Illness

My Alcohol Confession Part Two

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 28 Comments

It is currently 2am on Monday the 4th of June and this blog post is due up in a number of hours. Normally I have the blog and picture all prepared almost a week before it is due to go up, but this week I am unprepared because this week I am scared.

All week I have been trying to write yet I have been unable because I am so scared of letting something slip that I should have explained last week and therefore in holding my words back I am unable to say anything at all. You see last week in my post ….. I came clean about a new problem I have, that being the problem of me binge drinking alcohol, but what I did not mention is a consequence that has come from that binge drinking and it is that consequence that I want to talk about today.

 

I am so scared to admit it because it is something that has both been terrifying and upsetting me lately, even though it is nothing to be ashamed of. I feel like a right idiot and hypocrite for being so upset about it considering I would be the first person to tell anyone out there that what I am about to say doesn’t mean anything and doesn’t show how ill or well anyone is, but I cannot help it. 

I am shaking as I am writing this and it is so stupid because it isn’t even a big deal. I am sure all of you out there are going to be thinking that I am about to admit to murdering penguins or something as I am making it out to be such a big and terrible crime, when really it is all going to be incredibly disappointing when I actually get round to spitting it out. Oh God I am practically going delirious with fear and I can’t believe I am actually going to come out with it. Ok, shut up Katie, just get round to the point.

So here goes, here is my confession: I am a healthy weight. 

OH MY GOODNESS! I CANNOT BELIEVE I ADMITTED IT! WHY IS THIS SO HARD, GAH, WHY.

I have just read back all that I have written and good lord it is the biggest amount of codswallop I have ever read. What am I even doing? What is going on? 

Right, time to explain. So like I said last week, I have started binge drinking and I have been binge drinking every day for almost two months now, pretty much ever since my suicide attempt. When I started I was extremely underweight and you all probably think that that is still the case, but in actual fact it is not. You see, before I started binge drinking, I was barely eating anything, but then I got drunk for the first time and in my drunken stupor I started eating. I have heard of other people with eating disorders turning to drink and from several people I have heard that they tend to replace food with alcohol when this happens, but this is not how it has happened with me. You see when I get drunk, I get happy and I don’t care about anything and consequently I eat and that is what I have done for the past two months. “You have eaten food” I hear you cry “what kind of a confession is that?” But when I say I have eaten food I mean I have eaten out of control, drunken quantities of food and because of this I have gained a lot of weight. I don’t want to admit this because I am extremely ashamed but I have gone from being very underweight to being a healthy weight in two months. It has been extremely traumatic and what’s worse is that I cannot seem to stop. Weeks ago I said that I was going to stop drinking so that I could lose all the weight, but I still haven’t managed to do that and so the weight is piling on. Even worse than that is it is all a vicious circle. You see one thing I didn’t mention last week was one of the big reasons why I drink and that reason is that it helps me deal with all this new unexpected and extremely painful weight gain. Problem is, I drink to make myself feel better about the weight and consequently eat which makes me gain more weight, hence this most vicious of vicious circles that I am stuck in. It is like a massive whirlpool from Moby Dick (in actual fact there is no whirlpool in Moby Dick but I just wanted to use this opportunity to drop in a Moby Dick reference to show off the fact that I have read that massive book).

I have decided that from the day I put up this blog I am going to have a new start, no alcohol and I am going to try and lose this weight again because like I said it is making my eating disorder scream louder and making me want to drink alcohol more which I really need to give up. In the interests of losing all this weight again I have joined a gym and come up with a new meal plan to try and help me, but I have no idea how I am going to do it because I cannot seem to give up alcohol and I am scared. I am scared that I will never get sober and that I will gain so much weight I will get overweight .

I guess here is where I should probably take a moment to explain why I think all of this is such a big deal because in actual fact being a healthy weight is not a big deal at all as I have said multiple times. Being a healthy weight doesn’t mean I have recovered from anorexia, far from it, I am so distressed by anorexic thoughts that I have been driven to drink, and I am no less anorexic than I was two months ago, but I worry that all of you reading this will now think that I am not worthy of listening to. It is ridiculous because I would never think that of anyone else, but my brain is just such a mess. 

If anyone else were a healthy weight I would listen to them and hear them as much as anyone but I worry that all of you only read my blog because I am underweight and now I am a healthy weight I am terrified that you won’t like me anymore. Does that make sense? Gah THIS IS SO STUPID! WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? Oh purple pansies I don’t know what else to say because I am so anxious about posting this…maybe I can distract you from all of what is going on…OH MY GOODNESS LOOK A TURTLE!

GAH ok so what is the message of this post? What am I saying? Well, I have no idea and to be honest I am flip flapping all over the place, but basically what I wanted to update you on this week is the fact that I am still struggling to stop drinking alcohol since my suicide attempt and that this alcohol has made me gain a lot of weight which I now need to lose but please don’t stop listening to me because of all this because oh dear no please. Ok, now for me to run away and pray you don’t hate me. Cool…bye! 

Take care everyone x 

Fatty

A Message To Parents Of People With Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 7 Comments

In life, people like to blame people for things that happen, regardless of whether or not it was the person’s fault. If there is nobody to blame, things that happen are random and don’t make sense, so really we blame people to make the world tidy. When I was younger I lost my banana scented gel pen (it was a tough time in my life but I think I am just about getting over it), and in my head it was incomprehensible that the pen was just lost. I didn’t think at all about the fact its loss was probably the result of many little events, dropping it somewhere, someone spotting it and tidying it away, a gust of wind blowing it off a table under a chair, that was too much to think about, so instead who did I blame? My cuddly monkey, a culprit who made a lot more sense than some complex chain of events I couldn’t figure out. It was the perfect story, my cuddly monkey was clearly having jungle withdrawal symptoms living with me in Bristol, in my eyes he had heard the call of the wild and hankered after the scent of his favourite food in his homeland. I assumed he must not like the invisible bananas and cups of tea I provided (let it be known I did pretend to feed him and in my eyes this thievery was not an act of desperation out of hunger, I am not a monster who starves cuddly monkeys thank you very much), and that the taking of my pen was for nostalgic scent purposes. Obviously, my monkey did not really steal my banana pen (I am 99% sure he didn’t anyway…), and it was silly to jump to that conclusion before the idea that the pen was just lost, but like I said, people like to blame people to make the world simple. 

Unfortunately, this desire to blame often happens when someone gets diagnosed with mental health problems. After the initial surprise has worn off and people have time to really think, they always look for someone to blame. They start wondering why someone is ill, what could have caused it, and often, especially in young adults or children, the conclusion will be that it must have been something to do with the parents. Even professionals say it sometimes. My mum used to work in a school and one day a nurse came in to talk about how to spot eating disorders in pupils. One of the possible causes for eating disorders listed in her presentation was “Troubled upbringing/home life”, which naturally upset my mum and had her worrying more than usual that the past decade of madness in our household has been because she failed as a parent. To her and to all parents I therefore want to say this:

If your child has been diagnosed with mental health problems, that does not mean that it is all your fault or that you have done anything wrong. 

Your child does not have anorexia simply because you tried a lot of different diets when they were growing up. Your child does not have OCD rituals around washing because you insisted they washed their hands before meals. Your child is not depressed because you didn’t hug them enough and they don’t cut their bodies just because you didn’t give lessons in self acceptance over breakfast. Maybe you did all of those things, maybe you did none of them, but either way they are not the reason your child is ill. Many people with eating disorders grew up in houses that promoted a healthy relationship with food just as many people without eating disorders grew up in houses with parents who ran weight loss classes at the local leisure centre. The complexities of mental health problems are not as simple as A causes B, they are often frighteningly random, they don’t make sense enough to have someone to blame at all, and sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. 

Like all illnesses, mental health problems do not discriminate. Depression doesn’t go door to door and interview the parents to see how well they have brought their child up before it attacks. If depression is going to happen, it will just charge in and make itself known, it will not peer through a window, notice that you have a lovely home with a matching three piece suite and freshly plumped cushions and walk away to find someone whose mum didn’t cut the crust off their sandwiches. 

Now I will admit, upbringing can have an impact on a child’s development and mental health, if you locked your child in a basement and beat them with a wet slipper every morning, that may have played a part in their low self esteem, but generally things are not that clear cut and the reasons are so numerous and so bound up in random life nonsense anyway that you can never pin point a cause. You can list a thousand reasons why I have mental health problems, a history of mental illness in the family, certain events, loss of loved ones, broken hearts, a desire to control a world whose unpredictability frightened me, being the geek with glasses, you can say anything and even then you could not grasp the reason why, because all of those potential influences are glued together with a million invisible things that nobody will ever know or understand. It is rare that an illness can be pinned down to one thing, just as you can’t entirely blame a cancer on the fact someone smokes, when it comes to any illness, it is too complicated to be anyone’s fault. If someone watches a man on a bus stop raise his arm and stop the bus they could conclude that the stopping of the bus was caused by the arm lifting into the air. Okay it may look like that on the surface and make sense as a neat tidy story, but it takes no account whatsoever of all the other knots in that chain of events stopping the bus. For example the driver had his eyes open to see the arm, his brain recognising it as a symbol for “stop” (and hopefully not “Heil Hitler”), someone else having already pressed the button, a foot had to go on the brakes and various cogs and things in the mechanics of the bus played a part too. Blaming someone for causing a mental health problem is like blaming that man for stopping the bus without thinking of all the other things that come into play. 

If you are a parent and your offspring has mental health problems, I beg you, please do not blame yourself and assume you must have done a bad job in raising the baby you dreamed would grow up to have a perfect life, that is unlike the one you see in reality. In life, shit just happens and there is very little you can do about it. Your role as a parent is not to stop the bad things from happening, to wrap them in cotton wool so that the monsters don’t get in. Monsters do not give two hoots about cotton wool. Don’t blame yourself for things that were not your fault and that you cannot change (for even if you could blame someone, talking about whose fault something is will never resolve the situation), instead do what you can with what you have. Love and support your child even when those monsters get in and help them fight those assholes until they flee the house rather than checking the locks and wondering how the hell they got in in the first place. Nobody can raise someone to not have mental health problems and that is  not a necessary requirement of a parent. Mental illnesses suck, but nobody can stop them, your only job is to offer love and support regardless of what is going on. That is what a good parent is, so relax, if you are doing that, then you are doing everything. 

Take care everyone x

Parents

Suicide And Shame

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 14 Comments

Cabbages, sprouts, kale, broccoli, cauliflower. 

Apologies for that rather random start to a blog post, but to be perfectly honest I had no idea how to start this entry after last week’s post and after a suicide attempt it is so difficult to find the words to comprehend the world, that it seemed as fitting a way as any to start this blog by listing my top five favourite members of the Brassica oleracea plant species. 

So yeah…Hi everyone, I am back and I must say a little at a loss as to what to say. First off though I really must take this opportunity to thank you all for your support after last week’s post because I really was very worried about posting it and you were all so kind and lovely about it that it made me feel all of the warm fuzzy feelings inside (as warm as fresh bread out of the oven and as fuzzy as one of those little dogs that looks like a ball of fluff with legs, to be specific.)

Secondly, I guess I should address the elephant in the room (no not that trunked creature in the corner, Frank, he does not deserve to be addressed. He has been very badly behaved stealing cookies this morning…that is why I put him in the corner), aka the fact that last week I attempted suicide. Now I am not going to go into the details of how it happened because I do not think that is helpful and the last thing I would want to do is trigger anyone, but what I wanted to write about was the feelings that came after the attempt because all in all this experience has taught me some very interesting lessons that I think might be of use to some other people out there. 

You see, something that surprised me after this whole incident occurred is the level of shame that I felt after this whole suicide extravaganza. When I woke up in hospital and realised that all of my efforts had been in vain I felt terrible, not just physically, but mentally in terms of what I had put my family through and that is something that I doubt many people expect to feel. When you are all caught up in the moment of a suicide attempt, you cannot think about anything else. There is no logic, no rational thought, all you can think about is the big black hole swallowing you up, the level of intense pain and the desperate need to make it stop. As selfish as it may sound, you cannot think about family or friends, not because you do not care about or love them more than anything in the world, but because the pain is so loud that it drowns thoughts of anything and anyone else out. It gets to the point where the black hole is so dark that you wouldn’t notice whether or not someone turned the lights out in the room you were in because everything is already pitch black and you cannot see your hand in front of your face. The world is a blur, colours turn greyer than they are in the first ten minutes of the Wizard of Oz and sound or voices in the real world become the incoherent bumbling of voices underwater. When you wake up however and it hits you as to what has happened and you see the faces of your family there and hear their worried voices clearly for the first time, that is when the shame kicks in, and that shame only got worse as I heard the phone calls and read the texts of worried family members trying to reach out to me and my parents. It is that shame  that I wanted to raise awareness of in this post initially, because I wanted to warn anyone else who is suicidal out there of how much people care about you even when you don’t believe it possible and don’t care about yourself. 

Then again, at the same time, whilst I want to rase awareness of the shame that comes after one attempts to take one’s own life, I want to remind anyone out there that suicide attempts are in essence nothing to be ashamed of. Don’t get me wrong, they are nothing to be proud of either which is one reason as to why I nearly didn’t write about this event on my blog, but after reading your comments I have learnt that the shame that comes with suicide, though real, is not justified. That isn’t to say you can’t feel ashamed, for who am I to tell people what they should or should not feel (as if that would make a difference to those feelings that tend to creep up on you unannounced anyway). Still, feeling ashamed about a suicide attempt is very much like a person with kidney stones feeling ashamed that they have little pebbles lodged in one of their vital organs. Suicide attempts are, like physical health problems, a sign of illness and I truly believe that nobody who seriously attempts suicide ever does it by choice, rather they do it because they are driven to it through that level of pain they feel, just as a mother in labour may beg for pain relief and slap her partner across the head without really meaning it. 

Suicide is not a choice, it is a consequence of severe mental pain and it is being reminded of that by all your lovely comments last week that I wanted to spread the message of today to other people who may be out there suffering with the shame of suicide. If this is you, please know that I am so sincerely sorry that you are hurting and I do not condone your actions in any way, but I want you to know that if you’re struggling with the shame of what you have done, it is no way unusual, neither were these actions your fault. Instead they were the actions of a mental illness that is driving you crazy and in these circumstances rather than shame, the key thing is to reach out and ask for help and support to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again. I will admit, getting that help and support is a struggle (as someone who has been desperately asking for help from people for months, trust me, I know getting the help you need is no easy task) but it is that which you must do. Suicide may not be a choice but seeking help when you are struggling often is and if there is one message I want to get across in this post it is that if you are ashamed after a suicide attempt, please give yourself a break but more importantly seek help. 

Other than that, today I can honestly say I do not know what words of comfort I can offer to you all but I wanted to thank you from the  bottom of my heart for the words of comfort you have given to me. My dear readers, you really are so important to me and, as it turns out, vital to my survival in this game of mental health. Hopefully next week I will manage to talk about something a little more jolly or at least a little less depressing. In the meantime…

Take care everyone x 

Elephant

A Brief Mental Health Apology

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 18 Comments

Trigger warning: This post discusses suicide so if that kind of thing triggers you then please go and watch kitten videos on Youtube instead of reading the following post.

So this week I have a bit of an apology to make because this is not going to be a normal blog post as unfortunately it has been a bit of a hard week here at Born Without Marbles HQ. I wasn’t going to talk about it on here because to be honest I am really ashamed of what has happened but then again I am always honest about my struggles with mental health problems, so I figure why should today be any different. Anyway like I said, this has been a difficult week culminating in…gosh this is hard to admit to…a suicide attempt and recovering from all of that is why there is no regular blog this week. I did however want to take this opportunity to let everyone who may have heard of recent events know that I am physically now completely fine so there is nothing to worry about anymore and I am sincerely sorry for all the worry and distress I have caused. I will probably write a lot more about it next week when things have settled down a little bit. As I said, usual blogging will resume next week so stay tuned for that and please know that I am very sorry for having let you all down this week. Thank you to everyone who has shown me love and support these past few days and I look forward to speaking to you more next time. 

Take care everyone x

Apology

What Do You Do With Someone With Mental Health Problems?

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 28 Comments

Usually, when I title a blog with a question you would expect for me to find some kind of answer to said question in the blog below, but, spoiler alert, this week that ain’t gonna happen because today I genuinely am asking all you guys out there what on earth you do with a person with mental health problems.

I suppose to be more exact I should specify that there is a particular person with mental health problems in mind when I ask this question, perhaps obviously, me.

You see, as far as questions go, this is quite a big one that is perplexing and confusing the many therapists and family members in my life, and considering that none of them can find the answer, today I figured I would ask you lovely lot, aka the wonderful readers of my blog, for your opinion, because if you can’t go to the internet to solve all your problems and big questions in life then quite frankly where can you go? (don’t say a therapist, trust me they are stumped on this one too). 

You see me and my family are sort of stuck playing a game of Where’s Wally right now, although slightly different as we are well aware of where Wally is and just need a place to put him. Wally in this situation is me (I even have the glasses for it…just missing the stripy sweater and hat…actually thinking about it the glasses I am wearing are the only things that make this remotely like a game of Where’s Wally…Wally was never stuck as to where to go because of mental health problems and if he was then that gives those activity books a whole new spin to them), and lately there has been a big question as to what to do with me. 

You may remember that after coming out of hospital, the plan was for me to stay home and follow some ground rules set by my parents, but shortly after my departure from the loony bin it was clear that I was unable to follow those ground rules and consequently we came up with the plan of me moving into my own flat…However now…yeah…it doesn’t look like that will be possible as although the purchase of the flat is still going swimmingly (I think…I have never been one to understand the purchase of properties), it doesn’t look like I will be able to cope living there by myself as planned. On one hand I am fully convinced that I could do it, but considering the week I just had when my parents were away in Cyprus, perhaps that is naive of me to assume blindly that I could cope all by myself as when trying to live by myself for just one week in my own home, things did not go to plan. Indeed, a mere hour in my own company and I was on the brink of suicide, hence why my dear best friend had to step in and save the day and come to stay with me, so maybe independent living isn’t the thing for me at the moment, and that is why I am posing you this question today as to what to do. I cannot stay at home living with my parents as I am still unable to follow the ground rules required and am in short, driving them around the bend with my mental health problems (it is a lot to ask of people to live with a complete lunatic and one of these days I am going to give one or both of my parents a mental breakdown themselves at this rate), but it seems I cannot live alone elsewhere either, hence the question of where to put me. 

At the moment, the option my parents are pushing for is for me to go into this sort of long term hospital like place which is less like a hospital setting and more like a communal living area for people with mental health problems. I however am not keen on this idea and really I want to stay as far away from communal living spaces as possible. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one who is completely set against mental health hospitals, after-all I have been in many myself on previous occasions, but they are not places that I particularly like being and in my eyes, as bad as things are at the moment, I really want to do all I can to be treated and to get better somehow in the community as an outpatient. To be fair this hospital place isn’t like most other hospitals, there is no long corridor and like I said it is more of a communal house with a big family living space and a huge garden (a garden so big in fact that it is basically one giant vegetable patch…they even grow cabbages there and are looking into getting cows and chickens which has caused me to name the place “The Literal Funny Farm” to my mum’s annoyance…she really likes the place…can you tell I am not keen…). Still, despite the fact it isn’t like a  regular hospital I am still not convinced. Part of this I will admit is an OCD issue as the idea of communal living gives me all kinds of heebie jeebies what with sharing bathrooms and other areas, but also the problem is that I do not want to live surrounded by people with mental health problems. Obviously I do not mean this in an offensive way nor do I have any judgement against people with mental health problems, how could I, I am one, but there is something about living with other people with mental health struggles that I have always found difficult and potentially triggering. When you are insane yourself but live with sane people I always find it sort of gives you an idea of normality for you to try and follow however hard that may be, but when you are insane and living with other like minded people, as nice as it is to have people to relate to, crazy is in a sense a version of what is normal, and I have always found long periods of time in situations like that problematic which is what this would be. This hospital is not a place where people go for a few weeks to recuperate but a place people go for six months to a year to do serious long term pieces of work and I just do not feel ready for that, especially having just come out of a five month admission to a hospital only recently. To be honest I still feel like and want to feel like I am settling in at home but it doesn’t seem that that will be possible much longer for the sake of my parents physical and mental health…

Which is why I am asking you all this question today. What do you do or what would you do with a  person with mental health problems aka me, a person who is currently very much entrenched in their own lunacy but very much lost as to where to go? Seriously, I am asking you lot because of all the people in my life you are perhaps the people who, alongside my therapists and family members, know me best. After all you read my ramblings on a weekly basis (at least if you are a regular reader you do and if you are please know that I think of you as very special), therefore who would be better to answer this question? So, people of the internet, dear blog readers and lovely people who have just stumbled upon this blog today, tell me honestly, what do you think and where do you think I should go?

In my dreams I would ideally like to stay at home as I may have mentioned a million times but if that is not possible which do you think is the best alternative? Living all by myself in my own flat even when a mere hour of doing so in my own home went terribly wrong or living in a communal farm like area for people with mental health problems with a passion for growing cabbages? Or maybe you have a third option, who knows, all I do know is that I don’t have the answers and if any of you out there could help a mental out with a few words of wisdom, I really would appreciate it. I realise it is asking quite a lot for you to make a decision as to what happens at this next stage in my life but I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t seriously in need of some good old fashioned friend (for I consider you all to be my friends of the highest quality) to blogger advice. 

Either way, whatever you lovely bunch decide or think, I am curious to hear your thoughts as right now being landed with this question all by my lonesome is quite the burden and is one I cannot carry much longer. So what do you do with and where do you put a person with mental health problems? I really don’t know, but I sincerely hope that someone out there has the answers as lord knows I need some. 

Take care everyone x 

Cabbage

Should NG Tubes Be Used In The Treatment Of People With Eating Disorders?

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 10 Comments

When it comes to treatment for people with eating disorders there are many different options and interventions to be explored, various therapies, meal plans, pieces of group work and even hypnotism. However, alongside all the perhaps more psychological treatments, there are other more invasive practical treatments that can be used such as the NG tube (a tube that is inserted through the nose and into the stomach to feed a patient who is unable to consume food orally themselves), and this is something I never had much of an opinion on before it happened to me recently for several weeks of my admission to hospital. It may seem silly or odd to be bringing this up now as my tube came out over 8 weeks ago so surely I should be over it and not thinking about it anymore, but I have to say that even though it has been a while since its removal, the method of being NG fed still affects me to this day, is a fairly traumatic thing for people to go through, and it has made me wonder whether or not NG feeding should actually be used in eating disorder treatment full stop. 

Obviously if I am going to open up a debate in this blog about whether or not NG tubes should ever be used I am going to have to say that aside from all the ethical, psychological, long term effect complicated sides to the issue, bluntly yes NG tubes should be available as a way to treat people with eating disorders. Despite their perhaps negative side effects down the line, it makes no sense to rule them out completely (unfortunately…I really hate admitting this…excuse me whilst I go away and grumble). 

Sometimes, whether we like it or not, NG tubes are life saving necessary pieces of treatment and there are people out there who arguably would have died without them. If a person is unable to nourish themselves adequately and becomes seriously medically compromised, sometimes the only option is to NG feed them as a matter of saving a life and I know that, as much as I disagree with the methods used on me and wish more than anything it hadn’t happened, that that is the argument doctors and nurses have had with me in defending that method of treatment. 

Aside from life saving serious stuff, NG tubes can also be positively used not just for getting nutrition into people but for providing a motivation to eat orally despite the screaming eating disorder wailing in their head like a banshee who just stubbed her toe on a particularly sharp piece of lego. 

When someone is struggling to eat because of an eating disorder it is often made harder by the fact that eating always feels like a choice, an option you actively choose to partake in, and who would choose to torture themselves by forcing themselves to eat when they knew their brain would go off screaming at 90 miles per hour? With an NG tube in place however, the act of getting nutrition is no longer an option or a choice, it is going to happen one way or another and with this choice of whether or not the food will go in eventually being taken away, sometimes eating becomes easier. 

Personally I can at least admit and testify to the fact that I found the NG tube helpful in the sense that it did motivate me to eat because the choice was taken away. No longer did I have the raging debate of “do I eat or don’t I”, it was just a matter of how it was going to go in/happen (“up the nose or down the throat” as I used to think). It also gave me encouragement to eat in a way because there were times when I knew that if I didn’t consume what was in front of me orally, I would get an increased number of calories down the tube and that certainly served as some motivation! 

Indeed at my unit there was a rule that I was presented with a meal and if I were not to complete it, the entire meal would be started again via the feed. Therefore if halfway through a meal I was struggling and really wanted to give up, having the tube there motivated me to carry on as I knew that were I to stop, we would have to start all over again and I would essentially end up having to go through the same meal twice. NG tubes can also be helpful in the sense that they offer a way for medication to go into a patient when a patient is unable to take a medication themselves (another thing which I hated and disagreed with personally but can understand is necessary in some circumstances.) 

As I said at the beginning of this debate however, alongside these positives there are a lot of negatives and it is the effect of these long lasting negatives that I am still feeling today. You see, when you have an NG tube, it takes responsibility for eating away, and whilst this is a good thing when a person is unable to eat by themselves, it is a bad thing because in learning to eat again or going through the re-feeding process they are not actually learning how to do it for themselves. Indeed, people go from needing the tube in an emergency situation to becoming dependant on it and that is what happened to me. For the first few months of re-feeding I was going through the motions but psychologically was making no progress and then when it came out I didn’t know how to eat. Without the tube, suddenly the guilt became much worse because eating went from being the lesser of two evils with the tube in to simply “evil”. 

Another negative from using an NG tube and perhaps the one I am struggling the most with today is that of rapid weight gain. When you are on the tube it is possible to gain a lot of weight very quickly that mentally you are not ready or prepared for and although it can again be life saving and good treatment medically, it can be an incredibly traumatic experience. Similarly, now I have been left at a weight far higher than I am comfortable with because of the tube and because I reached this stage far quicker than I would have done without it, I am still struggling with the repercussions and am feeling overwhelmed. 

In terms of trauma it can also be a traumatic experience to be restrained for feeds and when this happens it can damage the patient vs treatment team relationship. For example I used to trust my treatment team and even get along with a lot of them, but if I am honest, now I resent them all and want to be discharged from the entire service because the act of having something so traumatic being done to me has led me to dislike and mistrust them all. Having something like an NG feed physically done to you whilst you are held down means being treated as an object not a person, there is no therapeutic benefit, you are just a thing being pumped full of stuff you are terrified of with no chance to work through it or figure out a long term solution at home. It is a temporary fix and though you can force feed someone food, you cannot force feed them long term recovery, so in a sense the NG tube method is unhelpful long term. Then again that is just my experience and I know that for other people actually starting with an NG as a temporary measure can help long term as it gets enough nutrition for their brain to work and allow recovery long term afterwards so it really is all down to personal experience. 

Overall then, should NG tubes be used to treat people with eating disorders? Well, I don’t know is the honest answer, it is a tricky one because I think the answer will be different for different people. For some people using the NG tube is not a matter of something to be debated but a necessary life saving act of treatment and sometimes it can even help long term recovery by motivating someone to eat orally by taking away the choice. Also the more nutrition someone gets the more likely it is that their brain will be receptive to treatment but then again there are the negatives of cases like mine where I have been fed up to an unbearable weight via physical methods without going through the proper therapeutic work, meaning that I am now stuck unable to deal with it and thus struggling with relapse. I don’t think when it comes to this question there will ever be an answer for everyone but it is certainly a controversial topic that I think we need to keep working on and talking about. 

Take care everyone x 

NGdebate

The Frustration At Not Getting Better From Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 22 Comments

I like to think of myself as a fairly calm person (watch as my anxiety laughs hysterically in the corner), but lately, I have found myself getting angry, like proper smoke coming out of the ears angry, and the same is happening with my mum. Nay, maybe angry is the wrong word for I am not exactly angry right now but frustrated, and this frustration is aimed entirely at my mental health and the fact that no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, my mental health is not improving/is sliding further and further into the abyss of insanity, and now even the professionals are at a loss as to what to do.

You see, ever since I left inpatient, things have been going in a downward spiral, and I am finding myself becoming hysterical and requiring my “emergency” medication to calm me down practically every night. Hell the other night things got so terrible that even my mum took some of my emergency calm down medication just to stop her from going completely bonkers herself and all in all it is getting out of hand. We have been phoning the crisis team almost daily in our attempts to manage my latest series of breakdowns and it has just got me asking, staring up at the sky and shaking my fist asking why, why is all of this happening?

It isn’t even as if I am one of these people who thinks life is supposed to be fair, far from it, I am one of those people who, when others protest “life is so unfair” ask them “my dear, who on earth ever told you that it was?” but this is ridiculous. I just don’t understand it. I have been in mental health treatment for almost 15 years now, 15 long years. Think about how many hours of 1:1 sessions with psychologists that includes, think about how many months as an inpatient in hospital that involves, the number of different medications tried (so many that when you shake me I rattle like a bottle of tablets and a leaflet of side effects falls out of my left nostril), and all for what? For me to still be completely insane…IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE.

What frustrates me is that I know how lucky I am and I know how grateful I am and should be for all the help I have received over the years. There are people across the country who have been suffering for as long as I have, maybe longer and they have not been given the support or access to help that I have been blessed with, they have not had the supportive family that I am lucky enough to be a part of, so logically I should be ok. Logically I should be doing better than most people out there, but I am not and it has me sitting here feeling angry and asking what the hell is wrong with me. What is it about me that seems so untreatable and why are my mental health problems so resistant to every form of treatment?

I think when you live with mental health problems you are expected to feel sad about them and to be fair I have felt sad about my sorry state of affairs many times but this anger is new, this rage at the fact that I have been ill for such a long time with no improvement and I wonder if this is an experience common to people with mental health problems out there. I have to ask, is it? Are there other people out there who, like me, have stopped feeling despair at their situations and have started feeling angry? Angry that no matter what they do or no matter how hard they try, their brains will not co-operate?

I have heard it said that it isn’t until you get angry at your disorders that you can actually get better from them because you need that anger in you to fight, but at the moment this anger doesn’t feel like it is doing anything constructive, rather it feels like a block that is holding me back in my therapy sessions and appointments. Rarely do I meet with a psychologist now with an open mind, now it is always a case of me going in enraged that things haven’t improved after the last session and show no sign of changing any time soon. I think I wouldn’t mind this anger so much if somebody else knew what to do with it, but I find I am dragging it around with me in a bin bag wondering where on earth to put it and the professionals don’t know either.

Today I went to an appointment with my ED support worker and the rage was bubbling, so I asked her what to do. I asked what we could do to treat me, where we could go from here, what new treatments we could try over the next few weeks to see if they help, and you know what she said? “I don’t know” or to be more specific “I don’t know what to do with you at the moment”…She doesn’t know what to do with me? Doesn’t know what to do with me? What am I supposed to do with that!? What is anyone supposed to do with that? Indeed, what on earth is one supposed to do when even the professionals are at a loss as to how to help or resolve the situation? What do you do when the person with all the answers tells you that they do not have any more answers, or even rough guesses, to have a go at answering your question? When I left that appointment I felt like a grocery shopper who had gone to a bakery and asked a baker how to make bread only to be told that the baker had no idea. What use is that? What use is a baker who doesn’t know how to bake? What is the point in a baker who just slaps flour around the place and wears a funny apron and chef’s hat? Sure it may be entertaining to watch someone slap flour about (for we all know that much hilarity can take place when a person is gallivanting with flour), but what use is it?
What do you do with that?

I think the main thing that is frustrating me however is the fact that whilst other people don’t have the answers, I don’t have them either, and if anyone should know how to help a person it is the person who understands the problem better than all others. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I would say I understand my mental health problems pretty well, I have explored them so much over the years that I am familiar with every nook and cranny (particularly the one in the far left…damn that is a tricky cranny), yet I am no more familiar with how to solve my problems than anyone off the street who has never spoken to me a day in their life.

Truth be told here, as I am writing this I am starting to think that maybe I am not angry, maybe my mother (who has also been getting frustrated at my current decline – not angry with me you understand, rather like me angry with the fact that no matter what we try we are not seeing any improvement) isn’t angry, maybe we are just scared because we cannot see the answers and when you are being stared at in the face by a pretty massive problem it is scary not being able to see any way around it. It is scary to be stuck in a vice getting tighter and tighter by the day with no sign of relief and hell, maybe some of that fear is what I am writing about rather than anger because in reality I don’t think I am angry with anyone in particular. I am not angry at my psychologist for not knowing what to do with me at the moment, I am scared, I am scared that if she doesn’t know what to do then nobody ever will and I will be stuck like this forever. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I have friends who have received the same levels of treatment as I have, who have been to the same hospitals as I have and they have recovered and that is another thing that scares me. If I have had the same treatment why have I not had the same outcome? Why am i different? Why do the answers for one person not serve as the answers for another? Is there something wrong with me or am I just one of those people who is doomed to never get better? How will I know? Will I ever know or am I just going to find myself sitting here asking these same old questions for years until I am blue in the face (and then indigo followed by a vibrant shade of violet).

To be honest I feel I have lost track of what I am even talking about and barely know what I am saying anymore but I had to get this out, this anger, this fear or whatever this is that is bubbling up inside me like the contents of a witches cauldron. Everyone knows that living with mental illness is sad, but I think today my message is that sometimes, when you don’t have the answers to your problems, that sadness turns to rage or maybe fear. Who knows, like I said I am confused myself, but I at least wanted to write about it in the hopes of finding some sense in all of this. Maybe I haven’t made sense here, maybe I have, but either way if anyone has the answers to any of my questions or feels the same as I do now, I would really appreciate knowing about it. I hope you are all well and know I am thinking of and supporting you all.

Take care everyone x

Frustrated

The Importance Of Listening To People With Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 16 Comments

This Wednesday the 14th of March is a very special day. Why? Because as of the 14th of March 2018 this little blog you are visiting right now will be two years old. That is right folks, as of Wednesday it will be two whole years since the birth of Born Without Marbles, nay not birth, the hatching of this tiny little mental health blog egg that I had been keeping in my oh so sufficient plumage until that moment (and my my do I have a lot of plumage).

How crazy is that? Pretty crazy if you ask me as two years is a really long time…Like a baby can go from a screaming ball of tears to a waddling and talking human creature in that time and I would like to think that my blog has undergone a similar amount of progress.
Now, you are going to have to forgive me in this entry as I fear I am going to sound very much like one of those actresses in a ball gown making a thank you for my Oscar speech and I am well aware that two years of running this blog does not entitle me to any award, but still today I really wanted to thank all of you out there reading this for making this blog what it is and for putting as much effort into reading it as I put into writing it. Indeed, you readers have helped and supported me more than you can ever possibly imagine. “How?” I hear you ask “What have we done?”. Well dear friends, you have done the most important thing that one can do when living with or dealing with someone with mental health problems: you have listened, and I think that this whole listening malarky is a seriously underrated piece of malarky on the scale of all things malarky.

I know people have messaged me in the past, people who may know or care for people with mental health problems and who have asked me what they can do to support them and the answer I want to advocate today is to listen to them. That is it.

I think a lot of people often find that when they have a loved one with mental health problems they want so desperately to fix their problems and unfortunately that is seldom, if ever, possible.
Mental health illnesses and disorders are complex and difficult to understand, intricate beings (which is why I have managed to write about and try and explain them for a whole two years now without really scratching the surface as to their mysteries), and I think that when people see themselves as responsible for curing a loved one it is simply too much responsibility to take hold of. It would be like asking one person to fight a whole army of sword wielding warriors who will need a lot of strategy and weaponry to defeat as apposed to one lone soldier with a mallet (for we all know it is notoriously easier to get hold of a mallet than it is to get hold of a sword…seriously where do they even sell those? Are they available on Amazon? Not that I want a sword of course…I am just seriously curious as to how one would obtain such a thing were one to be in need). If you ever set yourself the challenge of you and you alone curing someone with mental health problems then I think you are setting yourself up to fail.

This doesn’t however mean that when it comes to mental health problems and people who are struggling with them that it is best to do nothing, and that is where this listening thing comes in that I want to thank you all for today.

You see, when you live with mental illnesses, you live with a constant stream of noise and mayhem between your temples and that noise is difficult to deal with. Maybe that noise comes from the barrage of thoughts that come with depression, maybe they are the intrusive thoughts from OCD or an eating disorder, maybe they are audible hallucinations from psychosis or schizophrenia, whatever the condition, whatever the disorder, there is a lot of noise, and keeping quiet about it is a sure fire way of making that noise louder.
If people don’t speak about the noise, the noise tends to build up, louder and louder until all “real” sounds are drowned out by the cacophony and therefore it is important to have an outlet, a place to talk about and release a bit of that noise, not necessarily because that will make it all go away but because it will slightly lessen the burden that staying silent will weigh you down with.
That is where listening comes in. When you simply listen to a person with mental health problems, when you allow them to be heard, you are helping them more than you could ever know because you are sharing in that noise and therefore are giving it a little less power. I think when a lot of people think about going to see a therapist they assume that they will have these big elaborate contraptions designed to zap the mental illness away or physically remove it by some grand operation when really that is not what therapists do. There are no magical contraptions (unfortunately) and there are no magical zappers (also unfortunately), instead therapists listen, they hear and take on some of the noise because when you speak out loud about something it loses power. That is why in Harry Potter everyone is so scared of Voldemort, they don’t speak his name and by keeping it locked up in their minds as this big scary word they increase the fear. As Hermione wisely once said, “fear of a name increases fear of a thing itself”, and that is exactly how I feel about mental illnesses. When we fear them and keep quiet about them, we give them more power to control us, we give them authority as some big terrifying thing never to be spoken about and alright, I admit it, they are terrifying, but unless we talk about them and get them out into the real world, they cannot be tackled. If everyone were to keep their illnesses inside of their heads then they would be kept in a place where nobody else could reach them but by talking about them, they become tangible, they become part of our world and thus are something that can be dealt with.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that talking about a mental illness is going to cure it instantly, if ever, as I know very well myself that after a lot of talking and a lot of therapy, things are still pretty terrible (hey, I am nothing if not honest), but as terrible as they are, at least I have an outlet to get them out of my head both in therapy and on my blog. I have people who listen to me and hear all the pain it is hard to speak out about and if you have been a reader of this blog from the beginning, last week, or even if this is your first ever entry (welcome!) you have been a part of that and you have helped.

So what do I want to get across today as we approach the two year anniversary of Born Without Marbles? Simply this: That if you want to help someone with mental health problems, the first and best thing you can do is to listen to them, and if you have been listening to me for years or just today, then I want to thank you for hearing and taking on my noise. Trust me I do not know where I would be without all of you wonderful people out there listening and supporting me and I want you to know how much I appreciate, and how much all people with mental health problems appreciate it when people listen, when they are heard and when others are there to share in the noise. From the bottom of my heart and from my head to my toes, today, my message is thank you for being there. You do more than you know, and more than I can ever thank you for in a mere blog post. I hope you all know that I am also here to hear all of you struggling out there and share in any of your noise as well.

So happy second birthday Born Without Marbles and to all readers and mental health sufferers alike, remember to keep talking and to keep listening, for doing so is one tiny tactic we can use to tackle the mental health demon army.

Take care everyone, and thank you x

Anniversary

Dramatic Life Plan Changes When You Are Living With Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 16 Comments

You know that feeling where you don’t see a friend for a year (maybe they were backpacking around Australia or herding elephants in Africa), and then they come back for a cup of tea asking how things are going and you just sigh because there is so much to catch up on? Yeah. That exact feeling is the one I have today, only in this situation it isn’t that I haven’t written on my blog/spoken to you for a year (heaven forfend!). In actuality it has been a mere week since you last heard from me but what a week it has been and good lord with cheese and chopsticks do I have a lot to catch you up on!

Now, you remember last week when I talked about how I was about to go home after a five and a half month inpatient stay at my local eating disorders unit? Remember how I harped on about all the rules and regulations I had set in place to keep myself and my mental health problems on track and the importance of rules when living with mental health problems? Remember all that stuff I said about how I felt pressured to stick to the rules because if I didn’t there would be consequences including, but not limited, to my parents not being able to cope with me in the family home any more? (If none of this is ringing any bells I suggest you read the two posts that can be found, like aeroplane fire exits, here: The Pressure To “Get Better” When You Are Struggling With Mental Health Problems and here: Why Boundaries Are Important When Living With Mental Health Problems).
Good. We all up to date because you know that situation? Yeah, that situation has kind of sort of exploded all over the place and I have only been out of hospital for a week…

Indeed I can barely believe myself that it has only been such a short amount of time because so many things have changed. Like I said, I was only discharged last Tuesday, armed and determined with my rules and boundaries set my my parents to help keep my mental illnesses in check back home, but in this past week, all of those rules have gone horribly wrong.
From that first day back home my eating disorder looked at all of those neatly written out rules and laughed and I was smacked in the face by how much harder all of this eating malarky was going to be outside of hospital.
To be perfectly honest I do not understand it even myself.
For five and a half months I have been following a meal plan and now a simple change in location has completely thrown me off. I am not saying that I admit defeat already, far from it, but I can acknowledge that there is a serious problem and am well aware that, no matter how positive I try to be or how determined I am, I am currently unable to stick to the rules around eating certain amounts at certain times and not self harming that have been set.

“What is wrong with that?” I hear you ask “So you are breaking a few rules. This isn’t school, what are you worried about, getting detention or something?” I hear you cry!
Well no actually, I am not fearing detention but I have been fearing the consequences of me not being able to stay in the family home and in this past week it has come to my attention that me staying in the family home and living by my parents’ rules is, at this point impossible.

Now before I go on I would like to make it clear that my parents are not evil (well my mum is a little bit and she does cackle over a cauldron occasionally but that is a story for another day) and just because I am struggling with my mental health at the moment they are not kicking me out of the house. Far from it, they want and are doing all they can to support me with my insanity, hence why they set up these rules so that we could all try to live happily together, but to be blunt, they simply cannot cope with my madness any more for the sake of their own mental health (remember self care is important folks) and so me being unable to follow the rules has led to some consequences. What consequences?

Well, watch out because here comes a bombshell: I am not going to be living at home anymore. Yeah…I told you a lot had happened…

Like I said it was mere hours before we realised that I was not going to be able to live by the required rules and so, knowing that my parents could not cope anymore and that I didn’t want to put them through all of this again, I hopped onto google and started looking for a place to live. Mere days later I had impulsively used up my inheritance on a flat…yeah…I guess you could say things have moved pretty fast.

I don’t even know what to say or where to go from here because I am still so shocked and mind blown as to how all of this is happening and to be honest none of it feels real.

I am moving out.

I am in the process of buying a flat.

I have never lived by myself before and soon I will be living alone. WHAT IS HAPPENING?SOMEBODY STOP THE RIDE! I WANT TO GET OFF!

See what I mean about having a lot to update you on? Seriously, I have gone from living in an insane asylum for almost half a year, part of that time on 1:1 with a tube up my nose, to buying and living in a flat all by myself in the blink of an eye, and if I am honest, I have no idea how I am going to deal with it. Because of OCD and my eating disorder there are a million of normal every day things that I cannot do for myself from changing a duvet cover, to taking out a bin or washing a pair of socks and yet suddenly all of this responsibility is on me. Oh and how many Katies does it take to change a light bulb? THERE IS NO NUMBER HIGH ENOUGH BECAUSE THIS KATIE CANNOT CHANGE A LIGHTBULB. I AM GOING TO BE LIVING IN DARKNESS FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE UNLESS I GET SOME CANDLES WHICH I WILL PROBABLY DROP AND END UP BURNING THE WHOLE PLACE DOWN. I WON’T EVEN BE ABLE TO PUT THE FIRE OUT WITH WATER BECAUSE APPARENTLY FOR WATER YOU HAVE TO PAY A WATER BILL AND I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO DO THAT EITHER. SOMEBODY HELP ME FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

So yeah…that is my update, THAT is the latest Born Without Marbles news and an example of just one of the dramatic changes of plan that can occur when you are living with mental health problems…
Obviously it will be a while before I actually move out and into my new flat (turns out that buying property is far harder and more complicated than buying cuddly penguins…who knew?), but eventually that is what is going to be happening. In the mean time I will of course be living at home trying to stick by the rules as best I can and trying not to drive my parents completely mad but who knows how that is going to work out? Then again who knows how living by myself is going to work out because the only reason I am leaving home is because I am too insane and the last time I checked insane people weren’t the best at surviving in this world alone. Thankfully, whenever this flat does come through I will only be a five minute walk away from home and obviously my parents are going to support and help me through this more than I am probably giving them credit for, but purple onions and gravy am I terrified and filled with questions. How did this happen? How did my mental illnesses take over my life so much that they have led to me being practically evicted from my family home and forced to live alone where I cannot interfere with other people? How will I cope by myself if I can’t even cope with the support of other people? How on earth is this whole moving out of an intense inpatient setting and into an isolated empty flat going to play out? Well, truth is I have no idea. I guess we will be finding that out over the coming weeks together…

Take care everyone x

LifeChange

Why Boundaries Are Important When Living With Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 11 Comments

A few weeks ago when I was talking about the fact that I am getting discharged from an inpatient setting on the 20th of February/tomorrow if you are reading this on the day of upload, (handy link to that blog post here: The Pressure To “Get Better” When You Are Struggling With Mental Health Problems), I mentioned that there were going to be a lot of rules and boundaries in place regarding my mental illness that I would have to follow back home.
Seeing as these boundaries were set by my parents you might think I live in a particularly strict household with rules and regulations more often seen in a school rather than a home setting, but actually, I am starting to think that when you are living with mental health problems, it is vital for everyone to set some boundaries.

Thing is, when you have a mental illness bobbing along with you through life, you can guarantee that it is going to do all it can to interfere with any plans you had prepared. Thought you were going out for a night with friends? Surprise! Depression has crossed that out of the calendar and scheduled you in for a good old evening of crying into a pillow and thinking about what a terrible person you are. Decided to spend several hours working on that novel and actually being productive with your life? Nope! Instead OCD would like you to waste those hours antibacterialising various objects in the house that were already clean to begin with. No matter what illness you have, it is obviously going to impact your daily routine, and if left with total freedom, it is likely that it will impact your daily routine more and more as time goes on until you find yourself looking back and wondering how on earth things managed to get so out of control. Now when you are in an inpatient setting this aspect of mental health problems is managed somewhat by the rigid structure of your day to day life on the ward, but on the outside it is a hell of a lot easier to get carried away with your own rigid routines.

The reason for this is that I have started to realise that mental illnesses are much like dinosaurs, and living with them is analogous to being that professor that Richard Attenborough plays in Jurassic Park and it is that analogy (to be fair it has been a while since we settled in for a good old traditional Born without Marbles analogy) that I want to talk about today.

Maybe some of you out there haven’t actually seen Jurassic Park (and if you haven’t you really should, it is fabulous), but basically in Jurassic Park there is this guy called Professor Hammond (that’s the person with mental health problems in this analogy), and he owns this safari park of dinosaurs he created out of some blood that has been hiding inside of a mosquito for several thousand years (in the analogy the park is your brain and the dinosaurs are your mental illnesses, except obviously in the mental health version you did not create your dinosaurs/illnesses, rather they appeared one day and as a result you found yourself as keeper of this prehistoric zoo of insanity).

Having the dinosaurs there is obviously dangerous, so Professor Hammond does all he can to keep that danger to a minimum. In order to keep the visitors safe, he has a whole team of keepers helping him to keep an eye on his dinosaurs (aka psychologists and other mental health professionals), and there are physical boundaries/electrified fences set up all over the island around the dinosaurs to keep them in check. They are still dangerous dinosaurs, but when confined by their boundaries, their level of threat is somewhat controlled.

However in the film, before long, this idiotic man with absolutely no common sense turns off all the electric fences and cages that were housing the dinosaurs, and utter chaos ensues.
Without the fences, the dinosaurs do not remain in their neat little pens, they run amok and cause a hell of a lot of destruction and noise when doing so. That image (aka that of dinosaurs running madly all over the place eating people and crashing into everything), pretty much illustrates the importance of boundaries when living with mental health problems and why I have so many regulations in coming home.

For example, whilst I have been in hospital at my local eating disorder unit, there have been very definite rules set out to govern my behaviour. These rules are numerous and I cannot list them all for fear of boring you all to floods of uncontrollable tears, but as an example they have been things like the fact that if I do not eat my meal, there will be a replacement issued which if not completed will lead to consequences in ward round, or the rule that meal times take place at set points throughout the day with no option to delay that peanut butter sandwich for another five minutes. Meal times are meal times, you eat your meals in meal times, end of discussion.

Similarly there are rules to govern my OCD such as time limits for showers because without this kind of rule, my OCD tends to grab hold of all control over how long I take to shower and run with it a lot faster than I can chase after it (I was never one for athletics in school.)
When I have a time limit however, I have something to aim for, and though my OCD will still be present in my behaviours for the duration of the shower, it is my attempt at controlling it as best I can. If in hospital I weren’t to shower within the allocated time, I would be removed from the shower, so I sort of had to reason with my little OCD dinosaur to get through it. My dinosaur wanted to spend the next three years washing yet the rules meant this was impossible, so we had to work together and compromise. I would shower and do all the rituals I was told to, but only for a certain length of time. Having a time limit obviously didn’t always work and there are times where I still couldn’t stick to it, but like I said, it gave something to aim for and consequently I will still have that shower time limit now that I am heading back home again. Again it is unlikely that I will always be able to keep myself in check, but I know that without any rules in the shower things would be a lot worse than they often are and if I didn’t have a boundary set in place, then I doubt I would ever be able to get out of the shower at all.
I can of course tell my OCD that I have finished washing but OCD will always come back with “just another five minutes”, a request that, when given into, will be repeated every five minutes leaving me stuck in a ritual with no way out. With my rule, I at least have an argument against that. In the shower the OCD still dictates behaviours, but when it is time to leave the shower, I at least have the statement of “time is up and we must leave now to avoid consequences” to come back at any “five more minute” suggestions that should arise.

If you are living with mental health problems then, it is important to have your own rules in place to try and keep track of the interference it causes. You can’t control whether or not you have a disorder, but there are some things you do have control of that can help lessen the impact. Say you have an eating disorder and, as I will be attempting when I get home, you are trying to give yourself enough nutrition.
If you say to your eating disorder “I am going to eat better today”, then it is unlikely that you will achieve much, as “better” is a negotiable, subjective term that you will find yourself debating. Instead, hard and fast rules like “I am going to eat three meals and three snacks today” are more likely to merit results. They won’t necessarily mean you achieve what you want, yet again, like the shower time limit, it gives you something to aim for rather than a wishy washy “I will eat something” or “I will shower quicker” which without specifics don’t really mean anything and give too much control to your illness. I know that especially with eating disorders, giving into little things are a sure fire way of letting them spiral completely.
Whenever I have a bowl of cereal for example, I weigh out exactly the same number of grams each day without question. This is disordered of course, and one day I would like to pour cereal with all the gay abandon of a cereal pouring professional, but I know that if I don’t have a weight from my dietician to stick to, aka a boundary, then my portions will just get smaller and smaller. My eating disorder won’t ask for anything dramatic at first, just little requests like “just one flake less today” or “one gram less”, which doesn’t sound much but if you keep listening to that you will end up a few weeks down the line staring at a solitary rice crispy in the bottom of a bowl wondering where all the others went (and possibly hearing a very quiet pitiful sobbing from the rice crispy as they are very social creatures who, when portioned out individually, often get rather lonely. Rice has feelings too kids.)

You don’t have to make loads of rules and they can be small rules to start off, but no matter what the size it is vital that the rules are there. If you have depression, that sucks and you cannot control the effect depression will have on your mood. What you can control however, is things like taking any medication you have been prescribed or attending any appointments to try and keep it in check. If you have an eating disorder and a meal plan you have been told to stick to, make that meal plan your rule, your boundary that cannot be negotiated. Ok the eating disorder will still be there screaming and it may interfere with your behaviours, but having that meal plan there is a non negotiable that is not up for debate. With OCD rituals put time limits on how long they can take so that a quick five minute tidy doesn’t descend into a five hour mass organisation mission or at least put a limit in place as to how many times you are allowed to do something simply to give you something to aim for.
Like I said, this is not going to cure you of any mental health problems nor is it going to stop them interfering/being dangerous beasts much like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. In or out of a cage, a T-rex is a T-rex (unless it is a bunny in disguise), and you cannot control the existence of that T-rex or its nature/behaviour as a stomping, roaring, chomping scaly thing. What you can do however, is put boundaries in place to try and limit the destruction that dinosaur can cause, to do the best you can to take control of something that otherwise will take lack of rules as a chance to run amok to see what it can get away with, and that is why, as I go home tomorrow, I go with a set of rules and boundaries in place.

Coincidentally, that is also why mental health problems are like dinosaurs and why it is vital to have boundaries when living with them in your head/prehistoric safari park. Rules may be broken, but having certain rules in place at home does often help me to manage typically unmanageable situations a little better. If you have been in hospital, take hospital rules back home when you are discharged so that the illness doesn’t have the total freedom to reinvade, and if you haven’t been in hospital then maybe come up with some rules with friends and family who are willing to support you in your battle for sanity. Remember, a dinosaur is always going to be a wild destructive interference, but with boundaries, that destruction can at least be controlled as much as possible…I hope…

Take care everyone x

BoundariesDinosaur