I'm sure I experienced clinical depression as a child. I wasn't treated
for it. When I was 15, shortly before my GCSE exams, I got thrown out of
home for a few months. I'd become an angry teenager and things had
flared up at home. I'd been self-harming. I have a faint memory of
seeing a psychiatrist at the time who didn't give me a diagnosis or
treatment. I went to a children's home then a foster home. I continued
to go to school. I did my GCSEs too. I don't know how I avoided medical
treatment. My parents may have preferred I stay out of an NHS
psychiatric ward. I was lucky. I got to do my GCSEs. I was never
labelled. I never went through the trauma of first episode in the modern
psychiatric system, a trauma which in a recent study mentioned at a talk
by Jacqui Dillion (Chairperson of the Hearing Voices Network) may cause
PTSD nor did I have to deal with the problem of self-stigma. Those
awaited me in later life.
Eventually I returned home then was sent straight to boarding school for
two years at six form. Life at boarding school wasn't what I expected.
For a start there was a surprising lack of homosexuality. In fact
homophobia was prevalent. One person had seen a gay man executed in his
home country. I wasn't gay but they thought I was because I defended the
rights of people who fuck who ever they wanted as long as it was
consenting. Those two years were relatively problem-free. Boarding
school was a therapeutic environment. This particular school took on
children which other schools might not but wasn't a special school in
that respect. The teachers...they were amazing. Far different to the
school I'm spent most of my unhappy childhood in.
Getting my GCSEs meant I could go to this school. I got surprisingly
good GCSE results given the circumstances. In the children's home I had
nothing to do but revise. I managed to get onto a gap year scheme called
Year In Indistry. It took people who were expected to be "captains of
industry in 20 years time" and gave them professional experience and
education at an early stage. I worked for a company as an assistant
systems engineer and ended up working on a project for the European
Space Agency. I couldn't have done that had I ended up in a psychiatric
ward instead of a children's home. I was fairly unhappy for a lot of
this gap year but I didn't call it depression. I just got on with it.
Summer came and the misery subsided.
I went to university and was mad as a hatter. There was a distinct
madness which some of my peers recognised as a pattern. In my second
year I dropped out and got my first diagnosis of depression. I had
counselling through university and took antidepressants. I managed to
come back after a year, pass my exams and finish university even with
undiagnosed bipolar. I drank a lot, took lots of drugs and had a great
time. I also learned a lot though. I was active in lots of university
societies as well as the social scene. I worked too. I learned
photography. Self-taught. My degree was Electronic Engineering. When I
left university I blagged a job at one of the best places to work for in
the country on a graduate scheme. My peers where surprised. When I say
"blagged" that's my self-effacing way. I went through lots of testing
and interviews. Somehow out of 4000 potential applicants they chose me
as one of 10.
At the age of 25 I was first hospitalised and given a diagnosis of
bipolar with paranoid features. I was sectioned then returned home from
Nottingham where I'd been working a graduate role. I had a very high
level of self-stigma. For about 3 years I saw a private psychiatrist who
had been recommended to my family (who are all doctors) and he diagnosed
me with schizoaffective: bipolar type. Through a series of circumstances
I stopped seeing him and stopped taking medication. Obviously I became
very unwell and was hospitalised twice in a year. During the first
hospitalisation I was diagnosed as dual diagnosis. At the next
hospitalisation I was diagnosed with mixed affective disorder. When I
was seeing the private psychiatrist and accepting medication I was
taking up to 700mg of quetapine fulminate, 3000mg of sodium valporate
and 225mg of sodium venlaflaxine with propananol and thyroxine. I was
very unhappy during this time. I didn't want the medication. I
self-medicated heavily to gain something of my former self back.
This was about 4 or 5 years ago. I was on benefits for a while and in
temporary accomodation. Somehow I managed to get a part time job at a
mental health charity. When I started I was suicidal and took sodium
venlaflaxine briefly but came off after a couple of months. I then
experienced psychosis - very intense psychosis - but withdrew inside
myself so I could continue to function at work and went through hell
outside work time.
After a few months it reduced quickly and I felt much better. I'm not
sure if I entered a hypomanic stage shortly afterwards or whether the
state was normal for me. My state of consciousness returned as did my
personality. My mood was good as was my productivity. In fact my
productivity was exceptionally high shortly afterwards. I started taking
photographs again, my passion for many years, and even fell in love
shortly after remission.
I continued to work at the mental health charity up until a couple of
years ago. I found myself in a pattern where I was finding it hard to
control myself and there was a high risk of suicide. It's quite hard to
explain what this feels like. It's awareness of uncontrollable suicidal
urges and self-destructive behaviour. It's like not being totally in
control but aware of it and the risks. At this time I went for help from
the NHS but it was too late and the only thing I could do was quit my
job (I'm still very self-stigmatic about taking sick leave which they
would have given me without question) to take a break before I had a
breakdown or was hospitalised. It meant I had to resign, at least that
was the only option which I felt was available given my personal beliefs
(including the self-stigmatic attitude) and the risk of hospitalisation.
For the past year and a half I have been working for a friend's mobile
phone technology company. I went through a period of paranoid psychosis
last year but managed to get through it. It was relatively mild but
suffering nonetheless. I smashed up a few possession like 2 laptop
screens and camera equipment. A lot of it was triggered by something
real: a spurios message on a Facebook Captcha. This message sent me
wild. It broke down my trust in reality beyond what ordinary psychosis
can do. This was real and I couldn't fit it in my reality. I ask no one
to believe me but there's a screen capture posted to this blog within a
short space of this incident happening. Whoever did that to me is a
fucking cunt.
And still I struggle on. Last year was pretty rough in many ways and I
came close to taking my life. I found a solution through reading about
suicide and particularly the work of one person, Edwin Shneidman. He
quoted from the first lines of Moby Dick often. These words have become
a mantra for my plan to not kill myself.
These last two weeks have been very hard. My mood was getting better but
life circumstances have chosen this time to wrought their damage. 4
months of work and I'm probably not going to get paid for it. Any other
time and I don't think I'd be writing this blog post. I'd have tried to
take my life over this. I want to die but I'm not taking the option. I'm
not having to fight suicidal urges either. Just regular thoughts of
wanting to die which are more intense at the moment but nothing I can't
handle. I've been through a lot worse.
I read enough psychiatric literature to know that I'm severely mentally
ill. I know the results for being untreated are pretty bad too.
Eventually I'll join those poor clinical outcomes but for now I'm
surprisingly hopeful that I can get my life back on track in a small way
even. I've got problem debts which are reaching crisis stage. I've got
hassles with the student loans company. I have taxes to pay. I have
virtually no money and may not get paid for a significant amount of
work. I can't afford to drink with my friends like I usually do. I
haven't seen any of them for at least a month.
But there is no plan to take my life soon. I'm hitting the bottle pretty
heavily but that's my standard self-medication approach. Currently I've
switched to drinking wine for its soporific value. I try to sleep as
much as I can at the moment. I'm in bed before 8 and try not to wake at
all. I lie in bed when I wake up and wait to fall asleep again. It's
usually my cat wanting food which wakes me eventually. Then I just get
on with whatever I fill my day with.
I should be doing a pointless job application right now and this was
part of the work I was doing for it. Instead I'm just going to fuck this
day off and the job application. Instead I'm going to do my usual thing
of going down to the local park and drinking a bottle of wine, coming
home then finally eating the first meal of the day before I pass out
asleep (usually after some drunken Facebooking which gets me into
trouble. I don't care. Jacqui Dillon is hot!).
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