wrong, every tiny thought you might think or say, every minor thing you might do, into evidence against you. So you end up paralysed, unable to move in any direction, unable to distract, unable to avoid. There's a phrase, "deaden and endure", that comes I think from a poem, though I can't remember which, that is often in my mind right now.

And I have an uninvited guest, the suicide demon sneaked in when I wasn't looking. I turned round and found it laughing and dancing on the sofa. Perhaps it wasn't terribly intelligent to move within walking distance of the river. And why does there have to be such a very sturdy hook through one of the beams? All the better to hang yourself from, my dear.

No, no, that was last week. I'll be fine, I'll be fine, I have plenty of resources. I'll hole up and hunker down and I'll get through.

I said I didn't mind not being offered therapy, but I think I do. Because I feel as though I've been thrown on the scrapheap. They don't know what's wrong with me and there is no help available. So I guess that's it really, and this is what all the promises have come to.

Mixed Messages

2010-09-05T06:33:00.002+01:00

I was given a booklet which talks about the need to emancipate yourself from the psychiatric system and its toxic pharmaceuticals. And told to start taking my medication again. In the same appointment.

This seems symbolic of my own confusion. I'm trying to think. I can't seem to think. That's part of the problem.

There's something something something I want to write about, but I don't know how. How do you describe in sentences the loss of a self who thinks in sentences?

The sky is like a stripey cat this morning, but I can't see the moon.

Thoughts on Therapy

2010-08-22T12:44:00.002+01:00

So it seems there are two reasons I'm not going to be offered any therapy. The first is the predictable "risk factor" in that I'm judged too ill, or too likely to become ill, to cope. The second is that therapy possibly wouldn't be appropriate or helpful given the "psychotic-type" symptoms that cause me most difficulty.

Although part of me would like the chance to decide for myself, I don't think I really mind. While I would at times welcome someone wise to talk to there is of course no guarantee that any therapist I was assigned would be wise in the ways I need. And I don't actually feel any desire to go poking about in the few fragments I remember of my childhood.

I can apparently attend a group on "Thinking Skills" which is designed for those with "psychotic-type" experiences. I made a face at the name and I also made a face because it's held at the hospital, a place I have avoided visiting for about eighteen months now and have absolutely no wish to return to in any capacity. But maybe I'll try it. Maybe.

But otherwise I guess it's just me, my medication and my social worker. That's ok. I'm not doing too badly at the moment really. My lovely little house seems to keep at least one of my feet in this particular four-dimensional reality and it is hard, living here, not to feel there is some benevolence in the universe.

Freak

2010-08-16T20:09:00.002+01:00

A freak I am, a freak.

Still, I suppose I should be grateful that whatever force or demon or person possesses my body doesn't (usually) compel me to do dangerous or violent things, I merely look peculiar and daft.

Ah! And that's another thing to add to the "Do's and Don't's for the Crisis Team" that my social worker is compiling - DON'T assume that I am depressed and must therefore be indulging in obsessive rumination and negative thinking.

Blargle

2010-08-13T20:06:00.001+01:00

Glibbit slopadd bargle. Cobbrill argle pangle threm. Quibbreck dramble. Rill.

"I should eat some money"

2010-08-12T20:23:00.003+01:00

Except I don't have any.

Because the DWP seem utterly unable to cope with an address change. And, as always, they are very very quick to take money away, and very very slow to start paying it again. I'm sick with worry.

Meanwhile the council are demanding documentary evidence that I am actually a human being and do actually live in a house.

Movement/moving/being moved and a message

2010-08-07T16:48:00.003+01:00

for not pollyanna, if you're reading, because you posted a comment and I didn't reply and I hate doing that, it feels *rude*, and it wasn't, or not intentionally so, it's just that sometimes I lose language and can't seem to form sentences and have these long absences and anyway I wanted to say that I'm sorry.

And this post kind of follows on from that post because I found out I was prescribed the lorazepam because I was rocking throughout the appointment which I hadn't realised but I do now sometimes have moments when I realise that my movement marks me out as eccentric or odd.

And I moved house. Or something moved me. I was moved. And it's good, it's very very good, and it's made me think about mysterious processes because it seems that all the philosophies which require you to wrestle with your thoughts and pursue goals are deeply flawed, and maybe sickness has a purpose and so does dread and it's made me think about the impact of environment on sanity and mood.