Month: April 2018

The Best Friends

Friendship
1991

I don’t have a best friend. I have several.

My first best friend and I shared the ages five to thirteen in a tiny village in southern Germany. We explored our world freely. The church bells and the colour of the sky were our only reminders of when to go home. We played in the woods. We watched frogspawn turn into tadpoles. We climbed trees. We built igloos and snowmen. We ate wild raspberries and blackberries straight off the hedge. We rode our bikes everywhere. Then, one rainy October afternoon, everything changed.

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ECT: Blowing up some myths – Part 2

Mental illness
To find the story behind this photo read to the end of the post

Where were we? That’s right. We’d left me in a state of catatonic depression. If you haven’t read Part 1 of this post, which dropped yesterday, I suggest doing so now.

The first time I slid into catatonic depression, my psychiatrist tried anti-depressant after anti-depressant while I was hospitalised. Nothing worked.  I was still brand new to mental illness. Two months before, I’d suffered my first psychotic episode after the birth of my first child. My First Time

I had gone from mentally healthy for thirty-two years, to experiencing some of the worst psychiatric symptoms in existence. I felt as though I had entered a parallel universe. When ECT was recommended I had a sense of being at the end of the line. I didn’t know much about it.

Continue reading “ECT: Blowing up some myths – Part 2”

ECT: Blowing up some myths – Part 1

Mental Illness
To find the story behind this photo, read to the end of the post.

(Please note – this post contains vivid descriptions of severe clinical and catatonic depression)

Let’s play a quick game of word associations: If I say Electroconvulsive Therapy or Electroshock Therapy, you think…What?

‘They still do that?’ is a common response. A half jokey reference to ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ is another. If you thought there was stigma surrounding psychiatric medications (and there is), ECT takes the stigma, myths, misinformation, and at times insults to a new level.

Continue reading “ECT: Blowing up some myths – Part 1”

Decisions

Decision making

How do you make your decisions? Gut feeling or logic?

I am rational over emotional. Give me scientific data or a good pro/con list over intuition any day. I have no problem with risk, but I prefer it to be calculated rather than a leap into nothing with my fingers crossed. But not all questions can be answered with logic. Ten years ago, I wrestled with one that had no right or wrong answer: To have or not to have a second baby. Continue reading “Decisions”

My First Time

Postnatal Mental Illness

I was laden with milk, my arms filled with the incredible warm softness of my five-day old baby. Snuffling, and startling into starfish arms every now and then. Pink velvet skin, translucent enough in places to see the faint network of blood vessels sustaining a life that a week ago had been completely reliant on me. My first entry into a psychiatric hospital was like many people’s first-time admissions. I felt I didn’t belong there.

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Telling People

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There comes a moment in many of my conversations when I have a choice to lie or tell the truth. If I’m meeting a new person I don’t tend to lead with: ‘I have Bipolar Disorder’, unless it’s relevant. However, the longer I know someone, the more likely we are to reach that moment of disclosure. It came up within days of  my discharge from a recent hospital stay. I ran into an acquaintance who asked how I was.

And there was a second, where it would have been so easy to answer with the expected: ‘Fine.’ Or ‘Busy’ And leave it at that. If it had been a person I didn’t know asking, I would have. But this was someone I see quite often. So, I gave an honest answer: ‘Ok, but I have just spent a month in hospital. I have Bipolar Disorder, and sometimes it flares up badly.’

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