Quietly, thinking to myself...hang on that's not right, sure that's the lyrics to a song by fingers eleven! Lets try that again, I'm sat here, quietly, thinking about the last couple of months, in particular the last two. See this blog hasn't covered quite a few recent events, one of which was me hitting rock bottom and feeling suicidal. I don't say that lightly either, I was pretty damn low to say the least, staring into an abyss that was threatening to just drag me into the depths of whatever fresh hell was waiting at the bottom. I've experienced this before, in the sense that I wanted to end it all, had two very powerful reasons that tend to do the round trip on me. One is when my psychosis become so overwhelming that being alive is just a living hell with no hope of escape. Imagine for a moment my voices all screaming so loudly I can't hear anything but them, I am seeing things appear before that are so horrifying that I am too afraid to open my eyes and to top it off I feel like somebody is drilling a hole into my brain. Yeah, that is how it feels during those times, thankfully very rare at those levels, plus everytime it happens, I get a little more savvy to it. Then there is number two on that list, the moment where I hate myself so much, that I convince myself its not worth going on, that everyone actually would be better off without me ever existing. You know that phrase thrown as an insult 'I wish you were never born' well I feel like I shouldn't have been during such times. Its a crippling depression, driven by anxiety that just pushes you to make that decision to end all decisions.
Well recently I had a new and far more disturbing third option happen to me, yes the list got bigger and I'm actually still scared about how badly it affected me. I hit a point where I didn't want to go on, I wasn't suffering psychosis, I wasn't feeling like life would be better without me in it, no, this was weird. I simply stopped, I didn't want to go on, I had no real feeling in me, I felt numb and detached from the world around me. Now don't get me wrong, that sounds a lot like depression and it is, but for me, I'd never felt it so intensely as this. I had no will left, no strength and I just wanted to end it all. But the weird part, I had no reason to, there was nothing to say 'you really should kill yourself' no it was more like I lost who I was completely. There was nothing left of me, motivation, feeling, just this sense of being completely numb. I was watching the world in slow motion, nothing sparked any reaction in me, no real emotion and even if it did I felt so far away from it I may as well be staring across the ocean. So why on earth would that make me feel suicidal, surely I would just shut down and just not care right?
What triggered the suicidal feeling is you have to remember I'm bipolar, I'm used to emotion, feeling and although its really messed up and not balanced, that is what makes me, well me. Imagine if you are used to feeling emotion so intensely that it threatens to overwhelm you on a daily basis and the only thing keeping it in check is your medication and coping skills. It becomes your normal everyday routine, but to have that suddenly gone, sucked away as if some kind of emotion sucking vampire visited you in your sleep and forgot to finish you off completely. It was insane, I felt completely alone and isolated, and in this numbed state, in this moment of absolute nothingness, the voices. Oh yeah they didn't waste any time in this, I had it all thrown at me but one just hit me hard and it was simply put. One whispered, just loud enough to be heard 'see, you are broken, why go on?'
It was right to, I was broken, that is what happened, all the nonsense, all the bullshit I had put up with trying to just live life in some way that isn't just about coping. I broke, stopped, crashed, however you want to say it somehow I managed to feel so utterly removed from my life that it was nothing more than a distant memory. And slowly, due to that voice, those feelings of isolation began to swell to the point where I thought to myself, in the most rational way ever, why not end it?
It made perfect sense, after all if you look at is, my health isn't getting better, my mental health will in the end get worse and no matter how much I sugar coat it, its hurting those around me. I know people will argue, but trust me, few of you know the other sides of this, the parts where I am no longer me and something that is purely irrational and at times a monster. I sat there, thinking to myself how easy it would be, I even started to type up a suicide note to explain how this was different, so Elizabeth would understand that I wasn't in pain and that it was the right thing for me to do. Can you imagine that, just calmly typing the reasons you are dead and hoping that those reading it would understand your rational explanation. I justified it perfectly, what better time to go than like this, while I was not in any pain and calm.
Then another voice kicked in, not my hallucinations, my own inner voice, reminding me that I swore if I felt like killing myself I would talk. I hate breaking a promise, I avoid it at all costs, so I remembered, deleted the suicide note and decided to tell my wife that I wasn't right, something felt wrong, I felt broken. I explained that I had thoughts of ending it all. This naturally led to the call to the hospital for crisis team, which you'd think would be simple right?
Nope, never simple, first you got to jump the hoop of getting through to them, then you have to have them tell your wife that in order to help they need to speak to me on the phone, even though at this point I am now unable to even muster a sentence, but they insist that unless I do speak, they won't do anything. Its only after my wife gets upset that they even bother to say they will, but add 'oh can you get him down here' and when told we don't have a car they seem to think someone in my state can travel by bus (oh middle of the night, no buses). Eventually, after hours have passed, I get down there, I can't even quite remember how, may have been a good friend, taxi, I honestly can't remember right now as its still a little blurry. If it was a friend, I'm so sorry for not mentioning you and forgetting. That leads to me being eventually seen, by a doctor and a nurse who seem to have no idea what to do, when told by my wife what has happened previously, lets say it left them even more confused. That's a long story I'll get into in another blog entry, its a fun one but lets say my history with the crisis team is rather amusing and insulting.
In the end, I'm discharged, given meds I need to take, told they are ok and will cause me no harm. Good job I check things, I didn't like the mention in the side effects that this medication should be given to anyone with bipolar disorder. Turned out to be a good call to, as I was told they should NEVER had given to me in the first place and don't understand why they were. Finally I got to a professor, yes not a doctor, not a consultant, a professor that had been pulled out of retirement. This man is good, I'll give credit there, he is the one now taking me off lithium, a man who has told me the truth more than anyone else in the mental health department has in the last 10 years. I jumped a bit there, but I'll come back to point!
The crisis team, they arranged home visits, to come and make sure I'm ok, through these home visits I find out that somehow, I am no longer under the community mental health team. Even though I had previously been told repeatedly I am. Imagine my confusion when they even state I am an outpatient when I just came out of an appointment with my psych who stated I'm a secondary care patient. Home visits became a joke then, going from twice a week to not at all for a week, not seen the same person more than twice and even though I am supposed to be closely monitored for six weeks I have effectively seen my crisis team around five times and oddly we're on week eight. Yeah, week eight as they've not been able to discharge me as they have not been able to have someone pop over to do the final visit. Add to that we get random letters and phonecalls saying 'we have been trying to contact you' and when ringing them back they are saying one particular nurse has been trying to ring us. Odd however that we have answer phones on both our mobiles and the house phone, not to mention caller display and not even an unknown or withheld number has come up. Either this nurse is ringing the wrong number, or frankly, somebody is lying through their teeth at the expense of my wife and I's sanity. Now back to the community mental health team, after being I'm not in it, only a few days ago, I was told by that lovely professor that it makes no sense, I should be and there is no reason he can see why I'm not. He was as confused as we were as he thought I'd just not understood that I should be in it and he had assumed I already was.
Well tomorrow I have that final visit apparently, with news of what is happening with the team, so I am sat here thinking about what is going to happen and how I'm going to deal with it. Because I'll confess, I'm not fully healed, I still feel fragile and to find out that nothing is happening to help me and my wife, especially with the change of medication that is happening. I don't know what I'm supposed to do, I seem to fighting a system that should be helping and whats worse it seems to be fighting with itself in terms of who is doing what.
Now I know I've really laid into the NHS mental health department in this, I don't mean to attack something that is run by good people struggling with running the thing in the first place due to the pressures put on them by cuts etc. But they have failed me again and again in ways that make little to no sense, its seemingly all down to miscommunication pure neglect at points. We are talking about a department that once forgot about me for over 13 months where I had no appointments. I actually had to arrange on my own back with my GP to have my lithium levels monitors in a clinic that was not equipped to do so. So as much as I love the NHS, no matter how much I respect the staff, they need to sort it out, because I'm lucky, I have my wife, family, friends supporting me, imagine the people who don't?
They are the people you see on the news, the ones that didn't make it or broke trying.
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