Warning: this post contains content surrounding suicide and self-harm which may be triggering for some readers.

A little over a month ago I tried to kill myself.

That’s a fucking scary thing to write in a public place, and I don’t do so lightly. This is not the first time I have tried to take my own life, and I can’t trust myself at the moment that it will be my last. This time, and the previous times, I experienced all the same shame and humiliation, the depression and disappointment, that I had failed in my attempt. I rarely talk about my suicidal feelings, even with my closest friends, and I have never spoken about this in a place where the whole world can hear my voice or read my words. It is terrifying to write this, but for some reason I feel like I must, like the words and the feelings are bursting to be set free, that I just need to get it all down in one place. So here it is, and here I am.

A little over a month ago I tried to kill myself. It was the twenty-first of January. I won’t forget that date in a hurry. I had been leading up to it for months, for that day was the day I would finally see the fabled psychiatrist. Finally someone might take the terrifying things going on in my head seriously, might be able to help me understand what was wrong, might be able to help me learn to manage them, perhaps even to get better. Unfortunately, my hopes were misplaced. The doctor I saw listened to everything I had to say, told me he was referring me for a therapy with a year-long waiting list, but that he didn’t consider there was anything going on that was really problematic (apparently even my depression was ‘in remission’ according to him) and was basically dismissive and condescending. He made me feel like I was wasting his time.

For a long time I have believed I have two options. I can get better, or I can kill myself. I only have those two options because the third option – carrying on like this for the rest of my life – doesn’t even bear thinking about. As I walked out of that appointment I felt like the former option had fallen away, leaving me only with the latter. I walked the short distance home planning my own death. I got home and spent a few hours with my son as well as my my partner and my best friend, neither of whom knew what I was planning. After I put my son to bed and my friend had left, I tried to self-harm (for the first time in many years), getting no further than a few superficial cuts before realising that it wasn’t making me feel any better, that somehow my one outlet had stopped working for me.

My partner was working away at his computer, oblivious to my actions. He is not unfeeling or stupid; I am just very, very good at appearing normal on the surface even when my ability to cope is crumbling away. I went into the kitchen, collected up every paracetamol and codeine based painkiller I could find, and began swallowing them in groups of ten. In hindsight ten was a bad number to choose because by the third group of ten I was gagging. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, slipped reluctantly down my throat as my stomach tried to empty itself. I have a cast-iron stomach and was able to hold them, but had to stop a while to drink some water in case I vomited and wasted the tablets; I had a limited amount and wanted as many of them to stay as was possible.

I made a cup of tea. To my partner, the sound of the kettle is like the bell to Pavlov’s dog – teamaking means it’s time for a cigarette. He came out with me and we smoked, and I drank tea, and I was shaking and terrified and I felt totally out of control of my mind. By then any semblance of normalcy had gone and he knew something serious was up. After some pressing, he elicited a confession. Immediately I was marched up to the bathroom to be sick. He telephoned NHS Direct to find out what he could give me to make me sick, and was informed they had sent an ambulance. Apparently large quantities of paracetamol and codeine can be very dangerous, who’d have thought?

I remember very little of the following few hours. The quantity of codeine in my system was sufficient that I was barely awake. I remember monitors and blood tests and kind nurses, far kinder than I remembered from previous experiences. Mostly I remember nausea, consuming nausea. I lost count of the number of times I vomited. At around four in the morning my blood test results came back. I had taken considerably more than the lethal dose of paracetamol, but the blood tests showed the levels were low enough that I would not need treatment. Apparently being fat had worked in my ‘favour’.

I had just returned to my bed in the observation ward from a particularly nasty bout of vomiting when the doctor came on his rounds. He was polite and compassionate, and he asked the nurse to give me a shot of an anti-emetic so that I could have some rest from the nausea. A little later I saw the hospital psychiatrist, who was very friendly and loath to send me to a psychiatric hospital; she didn’t think it would be any good for me and I didn’t want to be away from Orion if I could help it. She released me “into my partner’s care” with a leaflet from the Crisis Team with their telephone number and instructions to call them to make an appointment for them to come and see me.

My partner made the call. For the next few days they visited every day. I was told that on the 27th their consultant psychiatrist would visit me to see what the long-term plan should be. I had been talking with my partner and he pointed out that face-to-face with people I don’t know, I come across as very ‘together’ and it can be difficult for them to see that under the surface, I am barely holding on. Like I said, I am very good at appearing ‘normal’ and I find it impossible to open up to strangers in person, however well-qualified they may be. However, I do write – prolifically, though not always legibly. He suggested I write down everything that has been going on in my head as a journal entry for myself to make some sense of it, and possibly to show to the psychiatrist to tell her in the written word that which I would be incapable of expressing in speech.

I’m going to copy here what I wrote then, because it is relevant to the rest of the story. Warning, it’s long and possibly boring and more than a little ‘emo’-sounding.

Fredrik thinks it would be a good idea to print out yesterday’s journal entry to show the doctor tomorrow. He also said it might be worth writing another one today sort of explaining where my head is at. Being intelligent and articulate is useful most of the time but when it comes to speaking with health professionals it sucks as I come across as really normal and ‘together’ and I don’t know how to let down that facade adequately to explain to a doctor how if you scratch the surface I am just hanging on by a thread.

So how am I? Well first of all I’m tired, both mentally and physically. My brain seems to be dealing with so much that’s going on internally that it barely has the energy for everyday thought and reason. My thoughts shout at me, clamouring for attention, often not in my own voice but that of screaming harpies, screeching sounds that are hardly human and make me want to clap my hands over my ears to drown them out but of course, that won’t work because they are me, my own thoughts in my own head and it is impossible to quiet one’s own thoughts. It’s exhausting, and it seems like the mental exhaustion bleeds into my physical state and sometimes it’s an effort just to keep my eyes open.

I do things compulsively, as if trying to sabotage myself. I eat compulsively, keeping my fat as a protective layer against the outside world. I eat until I am sick and then I eat some more. I spend compulsively, driving myself deeper and deeper into debt buying random objects I neither need nor particularly want, for the simple buzz of spending money. I lie compulsively, telling untruths about small, trivial things and important things alike. I can’t even remember the majority of the lies I tell. Some of them have become ingrained in me, so often I have no idea whether something I say is true or false because honestly I can’t remember the original truth any more.

I often feel like I am not really in my head. It feels like I am outside my body watching myself in a film. The things I do don’t feel like things I’m doing at all, but things that are happening to somebody else. I sometimes walk across the street and believe I am not really crossing the street, I am in a coma or dreaming I am crossing the street when in reality I am doing something else entirely. Other times I feel very much like I am myself, but this time it is the world that isn’t real. Sometimes when this happens, everything seems very loud and bright but somehow fuzzy, as if behind a frosted-glass window. Sometimes it is just the opposite, where everything seems subdued in hue and volume and size, like I am Gulliver and this is Lilliput and it is shrinking under my feet because none of this is real, not really.

It’s like a pervasive feeling of emptiness. It’s like loneliness but I feel fraudulent calling it that because I have this great support network of people around me all the time. How could I possibly be lonely? But I do feel empty, like there is nothing inside me. Sometimes I feel like the gods gave me eyes and hands but forgot to provide me with a soul. I don’t understand other humans. I react inappropriately to their emotions, and rarely feel any response to the emotions of others. I am good at appearing warm but most of the time I feel ice-cold. An empty house is a cold house, as an empty room is a cold room. I think if I was not so empty I would not feel so cold or perhaps vice versa. I have love in my life and yet I feel eternally empty, which in turn leads to guilt, which leads to depression, which magnifies the feelings of emptiness until I feel like I am being swallowed by a void, sucked into my own black hole of cold nothingness.

Sometimes I think Orion is not real. I will walk down the street talking to him and imagine that other people are watching me warily as I speak to thin air. Most of the time logically I know he is real but well… how do I know, really? I could have made up the memories in my head. There is no guarantee that other people are real either so their affirmation of his existence means very little. I often believe things exist which I later realise do not. I believe there is a person under the bed waiting to stab me. I believe there are invisible people, maybe dead people, watching me while I go about my daily business. I believe that someone will break into the house and pour acid all over Orion’s head. I believe this so fully that I see it happening. I see his skin melting, eyelids collapsing into eyeballs, his mouth fizzing and open wide as he screams for me. When I am having these beliefs, they are true. They are as true as my hands being attached to my arms. If I can believe all sorts of things to be true which others can tell me are plainly ridiculous, how can I be sure of anything I believe – and how indeed can I be sure I even exist, let alone Orion?

I don’t know who I am. People see Anji as a woman who knows herself, who has somehow ‘found’ herself. I wish that were true. I feel so lost most of the time that I don’t know whether I am coming or going. I feel like I am drifting, I don’t know what I am doing here, so purposeless, so empty. Some days I want to be an earth mother baking bread and making jam. Some days I want to be in the trenches fighting for women’s liberation on the front lines. Some days I want to train to be a veterinary surgeon. Some days I just want to pop out babies. I can’t decide who I am and I’m a different person depending on the day, so how am I supposed to decide on one career for the rest of my life?

Thoughts of suicide and self-harm are never far from my mind. Sometimes I love myself – but sometimes I hate myself, loathe myself to the point that I feel like I need punishment. I swing between believing I am the most important person in the world, head blown up with delusions of my own grandeur, to feeling tiny and insignificant and disgusting, an insect which needs to be stamped upon. When I feel suicidal it is for one of two reasons; despair at the state of my thoughts and the distress I feel on a daily basis, or this intense hatred for myself and the feeling that I ought to do the world a favour by taking myself out of the picture. Death doesn’t frighten me any more, instead I idealise it as the ultimate escape, the ultimate release. It fascinates me and tempts me and seduces me from inside my own mind. Even when I am feeling ‘well’ I have suicidal thoughts often, and thus far I can’t pinpoint a reason for that.

Self-harming thoughts are often for those two reasons; a release from the pain in my mind via physical pain, or a method of self-punishment. Sometimes though it is far more prosaic, simply wanting to ground myself, to remind myself that I am real. When I feel like I am unreal, like I am not really a person or that the world around me doesn’t truly exist, self harm can be the one thing that helps me re-associate my mind with my body. I see myself from the outside self-harming, and then I feel it from the inside, and it’s like a reminder that yes, this is me and this is my body and I am really real. Since I ’stopped’ self harming I feel distant from myself a whole lot more and I long to be able to self harm just to remind myself that I am me.

Often I feel like I am being watched. Sometimes I think there are cameras watching to make sure I am not abusing Orion. Sometimes I think the Government are watching me with cameras and wiretaps and goodness knows what, because I am somehow important to national security. Usually this coincides with my feeling-important episodes rather than the feeling-insignificant ones. Other times I truly believe I am in some kind of real-life Truman show; that all of the people around me are actors, that everything that happens to me that seems to be new or spontaneous or random, is already written by a screenwriter, that people I do not know and will never meet are watching me on this grotesque reality television show.

At the moment I am scared to leave the house. The world outside is huge and the people in it are dangerous and unpredictable and I don’t trust them. For that matter I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust myself not to step into traffic or throw myself off a motorway bridge or all manner of other ways I would have out there of killing myself. But even aside from suicidal thoughts I just can’t face the world. My little world here in my home is safe, I know it well, Fredrik is here to look after me. I am terrified, so terrified, that this is all going to get too much for him and he’s going to run away as so many people have in my life. I am terrified of being abandoned. For now he is here and as long as I am in my house and he is here helping me then I feel fairly safe. Outside, all manner of things could happen, and I just don’t feel up to going out into the world at the moment.

Fredrik is probably the first person who I have managed to have an equal, long-standing relationship with – not just romantic relationships but friendships as well. I think this is another reason I am so scared of him leaving me on my own, as with most people I get into very intense, fierce relationships quite early and then sooner or later, they blow up in my face quite catastrophically. Like I said earlier, I find it difficult to understand people, I am bad at dealing with them and I am bad at relating to them. I am scared Fredrik is going to eventually realise I’m a horrible person and make his exit. Orion seems to be particularly clingy too, and I know he is only three and logically I know that’s probably totally normal but I can’t help being scared that he gets hisclinginess from me, that he will be perpetually dependent on other people as a result of my own faults being passed on to him.

Along with all of these bizarre and distressing thoughts and experiences, there is my mood itself. I don’t imagine any of these things would be easy to deal with even if I felt stable but as it is, I feel like I am on an emotional roller-coaster every waking minute of my life. I have massive mood swings, from suicidally depressed to high as a kite, and there is no pattern to them. They last anything from ten minutes to a few hours. I never know how I will feel five minutes from now.

When I am high, I can’t stop moving – I feel like I have all the energy in the world. I sing stupid songs, I talk nonsense and say inappropriate things, I shout or squeak or tell stupid jokes, I embarrass myself. I clean until my hands are red and raw. I talk incessantly and never remember what I am talking about; it’s like as soon as a sentence is out of my mouth I have forgotten what it was and I have to ask “What did I just say?” I am particularly forgetful most of the time anyway, a fact I have always put down to the amount of other stuff my brain has to deal with – but when I am high or just coming down from a high episode, I can remember basically nothing of what I have just been doing or saying.

When I am low, I can’t even force myself to stand up. Eating, showering and housework seem like pointless activities. Orion is irritating and I just want him to sit in front of Cbeebies or a colouring book and leave me alone, because I can’t handle him. I don’t want to talk to people. I don’t want to do anything. Reading a book or watching mindless television seems like too much of an effort. Often when I am low, I sleep if I can. It’s all I feel like doing that is safe, because in a low episode left alone and awake with my own thoughts, I often get to thoughts of suicide and/or self-harm so sleep seems like the safest option.

So that’s my head in a nutshell. There are a whole lot more things going on than this, but this is as bare-bones a way of describing the environment inside my head as I can write. The doctor I saw on Wednesday afternoon basically told me there was nothing wrong with me, that it was just the way my personality is, and that he saw no need for further help (aside from referring me for the cognitive therapy with the 12 month waiting list) because my mental state “isn’t impacting on my life significantly.” This is my way of writing out what is happening to me, and to try to describe the significant ways my life is being affected.

As I said before, I can’t go on like this. Either I am ill, in which case I will get help, or there is indeed nothing wrong with me and I’ll be back to square one, suicidal because I can’t face the prospect of being like this day after week after month after year. I said at the beginning I’m hanging on by a thread and I meant it. I reached my limit on Wednesday and now I am only surviving because my friends and family are holding me up, hoping that there is someone out there who can help. Right now, I just don’t know.

- 25th January 2009

The next day, the psychiatrist came for our appointment. She was friendly and accessible with a wonderfully soothing Scottish accent. Fredrik gave her a printout of the above before we spoke. She read it and agreed that it had been a really good idea to write it and present her with it, because it got everything across far better than if I had tried to explain it to her face to face. She diagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder (also known here in the UK as Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder of the Borderline type). She asked if she could keep my piece of writing, because it was “excellent and articulate account of what it’s like living day-to-day with BPD”. A diagnosis isn’t important to a lot of people, but for me it felt like having a weight lifted off my shoulders. It was that realisation – that I’m not just being melodramatic, that I’m not making things up in my head, that someone is taking me seriously and now I have a name for this, I might be able to start finding out how to deal with it effectively.

Of course that wasn’t the answer though, and it didn’t make everything better. The Crisis Team were scatty at best and thoroughly disorganised at worst, and I was sinking further into depression again. On the seventeenth of February I fell apart again. I spent much of the day either catatonic or actively suicidal, everything I looked at I was wondering how I could use it to hurt myself or kill myself, I was shaking violently from stress and a complete lack of control. I broke a glass on the patio just so I could have something with sharp edges. My partner convinced me to call the Samaritans, who were very nice but I still felt the same way afterwards, so he made an appointment with the GP for that afternoon. The GP referred me to the Orchards, a local psychiatric hospital, to meet with the crisis team there.

The two men from the crisis team were nice enough, though one of them seemed insistent that there wasn’t much they could do and I’d just have to learn to deal with it by myself. They did however agree to make an appointment to see Dr McFarlane (the nice Scottish one) again the next day. So I did – and I think that may well have been my turning point. She wanted to change my medication; I have been on Paroxetine for the better part of four years and the thought of coming off it terrifies me. She said that we would simultaneously decrease the Paroxetine and increase the Mirtazepine, which is the new drug she wants me to try, which should minimise the effects of Paroxetine withdrawal. I have experienced its withdrawal symptoms in the past and they in themself would be reason enough to feel suicidal, so I am glad we are taking it slowly.

She also told me about something I’d never heard of before – hospital day treatment. Basically you go in Monday to Friday for about six weeks. They do all sorts of group talks and sessions about all aspects of managing mental illnesses, art sessions, relaxation techniques, mood management, all sorts of things. She made an appointment for me to go in to speak to the two people who run the Day Treatment and basically to sign up for it, stressing that if I decided in the meantime that it wasn’t for me, I was welcome to phone and cancel.

We spent the weekend with my parents as they’d offered to have us so I could have a bit of a break, and then on Monday morning I went back to the Orchards. The Day Treatment people were so, so nice and the course/whatever you want to call it seems really productive and proactive and it’s all very flexible. For once I’m feeling positive about something to do with my mental health. The Day Treatment will hopefully help me learn the skills and tools I need to cope with and manage my mood and deal with unwanted thoughts in positive ways, to keep me alive and coping until my therapy begins in a year or so.

So I’m now on day 3 of Mirtazapine, I begin Day Treatment on Monday coming up, and take my last Paroxetine tablet on Tuesday. It’s sad that it took a suicide attempt to get the help I needed, but now I am being offered it I am going to do my best to make the most of it. Get better or die, remember? I am still experiencing suicidal ideation and desires, and I haven’t managed to stop self-harming again yet, but I am at least having some positive moments as well. The universe decided to work with rather than against me for once, and maybe I can be successful with that first option after all.

Congratulations if you made it to the end of this. I promise my next post won’t be so wordy.

Please note this post could be triggering to self-harmers and recovering/ex self-harmers.

My boyfriend bought me a car. He lives in Norway, he transferred me the money so he could buy me a car. In fact he bought me my dream car; a pink Mini. I have named her Rosa, after Rosa Parks, and because it’s the Norwegian word for pink.

I live on Incapacity Benefit and the meagre tax credits I receive because I have a small child. I could not have bought this car without my boyfriend’s kindness. And I cannot finance the insurance/tax without quitting smoking.

That’s a scary thing to write. I am quitting smoking. Officially I have quit smoking as of yesterday, though I had one-and-a-half cigarettes at around 10pm as I sat in the garden reading. I needed to take the edge off it. Today I have not smoked at all, and I think one-and-a-half cigarettes over two days is pretty good.

My therapist asked if I thought quitting smoking was a good idea right now. Carol never tells me anything is a bad idea, she never tells me I should or shouldn’t or ought or oughtn’t. She just asks if I think something is a good idea… that is her way of telling me she thinks it is a bad idea.

In the short two days my head has turned upside-down.

I stopped self-harming at the end of 2004. Aside from one occasion in November 07, I have not self-harmed in nearly four years. I promised myself that I would do everything in my power to prevent myself from doing it.

I am wondering, now, if smoking is perhaps a psychological substitution for self-harm.

In the two days since I ‘quit’ I have found myself craving self-harm in a way I thought I had left behind. I have found myself banging my wrists and pinching my skin and, on more occasions than I would like to admit, dreaming about once again picking up a blade.

Cigarettes are after all bad for us. We all know that. I am told that there is a far higher percentage of smokers in mentally ill people than in the general populace. I wonder if it’s another form of self-harm, a more subtle one, a more socially acceptable one?

All I know is that I did not want to quit smoking. I like smoking, and don’t much care that it is bad for me. It keeps me from going mad and seemingly it keeps me from self-harming.

But I do not have the privilege as the general populace do, of having a spare forty pounds a month for car insurance. This is a position that I am sure many of the readers and writers here understand – to live on IB is to live in poverty. I am unsure even now if I will be able to afford petrol and recurring tax/MOTs on the vehicle. But it is something I really wanted, so I will try.

Now I just need to try not to walk down the road of self-injury again… or perhaps to ask myself if it’s worth what this is doing to my mental health?

I would appreciate it if people would be somewhat sensitive in any comments made. I understand there are people who might want to tell me to suck it up. I really don’t need to hear that right now, even if you think smoking is stupid… at least understand that the withdrawal is very real and that for those of us who appear to have been using it as a psychological replacement for self-harm, it is potentially very dangerous.

I went to Ladyfest last weekend and it was awesome! While there I met an absolutely wonderful woman who was one of the founders of Mad Chicks. From their site:

Mad Chicks is a new movement, which focuses on issues specific to women mental health service users, using creativity to achieve our aims and attract attention to our causes. We have developed from within Mad Pride, an international user-led movement which challenges discrimination and misinformation in relation to mental health and celebrates mad culture.

Mad Chicks was formed as a response to the number of women coming to Mad Pride meetings, who had hitherto been in a kind of vacuum, with little contact to others and no opportunity for debate, while struggling with mixed wards, childcare, assertiveness, rights, abuse and sexism in the NHS.

We believe the female service user voice has been overlooked as a positive force. Our aim is to create for ourselves a supportive environment, where women can find a voice and identify commonalties and priorities.

Of course as soon as she told me about it I told her all about this blog and we spent a long time nattering about feminism and mental health. I pondered over why it is that so many of us feminists seem to have mental health problems – she replied that nobody could realise they live in a patriarchal and womanhating society without going crazy! I think she has a point, and the crux of her group really resonated with me so I thought I’d mention it here.

And while I’m at it, I’d like to let everyone know about the new UK Feminist Bloggers group. An idea birthed by Kate Smurthwaite aka Cruella-Blog, and raised into a group by Anji aka me, this is a place for all feminist bloggers in the United Kingdom to come together and discuss national and regional events and issues, regardless of which flavour of feminism you come from. So tell all your feminist blogging friends, acquaintances and even those you don’t really know. I’d love for it to be a central place for feminist bloggers in the UK to network and liaise about all feminist matters. What are you waiting for?

I have been registered as a writer here for some time, but have been reading everyone else’s contributions and thinking “there’s no way I can write as well as that!” Regardless of my feelings of inadequacy, I feel the need to at least introduce myself and do what I promised the group and myself I was going to do, by beginning to contribute properly to the blog.

I have been affected by depression for many years. My mother (a nurse in psychiatry, with depression herself) can pinpoint times when I was only five or six years old where I showed signs of depressive illness. It really started manifesting when I was 15-16 and I went through several years of bouncing from one doctor to another, trying drug after drug after drug, and all the time spinning downwards with self-destructive behaviour; self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse and four separate suicide attempts, all to try to quiet the voices in my head and end the feelings of despair. When I became pregnant with my son I stopped the alcohol and drugs, was put on paroxetine and adopted a healthier, more ’stable’ lifestyle. It was around this time I started to be taken seriously by doctors. I am almost certain that had I not become pregnant, I would not be here today. My son indirectly saved my life. It felt like because I was pregnant, the medical professionals saw me as an adult all of a sudden, and they needed to ‘make me better’ so that I would be an adequate parent. I was put on the paroxetine because my (male) doctor didn’t know what else to try. There was nothing else to try. The benefits to my mental heath outweighed the risks to the foetus who later became my son, so my pregnancy was also my first experience of the dullness of a drugged mind.

Paroxetine is numbing and addictive. It prevents me from reaching the very lowest of my lows, but in kind it also prevents me from reaching the highest of my highs. As a teenager I was a creative soul; an artist, a painter, a poet. Paroxetine strips away my creativity, it leaves me standing cold with a paintbrush in my hand and a furrowed brow as I stare at a blank canvas, wondering what it is I am supposed to do. My anxiety makes me very forgetful, and sometimes I forget to take my tablet. It has a very short ‘half-life’ so the effects of withdrawal are felt rapidly in comparison to other antidepressants – within 24-48 hours. I begin to feel dizzy and unbalanced, like the fluid in my ears has frozen over and I have no idea if I am upside-down or back to front. When that dizziness begins I have to take the tablet within a few hours, because otherwise I will begin shaking and vomiting. When I pop that pill after forgetting, I know I have a two to three hour ‘window’ of creativity. There is just little enough of the drug in my system that colours look right again, and everything is bright and glowing and loud and my brain buzzes with ideas. Then it kicks in again and I go back to normal, struggling to squeeze out even a sentence or brush stroke.

I moved to the house I live in now two years ago, and met Dr R. Dr R is a wonderful woman, a feminist, the kind of doctor who never hurries you and takes her time and doesn’t fob you off with antibiotics or painkillers or long words. Dr R has admitted I am likely to be on paroxetine for life. It took me a while to become comfortable with this, but I accept it now. The withdrawal is physically painful, and the slight dampening of experiences and medical dependency is a small price to pay for the sake of staying stable around my small child. I don’t advocate antidepressant drugs – in fact I advise strongly against them – but I recognise through my own experience and from the experiences of others that for some of us, they allow us to lead fairly normal lives.

Alongside my depression I suffer from anxiety disorder, and this is more detrimental than the depression, which surprises many people. The general public seems to perceive anxiety disorder as ‘worrying’ or occasional panic attacks but it is so much more than that. My own experience of it includes not only anxiety and panic but also obsessive-compulsive disorder, extreme paranoia, delusions and aural hallucinations. I was recently referred to an organisation which deals with psychosis, as the gateway psychiatrist feared that my previous drug abuse had triggered it (a theory that not all psychiatric professionals agree on). I had a session with the psychologists there, who concluded that it was not psychosis but anxiety that caused my symptoms. I was loathe to become dependent on more drugs, and am now in the beginning stages of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with a wonderful woman who treats me respectfully, with dignity, like a normal person.

Living as a woman with mental health problems is difficult; living as a mother with mental health problems is more difficult still. I remember a few weeks before my son was born, out with his father (now my ex) and his mother (my son’s grandma). She, not being well-endowed in the tact area, expressed her concern about my mental illness, and wondered whether I was worried my son would be taken away once social services caught wind of my inadequacies. I had not even thought of it until then. I laughed it off and assured her that I would be a fit parent, but in the back of my mind I wondered. Did she think I was going to ‘go loopy’ and harm my child? Did she think I would be a bad parent because of my illnesses? After my son was born I was scared to go to my doctor, scared to talk to anyone about my mental problems because I was afraid they would perceive it as a sign of weakness and decide I was unfit to look after my baby.

This of course compounded on top of the anxiety I already suffered, plus the inevitable anxiety of the new mother. My ex, though a sufferer of depression himself, had no sympathy for my feelings and my dependency, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy were the cause of many, many arguments. Then my son had a near-fatal accident at three months; my ex tripped on the stairs and dropped him. He suffered a broken skull and collarbone and massive brain haemorrhaging. We were told he would die, and then after two bouts of brain surgery when it emerged he would live, we were told he would remain blind forever, he would probably never walk or talk, he was lost to us. By some miracle he made a full recovery; the only signs now are the large scar which arcs over his head from the surgery, and hemiparesis in his right arm – stiffness and slight inability of movement. A few months later my ex and I were irreparably damaged and we went our separate ways. Living alone has helped my healing considerably; our relationship was a destructive one and he could not give me the support I so desperately needed.

This has gone in a totally different direction to that which I intended when I first sat down and began typing! It turns out I have a lot to say; about the ways men and women are treated differently by the mental health system, about the ways mentally ill men and women are treated differently by society, about being a mother with mental illness, about the inadequacies of the system (I ‘live’ on Incapacity Benefit, though it’s barely enough to live on), about the history of mental illness and women’s ‘hysteria’, about theories on genetic predisposition towards mental illness. I can’t fit it all in today, but I have at least broken the ice and told you part of ‘my story’, how I came to be in the place I am now, how I came to this blog, what I am all about. I have never written about my mental health issues in detail before. It is cathartic, and it is important that our voices are heard. Now you know me, and I have my topic ideas here to jog my memory, I have a feeling you’ll be hearing a lot more from me. Thank you for giving me your time, and thank you to the creators and other writers of this blog for allowing me to have a voice.