It is that time of the month when I try and make people with mental health problems feel a little less lonely, so grab a cuppa and lets sit down together for a good old chinwag…
Born Without Marbles
How To Tackle Suicidal Thoughts And The Fear That Things Will Never Get Better
So, I will be honest, I am currently in a very dark place (my parents haven’t paid the electricity bill and I ate our entire supply of candles because they smelled like Jaffa cakes…Alas they did not taste like Jaffa cakes and I am still picking wax out of my teeth. Life lesson: do not eat scented candles).
Seriously though, mentally, things with me are pretty terrible and I am on the brink of giving up entirely. I am losing hope in the idea that one day things will be better, and recently I have noticed a lot of friends or people online with mental health problems feeling the same.
I think that there have been times in my life where I have just assumed that I am going to get better, just as you grow up assuming you will naturally fall into the stereotypical life of getting married and having a few kids. When I was younger I was always watching Disney films, and when it comes to Cinderella or Snow White, there is never any doubt as to how things are going to end. When you watch Cinderella you don’t sit around worrying that she will be stuck sweeping floorboards for the rest of her life, you know straight away that the girl is going to go to the ball in a big ole pumpkin and that her poor choice of ill fitting footwear is going to result in her marrying the man of her dreams. Naturally then, I assumed that one day I would lose a shoe and automatically fall in love with and marry some Prince Charming, without realising that my mother would never allow me to buy footwear I hadn’t tried on to ensure a perfect fit, or that I was a queer little thing who wasn’t interested in princes no matter how “charming” they may be.
Similarly with mental health problems, I guess I have always assumed that somehow, no matter what happens, one day there will be a fairy godmother with a magic wand and things will get better. I do not know how or when, but I simply couldn’t get my head round the idea that this could be it, that recovery isn’t as automatic and as assumed as I imagined princes to be, that sometimes, people spend their lives as tortured mentally ill souls with no happy ending.
Thinking like this, if I am going be in this state forever, it is easy to ask myself why not just end it now? Why draw it out? Why not rip the plaster off quickly as it were. It sounds incredibly bleak, but mental health problems are incredibly bleak and I am not going to sugar coat them to insinuate otherwise. Recently I have been having suicidal thoughts every minute of everyday, and when you don’t think you are ever going to get better, it is hard to come up with a good argument to fight them.
Like I said, I am not alone in feeling this, and I have had many conversations with fellow mental health warriors who have lost hope, who don’t think there is any chance of them getting better so why carry on? Maybe you yourself reading this have resigned yourself to the fact that you are a terminal case, perhaps because a professional has given you the label of “chronic” or simply because the weight of your struggles is so heavy that trying to imagine life without them is akin to trying to imagine a penguin without the adorablessness which, as we all know, is impossible (if anyone wants to debate this issue feel free to contact my solicitor and I will happily see you in court).
There is however one thing that I do find comforting, even when I fully believe that I will be like this forever, one argument against the suicidal screaming in my head telling me to jump into oblivion and end the debates/suffering once and for all, an argument that funnily enough, comes in the form of basic mathematics (don’t panic, I hate maths too but this is cool maths I promise and you don’t even need a protractor or a calculator to join in).
If you hark back to your maths lessons at school, you may remember the point where you started learning about things like probability. The lessons get more complex as each year passes, but in the early days of primary school education, the grand complexities of probability and chance are usually explained via some kind of analogy involving a bag filled with balls, for as we all know, in later life it is an incredibly common experience to be confronted with a bag of balls and the need to calculate your chances of picking out a specific kind of ball.
In the lesson, it is likely that the teacher produced a bag to explain things, and would say something like “there are ten balls in the bag, five green, five purple” before waffling on a bit about how if you put your hand in the bag there is an equal chance that the ball you pull out will be purple as there is for it to be green. Then the teacher usually complicated matters (don’t they always), and added say ten more purple balls to the bag. This would then make the chances of picking out a green ball less than they had been previously, and you will spend the next twenty minutes of that lesson calculating chance and ratios surrounding various combinations of coloured balls in a bag.
Now for the purpose of this discussion lets scrap the balls and replace it with a bag of Smarties because let’s be honest, we are not in some official school right now, we can do what we want in this maths lesson and if we want Smarties instead of balls we will damn well have them (I told you this maths would be fun…THERE ARE SMARTIES INVOLVED).
So, picture life as a bag filled with millions upon millions of Smarties (it is a really really big bag and these are really small Smarties).
All the Smarties in this bag are pink. Except for one. One of the Smarties hidden somewhere in that bag is blue. That blue Smartie is the chance of you getting better in a world of pink Smarties telling you that that isn’t going to happen. If you put your hand in the bag you may very well be right, you may get a pink Smartie and be mentally ill and miserable forever. In your mind the chances of you getting better are as rare as that blue Smartie, but the key thing is, as long as you are alive, that blue Smartie is still there, and the only way to guarantee 100% your belief or the professionals’ belief that you will never recover and are going to be miserable forever, is for you to end it all now.
When I have days that are plagued by suicidal thoughts so loud I can barely breathe because I don’t think things will ever be better, I always remind myself that the only way to make sure they don’t get better, is to listen to those thoughts. Killing yourself is basically like pouring all of your Smarties into the ocean so that the colour washes off and they all become white Smarties with that blue Smartie existing only in the realms of myths and legend. If you hang in there, aka you keep plunging your hand into that massive bag, there are no guarantees of you getting better, but by keeping yourself alive, at least you are keeping that chance alive too, however small and insignificant that chance may be.
Now like I said, I am going to be honest in this blog, because if you are someone who reads this blog, then I consider you as a friend and friends tell the truth so I refuse to sugar coat any of this (the only sugar coated contents of this blog are the Smarties).
If you are in a dark place like me right now, and have spent the day contemplating your demise, I am not here to tell you that if you keep fighting through this rubbish it will all work out in the end. I am not a fortune teller, I do not have a crystal ball, and the only conclusion I have ever gleaned from reading tea leaves is that I seem to have run out of tea. If you keep yourself alive and keep fighting maybe you are right, maybe things will stay rubbish and maybe you will keep plunging your hand into that bag and pulling out the pink Smarties. However, no matter how hopeless you feel, if you keep yourself alive, the chance that the blue Smartie will crop up is there. I cannot tell you the probability/ratio of how likely you are to get better, but you must always remember that if you are trying, there is at least a chance. Don’t allow the fear of being mentally ill forever, convince you to do the one thing that ironically does nothing but solidify that conclusion.
Fight back, keep trying, keep safe, and even in the darkest days, no matter what, you have to believe in that blue Smartie.
Take care everyone x
Why Praise Makes Me Panic
Whenever I am praised for something people think I have done well, I panic. Even if the Queen of England herself (Hi Elizabeth if you are reading), were to turn up on my doorstep with a party popper and a handful of corgi shaped confetti to congratulate me on achieving something, I would probably have started hyperventilating before a single streamer had hit the floor. Contrary to popular belief, this is not because I have a fear of brightly coloured canine shaped bits of paper flying through the air, but because any positive feedback from anyone feels like a terrible mistake.
Take my A-level results day for example. It was 2011 and was around the time everyone started rioting around England…remember that?..Not that they were rioting about my A-level results…I am just setting the scene…
Anyway, after months of stress and exams, I was handed the envelope that would tell me whether or not all my hard work had paid off. Upon reading the string of letters on the page presented to me, I was a little relieved. I had got the grades I needed to get to university so I thought I had no need for any immediate worry. That was until I turned the corner and bumped into some of my teachers who were all hovering around the corridors.
As I passed, each one turned to me, all of them smiling, all holding their arms out to offer a hug, and with a sinister sparkle of pride in their eyes, they all muttered those immortal words to me…”Well done”. Good lord, just the memory sends tingles of terror to my very core! Stephen King himself is incapable of inspiring such fright with so few words! Grab me a cushion to hide behind and for the love of God someone take me home!
Don’t get me wrong, if I honestly believed that I had done well I would appreciate being congratulated, but in my head I am incapable of doing anything well, so any statement suggesting the contrary is terribly confusing and thus makes me panic. People were looking at my grades and calling me clever, yet inside I knew I wasn’t clever in the slightest. I felt that any of the marks I achieved must have been down to luck.
Maybe I had a really generous person grading my paper? Maybe they made a mistake and added the total up wrong, or maybe I hadn’t taken the exam at all, had dreamt the whole thing and someone else put glasses on and took the test for me? Part of me even worried if I had somehow smuggled a textbook into the exam hall and cheated without knowing it. I wanted to cry out to all the teachers and tell them the truth, tell them that I wasn’t really clever or capable of those grades and was in fact a fraud with a lot of luck and possibly a lookalike somewhere who was the one really in need of praise for the success.
It was like in movies when someone whips out a gun and the person at whom the gun is being aimed throws up their hands and says “You’ve got the wrong guy!”. That is how I feel every single time I am told that I have “done well”, only with me it is when people start aiming trophies at me rather than a gun. I would probably react the same way if I was ever aimed at with a gun too to be fair, but thankfully I haven’t had the experience to confirm this hypothesis (neither do I want to thank you very much.)
Again I don’t want this to come across as the idea that I panic because I don’t want people to think good things of me. Even if people are mistaken I have no problem in being thought to be good at something. My teachers could have followed me around for the rest of the day with a brass band trumpeting my success if they wanted (for some reason they didn’t want. I blame the recession). No, what I fear is the consequences of someone holding that belief and the weight of expectation that goes alongside it. If you do well in education, sport or anything else that can be ranked competitively, you are branded as good at that sport or subject and are therefore expected to perform well the next time, which might not be possible. That is what I fear.
I fear that people will mistake any success I have in life for talent and that they will then expect me to carry on performing at whatever level, when in reality I am incapable of doing anything well and doomed to let them down.
I don’t fear them thinking well of me, I fear the inevitable disappointment when they realise they are wrong, the chance of being discovered as a fraud and made to stand up in court to defend myself against a judge with a hammer and a silly little wig. It is a problem I even struggle with on my blog, as if anyone gives me a nice comment about a post I am initially thrilled, yet at the same time worried that I have misled people into thinking I can write. After every good comment I wonder what the hell I am going to do and how I am ever going to write another post without exposing myself as an imposter.
The other day however, I was so fed up with feeling like this, scared that I was genuinely crazy or just ungrateful when people are nice to me, that I decided to google it to see if anyone else felt like this. They say you shouldn’t google something you think might be wrong with you because if you type in “I have a headache” the internet will automatically diagnose you with some horrendous disease/convince you that you somehow have a badger lodged into your temple which is causing all the pain, but this time I have to say that I am glad I did google this because it has made me feel so much better.
It turns out that this whole feeling like a fraud when praised is an actual thing, and was named as “imposter syndrome” by some clinical psychologists in 1978. Upon this discovery I set about scouring the internet on a grand research quest for knowledge (by which I mean I read some articles on Wikipedia), and it turns out that a lot of people feel like this! Apparently two in five people struggle with it, and though not a mental illness itself, more a psychological phenomenon, it is one that can in turn lead to genuine mental health problems like anxiety and depression. Therefore, knowing that others experienced this problem too, I looked to see if there was a solution or way for people to manage this “imposter syndrome”, and there is! According to some professional psychologist people out there, the main problem is that people who experience imposter syndrome are unaware that others feel inadequate in their achievements as well. However, “once the situation is addressed, victims no longer feel alone in their negative experience”, so talking about it openly with likeminded people is a key to “overcoming this burden”.
Basically then, what I learnt is that a lot of people feel the way I feel, that any success is luck and that they are a fraud undeserving of real praise, and the only way to deal with it is to talk about it. Upon my discovery I immediately wanted to grab a megaphone, climb to the tallest tower in all the land and shout this message to all the other people out there who feel like a fraud, in order to let them know that they are not alone in hopes that it might help. Unfortunately though, I was unable to find a megaphone and there aren’t many tall towers about where I live, so I thought it might be better if I wrote a blog about it instead, which funnily is the blog you are reading now. WHAT A COINCIDENCE.
Therefore I wanted to use this as an opportunity to write a message to anyone out there who has related to this in any way whatsoever, to let them know that feeling this “imposter syndrome” way doesn’t make you weird. More importantly though, the fact that a lot of people feel like it suggests that if you feel that everything you achieve is luck, you are probably wrong.
Ok, luck has it’s part to play in life and the opportunities available at a certain time, but “luck”, by definition isn’t a thing that happens all the time to everyone in every second of every day. The thing that makes finding a “lucky” four leaf clover so exciting is that doing so is rare, and that is what “luck” is about. It isn’t about a common occurrence in the general mundanity of day to day life, it is about those special unlikely moments that pop up infrequently and out of the blue. You cannot put everything good that you have ever achieved down to luck because it just doesn’t make any sense, and if a lot of people feel this way then we can’t all be this lucky, nor can we all be imposters.I know that people out there will probably read this and think the classic “I am the exception, I really am an imposter” but the truth is you are wrong. If we were all imposters and frauds where the hell would all the real people on whom we are basing ourselves be? Either way, the fact that this imposter syndrome is a common experience has made me feel a little less alone, so I have written this in the hopes that someone who also struggles with it will read this and experience the same reassurance I did on Wikipedia. None of you out there are “freaks” or “ungrateful” for struggling with praise, it happens to a lot of people, and hey, if we are all freaks together, then I feel I am in some damn good company. Well done us!
Take care everyone x
Why We Need To Keep Talking About Mental Health
Tomorrow is a very special day for this blog that you are oh so kindly reading in this moment (cheers for that), for tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of Born Without Marbles being “a thing” on the internet as opposed to an idea in my head that I was too scared to carry out.
That means that I have been harping on about mental health, whether you have liked it or not, for an entire year, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people out there wondering why on earth I am still waffling on about illnesses that the majority of the population are well aware of by now.
Ok the general public may have misconceived ideas and perceptions as to what an illness may really be like, but everyone has a rough idea these days as to what things like OCD and Anorexia actually are, so why am I still talking about these things and why do I plan on continuing to talk about these things for the foreseeable future? Newton isn’t still harping on about the time that apple fell on his head (partly because Gravity is old news that doesn’t own the headlines these days and partly because he died in 1726 which somewhat limits his abilities to “harp on”), so why do I keep talking about what it is like to be mentally ill when the existence of mental illnesses is no longer breaking news. Well friends, whether you have been here from the beginning or whether this is your first experience of Born Without Marbles (Welcome. Please excuse the penguins I have left lying around in each post. They are kind of important), today I am going to answer that question and tell you why, even after a year of weekly waffling, I still feel that we all need to keep talking about mental health.
Of course there are all the obvious things like the fact that the more we talk about mental illness, the more research there will be and in turn the more likely we are to find a cure. To explain why I personally have such a passion for the subject however, I need to take you back to 2003, and, more specifically, eleven year old Katie (to set the scene I looked exactly the same as I do now only shorter).
As the name of this blog suggests, I can see that I have shown signs of mental illness from the moment I was born, but it was in 2003 that things really began to become a problem, that I became afraid and ashamed for the first time of the thoughts going on in my head. It was the first time that I didn’t feel normal, and feared that I was different from everyone else.
Every day at school I would watch other pupils in awe. I would see them eating school dinners, opening doors and shaking hands with each other as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and I would wonder how on earth they did it all. For some reason when I tried to open a door, I would find myself frozen in fear, unable to touch the handle as if someone was holding my arms behind my back. When I was in the queue for school dinners, my head was screaming at me to run away because I wasn’t allowed to eat, and no matter how hard I tried to concentrate in lessons about ox bow lakes, all I could see in my mind were images of terrible things happening to all the people I loved, and hear threats that the only way to stop those things happening was to repeat some kind of ritual. This would have been rubbish enough, but the worst bit was that I had no idea what this meant or why this was happening. I thought long and hard, trying to come up with an explanation but the whole thing made very little sense to me. What was so scary about the germs on a door handle when I had evidence all around me showing that nothing bad was happening to people “contaminated” with them? Why couldn’t I go to lunch, even on pasta days? Logically I knew that I loved pasta (pasta is flipping awesome), so why did the idea of eating a steaming bowlful topped with as much cheese as I could get away with before a disapproving dinner lady grasped my cheddar filled palm, scare me so much?
These things went on for months, and I said nothing to anyone because I was too afraid. Maybe mental health wasn’t as widely discussed in 2003 or maybe I was just unaware of what mental illnesses were, but I had never heard of anyone experiencing these things so I kept silent and hoped they would go away. Spoiler alert: they didn’t. Of all the awkward situations I found myself in however, there is one in particular that sticks in my mind and one that continues to motivate me and my dedication to this blog today.
“It” happened at the end of a music lesson. Now, in my school, music was taught in a separate building to all others, ditto art, drama, and DT who all had their own individual buildings (something tells me the staff members of the more creative subjects did not get on well…this explanation of the separate buildings certainly correlates with the time I saw the head of drama pelting the art teacher’s studio with water balloons anyway…)
On the day in which our story occurred, our class had been taken to a room on the top floor of the music building where there were a lot of computers and keyboards set up for us to spend a few hours learning how to play the theme tune from Titanic (a vital part to any eleven year old’s education). Then, the lesson ended and we were dismissed, a fact that meant we were going to have to leave the room and therefore, someone was going to have to open the door. Usually I was very good at avoiding such a responsibility, and at the end of every lesson I would fumble around with my bag until someone else had done the job so that I could scoot on after them without touching anything. This technique worked perfectly for every lesson, but today, for some reason, the teacher wanted us to lead out in single file from the nearest computer to the door. I think maybe someone had been messing about with a keyboard, playing Celine Dion’s soundtrack with a little too much gusto, so in the exit of the classroom, the teacher wanted to establish some serious authority. I felt sick. I was at the computer nearest the door. I was to be the first to leave, I was to lead my fellow students to freedom. I was to open the door. When I saw that it was a push door then, I was thrilled. Happily I nudged the door with my foot and led my classmates out, but the relief was short lived as I realised we were headed for another door, a pull one with a handle…AND AN EXIT CODE KEYPAD.
I thought about pausing in the corridor to let someone overtake but the corridor was too narrow, it was single file, there was no escape, and as I walked down the stair case to the door I genuinely felt like I was walking to the gallows. This was it. I was going to have to touch a door handle, and it was going to be the end of the world. When I reached the door I stopped. The time had come to raise my hand, but I couldn’t move. Instead, I just found myself stuck, panic building as the queue of students eager to go home started forming behind me. Luckily everyone was talking about the day too much to notice my embarrassing situation at first, but after a few minutes of standing in a line waiting, understandably, people started wondering what the hell was going on, and from the back of the line I heard a voice ask perfectly reasonably “is there something wrong with the door?” From then it went silent and all I could hear was the response in my head of “no actually, there is nothing wrong with the door, there is something wrong with me and I have no idea what it is”.
Eventually, after what felt like 34 years, the person behind me became impatient, reached around and opened the door, and from there I ran sobbing to the medical centre with shame, fear and embarrassment. I didn’t want to see anyone ever again, I had to hide, so I decided to take refuge in the sanitarium. When the nurse asked me what was wrong, I lied and told her that I had a tummy ache. I spent the rest of the day curled up on the sofa with a hot wheat bag watching episodes of the Simpsons, feeling more alone than I knew it was possible to feel. There were hundreds of other pupils in the school, but for some reason I was different, I couldn’t open doors or eat meals like they appeared to, and there was nobody, least of all me, who understood why.
It is for that Katie sitting on that sofa with that smelly hot wheat bag that I started this blog, and it is for all the smelly hot wheat bag holding people out there pretending to be fine, pretending to have tummy aches to cover up the fact they are terrified of their own minds and too scared to speak out for fear that other people won’t believe them, that I write this blog. Had I heard about mental health problems sooner, maybe I would have asked for support sooner, but what I would have found more helpful than any of the symptoms listed in the millions of health care packs, would have been the knowledge that there was at least someone out there who struggled with the same things, who let me know I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t alone. It is for that reason that, no matter how much awareness there is about the existence of mental illnesses, I will keep talking about my experiences with mental health problems in public spaces. This isn’t a blog to just give information, in my eyes, this blog is a friend, both to me, to the readers and to anyone out there who comments to say that they can relate to my problems and thus remind me once again that none of us are alone.
So happy birthday Born Without Marbles, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the support anyone reading this has ever provided. Here’s to another year, another 52 weeks of my ramblings, another 365 days of friendship.
Take care everyone x
March Loneliness Tea Party
It’s that time of the month again folks…PREPARE THE MUGS
Are People With Mental Health Problems “Really Disabled”?
If you live in the UK and follow the news when it comes to anything mental health related, you will probably be aware of a certain Tory MP named George Freeman (not the guy who made grills. That was George Forman. He was so proud of his grills that he put his name on them don’t you know). Anyway, this Freeman bloke has been in the news a lot this past week, due to his recent comments regarding the rights of people with mental health problems claiming benefits.
Initially I wasn’t going to make a post about this, as thankfully a lot of people were angered by what he said on the issue, and therefore there have been many posts on the internet addressing why his opinions are so misguided. Having read a few of these posts I couldn’t help but think “well I don’t need to say anything about it because at least one other person has said it for me”, but then I realised that when a crowd of voices chant the same thing, it is a hell of a lot louder than any noise made by a single individual (unless that individual is armed with a giant and extremely powerful microphone…Alas, such things are often reserved for people with power who have no idea what they are talking about…ahem…)
I also wasn’t going to post about it because since his damaging comment, our old buddy George (again, not the one with the grills), has retracted all of the nonsense he has been spouting. Maybe then I should forgive the poor chap, as clearly he regrets his statements (or just realised that everybody hated him for being such an idiot and thus backed down on opinions he was so passionate about, to avoid being glared at in the streets…I guess we will never know…).
However the damaging comments made by Mr Freeman are unfortunately not anything new, nor any revelatory belief shared by nobody else before him. They are comments that a lot of the public have probably felt and said in private themselves, it’s just those people didn’t have the microphones allowing everyone to hear. So I am writing this as much for them as it is for my buddy George (starting to wish I was referring to the other George as my buddy now…I could use a free grill.)
So what are these comments that have outraged so many and that are damaging to society’s view of those who suffer from mental health problems? Well, they are about people who are unable to work due to mental health problems claiming benefits, and how their payments should be stopped in order to save the money for the “really disabled”.
It is funny actually that this has come up at this time as it was just last week before this controversy started, that I filled out a form applying for benefits myself. For years therapists have encouraged me to fill out these forms and claim what they thought I was entitled to, yet I have always refused because even though I knew they were right, the thought of officially asking for support for being disabled made me feel incredibly guilty. I think over the years you cannot help but internalise some of the stigma lying around these days, just as if you tell someone enough times that they have a big nose they will eventually start to believe you even if their nose is the tiniest nose of all time.
Though I have always been aware of my inability to work, I have still felt an internal judgement and feel that maybe I am just being silly and that I am not “really disabled”.
A wheelchair user may not be able to open a door that is at the top of a flight of stairs because they are physically unable to walk. I however am physically able to walk up those stairs, yet still I am also unable to open that door. Physically I could, yet still, mentally, the fear is so strong that I can’t. Really the brain shouldn’t be viewed as any less “real” than your average limb as technically the organ of the brain is a physical part of the body as much as a leg is. Still I suppose it is a lot harder to remember that when it is hidden behind a thick skull and an “I am OK” mask, unlike a broken leg which is far more visible. If you can see a giant green face claiming to be the Wizard of Oz, it is infinitely easier to believe in that reality over the invisible little man controlling the illusion behind it (if your name is Dorothy at least. I saw through that Wizard all along. Dorothy was silly…and her little dog was too!).
This being the case then, my brain often being the cause of my inability to perform basic actions like feeding myself or opening doors, how is that not disabled? I don’t claim to be an expert in the English Language (although I did study english literature and I read Moby Dick which is a HUGE book with a lot of long words), but when you look at the definition of the term “disabled”, I think that it makes clear that George and those agreeing with his views do not really understand what the word means, hence their belief that someone with mental health problems is not “really disabled”. When you look it up, the dictionary states that to be disabled means to be a person who has a “physical or mental condition that limits their movements, senses or activities. So lets examine this:
1. Do I have a mental condition – Yes
2. Do these conditions limit my movements – Yes. I cannot open doors or move around in public without an aid supporting me through the anxiety, much like a wheelchair user may struggle to be mobile without their aid, aka the chair.
3. Do these conditions limit my activities – Considering I am often able to leave the house/partake in normal life, yes.
Yet according to certain MPs, I am not “really disabled”? I am sorry George, are you arguing with the dictionary? I totally support your right to free speech but are you sure you want to do that? It is a really big book (even bigger than Moby Dick), and if you start arguing with a dictionary then all the words in your argument technically lose all meaning and thus you will be making no sense…are you sure you want to do that George? Gibbering nonsense to a book would look awfully weird…people may start to think you were mentally ill!
If people without mental health problems are not “really disabled” then what are we? Just playing some sick game of dress up like I pretended to be a vet with my very own stethoscope when I was younger and made it my business to treat all of my teddy bears (rest assured, I may have been pretending then but I was very skilled and all my patients made full recoveries).
Tell me then, if I am unable to leave the house or touch things in public and spend most of my time fighting demons, a pastime that leaves me utterly exhausted and often a bit soggy with tears, what job would you recommend I try? What job would I be able to do effectively on the days that I am so depressed and suicidal that I cannot leave my house let alone contribute to society? Any ideas? The only job I could think of would be that of performer in a freak show, where people could come to my house and pay to see the hysterical sobbing mess in the corner who is so deluded they fear eating with a knife or fork. Is that what you want? (Even if that is the plan I would still need benefits anyway…If I have to be in a freak show I at least need a sequinned leotard. THOSE THINGS DON’T COME CHEAP FREEMAN.)
In a way, I suppose George being so vocal with his misguided opinions could turn out to be a good thing. Like I said, I am sure that he is by no means the only person who feels this way about people with mental health problems receiving benefits, and by speaking out about it, it has given us crazy folk an opportunity to respond publicly and tackle the stigma that before now has existed only in people’s homes behind closed doors. People make these statements all the time and are never challenged, yet now the words are out in the open, we have a public platform on which we can talk back and educate those who may not understand how debilitating mental health problems can be. Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to do good.
So here I am, standing on my public internet platform speaking into my megaphone as someone with mental health problems and for others with mental health problems. To Mr Freeman and all of his supporters, I have one thing to say.
*STEPS UP TO MEGAPHONE*
“As sufferers of mental health problems, I will admit that our disabilities may be invisible, but our struggles are real. The pain in our heads is real. Nobody is pretending, nobody is playing games and we honestly are, “really disabled”.
*DROPS MEGAPHONE AND STORMS OFF PUBLIC PLATFORM LIKE A BOSS*
Take care everyone x
My New Diagnosis
For well over a decade, and since my very first therapy session many moons ago, (aka JUST after the dinosaurs died out and at the time when there were Tyrannosaurus Rex bones still lying about EVERYWHERE after that rather inconvenient meteor), therapists and psychologists across the country have always said that there is “something” wrong with me. Obviously they have always known about my OCD, Eating Disorder and Depression, yet still many have insisted that there is “something else” lurking within me and playing general havoc with my brain.
I have always found this “something wrong” that nobody can put their finger on, (or any body part for that matter), to be rather confusing.
When I was 15 the it was banded about that this “thing” might be bipolar disorder, but after trial and error with a few medications, that suggestion was tidied away as well as all the others and I have tried my best to forget about it. I was doing pretty well with this forgetting thing in my opinion (I had placed the “there is something wrong with you that we do not understand” memory alongside Pythagorus’ theorem in the box of “things I no longer need to know after the age of 16”), but then my forgetting box was rudely ripped open again very recently.
If you have been following this blog for a while you may remember that I had an assessment with a new OCD service in October of last year, a three hour interrogation examining all of my mental health problems and experiences of the world throughout my life. I mentioned nothing of any extra “bonus” diagnosis that nobody was sure of, so for this reason I was surprised when the psychologist I was speaking to randomly asked if I had any other diagnoses, as yet again I was showing signs of this “something else”, that something possibly being a “personality disorder”. I didn’t mention this when I had the assessment all those months ago because I imagined it would go away like all those other conversations of mysterious mental health problems in the past.
When I was told that the OCD service may not be able to facilitate my care if I had a personality disorder and I may need to see another service first however, I was unable to forget it again and became increasingly frustrated. Here I was potentially having issues with receiving treatment because of a mysterious something that I wasn’t even diagnosed with, and it was at that point that I knew I needed answers.
Like I said in my “why I like being diagnosed with mental health problems” blog post a few weeks ago, I like having the labels and diagnoses of my conditions in black and white because it helps me to deal with them and means I know what enemy I should be fighting. If you want a full understanding of why I like being diagnosed with (NOT HAVING) mental health problems, then I fully recommend checking that post out before this one (Why I Like Being Diagnosed With Mental Health Problems – it really is a great read. Trust me it involves a picture of a monkey banging a gong and singing Bohemian Rhapsody), but as a brief summary for all those with an aversion to classic song performing primates, my argument was that I like being diagnosed with mental health problems because it is only when you name a problem and pin it down that you can figure out how to overcome it. It is useless for a person working in a garage to simply say “there is something wrong with your car” because then they can’t fix it. They need to specifically identify the issue that there is a gaping hole in the front tyre, as only when they know that, do they know where they start tinkering and what equipment they will need.
Consequently, after my OCD assessment, I went to each of the three therapists I see in turn and asked them to tell me if there was something wrong and if so, what the hell it was. I can’t remember who first brought it up, but rather quickly a condition (we will call it Penguin condition for the time being), was suggested as the answer to all the questions I have had over the years. From that suggestion I had many appointments discussing the condition and as instructed, I researched it, learnt about it, and I watched a DVD given to me by a therapist, of various people being interviewed about their experience of Penguin condition.
Of course I didn’t relate to every single person on the DVD nor did I agree with some of the explanations of Penguin condition online, but on the whole, when learning about it, something clicked. As I heard people talking about what it was like I was astonished to hear them basically describing things I do/have experienced in life, and although scared and not eager to add a new diagnosis to my list, I was at least a little relieved. Finally I wasn’t just “weird”, I had Penguin condition and maybe if I started dealing with it, things would improve across the board. Perhaps the underlying issue of Penguin condition was the reason for the OCD and eating disorder, perhaps none of the treatment has cured me yet because we were actually treating the wrong parts first, like trying to eat the chunks of brownie at the bottom of a sundae glass before you have tackled the ice cream piled on top of it (ALWAYS SAVE THE BROWNIE BITS FOR LAST. ALWAYS. THAT IS THE RULE. ICE CREAM FIRST, BROWNIES LATER).
For this reason I became eager for the diagnosis to be put in place so that I could finally know where I stood. As well as answering my need for answers I also wanted it made official so that future therapists or medical professionals would know the full story if ever reading my notes, without me having to always add into new introductions the explanatory “I know you have read my notes but just so you know Penguin disorder is also on there but it is not written down”. I wanted it in black and white to be neat, to be clear, and partly because when things are in black and white, they look a little more like a penguin without the beak.
Then, a few weeks ago, I had a session with my psychiatrist and it was decided that we would make it official and the diagnosis would go on my records. At first I was relieved, but then he started to warn me about the consequences of it being made official. Suddenly I wanted to forget all about it and fall back into blissful ignorance again.
Apparently this condition is one with a lot of stigma to it, stigma that can lead to some therapists refusing to see you if you have the diagnosis. This wasn’t really a problem for me. If a therapist isn’t going to see me because I have a certain mental health problem then clearly they aren’t a good therapist or a person that I want to associate with anyway, but the constant reinforcement of judgement that could potentially befall me freaked me out a bit. I am not ashamed of having mental health problems, I talk about them openly on the internet for this reason and to hopefully help others be less ashamed about their disorders, yet with Penguin condition I really was rather scared and embarressed. My psychiatrist said he could treat me for the condition and just not put it on my notes if I would prefer, yet as easy as that would be, I still felt uncomfortable. Yes I wouldn’t have the “shame” of being diagnosed with a condition that faces a lot of stigma, but on some level I would also be admitting that there was shame in the condition and that I should keep it on the down low which is not how I feel about any other mental health problem I have. I am a firm believer that if you have a problem, keeping it on the down low is only going to make it worse and will not raise any of the positive awareness that could potentially be spread with honesty. Nevertheless I am a little afraid, and so for now it is on my notes as “under revision” incase I change my mind by the next appointment and want it removed (apparently without the under revision bit this is something that once on your records, will not come off no matter how much scrubbing or Cilit Bang you apply. Bang and the dirt is gone? Yeah, but the disorder will still be there!).
I have a few days until my next appointment now, and by that next session I have to decide whether or not I want to specify that mysterious something wrong or just sweep it under the carpet again. As well as debating whether to let it on my medical notes I have been debating whether or not to bring it up or “come out” with it in my blog. Again, my initial reaction was no. Even my mum agreed that it might not be the best idea. If you google the condition or do any surface level research on it, people with this disorder are painted as crazed monsters who are unbearable to be around. Reading the articles even I admit that I started to think that I would never want anything to do with someone suffering from the condition, and that was when I made my decision to get over my fear, come clean and talk about it on my blog like I talk about everything else, regardless of whether anyone else is interested. If everyone thinks people with Penguin condition are dangerously insane, then I want to talk about it and I want to raise awareness of the fact that that is not the case and what the people with it are really like. As you can see I am still scared of saying it on here (hence the code name Penguin condition), as I do fear the judgement, but they say feel the fear and do it anyway, so here it goes.
My most recent mental heath update then? After all that waffle what has happened? Well dear friend, I have been diagnosed with Borderline Personality disorder. I am still exactly the same blogger you have been following for however long you have been, with exactly the same issues. It’s just that one of the hidden ones now has a name (sort of like when some women on TV seem to name one of their boobs…it is something that has always been there only now it can be addressed formally in a letter or serious conversation). As you can see this post is long enough as it is so I won’t go into what that means and what myths need debunking here, but for now I feel like telling you is a big enough step. (That said I know many people do not know what this disorder is or have many misconceptions so, before I can provide an explanation of my personal experience I have linked a PDF below from the charity “Mind” which I feel is the best and least stigmatised description around, so if you want to learn more, dear god please go there rather than to a general google search).
Maybe I will delete this post before I upload it but I hope I don’t, and if you are reading it then I guess I have been brave. Nobody should be ashamed of their mental health problems, and I for one am going to live by that, even if doing so is something that scares me right now.
Take care everyone x
The “Lental Health Challenge”
Are you brave enough to accept…THE LENTAL HEALTH CHALLENGE?! Come on…I dare you…LET’S KICK MENTAL HEALTH BOOTY!
The Difficulty Of Losing A Therapist
Over the past few weeks, I feel that I have been going through what is commonly referred to as “a break up”, one of those horrible experiences that, in popular culture, is often portrayed as a situation that can only be remedied by much crying into tissues and several tubs of ice cream. Now I know what you are thinking, “but Katie, how can you be going through a break up when you yourself admitted the day before Valentine’s Day that you haven’t been in any kind of romantic relationship for over two years” (alright don’t rub it in guys…Jeez).
Well if you thought that, you would be right, no, I haven’t been in a romantic relationship for a very long time (aside from the one I am in wth Helena Bonham Carter that she isn’t aware of…yet), but in the world of mental health there is a common experience that is very like a break up, that being the loss of a therapist.
Now, before I go on I would like to preface this by saying that I do not mean for this to imply that I am caught up in any romantic entanglements with the therapist I am referring to and who is currently in the process of “leaving me” for a new job.
Indeed our relationship is very much the standard “patient/psychologist” affair (perhaps affair wasn’t the best choice of word there…). However, what I don’t think a lot of people understand is just how attached one can get to a person who only hangs out with you every week because they are paid to do so.
It a very odd situation, and whenever a therapist leaves I feel I should deal with it easily, without being particularly bothered. This is after all not a new experience for me, as I have literally lost count of the number of therapists that have left me over the years, (seriously if you rounded them all up you would have more than enough of a cast to put on a performance of Les Miserables and trust me, from someone with a theatre background, you need a lot of people to perform that show). That said I know a lot of people find this a very difficult thing to go through, and rather than it mean we are clingy or weird, I think it makes a lot of sense.
Yes, a relationship with a therapist is strictly professional and should, on paper, be the equivalent relationship to someone you have hired to be your private chef (who is paid for by the NHS because you are mentally unable to sustain yourself alone….I need to work on my analogies…)
The chef turns up at your house because it is their job just like my therapist turns up for our appointments, but when you are talking about your deepest darkest secrets and fears rather than how you like your eggs cooked, it can’t help but become more personal whether you intend it to or not.
In every other professional relationship you have with someone who is being paid to spend time with you, like a chef or a plasterer in your house, the reason for their being there is in reference to something separate, aka food or dodgy walls. With a therapist though, unsurprisingly, a lot of it is about talking about your life. How can that not be personal?
Ok other professional relationships have personal aspects to them as well, a private chef for example may eventually grow to know how much milk you like in your cup of tea without asking every time, yet with a therapist there grows a level of intuition that is less about knowing how you like your tea and more about being able to simply look at your face and know automatically that it is time to put the kettle on (although I would like to clarify that my therapist has never actually made me a cup of tea at all…if you are reading this dear therapist, maybe work on that in your new job). It is that deep connection of being understood as a person, and for that reason of course it can be like a relationship break up when a therapist retires or leaves to get a new job.
Again, of course I am not saying that it is in any way romantic and unlike romantic relationship endings we are not going to be left wondering who gets custody of the kids (we already decided in our first session that I get them Monday to Friday and then she has them over the weekend). Nevertheless I am left wondering what I will do without this person who is currently a big part of my life.
When you see a therapist for a long period of time, discussing your mental health problems/building a therapeutic relationship is sort of like building a house. In the beginning you have an empty plot of land and the patient has a hell of a lot of bricks (bricks that in terms of this analogy represent secrets/thoughts/things that make you as a person). The patient is standing in the middle of this messy pile of bricks without any idea of how to deal with it, so the therapist is there as a sort of builder/tidier to help sort it all out. Every week you both turn up at this plot of land and gradually, the patient hands the bricks individually to the builder. Together you try to construct something that is a little less of a mess, and a little more something you can work in. The more you talk, the more bricks that come out, and eventually the house is finished at which point you can go inside and start trying to make the place liveable. You try things out, experiment with fuchsia walls, checkered wall paper or new therapies and you see what works for you.
Then finally you get to the point where you can both walk into the house (aka brain), and know the insides and outs of it so well that one of you can reference something within the house and the other will know exactly what they are talking about. Refer to the “plant thing in the bathroom” and they know what that plant thing is as well as when in your life you bought it and why it is in the house, just as a therapist will eventually grow to know all about the way your mind works as well as any life events you simply reference to as “that time with the giant squid”. If anyone else comes in the house and you reference the plant thing, they don’t understand exactly what you are talking about. Even if you take them to the room to point it out they cannot have the same level of understanding as the person who helped you build the bathroom in that particular way and find that particular plant at the gardening centre. You can tell a new therapist about what happened during “that time with the giant squid”, but to them it will just be a story rather than an experience you have lived through together.
Getting a new therapist then is not as simple as the professional transition involved when you get a new plasterer for example (I have just realised there are a hell of a lot of interior design analogies in here which I think is in reference to my love of 90’s TV show Changing Rooms. I miss Carol Smiley. Where did she go. She was so Smiley). No, instead of a new therapist coming in to help you in the house you had made earlier, it is like having to smash all of that “brain internal understanding relationship” stuff to the ground and having to start again. Once again you need to start passing them all the individual bricks they have never seen before, so you actually have a long time of simply building up enough of a rapport/understanding before you can get on with any of the serious stuff.
Like the end of any romantic relationship you find yourself wondering if you will ever find someone you will get on as well with or who will understand the way you work in the same way, and the first sessions with a new therapist are very much like all the first dates you have to go on to try and find a new partner. Conversations go from deep personal investigations into the meaning of life to the cookie cutter “so what is your job”, “where do you live” standard statements that you have to go through before you can get to anything of real interest or value.
Unlike a first date of course, a new therapist will probably have all of your notes from the previous one and thus a rough knowledge of your history, but nevertheless, with or without these notes they will always say that they want to hear about your history “from you”. Admittedly this is a good idea. Obviously I can explain something that happened to me when I was eleven better than a therapist was able to jot down in a word document, but having to go through all that stuff is exhausting. Maybe if you don’t have a huge mental health history this “tell me about you” question can be answered relatively quickly, yet for me it is a question that is incredibly daunting. Tell me about your experiences with mental health services?! How can I do that? We have nearly 14 years of appointments to catch up on! I can’t get through all that in one hour!? DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW EXPENSIVE HOSPITAL PARKING IS?
This entire blog is probably just one long incoherent ramble so half of you reading will be probably wondering what the hell I am talking about and who the hell Carol Smiley is. I guess I just wanted to raise some awareness of how difficult it is when a member of your therapy team has to change and why it feels so much more impactful than a change in any other strictly professional relationship. If I was ruler of the world I think I would probably make it law that therapists are unable to ever get new jobs, retire, change jobs or go on maternity leave (sounds ridiculous I know but in terms of fair/rational leadership I would still be doing a better job than Donald Trump.)
Luckily as you will know if you have been around my blog for a while, I do have a whole team of therapists so it isn’t a total break down of my psychological support and only one person is changing. I also know and like the replacement very much so it is as “good” and manageable a “break up” as it can be. Nevertheless I can’t help but feel as though in a few weeks when it is time for our last session (on the 21st of March, put that in your diary folks), I will be losing someone very important, someone who I can trust and rely on, so naturally, this isn’t going to be easy.
Take care everyone x
Valentine’s Loneliness Tea Party Date
It’s that time of the month again folks, and this time, we are going on a very special loneliness tea party date! Prepare yourself for love! Prepare yourself for romance and get ready, because I AM GOING TO WOO YOU…
Born without marbles 