It’s all go around here

I’m seeing a psychologist. I’ve seen him twice to see if his sort of treatment (psychodynamic psychotherapy) would be appropriate for me. I’m on a really low income and this sort of support is only usually available on private, but he is doing some further training for two years and has said that he can offer me support for a nominal fee for two years while he is training, as a mutually beneficial deal. I have no idea what to offer him, he seems to suggest the amount is not important, but i dont want to be rude and offer him the little we can really afford. I had to see a second psychotherapist (she is in charge of the region) to give it the go ahead, she seemed to think this would be good for me, although she considers me something of a flight risk. Not surprising really, i cant fault that reasoning.

I’m seeing him next Friday for our first proper session and from then on I will apparently be seeing him for two one hour long sessions a week, for two years. Thats a helluva thing. On the basis of our first session he says he thinks it unlikely that I am bipolar, although I do share many symptoms with bipolar people. I’m skeptical at the moment but I guess we’ll see.

Actually I’m really scared right now. I’m scared he’ll think I’m a fraud and kick me off my incapacity benefit. I’m scared he’ll think i’m incurable and get me sectioned. I’m scared it will cause problems in the future with my kids - could it be used against me, could they be taken from me? I am not harming them and I love them dearly but I just don’t trust the authorities to give a shit about this stuff, just mark me down as mental and take them away. I’m scared that i’ll be cured and i won’t be me anymore. I’m scared that my mental issues are all there is to me and if they’re cured i will disappear. I’m scared to find out who is underneath it all. I’m scared that there isn’t anyone there anyway, that I’ll turn out to be just a figment of my own imagination, that i’ll cease to exist once everything has been talked away. That i really did die a long time ago and now i’m just energy hanging around trying to convince myself i’m real.

I’m scared that i really am a fraud and that i’m wasting someone elses needed time.

I talked through my life in a nutshell with these two psychologists and they both noted how out of it I am, how matter of fact, how much I refuse to cry or feel. How I laugh about abuse i’ve been put through, because, I say, “in retrospect it’s quite funny really”, to their nothing-expressions. There is concern I will run away if I feel they care about me, about what I’m saying. Because I can’t deal with people expressing sorrow or care without feeling patronised, feeling I should show manly strength in the face of assumed weakness. People say “i’m sorry for what you have been thorugh” and I respond, why, *you* didnt do it, other people have it worse, i’ll survive, i always do. And then the psychologist says to me, why cant you cry for yourself? Why do you hold it back? Why do you stop yourself from feeling? And I think - because it’s all I have, this pseudo-strength, its what keeps me from dying. And then I don’t want to talk about it anymore, it hurts so much, I just want to die.

Wish me luck, i’ll be posting updates as I can. I’m trying really hard to take this seriously because it’s too easy for me to use humour and skepticism to not take it seriously, and I don’t want to waste my time and money.

And on money - any suggestions on what it is appropriate to offer? £5 a session? I can barely afford that - that’s a tenner a week too much. £1 a session? Seems so rude. I have never been one for haggling and this guy has left it totally up to me - i’m not sure if it’s a test, but i see tests everywhere, all the time.

Anyway - money - how much - help??

 

Breaking the Silence

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.

 

Mum’s the word

If I thought that just because I was now an adult, working my way into the wider world, my depression would be treated with more severity, I was bitterly disappointed.

Reading what shatterboxx wrote yesterday, I figured out what it’s taken for my depression to be taken seriously: I had kids.

I’ve been a depressed schoolkid. I’ve been a depressed student. I’ve been a depressed young employed, and unemployed, woman. But a depressed pregnant woman, a depressed mother? Whole different kettle of fish.

It’s not that I’m not profoundly glad that midwives, GPs, psychiatrists, CPNs, health visitors, psychotherapists, art therapists and whatever else have taken my problems seriously. And it’s true that, as the mother of two children under four, my usual “coping strategies” of staying in the house, stopping doing anything much and pretending nothing bad was happening haven’t been available to me. If I hadn’t got support, I would not have survived the last four years.

For all that people say postnatal depression is hard to talk about, hard to diagnose, invisible, it’s respectable in a way my earlier miseries haven’t been. Perhaps because it sounds so clean and curable (after all, you’re not postnatal for ever. Well, except you are, of course). Perhaps because it’s connected to something that’s okay for a woman to do; positively applauded, in theory at least (though, whoa, try being a mother who wants respect or a flexible job). There are professionals, pathways and dedicated services for me now. To the extent that, when my PND specialist psychiatrist booted me when my firstborn reached a year, I seriously considered bumping up the schedule for a second kid. (I didn’t do it, okay? That would have been crazy!)

Anyway, as my secondborn approaches a year, what of the fact that I’m still taking Prozac? What of the fact that I’m not yet cured? Who will want me now? I had an illuminating conversation with my GP when I was pregnant with #2. She’d assured me that most women who experience depression during one pregnancy don’t with another. However, it was now a couple of months later, and I was a howling loon again. “You might want to consider not getting pregnant again,” she said. I’d done the socially acceptable thing; I’d chosen two kids. I even have a girl and a boy! But it was made clear to me by various people then that a third pregnancy wasn’t thought appropriate for the likes of me.

There are a number of things that aren’t appropriate for the likes of me, as a nutso mother. I’ll write about more of them another time. But basically: this is the best mental health care I’ve ever had. It’s contingent, I feel, on playing the game; on having the right number of babies and no more; on not presuming that I know what I’m doing more than the professionals do; on getting better on the right schedule and then pissing off and not bothering people any more. But hey, at least it’s there.

(Disclaimer: I’m seeing a therapist at the moment who is a feminist treasure. I don’t mean you, if you should, by some odd circumstance, read this!)