Therapy

I am hating every single second of therapy.  I leave every appointment feeling awful and spend the next few days miserable.

That is all.

Save One In Four Magazine

Hello, please click on this link and watch the video by Mark, the editor of One in Four magazine.  I’m one of their contributors, and I love them very much.  They’re a magazine written by mentalists like me for mentalists like you (and you and you and bah-bah-bah) about the practical and the political issues facing people living with mental illness.  I know it’s not to everybody’s taste but I’m glad One in Four is out there trying to change peoples’ attitudes towards mental illness.  Please show your support, take out a subscription if you can (on their website individual copies are £2.50) and spread the word!

Three Steps to Save One in Four

Thank you

I privated my last post because, as I explained in it, I did indeed get the influx of, “DIET and EXERCISE and an eating disorder and antipsychotic medication and a mental illness is no excuse for being 6lbs overweight!  Throw up everything, it’s healthier than being fat!11!” emails that I’ve come to expect when I discuss such things, and I really don’t have the energy to field any more of them.  There’s being genuinely helpful and wanting to share something, and then there’s, “Well, it’s as simple as that” *clicks fingers* snideness that I can’t bear and tend to respond to with, “OH FUCK OFF!”, if I respond at all.  (I’m toss at responding to most emails, really).  They come from people who’ve read one entry and who probably hang around smoking in the comments section of fat acceptance blogs.  But thank you to everybody who replied with helpful links and advice.

Off I trot again, back to the land of trying to be productive.  Can’t believe I’ve stayed awake long enough to write this entry.  I’ve been sleepwalking this week, and have the concentration span of a gnat with ADD.  God bless antipsychotics.  I kind of feel like conjuring up some cheap flour-and-water-and-green-food-dye prosthetics and lumbering into the street groaning.  That would entertain me for…oh, seconds, at least.  I wish I was of a more impressive stature.  Who’d be afraid of a 4ft 11″ zombie?  A 4ft 11″ zombie who is without the, “society is collapsing!” qualities of a child.  Who is just a pint sized adult with cartoonishly large breasts.  The humans would just flick me on the forehead and walk on.

Er. Yes!

Edit:  This post is titled, in my permalink, “thank-you-3″.  Which means I have only thanked my readers three times, well, in any significant way.  That’s rubbish.  That’s an annual thank you.

The Bedside Divide/How Things May Have Been Different

To calm my nerves about the fact that the replacement IB50 form has not yet arrived which means I may be money-less on the 4th, here are two pieces of writing about mental illness that I penned for elsewhere, but which were never published.   They were difficult to write, so don’t want them to be in the ether forever. Hope you like them. They are a little melancholy, really. Because they’re not written for this blog they don’t count as a new post, no, not at all, I am not, in fact, a complete flake, it is not I speaking to you, I am in the ether…

PS: In terms of the education thing, my wanting to study English was in part due to my desire to be a writer. Now I’m (trying to) pursue that without a degree. If everything goes tits, I think I will do an Access course and go to university. But who knows. At the moment, I’m focusing on other things.

Anyway! Cheerio, I’ll just leave these here.

The Bedside Divide

It’s now commonly believed that mental illness runs in families. Whether it’s nature or nurture responsible for that particular heirloom is up for debate.   Most people have a “mad” relative, be it the aunt who streaks at midnight or the great-uncle whose very name choruses hasty “ssssh”s across a room.  I’m lucky.  I have two mad relatives.  They’re my parents.

My dad suffered from depression and alcoholism.  The latter killed him in 2006, at the shamefully young age of forty six.  My mum has what I like to call, “Mentalism Unspecified”, a veritable rag bag of psychosis, depression, mania and general oddness. From a very tender age indeed, I thought nothing of finding my mum’s suicide notes stashed in the strangest of places.  Sometimes they were in the boiler, or a top drawer in the kitchen, hiding amongst dried up old pens and crumpled receipts.  Eventually, I learned just to put them back where I found them.   Living in our house, you grew accustomed to certain sounds; my mum hoovering at four in the morning, my dad crying, and the hiss of a can being opened the moment he woke up for work.

I didn’t realize that my parents suffered from mental illness until I reached my teens.  To me, they were just my parents.  Okay, granted that visiting your dad in a mental hospital isn’t really part of the “normal” childhood experience, but it was in our world.  My siblings and I were used to hauling our dad off the floor, soothing our mum’s
worries about rats living in the bath and listening to her somewhat tall (extremely tall, giraffe on stilts kind of tall, Stephen Fry up acrane kind of tall) tales.  We tried to cope- and care- as best we could, while, of course, being subject to all the ordinary, “IT’S NOT FAIR!” door-slamming adolescent rages.

It was undeniably traumatic at times, but I don’t feel hard done by. I love my family and we are all incredibly close and supportive of each other.  In turn, my family had to cope with my own encroaching mental illness. Because they knew, in some sense, what to expect, I was spared the jaw-dropping horror, the hysteria and the confusion often meted out by our loved ones when our marbles are missing.  There was often tension, annoyance and frustration (case in point; my mother bellowing that she was sick of me and my “marnick depression” and my “pills” when I was sixteen, but she was still the same woman who didn’t bat an eyelid when I found myself on the acute ward of the local loony-bin) but crucially, after a little while, there was acceptance and support.  I have been on both sides of the electrified security fence.  If I printed up business cards, the words, “TWENTY FOUR YEARS EXPERIENCE” would be garishly embossed above a photo of me giving two thumbs up.

So you think I’d be good at it.  You think I’d know what to say and what do when someone other than myself is in a mental health crisis. After all, I’d done it before.

Recently, a friend of mine took an overdose, which landed them in hospital.  In 2008, I spent a similarly charming afternoon vomiting and having fits, before rather lazily passing out on my living room floor.  I was discovered a few hours later and given the VIP nee-naw treatment.  I endured a barely-remembered evening getting acquaintedwith a little cardboard bowl that would have made a fabulous hat had I not insisted on throwing up into it every fifteen seconds.  My then-boyfriend stroked my hair, tried to make me laugh, and friends filtered in and out, with me too adrift to truly appreciate their presence, or their pain.

One year later, and there I was, the numb and dumb one by a hospital bed for the very first time my adult life. I wanted to be there for myfriend, figuring that I’d be good at this.  I’ve been there.  I’d beenthe one with the vomit-soaked sheets and I know what helped me.  I’d say the right, insightful things.   Be witty and wry, but sympathetic. Show him that I cared, and, importantly, understood.  And, given my inappropriate behaviour at times, maybe cheer him up with a spot of daring Vaudeville tap-dancing.

But he looked so small, so shockingly childlike, fists folded like a dead bird’s claws, eyelashes slick with tears, with no heed to the runny nose and horrorshow hair.  He drifted in and out of consciousness, waking only to spasm and sicken, then would descend once more into the sarcophagus of starched white linen.   I had dismissed my own trip to the emergency ward as shenanigans, because that was me, and that was normal for me.  Although that was my first time in hospital for a suicide attempt (the rest were just retching days off school, bleeding wrists tucked into pockets, ligature marks hidden by high necked jumpers, private, banal), I didn’t die, it wasn’t that bad, and it can’t have been that traumatic for those around me.

But stood there, awkwardly pawing at my friend, realizing I had absolutely nothing useful to say, with my heart twisting in my chest, I thought, “This is not right, and nor should it be”.   Just because so many people- my friend, my parents, myself- experience these things, doesn’t mean that it should be what we accept for them, or dismiss, or even think we can fully relate to because we’ve “been there”. Because when we’ve been there, we probably felt we were there alone.  But in those moments, when we don’t know what to do or say, we
should remember that they are our parents, our family, our friends.

In some ways, I find that being the one in the bed is sometimes easier than being the one by the bedside.

How Diagnosis Changes Everything

When I was a teenager, my best friend lived in Dublin.  Every so often, I’d take the two hour journey from my home town of Belfast and spend a few days with him.  I loved wandering through the wide, windswept streets, secretly reveling in the tin whistle siren songs to the tourists trickling by.  But my favourite place in Dublin was Trinity College.  All I wanted was to study English there.  I imagined myself as a louche Donleavy-esque character, burrowed amidst fusty, loved tomes in an expansive library, happily ensconced in the dual worlds of academia and alcohol.  I would stand outside and run my hands across its historic stones, and wish.  I even printed out a photo of it and blu-tacked it to my bedroom wall. And as ambitious as it was, everybody had faith in me.  I was one of those effortlessly brilliant and ambitious students who’d never got a B in her life.

Instead, I became very unwell.  I missed six months of school, scraped a few GCSEs and was then gently dropped from my A-level courses with the humiliating declaration that my “mental health was more important than my education”.  Then, on an impulsive whim I ran away to London.  Seven years later, I’m still here, still ill and have, of yet, been unable to reattempt education.

Throughout my teenage years, it was assumed, despite the fact I’d suffered severe bouts of mania, depression and psychosis since the age of twelve, that I was just an attention seeking adolescent.  Anybody with a “teen” in their age isn’t ill.  They can’t be ill.   At sixteen, there was some vague hand-gesturing regarding a, “mood disorder”.   I was prescribed a medication that affected my balance so severely that I spent a good few months living on the hall carpet after yet another tumble down the stairs. I stopped taking it and there were no follow up appointments.  Even as I dropped out of school, nobody took my alleged illness seriously, and eventually, that included me.  For the next four years, I was too afraid to see a doctor, convinced that I was wasting their time and that they would dismiss me.  During those years, I deteriorated.  I developed the difficult-to-treat rapid-cycling (in which a person has four or more episodes of illness a year) and it caused untold problems in my relationships.  I lost countless jobs, I had to perform the famous, “moonlight flit” due to the fact I couldn’t pay my rent, I self harmed severely and I began to drink heavily.  At the age of twenty- psychotic, jobless and bleeding from the throat- I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.  It was only then that I began to receive help for my mental problems.  By then, it had been eight years since I became unwell.

What happened to me is not unusual.  There is, on average, an eight year delay in diagnosing bipolar disorder, in which time the damage in a person’s life may have already been done.   It can also be misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder or depression, so the person may not be receiving the right treatment.  In fact, using antidepressants to treat bipolar disorder misdiagnosed as depression can be downright dangerous, triggering mania in some patients.

Mental illness is often not diagnosed until a crisis point has been reached.  It can be for various reasons.  A person can lose insight into their behaviour and refuse to see a doctor, or, in the case of bipolar, they may experience hypomania which can cause someone to feel not only good, but great.   Or, like me, they can think that they’re just flushing NHS hours down the toilet by bothering a doctor.  Or, as revealed in a recent survey of psychiatrists, doctors are simply not recognising the symptoms of mental illness.  And obviously, they’re somewhat easier to recognise when you’re bad enough to be hospitalised.

Finally getting a diagnosis can be a relief.  When I finally received the less-vague diagnosis of bipolar disorder, once I’d gone through the prerequisite period of, “You’re wrong, I’m fine”, I was thankful, in a way, to knew that something ailed me, and I wasn’t just, er, going mad. It explained a lot.  But it was also a harrowing experience.  I had kind of hoped that the doctors of yore were right and I was going through a teenage “phase”.  To be told, with all the characteristic tactlessness that the psychiatric profession is renowned for, that it was likely I’d have to live with this for the rest of my life (ah, the “rest of your life”- a particularly frightening prospect for the barely-lived in twenty year old) rendered me as flat and amorphous as a dinghy with the air let out.  That this too would not, in fact, pass. Yes, it had messed up my life.  But it it had a hand in my personality, my behaviour.  Some people liked me the way I was.  And I wasn’t sure who that person was anymore.  If they would even exist anymore.

I had an image of my future.  I wanted to be carefree until I was in my early nineties.  An elegant writer, well-studied, well-traveled.  Quaffer of wine, that kind of thing.  Taking medication that would change who I thought I was, living a life relatively free of stress, avoiding alcohol, my main confidant being my social worker and being forever saddled with the stigma of mental illness hadn’t figured into it.  Simple things I previously believed would be joyful experiences- such as having a child- were suddenly terrifying.  I’d have to take medication, and even then, only certain medications because others could harm the child.  There would be the grave possibility that I would experience post-natal psychosis, since I am prone to psychosis.  And there is increasing evidence that some mental illnesses are hereditary. So great was my worry that it contributed to my decision to have termination earlier this year.  There were other factors, but it was a position I never imagined I’d find myself in, and sobering reminder of the realities of living with a mental illness.  I’ll never fully adjust to it.  And forgetting it comes at a high price- in my case, when I stop taking medication, I start to become ill.  I need to be aware to be well. Ah, fantastic.  All the pep-talking statements that mental illness only changes your life as much as you let it isn’t true.  You cannot be well by wishing alone.

In a way, you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.  Not being diagnosed leads to not being treated, and being diagnosed leads to a whole world of change.  Whereas I’m glad I didn’t have, “MENTALIST” stamped across my head when I was fifteen, I do sometimes lament what I lost. I don’t regret where my life has taken me.  But I’m sad that I never made it to Trinity.  Things are different now

Cheerio

Edit: Deleted recent post, got more time, was panicking unduly.  Thank you for advice!  Also come clarifying below.

(Edit, wow, this sounds dramatic.  Sorry, just tired!)

I’m buggering off for a while!

I always tell you because the spate of, “Have you killed yourself?” emails are difficult to respond to, though understandable, since when mental health bloggers don’t update, I think the same thing, they’ve Gone Done It.  It scares me, and I periodically check back the abandoned blogs, and my heart sinks when they remain abandoned.

I have had the need to be writing a book, but not the inclination due to exhausting depression and some personal problems I haven’t wanted to discuss here. (Though mostly resolved now, hooray).  I have yet to update my personal website, either. Now I NEED to need, I can’t lie adrift anymore on the downy pillow of self-indulgence any more,  I have to stop becoming distracted by the lure of right-now communication, emails, Facebooks (which is also going for a while), the beacon in the night, all shiny, when someone feels lonely or bored or just not wanting to do much.  It’s been depressing me even more how incapable I’ve been feeling lately, how little I’ve washed, how often I haven’t bothered to get dressed, how paralysed I’ve felt, so I need to just take a bow to the, “CHIN UP!” brigade and KICK MYSELF UP THE ARSE.

So I’m taking my leave from blogging for a while, as I often feel as if I have left an old friend shivering in the cold when I don’t write here, because it’s become rather important to me to do so.  You’ll be missing such wonderful things as me moaning about my therapy appointments, but it’s been so dull, and often painful, that I’ve barely mentioned them anyway.   I am throwing a warm blanket, I will be back, but for now, I must apply myself, shake off my sadness and to carry on attempting to boil my life into about eighty thousand words, in the hope that I can make some sort of sense out of it for myself, and to make some sort of sense out of the seemingly senseless world of what-is-called-to-some madness for others to try and understand.  It is worth it, I think, I hope.  If not, at least I tried, eh?  Very frightening, very very, but, hey ho.  Should also clarify that I don’t have a publishing deal or anything like that.  I am just trying to write something, that’s as far as I am, but, y’know.

I’ll be still reading comments and emails but slow to reply (I’m terrible at the best of times due to volume and shoddy memory), but do go ahead, as the ones recently on the past two posts have been ace.

Cheerio, and take care you lovely people. x

In Defence of the Medical Model

Zarathustra from Mental Nurse wrote a very good blog entry on the Mind website called, “Is the Medical Model Really So Evil?”

http://www.mind.org.uk/blog/2943_is_the_medical_model_really_so_evil

Before I became a mental health nurse, I spent a few years as an over-educated, unemployable humanities graduate – hey, I’m not knocking that; being an over-educated, unemployable humanities graduate can be a lot of fun.

I also had quite firm views on psychiatry. I was a huge fan of RD Laing, the radical 60s psychiatrist. I’d tell anyone who would listen that psychiatric diagnoses are a subjective construct, that drugs aren’t the answer, and that the medical model of mental illness is irredeemably reductionist (yes, I was the kind of humanities graduate for whom “reductionist” is the ultimate word of abuse).

I broadly agree with him- go have a read, and also, a warning: some of the comments will make you want to headbutt the screen.

The Underclass

Look!  It’s the face of the underclass!

Oh wait, no, I meant this:

*Edit: for the purposes of this post, I’m going by what is portrayed by the media as an underclass, and not getting into the sociological ins-and-outs of it, since the former has more resonance with the public than the latter.

The above links to another sneering, dehumanising tale from the Daily Mail about a woman who has had her fourteen children taken away from her by social services.  She is a, “baby making machine”, with her life being, “rich material for a satire about the tragedy of the British underclass”.

It’s quite likely that she is, in fact, an unfit mother.  But she’s also a human being, not that you’d guess from reading that article, which also discusses how some of her children died like it’s just a little thing.  It’s deliberately one-sided, portraying her as an almost emotionless leech.  It’s skirted over that she has learning difficulties.  Don’t want to get in the way of a good story, eh?

The Daily Mail like to bang on about, “the underclass” a lot.  They are this century’s British, “life unworthy of life”  A quick glance over the spiteful comments from the Not so Great British Public confirm that at least a section of society wish “the underclass” could be sterilised, and, “she claims for hip and back problems yet can have fourteen kids!”  Yeah, she’s had FOURTEEN KIDS.  Why do you think she has hip and back problems?

You’ve seen the underclass.  They wear tracksuits.  They live in council houses.  They have kids.  They claim benefit.  They are scroungers, and at the bottom of society.    More liberal types like to think that this dismissive, scornful derision poured upon, “the underclass” is limited to hateful rags like the Daily Mail.  It isn’t.  Everybody who isn’t part of it views the people who supposedly are as beneath, be it with pity or with hatred.  The Daily Mail like to castigate them, the Guardian like to gather a few people in an interior-designed room to decide what’s best for them.  They are a mass, a writhing sea of featureless faces, all older than their time, in the black pits of economic deprivation.  They all have the same story, they all have the same future.   Born, beaten, breeding, dead. They are-en masse- stupid, ill, baby machines, useless and everywhere.  There to make the rest of society pat themselves on the back for how undeviant and worthwhile they are.  Middle class housewives who stay at home while their husbands earn are heroes, working class mothers who stay at home and claim benefits are scum.   You are hard working therefore worthy of life!  Make them pick up dirt in the street!  Reinforce that social model! DO IT!

When I read stories of people living in council houses smoking and claiming benefits I’m actively jealous because they have something I have never had and desired for most of my life; a stable home.  I’m on the council housing list and know I’m going to stay there for the next decade.  I can honestly see the appeal of having a baby and getting a council house because having a home is an absurd privilege, when it should be a right.

Tales of, “the underclass” enrage me.  Because I am the underclass.

Time and time again, I’ve been proffered the courtesy, “but”. It goes like this:

“I hate benefit scroungers”.

“Yeah, I’m on benefits, mate”.

“Oh, but you’re different.  Your problems are genuine.  You deserve your benefits”.

Why?  Why do I deserve the small amount of to live on that benefits are?  Doesn’t everybody deserve that?  Doesn’t everybody in the fucking world deserve to have enough money with which to buy food and clothing?  Why are my problems more real than Theresa’s up there?  Because I budget my benefits so that I can afford an internet connection?  Because I articulate them?  Is it because I have an education?

Except I don’t.  Consider me as the subject of that article-

“Seaneen left school with seven GCSEs…”

And if we want to go even further,

Seaneen was born on a rough council estate in Republican West Belfast, the third of five children.  She had a traumatic childhood lived in poverty.  Her mother suffered from mental illness and physical ill-health that meant she claimed benefits.  Her father worked as a low-paid laboratory technician before being forced into early retirement by his alcoholism.  He died at the age of forty seven from alcoholic liver failure.

Do you see what I’m getting at?  On paper I’m not out of place.  My mum will be on benefits forever.  My dad was an Irish alcoholic, the same kind despised and lampooned via the mainstream media.  He was not a middle-class whiskey drinker.  He was the man you’d pass on the street drinking White Lightning.   Social services had to step in a few times and tell my mum to send us to school.  Our house in Ardkeen was in the local paper when we moved out because the squalor was so bad.  There were loads of photos of women pointing at bits of filth on the wall.   I am not one of those crazy kids who lives in London on benefits while their rich parents sneak a few hundred into their bank accounts every month.  If I fall, I have no safety net other than my social worker being able to step in and help me.

It cuts two ways, because people think they’re doing me a favour by, “but”ting me.  That I’m not one of those nasty little poor people.  I dress nicely (in my second hand clothes), I dye my hair funny colours, I know people who are in bands and shit. Newsflash: I AM.  Every bit as much as Theresa up there.   As are a lot of the wonderful people I know who live on benefits and have done, and will probably always do, because they are too unwell to work.

I have been, at various times in my life, the crazy person who smells that you’d cross the street to avoid.  I am a mentally ill (oh, but I have bipolar disorder so I must be CLEVER and MIDDLE CLASS, right?)  person on benefits.  Like many of the, “underclass”.  It’s me too, it isn’t just people like Theresa.  You can’t pour vitriol over a whole section of society while quietly trying to exclude me from it on the spurious grounds that I’m quite clever, or something.  That I don’t wear tracksuits so I’m different than they are.  The difference with me is that I don’t live on a ghettoised council estate.  But fuck, I probably would given the opportunity.  I’m terrified of getting ill sometime in the future and losing my home.  But I still can’t afford my heating bills and I’m one severe episode of illness away from possibly being fucked for life.  I could be the “passive poor”, I could be, “the traumatised” and on paper, I would be. I function via numbing medication, I accepted a trade-off in my life. And if I’d had my baby, it might have been taken away from me, and I was aware of that.

But you look closer, or at least, you should.  My messed up dad nicked books from school for us to read, paper for us to write on, pens for us to write with.  Because of him, I went to the Good School, like my sisters.  Our horrible houses were so ill-kempt because my dad would often lose his rag and kick a door and because my mum was often too depressed to clean and we were lazy shits.  You read this blog and know me somewhat and I don’t think you’d ever associate me with those tracksuited haggard faces photographed even though I’m likely from a similar background and superficially in a similar situation.  I could be an exception.  And even if I was born, didn’t educate myself, enjoy books etc, had lots of kids and lived in a council flat, so what?   There are reasons why the “underclass” exists, why poverty exists, there are reasons for violence, there are reasons for “ignorance” and low intelligence (things ascribed to, “the underclass”) and blaming the individual in these little pin up pieces to remind everybody that some people don’t deserve to live completely ignores the wider problems in society that don’t start at the bottom, they start at the top.  They haven’t failed society; society has failed them.

The differences people try to point out with me are that I’m intelligent- but how do you know the clichéd image of the “underclass” are not?  A lack of ambition, or a lack of culture, doesn’t mean someone isn’t intelligence.  Intelligence isn’t just education, it is much broader than that.  It isn’t just common sense, too.  Even if they aren’t intelligent, then…so?  People are different.  Being middle class or upper class doesn’t make you intelligent, it just likely gives you access to more educational opportunities (and don’t get me started on nepotism…)

Sometimes the middle class aspirations of be born, get a great job, have a nice house, toil, retire, die, seem every bit as ridiculous to me as the aimless ones so often ascribed to this peasant underclass.  The difference is perceived as “giving back to society”.  Every person gives back to society by their existence.  I hate this idea of social burdens.  It’s repugnant and extremely dangerous and it’s the one that lumps the, “underclass” into one homogeneous hopeless mass.

You might also be thinking, “How can you be part of some sort of underclass when you write a blog people read, won an award for play, have people interested in your writing?”  Again, people might separate me via the route of ambition, in that I have some.  They might separate me via intelligence, while forgetting I do not have much of an education, so “something” must make me “better” than your average council estate mother (and it’s always the women, notice, who are most vilified).  They separate me via my cultural interests, which buys into the repellent idea of, “high” and “low” culture.   But the blog is a blog, the interest in my writing may help me in the future but it doesn’t make a difference to my every day life in which I have intense difficulty actually writing due to my stupid fucking brain, in which I can afford very little, sit in the cold and claim Housing Benefit so I have somewhere to live.  It doesn’t negate my background, and it doesn’t change how it would look if you put all the cold facts of my life on paper, right now, at this moment in time.  Right now, at this moment in time, I look like a member of the underclass. I don’t particularly engage with the rest of society, either.   In the future, who knows, I might some wildly successful writer whom the Observer asks to pen a weekly column about my three golden-faced, honey haired children and the problems of fitting them all into my hybrid car and getting them off to their public school,  or maybe I’ll become a social worker and put my years of experience as a mental patient to good use, but that’s not the case at the moment.

I’m not playing Larkin Trumps (“they fuck you up, your mum and dad, but mine fucked me up more than yours”), or trying to either romanticise or vilify my background.  Nor am I indulging in self pity because I don’t feel that way, likewise, I’m not comparing myself to those who are in desperate situations (and many are, but they’re just “scroungers”).  Nor am I an asylum seeker, who I don’t know how they live in this country without feeling assaulted.  I’m pointing out that on paper means nothing, and that I don’t deserve any more or less respect than the “tragic” examples of the underclass plastered all over the media whose lives, desires and dreams we know nothing more about than is told by the journalist.  The lack of humanity people can feel stuns me.  To see a group of fellow human beings as a problem rather than as afflicted by problems.

Now I’m going to empty my ashtray in case a Daily Mail journalist comes round.

Vanity

I think I would be so much happier if I never had to see myself in a mirror, a pond, the back of a spoon, the whites of someone’s eyes, ever again.  I spend one half of my life dodging mirrors (those who know me are kind, and if they meet me somewhere for a cup of tea they always choose the seats that aren’t near or facing mirrors) and the other half using the smallest, most smudged, sometimes outright broken ones to apply the ranks of make up that probably make me look worse anyway.  Seeing my face a bit at a time is the most I can handle.  In the toilets of the place I was at on Saturday, I remembered I had been there before, and driven my fist though their mirror in rage, then ran out quickly, embarrassed, knuckle ragged.

Then there’s the calorie counting, the vomiting, the worry and vigilance that makes me a complete bore, that seeks reassurance even though it makes no difference, that wears the brightest tights I can find while shrinking in acute terror when somebody, anybody, looks at me for more than the merest slip of a second because they might actually not be blinded by the shiny colours, they might actually look at my body or my face instead. That means I can’t have a meal with someone without reading the whole way through it, and after it, in an attempt to distract myself enough to eat, to distract myself for the half an hour after eating that would render any trips to the toilet useless.  Such wonderful company I am.

I can handle photos if I’ve taken them, one out of a hundred might be okay, I can handle them because they could be of another person.

I am exhausted by being this way.  I want to not care.  Even if I never look into a mirror and think, “Hey, I look good”, I’d like to at least look into one without wanting to cry.  And sometimes I do think that body dysmorphic disorder is just a fancy term for tiresome vanity.  And that I’m like any other woman except that I talk about it slightly more.  I think I’ve met maybe two women in my life who don’t hate a part of their body.

Comments off because I’m not fishing for compliments or reassurance, just expressing my tiredness.

I had a normal day

Happy very very very late on February 13th, as I haven’t been to bed yet.  Valentine’s Day, pah etc, but still, feckyis, I like it.  For those who also like it, or those who don’t, have a nice day whether you care or not.

Today I did things that Normal People do.  Leaving the house.  Engaging with other humanoids. Tagging along at a strange, yet charming, hippy flashmob called, “Reclaim Love” in town.  They made us stand in a circle and chant, “May all the beings in all the worlds be happy and at peace”, except Robert misheard, “beings” as, “beans”.  I was terrified they were going to start darting around with cups of “punch” while reassuring us that all it contained was fruit and sugar and not arsenic or bromine.   I am culturally far removed from hippydom.  Any hippy events I’ve recklessly stumbled into have always had the vague whiff of cult to me, as well as weed.  But I’m secretly a little bit of a hippy at heart, if you consider my lax personal hygiene and enjoyment of watching children play to be hippyish.

Reading that back, it sounds like I’m actually a paedophile at heart.  Oh dear.

I did get into the spirit a little, as did Robert.  To the uninitiated, Robert comes across as a sociology lecturer that you just know is wearing french knickers under his suit.  To the more initiated, he’s a bit of a sop, too, and utterly romantic and believing in Love (as he writes it).  So it was nice to be there with him.

Later, I went to see the New Royal Family’s last gig (they are a band.  To explain.  Even though it’s self explanatory).  It was a five minute walk from my house so I could bolt home and bury my face in cat fur if it was too much.  I was a bit anxious about the whole affair for the obvious reasons- I’ve become so horribly socially nervous that the thought of it gives me a panic attack, and the actuality of it- when I force myself to socialise- also gives me panic attacks and I can’t focus on what I’m saying because I’m too busy thinking the other person is mentally noting how much of a prick I am.  (Yes, it has become so troublesome and life-wrecking that I am now in therapy for this.  Oh larks.  So proud.  I think some of you may have the false impression that I am some sort of wildly popular social butterfly.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In the past year, my social ARGHness has been so bad that I’ve become almost reclusive.  It’s cheap at least).   But I only panicked once and dealt with it by (wishing I hadn’t) mentioning it to the person I was talking to, then the person I stumbled into (who, fortuitously, was Rob, who has four years experience of my panicking so doesn’t look at me oddly) when I went outside to calm down.  And I had a nice time.  Nothing awful happened.  Only put my foot in it about…ooh, I don’t know, twelve times, but that’s a fairly modest number for me.   I sang a bit, got a rose and smoked a lot outside.  It was good.  I don’t want to use people I know or just going to a pub as some sort of therapeutic exercise but it made me feel better being out and not immediately running home.

So yes, such days are so rare that I thought it’s worth reporting.  You may be thinking that I have wasted 638 words of internet.  I’ve also been a bit more productive in the past two days- the fact that I managed to even get dressed makes me want to fashion a celebratory badge and pin it to my forehead.

For people who like that sort of thing, here’s some photos I took of Reclaim Love (I won’t post the NRF photos because they’ll be untagged to feck, I know it), posted on Facebook, therefore compressed to fuckery and as detailed as a smudge in a blur factory.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?id=555060779&pid=3978152#!/photo.php?pid=3978133&id=555060779

Fancy.  It is too late and I am too tired to upload them to somewhere less shite.

Have a lovely day/week.

“Open Up” conference from the perspective of the sociologically inclined non-mentalist

EDIT:  I bloody well missed it!  Happy (er?!) three year birthday to my blog! That’s ancient in blog terms.  Hark, I hear a man approaching with a shotgun… RUN! RUN! RUN AND GRAB ALL THE CAKE YOU CAN CARRY!

EDIT EDIT:  I found the speech I made as part of the panel in my emails, but I deviated wildly from it.  Anyway, it’s at the end of this post after the cut.

I have my own extremely late thoughts on the Open Up conference, which was about how to communicate mental health issues through the media, but due to aforementioned feeling depressed thus tired, I haven’t finished the post. In short, I enjoyed it, it was interesting, it highlighted a glaring division in the mental health “community” (the problem of language- some people take massive exception to “illness” and to words like, “mental”, some are more in keeping with the medical model who want mental illness to be more normalised.  The issue of identity- if there is no consensus, we’ll just argue amongst ourselves, and what then?) and I hope to be hanging around at other such events.  As I was hanging around I met a few of my readers, so hello out there!

I found speaking nervewracking and I will post about it properly when I’m feeling a bit better (which I hope comes soon- I feel slightly better today) as it deserves some proper articulation.  I was glad to see that a lot of people made an effort to be there, coming from far afield. I still think Alastair Campbell is a tiresome, self promoting cockend. Do quote me on that.  There is no thread of discourse so interesting that he cannot turn it back onto himself somehow.  He even had a book signing at the break.  I admire Campbell’s openness about his problems, but I wish he was more inclusive in his promotion.

I think Mark from One in Four is a star.  Here was his opening speech:

Hello, I’m the editor of One in Four magazine.  I’m a professional.  I’m also a person with mental health difficulties.

There isn’t a division between people with mental health difficulties and professionals, be it professionals in politics, in the professions, in the media or in any sector.  You’d be surprised at the amount of charity, public sector and private sector professionals that we run into who have a mental health difficulty. It’s like a secret club, spread across workplaces throughout the country.  Some of the people you’ll hear from and meet today are members of this club.  I know I am.

This afternoon is about beginning to find new ways of talking about mental health difficulty.  More than ever, we need to be cleverer and more effective in getting across useful, meaningful and positive ideas about mental health difficulty.

Like a growing number of exciting and groundbreaking projects like Star Wards, Patient Opinion and Cool Tan Arts, for us in producing One in Four it’s about meeting people halfway and collapsing old divisions between those providing services to people experiencing mental health difficulties and those experiencing them.

One in Four is a grassroots project, similar to all of the other excellent and innovative projects created and run by people with mental health difficulties that are supported by Open Up, the part of Time to Change that incubates and supports grassroots projects.  But we’re also professionals.  The old divisions no longer apply.  We produce a magazine that is written by people with mental health difficulties from the point of view of what people need to know, not the point of view of what needs to be told to them.  We all face the challenge of not only making people aware of what mental health difficulty is, but also what it means.

It’s more important than ever that we get things right.  Just one little slip, one badly judged idea, one badly informed person and an individual can be made to feel worthless, forgotten, stigmatized or without hope.  People focus on information, but information is meaningless unless people know how to understand it and how to make use of it.

We all need to find new ways of moving people’s ideas of mental health difficulty on, of shaking up old understandings and putting in place new, positive ideas.  We need to finally remove the stigma of mental health difficulty and help everyone to see that mental health difficulty isn’t a list of symptoms and treatments, but a series of challenges that can be overcome and lived through.

The reality is that there is no ‘us and them’ when it comes to mental health difficulty. Any group will contain people with experience of mental health difficulty, regardless of how much it might protest that it does not.

It’s only through working together that we will be able to change attitudes, be they the attitudes of those that don’t experience mental health difficulty or those that do.  There is so much information available, and so many competing ideas that we must find ways of helping and supporting people that start from the point of view ‘what do people want to know?’  The only way we can do this is to shake off the idea that simply putting information out there in ever-increasing volumes is the answer, and meet people halfway by working with them to find out the best ways of answering their questions and meeting their needs.

It’s about all of us working together.  It’s about getting beyond the idea of thinking of people with mental health difficulties a separate group in society. It’s about working together, whether it’s with public sector organisations, the voluntary sector, the media or just in everyday life. People with mental health difficulties need to be at the heart of the production of messages about mental health difficulty.

It’s awful to be stereotyped by people who should know better.  It’s time for a new way of dealing with mental health in the media. At least one in four people will experience a mental health difficulty.  That means a quarter of the audience for any television programme; any radio show, any newspaper or any other public material will have experienced mental health difficulties in their lives, or will know someone who has.

If one in four of us experience mental heath difficulties, no one who produces materials for public consumption should ever use the excuse that they couldn’t find anyone to talk to about the issues or the best way to discuss them.  There’s thousands and thousands of us out there, just waiting to be asked what we think, what we’ve experienced or how something affects us.  Some of us run companies.  Other provide services.  Others are more than happy to give our time for free if we know it will make a difference.

We need to get beyond a culture of just complaining. We need to get beyond saying ‘oh dear’ or working ourselves into a moral lather. People with mental health difficulties need to work with, and in, organisations to make sure they get it right and producers and organisations need to accept that and make it possible.

We hope that this afternoon will mark the birth of a number of new ideas, schemes, ways of working and plans for doing just that.

Thanks.

So, it might interest you then to read the thoughts of my glamourous assistant Robert, who is- as is quite apparent from his manner of speaking- a sociology student.

He also blogs over at: Vaughan Vanquishes Vaughan (his “nice” blog- warning, CONTAINS ARSE), Sporting Deviance (his sociological sporting blog) and The Trap Box (the “nasty” blog.  Warning: contains visceral mentions of teeth).

He is also a Nice Man.

Hello. I am not Seaneen. I am, however, a Sociology student. And whilst I attended the Open Up conference solely in the capacity of giving Seaneen moral support for her speech, I found myself studying it, in academic terms.

I am particularly interested in how people organize and express themselves as groups, how they try to exert power & influence and the smorgasbord of things they believe in. All collective action is interesting in the same way, be it women’s lib, football hooliganism or a pop.culture scene. They exist and act in the domain of culture, lifestyle and symbols, not the old-fashioned rigidities of traditional politics. Changing language can be as powerful as changing laws, if not more so. It’s sometimes called postmodern politics. I would call it, simply; the way things currently are. It occurred to me that the Open Up conference was an event for one (or more) such group(s).

This was an event held largely by and for *enters lexiconographic minefield* mentalists/people with mental health problems/service users etc. I myself, if I may just jump into another minefield, am… normal/healthy/able/non-service user. An “unmentalist” perhaps.

I was very aware of my difference. You don’t notice not being in “a secret club” (as Mark Brown put it) until you’re there amongst them.A stowaway. Amidst this company I was The Other. Not in an extreme or difficult manner, in fact I quite enjoyed it for its strangeness & irony, and must emphasize the incredible friendliness of everyone I met. This was the, ahem, polar opposite to, say, being a Manchester United fan sat amongst the Liverpool hardcores.

But the sense of difference was tangible inside me, profound enough for it to be noteworthy. It was a polite Us & Them. The “normal” me as the minority Them surrounded by a majority Us. The spatiotemporality of my supposed normality was exposed. For a brief fascinating moment I actually had an insight into what it is that might make someone yearn for diagnosis/labelling – the precise kind of thing that for good reason so enraged Seaneen last week: http://thesecretlifeofamanicdepressive.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/bipolar-disorder-can-suck-it-suck-it-hard/

In fact, as a warning, I should like to predict that as this self-organizing “mental rights” movement(s) continue, as they win their discursive culture-battles, be prepared for more and more wannabes. Having something to believe in, something to challenge, something to change is an intoxicating feeling. People will aspire to the bandwagon as it gathers more pace. Prepare yourselves for some annoying buggers! But take it as a sign of success, perhaps, albeit one of the least desirable trappings.

Superstar speaker and self-promoter galore Alastair Campbell was, as one may expect from a former PM’s spin doctor, absolutely explicit in this being a cultural battleplanning meeting, emphasising the all-importance of (mass) media… He made reference to the fact comparable movements such as gay rights and black civil rights were “five or ten years” ahead (I would sy they’re further than that). “Have your arguments ready!” he demanded. In sociological terms, he was urging the listening audience – the group – to push their discourse to the vibrant globalised centres of knowledge/power.

There is serious business afoot, things are in motion. And this added to my sense of separation. Which is to be expected. But perhaps wasn’t quite the intended point…

For while I felt separate, it wasn’t because I found myself in a dynamically bizarre heterodox environment. It wasn’t. It was very normal. Normative. Homodox. A business conference in a business conference setting. Suits. Chit-chat. Pressing of the flesh. Mingling. They, those crazyfolk, were more normal than me in the presented aesthetics of the event. And this is a good idea. A good tactic. I’m sure. The general message was: mental illness is normal, even mundane, and should not be allowed to get in the way of anyone’s life, career, social life etc. Which is a message I support…

However. I have a right troublemaker who lives in my gut. Mr. Visceral. He was alarmed. He claimed that whilst challenging the dominant discourses about the mentally ill being dribbling axe murderes is no doubt useful & interesting, there is another discursive action going on. A deeper, more profound one. The active conformity to normality… the drab bureaucracy of the businesslike setting… the bending over backwards to accommodate an elite figure like Campbell…

Do we (as in all human beings, and gutpeople like Mr. Visceral) really want to carry on the social order as it currently is? This is something I, er, I mean, Mr. Visceral would ask of every group, every movement. From football fans to feminists… Motorway protesters to the mentally interesting…. Is the rest of the world worth joining as it currently is?

Rather wise words, there.

Here is what I said, roughly.  I deviated massively from this.  It’s long, so behind a cut it goes.

The Bennos

The arrival of housing benefit today was ridiculously early- at least for drugged up little me- and my slurring self, a slumped S shape on the carpet, prompted them to wonder if I had been drinking.  Dignity, farewell.

It went fine though, and they’re going to continue my benefits as is.  I found it horrible to show them my woeful bank account, especially as I only have online statements and was too buggered to properly operate a computer.  I just kept pressing, “N” over and over again to increasing confusion as to why it wasn’t working.

I was in such a foul mood, and so tired, that when a man came to read the electric meter I shouted,”FUCK OFF!” from my doorway, which I feel terrible about, and hope he didn’t hear.

The whole experience acutely reminded me why I wish I could work full time and not be on benefits.  It oftens feels like the rug’s about to pulled out from beneath me, how unstable everything actually is, how in service and duty I am to, “the taxpayer”.  I hate it.

I feel somewhat less stressed out now, though I do need to sort out my sleep as my mood and energy has been utterly toss for the past fortnight leading me to getting next to nothing done due to an overwhelming sensation of exhaustion.  Bollocks.  I did at least have a lovely day with Robert animatedly chatting to me while I lay in bed (the drugged-feeling lasted for hours and hours upon waking, and I kept losing my balance) and then when it lifted a little, he took me out to dinner.  He is gracious in not minding my reading when I eat, no matter where I am, because it takes my mind off the fact that I’m eating.  I hope I compensate with the completely out of context conversations I start because of what I’m reading.

I have a few things to post which I’ll do when I get the energy, in the meantime, thank you for your questions.

Ask me questions

I may regret this but ask me anything anonymously here:

http://www.formspring.me/brainopera

Anything you like, insulting, curious, advice,  whatever.  I’ll answer you.

I still feel like toss, I’m sorry.  Though I am eating nice biscuits.

I still feel like shit

And have that bodily feeling that encompasses both emptiness and a sludgy heaviness.  My thoughts are at about two per minute, and both consist of how shit I am.

I think the worst thing for me when it comes to feel depressed is that it shocks me into understanding how conditional everything is.  I’m sitting here, with Robert, and feeling cold with terror that I’ll become really depressed, he won’t be able to take it and he’ll leave me, or if not, and almost worst, be dragged into my pit.  Whereas I don’t think I ruined Rob’s life or anything, in the four years of our relationship, I know how difficult he found it at times to reach me, how helpless he felt, and how much my moods limited our lives together, even so far as for us to rarely discuss the future because he simply didn’t think I’d be there to experience it.  And now I’m in a new relationship, I’m petrified of putting someone else in that position.  Of being, let’s face it, a burden.

I hope I start to feel better.   I want to open up a window and scream, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?” despite the fact that I know.

Open Up Conference

Hiya, I have yet to write about the Open Up conference.  This is because I seem to be lapsing into a bit of pesky depression and have not had the energy to write, or to do much else.  I’ve had a bit of a difficult week.  It’s not helped by a letter from Housing Benefit in which it seems that I’m being suspected of fraud, and they’re coming to my house.   At least I can show them my bank account and prove I’m broke.  Nothing about my claim or circumstances has changed, and I am stressed and upset because of it. So bear with me.  Cheers.

Weekend fluff-ish

For all the skeptically interested out there:

The Secrets of the Psychics with James Randi:

The Peter Popoff sequence is an uncomfortable joy.

I am now very very tired and not feeling as ARGH as I was.  Thanks for your comments.  Do forgive me for sporadic updates, I’ve been a bit stressed and it means I’m not very consistent right now.  I’m keeping weird hours and catching sleep when I can on a lower than usual dose of medication (reduced it, as I mentioned before, I was sleeping far too much) so am all over the place.

Bipolar disorder can suck it, suck it hard.

EDIT: This was not directed at anybody!

I can’t fucking DO THIS ANYMORE.  I want to crack open my skull and scream, “LEAVE ME ALONE!”

How can people celebrate having this stupid fucking illness? It doesn’t make you special.  If you want to be special go get a fucking tattoo or something.   Don’t wish mental illness upon yourself for the street cred, which, by the way, doesn’t exist except within a niche of wankers.  A niche of wankers who wouldn’t associate with you if they saw you within the grip of psychosis.  A niche of wankers who’d use you for comic effect in a tale they were telling their wanker friends as if you were an article they read about in the Guardian and not an actual human being.

I would like to be able to concentrate for MORE THAN FIFTEEN SECONDS AT A FUCKING STRETCH PLEASE.   To function like I should be able to for more than a day.

Yours hypomanically (and still taking medication, worst luck.  Why don’t I get the brilliant, productive, giggly hypomania anymore?  Eh?  Why do I get the paranoid, screaming, wanting to kill people hypomania?  Wanting everyone to die?  Wanting to be amidst the smoking ruins, laughing insanely?   I’m suing.  Trades Descriptions Act.  I’ll ‘ave you) and filled with total rage.

This entry may disappear by the way.  Oh I do love writing, I want to write something that’s hugged for comfort and love, if you could print this out and it would help, as if you felt someone else was there with you, but sometimes I am so pricklingly aware of how much I hate this, and how I’d give anything not to be a manic depressive, to just not be, to see what my life would have been like without it.  Would I have made it to Oxford, would I be a mother?  Would people think better of me, would I be less lonely?

And no, there is no, “working it to my advantage” (how? how do you do that?  How do you harness racing thoughts into any sort of coherency?  Paranoia? Rage? Fear?)  or so on, or viewing it in a different light.  No matter how much some want to subscribe to be a walking work of art, it’s not true, you still have to live and breathe in the real world and this, this is where it is hardest of all.

I am so grateful for what I have in my life.  But it’s no thanks to this fucking stupid illness.

Hooray!

I finally have access to a working computer again!

Oh fuck

Well, I’ll be speaking in front of over hundred people at the Open Up conference:

http://www.oneinfourmag.org/openupconference.html

A free conference about how to communicate sensitively and appropriately about mental health

Encouraging us to reconsider the way we represent mental health difficulty by talking about the issues and hearing from speakers and panellists with direct experience in mental health and of working in media and communications.

For professionals who communicate with the public, for journalists, for people in public bodies and for people with mental health difficulties. Attendance is free but you need to book a place.

Speakers and panellists will have direct experience in mental health and
of working in media and communications. Those already confirmed include:

Alastair Campbell, formerly Tony Blair’s Director of Communications and a campaigner for mental health awareness

Debra Allcock Tyler, CEO, Directory of Social Change

Jacqui Thornton, freelance journalist and former health editor of The Sun

Sue Caro, Senior Diversity Manager, BBC

Shaun Crowe, Regional Co-ordinator, London Mental Health and Employment Partnership

Heather Payne, Media Action Worker, South Warwickshire User Forum

More speakers will be confirmed soon.

Talking about mental health – getting it right: Monday 1st February 2010. Registration: 12.30pm. The conference starts at 1.00pm and finishes at 5.00pm.

The UCH Education Centre, 250 Euston Road, London, NW1 2PG.

Laurie Penny will also be part of the panel I’m speaking on.  Implacable Marigold, the therapist I’ll be talking to about social anxiety next week, will be salivating over this.  I had a panic attack before I went to the pub on Friday.  I wonder how I’ll deal with this, eh!

Get your tickets!

“It’s chips tonight! I burned them! They’re actually twigs! Eat it and like it!”

Hello- can anyone reading my blog comment on this post, please?  For two reasons: 1) to say hi and tell me how you are and 2) there’s a few regulars I’ve been missing and I’m just wondering if you’re all out there and okay!  I’m notoriously bad at responding to comments and emails, but I do read them, thus I notice when people aren’t around. Or maybe just not reading anymore because I’m rubbish.  You don’t have to comment, obviously.  If you do, feel free to post something- a link, a story, anything!

Yours,

Your mother waiting at the door, anxiously jiggling her foot and calling you in for your dinner.

P.S- Thanks for the advice on my previous post.  The general consensus is that I’d have to be mad (AHAHAHA) to quit a medication that semi-works, and to try other methods of not sleepwalking through my life in the meantime.  Otherwise, maybe give it a go but to let my CPN know so she can monitor my mood.

I’m seeing the psychiatrist for a review.  Not, alas, “the gorgeous one”.  That’s probably for the best, as I don’t want to discuss slurring my words and pasting my hair to my face with gelatinous drool in front of someone who probably shaves their pubic hair to make it look bigger for his second job that involves dissolving women’s knickers with a bat of his luxuriant eyelashes.

P.P.S:- I’ve made a website where I can stash my work and write about things that don’t involve, well, drooling on myself.  Or maybe they do.  Look!  It’s at www.seaneenmolloy.co.uk, a URL that will backfire somewhat since it’s been scientifically proven that 99% of people can neither spell nor pronounce my name.  I should have registered, “Just call me Shannon or something, for god’s sake.  No, SHANN- call me Jane”.  Redirected from, “It’s SHAUN-ing, like a verb.  To Shaun.  I Shaun, you Shaun, we Shaun, we are Shauning”.

FUN FACT: A temp agency in multi-cultural London once asked me if I’d consider using a pseudonym or changing my name by deed poll since none of their clients could even work out whether I was a man or a woman by my name alone.  I just flashed a photobooth and asked them to add it to their records.

FUN FACT NUMBER 2: 93% of injuries sustained in the workplace between the years 2003-2007 were caused by my headbutting people who called me, “Paddy” instead of using my actual name. BECAUSE I’M IRISH, Y’SEE!

Thanks to Bekki for the lovely free hosting.

(P.P.P.S: Sorry about blatant validation whoring, but in the madosphere, I become paranoid when people aren’t around anymore in case…)

And the inevitable…

…You saw this coming, didn’t you?  Ending any post with, “I’m doing okay” means…

…I’d like to stop taking my medication.  Because of it, and no matter what dose I take (I’m prescribed 450mg, sometimes I take half that, because I augment it based on my mood), I sleep at least twelve hours a day.  Sometimes more, and never less.   It’s been so prevalent in my life that I call it the, “Twelve Hour Rule”.  If I wake up before then, I’m still sedated, zombified, slurry and likely to walk into traffic.  I can’t function.  I can hardly speak, and being woken up suddenly throws me into shaking shock.

I can’t really take it anymore.  I’m spending over half of my life asleep.  Recently, I’ve missed doses and have been trying to sleep without it.  I can, to a degree, but I don’t feel rested.  Then again, I don’t feel rested on Seroquel, either.  Which is another problem.  I am always tired.  On bad days, I’m bone-snappingly exhausted and completely useless.  I’ve been taking this medication for over two years, and this hasn’t worn off.  I’ve tried a lot of medications (as regular readers will know), and most of them have either made me worse or made me physically ill.

I’m seeing my CPN tomorrow and I want to talk to her about it.  I’m not entirely sure I have enough of a handle on myself to stop it altogether, but I don’t know.  I stopped it taking it completely for a few days about a week ago.  I got the withdrawal first- agitation and unbearable itching, which meant I was popping antihistimines.  But worse than that was paranoia.  It seemed to descend out of nowhere.  Robert came round to my flat and I suddenly started accusing him of cheating on me.   Every time I have stopped taking my medication, I’ve become ill quite quickly.  The longest I went without it was about ten days, and I spend it wanting to die, convinced everybody was talking about me and wishing me dead.

I don’t know if it’s worth quitting the one medication that has some sort of effect on my mood.   But I’m not sure how much longer I can live like this, either.  It’s a huge trade-off, and an even bigger risk.  We’ll see, I guess.

2009-a year in very brief review

Hello!  I’ve been neglecting this blog lately.  It’s been for a combination of reasons.  The first was that I got caught up writing a huge review of 2009, which depressed the feck out of me.  Every time I approached the computer I pulled a hood over my head, gave it the fingers and exhorted it to fuck off.  It was a year of both miseries and marvellousness but the explanation of the miseries were upsetting to write about.  I also decided that because it involved other people, it was best not to post all 3000 words of it.  I can’t really continue to remind the world of things that others may have moved on from.  The second is that I’m knackered and feel as though I have the flu constantly.  Please bear with me if you’re waiting for responses to emails as right now it’s taking me about ten minutes to respond verbally.

The decade can be summed up thusly: Started it as a mentally ill fourteen year old with a leggy, eccentric Englishman.  Ended it as a mentally ill twenty four year old with a leggy, eccentric Englishman.

I was going to write a review of the entire decade, but god, it would take a long time.  I’d love to do in an arch, BBC Four fashion, with archive footage to illustrate my pitfalls- all in shaky, skittering black and white, narrated by Adam Curtis- but alas, the scraps from my Photobucket and from my fitful mind will have to suffice.  Fitful it will be, since I’ve been sleeping terribly lately, not been able to take my medication and am thus covered in a massive, itchy, welt-ridden rash.

I remember my teacher, Mr Conlon, eulogising about how privileged our generation was for straddling two centuries, two millenia, as if we’d lived through it all and were now lying, half-exhausted upon the floor, and this was his rallying cry. To make us arise like shadows when no-one’s looking, to be strong, when really, we lived through the 31st and 1st.  But it has a bit of a resonance with me now, as I didn’t really believe I’d make it to the end of this decade.  It’s been spent battling mental illness and my brain’s as-yet-fruitless attempts to kill me.

As for 2009, what a beast of a year it was.  In summary:

The Crap Stuff

Best to get this out of the way first, so I can end on high, balanced upon the shoulders of two large, grinning men like the FA Cup, only, y’know, a woman, and not made of metal.  On the last line of this post, please be pretending to be Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club.  Oooooooooooooo-ooooh.

The crap stuff was very crap.  Throughout 2008, I’d been suffering from fairly crippling depression, which, of course, gifted me a night in hospital after downing the contents of my medicine cabinet.  It lifted then, a bit, but I became utterly obsessed with sorting out some aspects of my past (thinking about dying, and wanting it to be okay if I did- look, I wasn’t thinking rationally), and thus I wasn’t really there for the beginning of 2009.  I started the year quite manic, which wasn’t fun.

I had an abortion.  Which I thought I’d be okay with.  Ahahaha.  Instead of coping and moving on, I decided it would be more fun to go absolutely insane.  This took the form of: drinking, slashing my arms up, not sleeping or eating, running away and generally being a complete mess.

Subsequently, Rob and I broke up, after almost four years together (give or take the six months of being split up yet spending most of our time together, when I had manically ended our relationship, then immediately regretted it).  I loved him very very much, he was my best friend, and I am glad that we had that time together, though I wish we’d had a better ending.   We had just gone through too much together, and the abortion was the last straw because it changed, everything.  Still.  I’m a far better person for knowing him.  He saved my life, and, to be cocky, he did it twice.  I’ll always have a lot of love for him.  I guess that’s the best most of us can hope for, really.  OH GET ME THE PHILOSOPHER EH.

The emotional fall-out of the above meant that I cheerfully continued in my insanity for a few months.  I hated myself, hated living here,  felt suicidal with guilt, had to be fed and decided that relationships were not worth it.  I eventually began to feel okay again, though November was a shaky month spent mostly with tissues stuck to my face.

I’ve also been suffering from Physical Illness Undisclosed for most of the year which has sapped my strength and energy, which means I’ve pretty much crawled through the months.

No social life!

The Good Stuff

“Dos and Don’ts for the Mentally Interesting” on Radio 4 was broadcast and well-received, which was lovely, even if I did feel like a hypocrite because Rob and I broke up shortly afterwards.  I had been dreading being slagged off, or being unhelpful or stigmatising.  The award from Mind Mental Health Media was shocking and wonderful, and it lives on my fireplace, ironically mirrored, which means I can hardly look at it! And- this is a cliché, by the way- but through Radio 4,  I met fantastic people like Lou and Fiona.  Being nervously interviewed for BBC Ouch was terrifying fun.  It felt so strange, though, for that to be happening when there was so much chaos in my personal life.  I wish things had been more settled so I could enjoy it more.

I wanted to be working again in 2009, but alas, was too mental to do so.  However, I did write for BBC Ouch and One in Four, which was great and a little bit like having a job where I could put in an hour a month and turn up drunk.  I did some interesting things- like meeting the shadow minister for disabled people and quizzing him on welfare reform- with Rethink.  By the end of 2010, I’d like to be back at work.  Obviously, my ideal profession would be writing my bollocks off and earning a living from it.  However, if that particular dream doesn’t materialise, I’d like to study for NVQs and become a psychiatric nurse, if they let me.

I also met a literary agent in December, so I am writing a sodding book.  Hooray!  This is the first time I’ve mentioned it here, so there you go.  God knows if anything will come of it, other than my inevitable nervous breakdown and descent into alcoholism as I smash my head repeatedly off the keyboard.

Seeing Blur in Hyde Park was rather amazing.

As was Barcelona.

Robert, in general, has been fantastic.  We have such a fraught history (which I’ve never properly gone into, but it involves an imaginary boyfriend I dreamed out while in the midst of a psychotic episode, and I didn’t realise it until I was sixteen), but I’m glad I found him again, that he was a wonderful, if unlikely friend to me when I needed one, and that I finally got the guts to get into a relationship with him.  Things are going well.  It is good.  He is wonder and inspiration strangeness and vitality.  In a way, I’ve been too afraid to succumb to serious illness again, because what if I ruin it again?  What if, what if… etc.  I’m ignoring those fears and just getting on with the happiness.  It makes me fight harder, though.

And, as much as “Irritated”’s comments, well, irritated me, I have to grudgingly concede that focusing less on my illness and my problems has been a good thing.   In the past two months or so, I’ve been just trying to live my life, and I’ve been okay.  Mostly.  It’s been Real Life stuff that has gotten me down.  And it’s almost a relief to know why you are so sad.

Of late I’ve been becoming a little depressed again (very erratic sleeping is not helping, but then again, I should be more diligent in taking my medication), and my body image bullshit is still a problem,  but I’ve mostly been alright, or at least, what passes for alright when it comes to me, which is escaping the attention of the Crisis Team.  Hooray!  If you’ve been reading for a long time, you know that two months of relative stability is a huge thing to me.

This blog is approaching its three year anniversary, which is startling.  On one hand, I thought by three and half years since diagnosis I’d be swanning around all-cured and talking about how well I’m doing, rather than still writing a blog about being mentally ill.  On the other hand, I’m glad I’ve kept something up for three years, and met a network of fellow mentalists from it.  When I was diagnosed, I felt acutely alone, like I was a cork floating to the ends of the earth.  It’s nice to know that I’m part of a raft.

I’m rather late, twelve days into the new decade but- 2009, how was it for you?

Happy new year

Happy new year, everyone!  I spent it half-asleep in Brighton. Cheerio 2009, you were sometimes great and sometimes a big pile of pendulous bollocks.

I have a massive post to make I have yet to finish.  I’m glad the previous one inspired some debate.  And, while I’m here, thank you Mental Nurse for voting me best mood disorder blog, and hooray for Madsadgirl!

China executes Akmal Shaikh

Akmal Shaikh is dead.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8433285.stm

That is heartbreaking.

Edit:  I’m not able to write about this in detail at the moment but to clarify my position: I’m against the death penalty in every circumstance, in every country.  No exceptions.  It is a brutal act, the revenge of the mob and no less so via a needle or a noose.  Those who are saying, “He smuggled heroin in a country that executes people for it” are missing the point, as is anyone saying, “Well, I have a mental illness and I’ve never smuggled heroin”.  So?  For the record, I’ve suffered from manic psychosis and also known people to suffer from psychosis more severe than I have and can completely see how this could happen.  People in the midst of psychotic episodes (and episodes of mania) are extremely vulnerable.  More vulnerable, I imagine, to a group of exploitative criminals.

The point of this is that there is a lot of evidence that he didn’t know what was happening to him, and was duped.  This was not a deliberate act on his part.  He didn’t slyly take a chance and get caught.  He seemed to be seriously mentally ill.  I say, “seemed” because he had not been formally diagnosed with a mental illness.  And I, and other people, might be wrong, and he may not have been ill.  But there is much to the contrary.  (Please read the link I posted at the very top, from the Guardian).

As for not meddling in affairs, China has a history of human rights abuses.  Would you say countries like that, like Saudi Arabia, like North Korea, should not have pressure put upon them to stop these practices?  That said, America also has the death penalty and has until fairly recently executed people with mental illnesses, and I doubt they would have tried to intervene had Akmal been a citizen of their country.  It is somewhat backwards to say we should look after our own, but British government had the right to protest (weakly, as they did) against his execution as he was one of their citizens.

Happy Christmas everybody

Right, I’m off home today, or at least, I hope I am, given that so many flights are being cancelled.

Enjoy the holidays, chaps!  Here is your annual bit of Christmas comedy.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/father-ted/4od

Cheerio!

A reader asks for advice on the Christmas holidays

Edit: whoops, sorry!

Reposted with permission- I thought you might be able to give her some advice, because I’ve got nothing!  And I seem to be getting the ills so will likely spend Christmas under a duvet screaming, “THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!  SATAN LEAVE THIS GIRL!”

I think I’ve been bipolar since I was 12, but who can tell . . . my parents still don’t believe in mental issues.  I was “technically” diagnosed 12 years ago and have been on medication since.  I hate the medication, but I have to work so that means being “controlled” by substances.  I am now 48.

My issue (at this moment) lies with “family” at the holidays.  My family, as well as my husband’s family, are totally dysfunctional.  If it weren’t for our kids, I would skip the whole thing.  And then there is my oldest from my first marriage.  He is 26 and thinks that the way my family treated me (my husband and I were separated for a year 3-1/2 years ago) during that separation was appalling and wants nothing to do with them at all.  I really consider my family my husband and my children, as the only time we see these other “family” members is on holidays — Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Yes, for the kicker of all this, they consider themselves Christians, and obviously that’s why Christmas is “the” family holiday.

Any ideas (besides claiming an “episode” on how to avoid the whole bloody mess, or at least minimize the stress) so everyone can enjoy the holidays without it being a phony-baloney gathering of dna-alikes.

Brendan

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day Brendan was found, and we found out he was gone.  It’s been two years and he is never far from my thoughts.  So I am just writing this to say that I miss him, and I won’t ever forget him. And I don’t think I’ll ever have a friend like him again and I wish he was around because there’s so much I want to tell him, that I want him to tell me.

And I’m sorry the last message I ever sent you was calling you a wankpot.

Christmas is a difficult time for lots of people so please, if you are suffering, ask for help.  It’s selfish of me to say this but don’t leave people like me behind because time really doesn’t make it that much easier.  Eight years later, I still cry when I think of Vicky, I still can barely think of my dad, I still miss Brendan.  Nobody is truly alone, and nobody deserves to die that way.  And it is dying.  It’s not escaping, or running.  It’s dying.

Not that that really helps, though.  I just don’t feel like romanticising it today.

Can’t Cook, Won’t Eat: vicarious enjoyment of food, hating “Femail”

EDIT:  Read this one, the previous one posted on the 10th for some reason so had to delete it!

Also, as much as I appreciate your compliments, you don’t need to comment saying I’m not fat etc.  The point of this is- even if I were, even if I were 400lbs- it doesn’t matter, because there is no shame in a body and nobody has the right to shame your body.  Fat, thin, whatever- it does not matter.

First of all: look who we met!

Robert does not always wear a bicorne, although like Eddie, he used to ponce around in a dress. It was at 2am. Ignore my stupid face please please please.  I would have put a happy yellow face there but that’s very antisocial (edit: that is not fishing for compliments, by the way).   We were at the screening of Eddie Izzard’s self-documentary, “Believe”. It was interesting to see what he’d waded through to be so successful, and he seems superhumanly driven.

But at the Q&A afterwards if he’d just wanked into the audience he’d have saved us all an hour and a half. I still love Eddie Izzard as a comedian, but the lengths of the documentary to show just how BRILLIANT he was became almost parodic. At one point, the voiceover from his tour manager reverentially tells us that his shows are almost a “religious experience”. And then a tearful girl dressed as a bee breaks down and said that Eddie healed her when she was sick. I thought, “Aww, this is touching (unlike Eddie, however. No healing hands, just a CD of Definite Article”). Then I did a double take and stammered, “Hang on a minute- is this documentary seriously comparing Eddie Izzard to Jesus?!”

The premise of the documentary, by the way, was Eddie Izzard was accused of fraud by Watchdog for repeating material in new shows. The episode he was accused in was like some Brasseye special, it was so over the top and ridiculous. So, upset, he took a break from comedy then returned with the all-new Sexie. WATCHDOG. REALLY. WHO CARES. That’s like hanging yourself because Esther Rantzen slagged off your fridge.

So I was left wondering if it wasn’t just a bit of sly mockumentary too. His manner at the Q&A attested that it may not have been. He seems genuinely devastated by the Watchdog shenanigans. He also seems very wounded by the fact that Michael McIntyre is on TV a lot, and he isn’t. If that’s a comedic genius’ aspiration, we’re doomed.  (However, I think almost witty is correct in that it’s mostly an incredulity that McIntyre seems to have just shot all over the place).

My flat is a mess. My bed looks like its been the lucky host of an orgy in which I blew copious amounts of cocaine over the breasts of a nubile young woman, pausing only to flick through some De Beavoir to assuage my dizzied conscience. No such luck. It is the talcum powder I haphazardly snowed upon myself earlier, and it will remain there until I can be bothered/can afford to do a wash. I don’t know why I own talcum powder. There are no soft, rosy baby bums to be buttered, nor do I wear latex pants. (That would look like a joint of meat wrapped in a bin bag). I have no recollection of buying talcum powder, so can only assume it was one of the wares of my hypomanic episode a month ago in which I bought things I decided I needed, or that it’s been sneaked into my bathroom by Robert. What a fucker.

The reason my flat is such a mess is that every time I think, “Right, I’m going to make this place look less like a crack den”, I am inexplicably drawn back to the computer and, almost in a trance, type the words, “Come Dine With Me” into Google. I only recently discovered this wonderful programme, and have devoured almost every delicious episode.

Come Dine with Me is a cookery programme. Four strangers meet up, cook each other dinner, then score each other’s efforts. All this is presided over by a sarcastic narrator whom upon Googling has a face as irritating as his voice. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? But I’m obsessed. I am helpless in its grip. And it’s not the first, and it won’t be the last. There were times in the recent past when I’d wake up in a sweat and check 4oD for new episodes of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. When I can be arsed to buy the Sunday papers, it’s usually so I can perv over the Observer Food Monthly.

I can’t cook. I don’t like cooking. It’s boring and I’m shit at it. I give people food poisoning. I heated up something in someone’s microwave the other day and melted the plastic. My warped little failure was a testament to the fact that I just don’t know what the hell to do with food. I have successfully razed four cookers to the ground. And I have an eating disorder, and BDD. Food is a fraught affair for me. I feel guilty when I eat, I feel guilty when I don’t because I’m trying to be healthy, and I am trying not to revisit the land of blacking out after spending the day with my head down a toilet bowl. I am trying to align my emotions with my logic- I am fat, but so what?

It only recently occurred to me that my obsession with cookery programmes and paraphernalia wasn’t despite the fact that I have an eating disorder, but because of the fact I have an eating disorder.

It’s strange that I hadn’t thought of that before. A lot of the people I have know who have also suffered from eating disorders have been obsessed with food. Obsession with food, is, of course, fair dos. I am obsessed with what I put in my mouth (FNAR!). I think about food, all the time. Recently, it’s been on my mind more than usual. I have gained weight since the contraceptive implant, and weirdly, the weight has gone directly to my stomach. It is a bitter irony that the baby I didn’t have seems to have left a phantom in its wake. I genuinely look pregnant.

I had a good day today. I had one of those days where my self esteem was stroked like a purring little kitten. But in my joie de vivre, I thought it was okay to break my own pact about not weighing myself anymore. I could take it! I was in a great mood! But it fucked my mood. I have over 30% body fat, when I used to have under 25%. All my self esteem came pathetically tumbling down because of a few numbers. I felt like a total failure. BMI 27. I am panicked. I spend most of my day in a panic. I hate my face, but you already knew that. It is bloated, deformed. I split whatever I eat in half, and throw one of those halves away. And I have a habit of listing my intake that day to whomever I’m with. I am obsessed with food, and, because of that fact, self-obsessed (I am certainly self-obsessed- just look around you. It’s partly my personality, but partly because various mental brainwrongs make one so- the internal landscape is frightening, the external, threatening). It is dull.

I have been trying to find a more balanced approach to eating in recent months. Robert is the polar opposite of me in that, lithe little sod that he is, he loves to cook and loves to eat. He practically shags attractive kitchenware. He has a pepper grinder that would make most people seriously question if he was overcompensating for something. He’d be buried in a 6ft casserole dish if he could be. When he cooks for me, it’s healthy food, partly to encourage me to eat it, and partly because that’s the food he enjoys most. Sitting down for a meal with him has become part of our relationship. I would miss it. But I still don’t really enjoy eating. So I find my enjoyment in other peoples’ enjoyment.

I watch Robert eating with a mixture of jealousy and joy. Jealousy because he seems to always be eating yet is still slim, and joy because eating makes him happy. When he likes what he’s eating he makes a little unconscious humming noise, like a happy child lost amidst a new toy. When he’s hungry, I become my Irish Catholic grandmother (a close relative of the Jewish mother). “Eat! Eat! You are wasting away! Look at your bones! Let us find you food!” And then I take to the streets dragging him by the hand and morph into a pushy market stall owner at every almost-shut newsagent. “These aubergines! Only a quid! They’d be lovely roasted!”

And cookery shows are food porn. And because I’ve watched Kitchen Nightmares so religiously, I keep thinking that I can go into any restaurant and tell them how to run it better. Or imagine him doing it instead, then carrying me off like An Officer and a Gentlemen.

At the height of my bulimia, I used to go for meals with Rob or with friends, and tuck in with gusto, make all the right noises and not give away the fact that fear was clenching the beating out of my heart. I’d have the dessert, too, and then make noises about being full, fuck off to the bathroom and puke it out. Worried it wasn’t enough, I’d do it again when I got home. Disabled toilets were my best friend and I still instinctively always use them.

So I watch other people having dinner and having fun and think, “That looks nice”. And I read the Food Monthly and think about all the things I’d like to eat.

I’m not even extreme- I’ve met far more extreme people than I. And I have almost never met a woman who doesn’t worry about what she eats. When I was growing up, I’d watch my mother cook meals for us, then sit and eat almost nothing herself. My dad would be the served the biggest portions, us, the girls, smaller ones. We are taught, from a very early age, that “boys need food to be big and strong” and girls need to be pretty, thus, in our warped society, thin. Robert has a male attitude to food, and I have a more pronounced female one. I deserve to eat less, because the price of eating enough is fat, and greed. It is not right, but it’s true.

I have an academic interest in it all. I read a lot about feminism and the fat acceptance movement (How I envy Fat Acceptance bloggers.  They struggled but they got there, to the magic place that my brain lives in but my heart doesn’t). My daily reads are Shapely Prose and Sociological Images. It’s one of the things that I talk most about in my day to day life.  It fascinates me and I have seriously considered studyin it.  It’s one of the things I notice a lot, how people are represented, how prejudice is widespread and accepted.  (And there are some things- interesting to me, at least- if you look on a McDonalds wrapper at the calorie content, the illustration is of a woman.  Usually a “default” is a man- so either this is something progressive, or they think that woman are the ones who will look at the calories, either for themselves, or for their children).

I consider myself a feminist. I spy implicit gender reinforcement in our day-to-day media bombardment. I torture myself by reading Femail (particularly horrible Daily Mail subsection that loves using the word, “lumpy” to describe womens’ bodies) and “womens’ weeklies” because the implicit division makes me angry, and because our little worlds are so little to them. In Take a Break last week, a guy had made his “dream woman”- a robot. And the subheading was, “…but she still talks back!”, because perfect women don’t.

And it irritates me, everything. The WAH obesity epidemic making fat people, and anyone in between, feel as if we’re taxable space-hoggers. The fact that, after I wrote this (it’s two days later- I am really not getting on with stuff lately), I went to Piccadilly Circus and someone shouted, “FAT CUNT!” at me as I walked up the escalator. It angers me that I know, and am, a woman who finds it difficult to eat in public lest she be judged. Who puts the lettuce at the top of the shopping basket as if to say, “I AM TRYING”. That every time a successful woman is interviewed, her physical beauty is mentioned. And if she isn’t what’s considered physically beautiful, then she’s “made up for it” in other ways. IT. DOESN’T. MATTER.

Likewise, I’ve had comments on this blog when I have been severely suffering kicking at my appearance. When I get insulting emails, that’s what they focus on, because, as a woman, the greatest insult you can throw at me is that I am ugly. Once, when I moaned about the three stone I piled on in as many months of antipsychotic treatment, someone had a go at me for it. How can you accept this, they say. When I am very ill, my FAT is the biggest problem. I should be focusing on losing the weight rather than grasping back the last remains of my sanity. Be thin and insane instead of fat and well.

I hate that women are considered shallow, I hate that there’s culture and lifestyle, then female culture and lifestyle, when there should be no such thing. I DREAD writing a book and its cover being a high-heel or something, it just being so because I’m a woman. That someone might call me “sassy”. I’d take that illustrated stiletto and force it through their eyeball. It is geared to make us hate each other. To bitch, to judge, to envy, to blame ourselves and each other for the still present inequality in society. To quantify worth by the size of thighs and not personality. To assume we’re all united by our love of shoes (I do not give a toss about shoes, I hate shopping, I don’t really care to write about relationships, I don’t have “girlfriends” I go to for advice), so that we can be divided in more meaningful ways.  I’m not saying there is no intrinsic worth to the “female” sections of magazines and newspapers, and women-orientated media (indeed, I am a hungry consumer of most of it), just that the power of such a thing is misused.  Some of it is great (such as Jezebel), but even the supposedly intelligent mainstream has two types of women: rich homemakers, rich career women.  And women like me- that is, young people with a mental illness- live in Take a Break and the Sun.

I hate that adverts on the tube encourage us to butcher ourselves and remove the sexual and biological function of our breasts. And I HATE when people call those who undertake it shallow. They’re not shallow. It’s a rational reaction to extraordinary pressure. I hate that it’s seen as trivial. IT IS NOT TRIVIAL. It is insidious. As much as I utterly detest listening to anybody talk to me about their diets (likewise, I hate it when people comment upon my weight unless I ask them to, as I tend to lose weight through unhealthy means) or cleanses or some other crap, I understand the urge to evangelize. Because in the twisted culture war, you’re rallying the troops. Culture is killing women. This isn’t a simple choice someone makes one day. “So, I’ll care”. The choice is made from the moment we’re born. This is what you have to be. You can fight it but it’s still there. It is not vanity. To borrow from Ginsberg, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving.   The vigilance is a frenzy, the energy, wasted.  Fluttery from hunger, focused on lunch. It’s hard to function on any meaningful level sometimes. The culture around is tunnel vision, except the sense of it getting narrower and narrower is real. The mouth of the tunnel is wider than the exit. We get suffocated, we get stuck.

And yet… for all I am intellectually aware, I am still bulimic and I still have body dysmorphic disorder  Although media dictates that I shouldn’t.  After all, I have a “partner”, I have an outside voice reinforcing the idea that I am beautiful therefore worthy.  But it doesn’t work that way for me and many other people.  It isn’t true that if someone looking at you thinks you’re beautiful, then you are.  I believe the people who think I am.  But it doesn’t change how I feel, and I regret that, because I know how frustrating I am. I still always wear a hat or my hood up, I still have days when I can’t leave the house, I still have scars on my face.  My mind gets it but my emotions don’t.  They’re rubbish.

If it were just a choice…

And I am bitchy, too. I became annoyed at Robert earlier when he was commenting that he’d only eaten about 1500 calories yesterday. For me, that’s overeating, for him, under. I was resentful that was the case. He can twice as much as me and I can eat fuck all. For a second, I felt as if a deep injustice had been wrought in the world. My intellectual mind says, “What the hell. You’re hungry, eat something!” My irrational mind says, “You pig, you’ve eaten too much”. Why should I resent his body, though? His body is his and it is lovely and it would always be. It isn’t his “fault” he is tall and slim and goes to the gym and needs to eat a lot, and that I am short and can’t eat much without putting on weight.  I shouldn’t shame him for his body. It tangles me up, it wastes my energy and it’s why I’m sitting here feeling hungry instead of cooking dinner. And it makes me, even for a second, hate people I love.  And the fact I’m living in clothes that don’t fit me anymore doesn’t help (I thought about investing in Spanx, to hold me in enough so that I didn’t have to buy new things).  But I don’t know what to do.  As soon as I consciously diet, all the old bad behaviour comes back.  And I don’t have any money so I can’t buy new clothes.  Does not make one feel good about themselves, really.

So, I’m trying to see food differently. As social, nurturing and un-hateful. But it’s bloody hard. I just hate the way I look. And I worry that I could achieve everything I’ve ever wanted and still break down every time that I accidentally glance into a mirror, and that hatred will follow me for the rest of my life.

And, in terms of mood, I am alright.  I’ve had a funny six weeks.  A wee hypomanic burst that made me ragey, then two weeks crying in bed.  But, yes, I actually went to a CPN appointment today and said, “I’m fine!”  And I wasn’t lying.  How lovely.

Another December (Written 2nd December)

I have spent most of today crying my eyes out.  Hooray!  And I mean that.  Despite my status as Mentalist Ordinaire, I almost never cry.  I am stoic.  I have a perpetual stick up my bum.  I sneer at tears.  But for the past six weeks, I have been crying almost every day.  And on the days I cry, I really go for it.  Proper, facially disfiguring tears.  The sobbing recently have only been visited upon me when death has been visited upon my loved ones.  And on those lonely hours on a teenage mattress that squeaked too much and made my anguished wailing sound like very vigorous masturbation.  And listening to the Smiths while weeping for some imagined, life-swallowing problem (at least, I guess, my problems then were that I was locked in psychosis, and losing my mind, but also, there was this boy I liked…) is a kind of masturbation.

Ah, I’m trying to be amusing because I feel quite parodic sitting here.  My hair is greasy and half-heartedly scraped back from my blotchy Alice Copper face.  I’m wearing pyjamas, something normally reserved for weekends with my family.  I haven’t slept, and I am exhausted. I have eaten very little.  I look like a lady of the sorrows.

I have been crying because today is December 2nd.  I  place too much importance on anniversaries.   I would, according to rude maths and optimism, have most likely been a mother by now. I wrote about it earlier on my Livejournal then, infuriated with myself, deleted the whole journal.  I don’t feel so scared here.

I am hoping now such a day (like any other day, really) has passed that I might begin to feel better.   I have been very very sad lately.  I have been in touch with a charity and am going to go and talk to them.  Otherwise the other place is…the place.  And I would rather not go back to the old house.

Everything has felt disparate and unsettled lately.  I haven’t seen my CPN in a while, and the appointment I kept myself awake for on Monday never happened.  I was remembering earlier- almost with admiration- myself at the ripe age of nineteen.  A girl of prestigious self harm.  Hateful to be alone. Desperate, wandering, wild-eyed, extreme.  Although I am, for the most part, careful in managing my illness, sometimes I miss her.  Not the self harm.  There is an element of the abusive relationship there.  I have no desire to test the limits.  I don’t want to bind people to me with anything other than love.  It is scary.  It is isolating.

But I miss the fleeting, momentary freedoms of madness.  I feel bound, gagged and numbered sometimes.

At least with crying, with grief over something that has nothing to with being ill (although the reasoning that led to this did), I can feel like this is my own grief.  There is no pill to take it away.  No strategy.  No fruit smoothie.  No sunshine.  Just tears, and one day, soon, I hope, I will feel like I can live with myself again, and with the joys of this brittle, brand-new present, and not the ghosts of the past.  For months I have felt like I was wading through vapours.

I don’t know what to say anymore.

Whoops!

Oh bugger, I am a twat.  I had this on 100 posts per page- I have probably crashed quite a few browsers.  Sorry!  Set to the more sane 40 now.

Your Crumble Narrator

Thank you very much for your congratulations in the previous post.  The award is on top of my fireplace.  Its luminescence sets off my Rutles vinyl nicely.

I haven’t updated until now because I have quite sad, and it isn’t the done thing to turn around and pout when you’re receiving awards and people are telling you you’re great.  All that validation must go to ones’ head, and I wish I was more egotistical than I am so I was floating around haphazardly like a daddy long-legs, bouncing from cloud to cloud bowed by the weight of my head, hindered by my uncertain, hair-breadth legs.

I am certainly not moaning about it. I need that validation sometimes, because I often feel like toss.     But being unhappy right now feels a little bit like being ungrateful.  And I am unhappy at the moment- just the moment.  And it’s little to do with manic depression.

I was asleep for a little while tonight, and then awoken by a phonecall.  My blood freezes when the phone rings at four a.m.  In the middle of the night, it is never good news.  It was a Facebook friend- someone I knew years ago- thinking I might be up to talk.  And I would have been had I been somewhat more awake.  But I wasn’t.

My sleep has been erratic lately, and I am constantly exhausted.  I missed my therapy assessment appointment with the icicle therapist.  I can’t even remember what day it was, and, either way, I was too afraid of her to call.  The thought of her flatline voice worming through the phone handset (I don’t like using my landline, I become obsessed by the patterns of the holes, I lose my concentration), I’m worried now I’ve blown my chance to have therapy, but the alarm didn’t wake me up- it rarely does.  Nothing can cut through antipsychotics except fire and murder.

I’m awake now, close to 6am, because I don’t want to go back to bed.  I didn’t take any medication today because I have to see my social worker tomorrow.  The time was spilling past midnight, then one, then two… and if I’d taken my medication, I would have been in that coma for at least twelve hours and missed my appointment.

I’m putting this entry behind a Read More because it talks about abortion.  I think this month is one of those emotional meltdown ones- it’s near Christmas, which I always find difficult without my dad, my “due” date and Brendan’s anniversary.

Edit: deleting the rest for now.  Too much for me on a public blog.  Basically discussed nightmares, getting counselling from Brook, going off the rails this year, and nice things.  Sorry, and thanks for comments.

Bloody hell. “Dos and Don’ts for the Mentally Interesting” got the Best Radio Drama award at MHM

Well, CRIKEY and other such exclamations from my adopted homeland!  We went to the Mind Mental Health Media Awards at BAFTA yesterday evening expecting to have conversations about how great it was to be nominated and nothing else, and we won Best Radio Drama for the Radio 4 play based on this blog!  It was an immense, yet obviously welcome, shock. None of us had prepared a speech so we pushed erudite producer Fiona to the fore to say some words.

Here are some photos of us and our award (which, kindly, Lou and Fiona asked me to have).  And Jimmy McGovern, who was on the judging panel. Excuse how utterly shite I look.

Melvyn Bragg

Alistair Campbell accepting his award for, "Cracking Up".

Me, Lou and Fiona, featuring our award and MY GIANT KNOCKERS

SUBTLE

“Dos and Don’ts…” has been surreal- a radio play based on my scribblings here-therefore, my life- was something I’d never even have thought of or imagined anyone would be interested in.  And it’s strange for something that’s so intensely personal to be received in such a lovely way.  It’s so heartening that people feel it helped make a difference.  We all felt quite honoured to even be nominated.  And it’s a strange experience, sitting in a room full of people you don’t have to hide from, because they were all there with the same ideology, that there’s nothing shameful about having a mental illness.   I was reunited with Lou, the dramatist, Fiona and some of the shortlisters I’d met when I did it two years ago, which was nice.  And I think I coped fairly well with people talking to me, thanks to the lovely lovely free booze!

The shortlist was fascinating- have a look for yourself.  I’ve only seen/heard a few things on it (such as Terry Pratchett’s, “Living with Alzheimers”) but I shall now dig out the rest.  The Speaking Out award was given to the men featured in, “Chosen“, a documentary about the sexual abuse they experienced as children.  It was moving, and humbling, to watch them accept their award.

Anyway, HOORAY and such!  I shan’t go on about it  (mostly because I am a bit unwell today) but I feel proud.

Out to Lunch

(Redux- my first version of this disappeared for no reason!)

Right, I deleted my grumpy posts about losing my passport and having to waste money because I couldn’t get my flights and to shell money I don’t have on now getting an 11 hour journey home by ferry. Grr. I had been planning this visit home for ages and was furious that it all fucked up at the last minute due to quite extreme forgetfulness. (Fun fact: I took my passport out of my bag and then put it in a cool little travel wallet I had. Then I triumphantly declared I would put it somewhere safe, somewhere so safe that even tearing the house apart didn’t reveal its whereabouts). Robert is lovingly missing his flight to Belfast on Saturday to get the ferry with me later so that I don’t go mad and nut a Glaswegian in their beautiful face. Oh how I hate being cooped up on trains.

Boils down to: I will be away in Belfast for the next nine days or more, and not contactable by email since my mum lives in a household with no internet. Yes, they exist, but it’s Ireland so we’re lucky to have electricity EH. Have yet to book a return back to London as I’m not sure I’ll try chancing it with a shitload of birth certificates and stuff with Easyjet or if I’ll have to get the ferry back by myself. So! That’s it.

In mood news for a rare relevant post, for the past few weeks have been rather jittery, very anxious, imbued with the raging horn (oh yes), buggered for concentration, sleeping about two nights a week, talking bollocks, and, I guess, slighhtly hypomanic (which Robert was openly bemused at when we went to Tesco the other day and I was gabbling to myself about all the things I was putting in my basket while running up and down the aisles deciding I needed this and that) which is one reason I’ve been struggling with long entries. I’m okay, except that in the hassle to sort out getting home on extremely short notice, I forgot to pick up my prescription and will not have any medication until get back, which, at this point, is in question. That might spell trouble. So, if I come back in a week raving about being the next queen of France (which would be ridiculous, France doesn’t have a monarchy so expect further delusions of, “THEY’RE COMING TO GET ME WITH THE GUILLOTINE! MERDE!”) then do point and laugh. I also find it amazingly funny when I do take my medication and see someone- case in point, the therapy woman on Wednesday. I was still slightly drugged but also quite jittery so I was all over the place, rambling, pacing around then half-slumped. On the way back, the haze mostly lifted but I was almost FOILED by what I thought was half a polo mint in my pocket actually being half a 200mg Seroquel. I popped it in my mouth then spat, but bitter was my disappointment. But I smoked a menthol cigarette so all was well.

I shall leave you with some photos From My Real World and Everything to prove that I have a life, that I’ve taken recently, just to make this entry less of a waste of…internet.

Take care chaps.

Rob, my lovely ex boyfriend, with David, my lovely Scottish friend, playing with his band The New Royal Family at Ant Lib

Robert kissing Jack after kicking a ball into his face on Hallowe'en

We didn't just kidnap a child, that's Robert's stepson, and our pumpkin

 

 

 

Cheerio!  x

When I was a teenager, my best friend lived in Dublin.  Every so often, I’d take the two hour journey from my home town of Belfast and spend a few days with him.  I loved wandering through the wide, windswept streets, secretly reveling in the tin whistle siren songs to the tourists trickling by.  But my favourite place in Dublin was Trinity College.  All I wanted was to study English there.  I imagined myself as a louche Donleavy-esque character, burrowed amidst fusty, loved tomes in an expansive library, happily ensconced in the dual worlds of academia and alcohol.  I would stand outside and run my hands across its historic stones, and wish.  I even printed out a photo of it and blu-tacked it to my bedroom wall. And as ambitious as it was, everybody had faith in me.  I was one of those effortlessly brilliant and ambitious students who’d never got a B in her life.

Instead, I became very unwell.  I missed six months of school, scraped a few GCSEs and was then gently dropped from my A-level courses with the humiliating declaration that my “mental health was more important than my education”.  Then, on an impulsive whim I ran away to London.  Seven years later, I’m still here, still ill and have, of yet, been unable to reattempt education.

Throughout my teenage years, it was assumed, despite the fact I’d suffered severe bouts of mania, depression and psychosis since the age of twelve, that I was just an attention seeking adolescent.  Anybody with a “teen” in their age isn’t ill.  They can’t be ill.   At sixteen, there was some vague hand-gesturing regarding a, “mood disorder”.   I was prescribed a medication that affected my balance so severely that I spent a good few months living on the hall carpet after yet another tumble down the stairs. I stopped taking it and there were no follow up appointments.  Even as I dropped out of school, nobody took my alleged illness seriously, and eventually, that included me.  For the next four years, I was too afraid to see a doctor, convinced that I was wasting their time and that they would dismiss me.  During those years, I deteriorated.  I developed the difficult-to-treat rapid-cycling (in which a person has four or more episodes of illness a year) and it caused untold problems in my relationships.  I lost countless jobs, I had to perform the famous, “moonlight flit” due to the fact I couldn’t pay my rent, I self harmed severely and I began to drink heavily.  At the age of twenty- psychotic, jobless and bleeding from the throat- I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.  It was only then that I began to receive help for my mental problems.  By then, it had been eight years since I became unwell.

What happened to me is not unusual.  There is, on average, an eight year delay in diagnosing bipolar disorder, in which time the damage in a person’s life may have already been done.   It can also be misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder or depression, so the person may not be receiving the right treatment.  In fact, using antidepressants to treat bipolar disorder misdiagnosed as depression can be downright dangerous, triggering mania in some patients.

Mental illness is often not diagnosed until a crisis point has been reached.  It can be for various reasons.  A person can lose insight into their behaviour and refuse to see a doctor, or, in the case of bipolar, they may experience hypomania which can cause someone to feel not only good, but great.   Or, like me, they can think that they’re just flushing NHS hours down the toilet by bothering a doctor.  Or, as revealed in a recent survey of psychiatrists, doctors are simply not recognising the symptoms of mental illness.  And obviously, they’re somewhat easier to recognise when you’re bad enough to be hospitalised.

Finally getting a diagnosis can be a relief.  When I finally received the less-vague diagnosis of bipolar disorder, once I’d gone through the prerequisite period of, “You’re wrong, I’m fine”, I was thankful, in a way, to knew that something ailed me, and I wasn’t just, er, going mad. It explained a lot.  But it was also a harrowing experience.  I had kind of hoped that the doctors of yore were right and I was going through a teenage “phase”.  To be told, with all the characteristic tactlessness that the psychiatric profession is renowned for, that it was likely I’d have to live with this for the rest of my life (ah, the “rest of your life”- a particularly frightening prospect for the barely-lived in twenty year old) rendered me as flat and amorphous as a dinghy with the air let out.  That this too would not, in fact, pass. Yes, it had messed up my life.  But it it had a hand in my personality, my behaviour.  Some people liked me the way I was.  And I wasn’t sure who that person was anymore.  If they would even exist anymore.

I had an image of my future.  I wanted to be carefree until I was in my early nineties.  An elegant writer, well-studied, well-traveled.  Quaffer of wine, that kind of thing.  Taking medication that would change who I thought I was, living a life relatively free of stress, avoiding alcohol, my main confidant being my social worker and being forever saddled with the stigma of mental illness hadn’t figured into it.  Simple things I previously believed would be joyful experiences- such as having a child- were suddenly terrifying.  I’d have to take medication, and even then, only certain medications because others could harm the child.  There would be the grave possibility that I would experience post-natal psychosis, since I am prone to psychosis.  And there is increasing evidence that some mental illnesses are hereditary. So great was my worry that it contributed to my decision to have termination earlier this year.  There were other factors, but it was a position I never imagined I’d find myself in, and sobering reminder of the realities of living with a mental illness.  I’ll never fully adjust to it.  And forgetting it comes at a high price- in my case, when I stop taking medication, I start to become ill.  I need to be aware to be well. Ah, fantastic.  All the pep-talking statements that mental illness only changes your life as much as you let it isn’t true.  You cannot be well by wishing alone.

In a way, you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.  Not being diagnosed leads to not being treated, and being diagnosed leads to a whole world of change.  Whereas I’m glad I didn’t have, “MENTALIST” stamped across my head when I was fifteen, I do sometimes lament what I lost. I don’t regret where my life has taken me.  But I’m sad that I’ll probably never get to Trinity.  Things are different now.

Blogs, forums and resources on ECT

Hello!   Do any of you know of write/moderate/recommend good blogs, forums or resources on Electroconvulsive Therapy?  I’d really like to compile a list and since my computer fried up last week (woe, had to reinstall the operating system), I have lost every single bookmark (fecking loads),  documents et al that I had concerning it.  Or if you’ve had ECT and have any personal experiences you’d be able to share, that would be appreciated too.  I can’t even find my own post on it.

Thank you muchly in advance.  Thanks also for commenting on my previous sad wee post- funny few weeks really to round off a strange year!  I feel like Egbert’s been at my head with a whisk.

EDIT:  This post isn’t about me, I’m not having ECT or anything.

On or around the 2nd of December 2009

I might have been a mum by now.

Feck

I am embarrassed to be writing this but I need to talk.

(Talk of imaginary spiders and ranting, cut for boringness and embarrassment)

Hypocrite

I know the vast majority of people with mental illnesses- like the vast majority of people without- aren’t going to stab me.  So I am feeling quite guilty that this morning, while in the reception area of my local CMHT, I seriously thought I was going to get knifed by someone sitting opposite me. They were staring at me very intently with an air of hostility, and the intensity of the stare frightened me.  I found myself busying myself in a boring way, to show how uninteresting and also unthreatening I was.  I nibbled a bit of the Tesco fruit salad I had in my bag. (I ended up not sleeping.  Thought fruit would perk me up). I pulled my hat down over my ears.  Sauntering up to the desk I forced myself to look cool and unbothered. Then I legged it.

Of course I wasn’t in any danger.  And they could have been staring at me because I looked like an idiot (I did).  And I’ve been the starer in the past.  I’m used to strange behaviour.  I’m often a strange behavee.   I’m wondering if this is a case of Mentally Ill Dominos, in which a circle of people with mental health problems act in ways which are innocuous but which feed into the mentalism of the other people in the room.  In this case, my ever-present paranoia.  Would I have felt the same in ANY waiting room?  Or am I indeed just a stinking hypocrite who’s afraid of people with mental illness?  Or am I just afraid of everyone?

Edit: Aha, showing your own prejudices there!  It was a woman.

Thank you Psych Central! and therapy things

Hello, this entry is sponsored by parenthesis (signifying an aside so you don’t have to).  And tiredness.

I’m in Robert’s new digs in South London, where he was born and grew up.  He is currently in pyjama bottoms exercising with a giant pumpkin.

Edit:

Thanks Robert!

First of all,  THANK YOU! to Psych Central for giving this blog first place in their 2009 Top 10 Bipolar Blogs!  It was second last year so I was happy (and surprised, since I don’t feel I’ve posted much of interest lately) to be first this year.  Here is what they say:

1. The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive
Do’s and Don’ts for the Mentally Interesting was a BBC Radio play based on Seaneen’s blog produced last May and just nominated for a Mind Mental Health Media Award. Always a compelling and honest read, it was no fluke or sympathy vote that caused us to place this blog near the top of our list last year – it deserves many accolades. Well done.

I feel awkward at this kind of thing so will just say thank you for the loveliness. Well done to everybody, especially Bipolar Chica and Patient Anonymous, whose blogs I love.  I’m glad to see that this year includes a lot of newcomers, and not just old timers like me, Spikol et al.  And hooray for the madosphere!  Aceness abounds.

Life, as usual, continues at my undazzling end. I’ve seen not one but two of my Belfast friends of late, which is always lovely (and, for the photographically inclined, feel free to nosey at my October photos on Facebook).  Apparently I sound English to my countrymen’s ears, and Northern Irish to the English.  It’s no wonder my (Irish Republican) family only half-jokingly refer to me as “the traitor”.

It’s been a little bit of a strange month with my moods teetering to and fro.  I’m still feeling a bit weird so excuse me if I sound…er, weird.  I had the drying-out alcoholic shakes, so no sugar in the tea unless I was armed with a sponge at all times.  My mind had been racing a little bit too, with a slew of unsettling negative thoughts, which wasn’t good. Background noise was also turned up to eleven. I’d been on minimal medication for some time- my usual dose is 400mg but I’d cheekily lowered it to 100mg, then to 50mg, occasionally nothing, which, I have discovered, is a bad idea.  I know my reactions well enough to be able to do so fairly safely. Up the dose when hypomania strikes, lower it when depression does.  See-saw. So I upped the dose to 200mg, and the agitation has calmed down.  It had no choice but to, given the fact that I have pretty much spent the past three days asleep because of the extra 100mg.  It’s hard to shiver and shake in your slumber.  Downside is I’m exhausted, my concentration and memory are still shot and I have no idea how to help that.    I joke about my terrible concentration and my memory but it gets me down.  It buggers with two of my greatest joys- writing and reading.  I find it a huge struggle to write sometimes, I can rarely read anything more challenging than a magazine and I’m generally a forgetful, scatterbrained twat.   I need a tattoo pen to write stuff on my forehead but I’d probably forget what to write or get distracted halfway through.  Bollocks.

Last Thursday was my first (first! I thought there was only one!) therapy assessment.  I’d been a wee bit nervous about it as the therapist is an icicle of a woman.  She is beautiful.  That was my first impression of her when I met her last year.  In the olden days when people still cared about the possibilities of verse, many a thigh-rubbing poet heart would have been in an absolute frenzy about her hair, a waterfall cascading in sunlight, the golden silk with which god spun the sands…and so on.  You wouldn’t be able to hear yourself think above the din of quills scratching paper.

And she is cold. Her golden loveliness (even her name is lovely) makes her stiffness more striking.  She is expressionless, often toneless.  She is professional.  The impassive manner of therapists is the stuff of cliches but having had little to do with therapy, it’s something it’ll take me a little while to get used to.  I guess I’m more accustomed to the casual and friendly manner of my social worker.   Though I would much rather speak to someone who is professional than someone who isn’t, or who tries to be chummy and matey without knowing me.  I’m just not used to it.  And besides, we don’t know each other, even professionally.

(Urgh, professionally.  I realise sometimes that seeing me is someone’s job.  We’re not friends, and they might not actually give a toss outside that one hour a week.  It’s a disconcerting thought sometimes and makes me wonder about people’s sense of duty, not just professional people.  How would I feel if I didn’t have anybody, had never had anybody, who cared about me?  Even though I am unsure most of the time if I do, but I must do, because almost everyone does really.  I wonder how I’d feel about my appointments then.  I do, for the most part, look forward to them).

Anyway.  I was in a bit of a funny mood that day (aha).  And nervous, and a bit anxious about rambling and just sounding like a churlish, entitled brat and so on.  I wanted to be articulate, and to answer her questions.  Because these things can feel like the world’s strangest job interview.  (Especially when your social worker is sitting in on it.  But I was glad she was).

Hooray

I’m going to apply for this.

Addaction SmartScheme

Good idea?

“STATE-SANCTIONED MALINGERING IS THE BIRTISH DISEASE”

“Birtish”?

If this article can’t even be properly edited then why should I trust what they have to say?  Learn to spell.

The Daily Express is a horrendous little rag anyway, but here, for fun.

It is telling that more than1.1million incapacity claim- ants are not suffering from any physical disability at all, but get their handouts by moaning about problems like “stress” and “depression”.

Once again, the largesse of the welfare system provides perverse incentives for people to exaggerate their emotional suffering rather than demonstrate resilience; no wonder, then, that the number of people saying that they are “too stressed” to work has trebled during the 12 years of Labour rule.

By far the greatest outrage is the money dished out to more than 100,000 alcoholics and drug addicts. It is the height of lunacy and immorality for the state to pay people to continue with their dangerous habits. Awarding “disability” handouts to drug abusers makes a complete mockery of the law, given not only that narcotics are illegal but also that a  significant proportion of crime is committed by addicts.

These people deserve spells in prisons, not an easy lifetime on the dole (not sure what’s “easy” about living on £50 a week…). The incapacity benefits system has been disastrous for the moral fibre of our nation.

Ants claiming incapacity benefit is a new one.  But I can understand them being off work for stress.  Ants work really long hours.

I don’t trust any articles written about benefits that still call them “incapacity benefits”.  It is the Employment and Support Allowance now.  If someone can’t even use the correct name for the benefit, they have no authority to write in a national paper about it.

Anyway, there you go.  I am too knackered and pissed off today for much else.  But stop your moaning about potentially fatal illnesses like depression, eh.  Demonstrate more resilience.  Hang yourself from your good old Birtish stiff upper lip.

I am sick of this bullshit being published.  Swap places with someone incapacitated by schizophrenia for a week, you fucking idiots.

Edit: Going to add here, when I was sixteen/seventeen, before I got kicked out of college for being mental and manic, when people thought I’d be destined for Oxford, I used to lie in front of traffic, and think I was Jesus.