Happy Saturday, everyone. Pandora here, reporting for service. I hope your weekend has so far been sparkly, shiny and fun.
Permit me, please, to raise a bit of house-keeping before we get on with the matter in hand.
The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that there was no TNIM this week, and indeed that the same was true about a fortnight ago. The reason for this was that, on both occasions, no one offered to write the posts – meaning that the task would fall to me as Editor/Curator/Whatever You Want to Call Me of This Week in Mentalists. There are a few issues with this: one is that I don’t feel that I can commit to writing posts every week (the case being (a) that I’m mental and (b) that occasionally I have appointments or even actually do stuff!!!!1!!!11!!!!eleven!!thirteen!) but secondly, and more importantly in my view, is that the beauty of this blog is that it’s collaborative; it was never intended to be written primarily by one person. The group blog element is important in getting a range of perspectives and writing styles.
I’m not saying I’m chickening out of doing my share – far from it – but if we’re to continue publishing TNIM, then I really feel it would be best if the relevant posts came from a range of authors. So then, a poll: will we continue writing TNIM on a weekly basis, or abandon the effort and only highlight news stories when something particularly juicy or interesting comes up?
If you vote ‘yes’, please be prepared to write a future TNIM! :) Obviously it would be at a time of your convenience.
I hope I’ve not come across as preachy or demanding or anything. I just wanted to clarify all of your positions on the matter, and once that’s out of the way, we’ll take things from there :)
Anyhow! Now that the housekeeping is completed, let’s get to this weeks TWIM. Please be aware of possible triggers regarding suicide, benefits issues, the continuing wankery of The Daily Mail and child sex abuse.
First up is tb0316, who blogs over at Living and Dealing with Bipolar Disorder, DID and the Consequences of Childhood Abuse. In the last few weeks, she has been haunted by several disturbing dreams.
Last night I had another dream. A different child again. In fact this one was a baby. I remember that she was a girl. Again I heard crying and again I knew that something terrible was happening to her. I ran really fast to try and find her and I did. There were at least two adults around and one was an older woman who reminded me of a grandmother. The child was there and it freaked me out because whatever was being done to her was still happening while I stood there but I couldn’t see anything. They kept it right out of my line of sight so all I could see was her face. It’s like knowing that someone is doing something with their hands under a tabel with tablecloth. You know they’re fooling around but you can’t see exactly what they’re doing.
When I woke up this morning I was really tired of dreaming about these different children. Hearing them cry continuously and not being able to see what was happening or stop it drove me crazy. I felt helpless and surrounded by dirt.
Now, I’m scared of going to sleep because I don’t want to dream about them again.
Writing at The Not So Big Society, ermintrude2 examines the tragic suicide of Helen and Mark Mullins.
Like others, I read with a deep sense of sadness about the deaths by suicide of Mark and Helen Mullins, a couple in Coventry who were struggling against the insurmountable barriers set up by a social services and social security system that seemed to be weighted against them – existing between them only on £57.50 per week due to a set of circumstances that laid to waste the idea of a welfare state that supports those who need support to the extent that they were driven to despair.
However, the overwhelming sadness I felt was not accompanied by surprise that I’ve seen others express. I am shocked that this situation can come to pass in the UK today. Shocked but not surprised. I can see how it happened.
…
Ultimately, it is tragic. This should not happen. There may be many issues we don’t know about but this is not a society that I want to live in. We must protect and support the right to welfare without stigma and we must be aware of the chipping away of social services support from all angles.
This is the tragic and human face of cuts.
Rest in Peace Helen and Mark. We must find the gaps in the system and fill them in and we must push the government again and again not to pull the support away from people who rely on it.
Well said, ermintrude.
Faith from the Blooming Lotus blog discusses how lying to yourself can be a means of psychological protection.
A big lie for me was that I was a virgin. My virginity was viciously taken from me by a grown man when I was just a little girl, and multiple men and women raped me after that. I dissociated all of those memories and, instead, told myself over and over again that I was a virgin. I really believed it for a long time.
As an example, my wedding had to be white, white, white to drive home that I was a virgin. My wedding color was white. My bridal bouquet was white. Even the fabric for my wedding gown was the whitest white I could find. As long as I kept telling myself a lie, I believed it. If you have to keep talking yourself into something, it probably isn’t true.
Life of a Maybe Borderline has little control over things, and is rather ambivalent about recovery.
I have learnt many dangerous things from my parents and this means that I do find it hard to have control over my actions because I know extreme actions get equally as extreme reactions. I would only get cared for if I was dying so sometimes dying can be very appealing. Not being dead, but dying. I want to be begged to stop harming myself. The fall that comes with that though is often with these actions, if you do them too many times, the person who has to experience what you’re doing can often just start to block it out. They think well you do this all the time and I give you the reaction you want yet you do it again so telling you I care doesn’t seem to help. As with everything, validation is temporary.
When being told to recover from BPD, it mean unlearning that bad things mean you get looked after. It means unlearning that para-suicide and suicide is the way to go when things get rough. It means unlearning that addictions will keep you going forever. But then it means learning that my husband does love me and I don’t need to keep asking him again and again and again whether he really does love me. It means learning that I have to look after myself sometimes and accept that everyone can’t look after me for me. It means learning Independence. It means you can’t just kill yourself when you miss the bus because you don’t want to have to feel any negative emotion. It means learning that food will help in the short term but in the long run your problems won’t just disappear.
Both paths are hell but only one can lead to potential recovery. But then do I really want to recover. Not right now.
Pennies, of We Had Pennies in Our Pockets, has finally got a place to call home. Yay!
I am Home.
Officially.
No longer homeless, no longer in emergency accomodation. I gave the keys to the emergency accomodation back today.
I’m getting all my stuff back from Ex, I’m sorting out all the stuff I need for my house, doing a passable impression of knowing what I am doing.
I’m so scared.
But maybe now for the first time in a long time I will have a place I can truly call home.
The Mental Mouth is angry at how she’s been treated by the NHS. Those of you that have followed my blog for a while will appreciate that this is something I can particularly relate to…
I quite honestly cannot believe the way that I have been left to rot by NHS mental health services. And they can throw every excuse they have at me. It is simply not on. They have not called, not checked up on me, not sent my files over to my new surgery which now makes it impossible to get the appointments and referrals I need. As I type this I am getting more and more irate.
…
And here I am, in limbo, having moved borough and having no support. I have one more appointment with Dr R, no more appointments with PM (cause I fucked the last one up and forgot to go), and no one in charge of my mental health. Apart from me. Which is fucking scary because half the time it’s hard enough to make it through the day without harming, hearing things or hating myself and everything I stand for and, and most of all, wishing I didn’t exist as I am. I need therapy now more than I ever have and I am finally ready to talk (something PM felt was a problem previously). I have been to my new GP and have tried to get an appointment to sort out my brain stuff but no one has transferred my files so what the fuck? I am stuck forever it seems. At least I have my meds and the support of an incredible boyfriend, but I need these ‘professionals’ to pick up their fucking game and HELP ME.
In honour of Remembrance Day, The Urban Worrier takes a look at how war can impact on soldiers’ mental health.
Of course there is politics in society and in war, and that does play a factor across all of this. Research and treatment into combat psychiatric diseases stemmed mainly from a desire to get men back into active service (a point made in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy). It’s disturbing to discover that Alan’s experience is that this is still the case. The link between exposure to mustard gas and agent orange and the subsequent role of physiological factors in combat diseases hasn’t been established. And (as they are trying to establish now) there may be a genetic disposition towards ‘vulnerable’ individuals developing trauma-related diseases (perhaps it *is* the case that mental people ‘deserve’ it). And of course, the gendering of illness sees me *routinely* being asked if I was a soldier when I admit to suffering PTSD. Wars have happened throughout history- but women (in addition to being exposed to combat trauma) and children don’t need to leave home to be put at psychological threat.
The sacrifices honoured by Armistice Day and the wars subsequent to it were of debatable political importance. But in bringing about a fundamental change in how mental illness is recognised, researched, and treated, we owe those who served a great -and very personal- debt.
We will remember them.
Werehorse, at A Path With Heart, is justifiably frustrated with her social worker – but fortunately finds her support worker more…well, supportive.
I said to my social worker “I keep thinking I need to die to save the world”. “Mmm,” she said, “that sounds like a difficult thought to have.”
I said the same to my support worker and she said “That’s not good. You need someone to come and see you.”
Guess which response made me feel better?
I got angry and desperate with my social worker. I was trying to tell her I was in trouble RIGHT NOW, she tried to remind me that I have been doing more cooking.
My support worker is better in a crisis. She came, we had a direct conversation about whether I needed to be in hospital. She said I was poorly, she persuaded me to reincrease the medication I have been reducing, she reminded me to eat and helped me come up with a plan for the evening. I was calmer by the time she left.
B. D. Erline from Hurry Up Please, It’s Time! has had a relapse back into alcoholism.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this most recent relapse (although, by its very nature, I would have to call it disturbingly undisturbing) is how natural it felt to wake up in a strange place, in a jail cell, no less. I was not surprised in the least. Of course, I had been thinking that this was my destiny–not the jail cell in particular, but in general a life as an irredeemable mentally ill alcoholic fuck up.
…
How to get out of this hole? How to take control where it is within my power to do so? Can I do that without believing that there is any attainable goal that means anything? I’m tired. I don’t know what I’m going to do today. I guess I can say “I won’t drink today. Maybe tomorrow.”
Good luck, sir. I hope you can manage to stay back on the wagon.
Over at Anickdaler, Ana has had to quit university, and doesn’t know where to go from here.
If I can’t do a university course with 18 hours a week contact time, how am I ever going to hold down a job. That’s of course assuming that someone would employ me when I have no references and no employment history to speak of. My life is a series of aborted projects. Of things started with the best of intentions and then failed. My psychiatrist says I just haven’t found the right path yet. That’s bollocks. There is no right path. Everything I try is doomed to failure from the start. I am a self fulfilling prophecy of destruction.
…
In the end there is one solution. There has always only been one solution. I may be able delay it by days, weeks, months or years but in the end it all stops one way. That has been the case for so long, I don’t know why I bother fighting it any more.
It’s easy for me to say, but please try and hang in there, Ana. Thinking of you.
Clarissa from Just Difficult takes The Daily Fail to task on that headline.
The danger with articles like this one in The Daily Fail is this: our heads are being messed up with the use of misleading statistics and percentages and the general public is not being encouraged to join the dots between things. The 94% that the Daily Fail quote as the percentage of people receiving DLA after a claim is totally wrong: they are using the percentage breakdown of people who have their application approved and who receive benefit – not the total number of people who actually claim the benefit in the first place. Disgusting – but how many people out there will actually bother to do the maths and read behind the statistics they use to mislead their readership?
Oh, and just in case this post “enables” me to be fit for work, it took me fucking 10 hours to write it, and I had a panic attack twice in that time, along with sweating, palpitations for the last 3 hours and general brain fog that left me staring into space in order to remember what the hell I was supposed to be writing about.
Daily Fail Mail = Fucking Misleading Cunts.
Hear, hear!
Last but certainly not least comes from Karen at Karen: In Theory, who entertains us with a brilliant infographic on mental health clichés.
Mental Health Cliché Bingo
“Hmm”, “Go to A and E” and “Meditation and Breathing Exercises” remind me so much of my erstwhile therapist, C, that I was vaguely tempted to print this out and post it to him – probably not the best idea though ;) Can anyone think of any more relevant clichés, in case Karen wants to do a follow-up to this?
This week’s wildcard, keeping in mind that it’s Armistice Weekend, is about bizarre wars.
- The Anglo-Zanzibar War: the shortest war in history, only 40 minutes long
- The Pig War: triggered by the shooting of a pig
- Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years’ War: lasted over 335 years with no casualties
- Moldovan-Transdniestrian War: where both sides’ officers would drink together during the nights and fight during the days
- Emu War: how Australia lost a war against birds
- The Football War: started with a football game
- War of 1812: caused by faulty telegraphic communications
