hsphaven

I begin this post firstly apologising that it may not be a very good piece of writing. I got no sleep last night due to my OCD, and I feel awful today. I want to cry and I feel like I’m being squashed by a heavy raincloud. My bloody OCD rears its ugly head at the most inconvenient times: when I need to go out, in the middle of the fucking night. I have written about my OCD before here. OCD comes in many different flavours, not just an obsession with cleanliness. I am a hoarder, my house looks like it’s been bombed, and I cannot let go of anything. Losing things gets to me more than it would for anyone else. I’m still trying to understand what it means to my mind when I lose a material item. Is it associated with a deeper loss in my life? I watched a documentary on hoarders and many had experienced some kind of trauma, loss, or deprivation in their life which collecting material objects seems to compensate for. I do think there is a genetic component too, as OCD seems to run through my dad’s side of the family. My grandfather hung onto every single receipt he got from the shops, even for little things like a tissue box. It was a nightmare cleaning out his house after he died. At the table I also remember him straightening the knives and forks so they were perfectly straight.

I need to know where everything is in my vast collection of belongings, and I cannot feel at peace until I find something I’ve lost. It will continue to torture me, like an itch that I have to scratch. The only remedy is to scratch the itch, to find the item, and I will go to extreme measures to find it. I will not stop searching, even if it will make me late for something I need to attend. Last night I couldn’t find my swimming goggles. Dad and I had gone to the beach that night, and I realised I must have left them on the sand where we were sitting. It was dark and I wouldn’t have seen them. My dad got up, as he usually does in the night. He found me stressing over the lost goggles. I have the best dad in the world and he will do anything for me. Bless his heart, he agreed to drive me back to the beach, which is an hour’s away, at 3am to retrieve the goggles. So that is what we did at 3am last night. I found the goggles, and it was actually really peaceful at the beach at this hour. The water was still and clear. There was only one other insomniac wandering about, a guy dressed in black. He kind of creeped me out, but he was friendly and said hello as he passed us, which reassured me that he wasn’t going to stab us.

Damaged by the mental health system

Now, moving onto what I have been meaning to write about. Right now I am recovering from my recent stay in a public hospital which actually made me worse instead of better. I was in a critical state when I was admitted. My suicidal thoughts have been a lot worse the past few months and have not been going away. Hiding in my house are things I’ve purchased which I planned to kill myself with. One evening I impulsively took a whole lot of Panadeine Forte, Diazepam, sleeping pills and alcohol which knocked me unconscious. I woke up in hospital with drips and monitors attached to me. I won’t go into this night, as I believe I have already written about it (here). But it is concerning that these thoughts are turning to plans and actions. I don’t know why this is all happening. I think I’ve just suffered for so long, am at the tail end of everything and want it all to be over. As Jamestown Story sings in “Goodbye I’m Sorry”, “It’s been the years of abuse, neglected to treat the disorder that’s controlled my youth”. The situation is serious, but the hospital didn’t even want to admit me at first. It was only when I got up mid conversation with the psych man and tried run out of the hospital that he decided to admit me, calling a “code” on me. Unfortunately that is what you have to do to get a bed, I’ve learnt. You’ve got to act like you don’t want one, that you don’t want help, that you have no “insight”. Psych wards are full of people who are psychotic and don’t want to be there. The public hospitals will turn away the people asking for help, and detain the people who don’t want it. That’s how it usually works.

Initially I was only going to be given 48 hours. Every day they threatened me with discharge. They just wanted me gone. Public psych wards have become a dumping ground for ice addicts and the psychotic. They’re not interested in anyone else, especially a person with a BPD label.

I tried to stay as long as I could. I needed it. I was barely eating, I battled suicidal urges nearly every day (I even wrote suicide notes to my family and friends whilst in there), I was reckless, struggling to sleep, often up all night dancing and posting unfiltered posts to Facebook then crashing the next day. I had a host of problems that needed treating, including bipolar as my friend suspects I have. But the hospital didn’t give a shit. I think I just got worse there with them threatening discharge all the time. There was only one good nurse who assured me that they would not be discharging me until I am better. I did a lot better under his care, and was finally able to have a shower.

I managed to stretch my stay out to two weeks. But it was a very unsettling two weeks with them threatening discharge all the time and making me move wards at one point. Finally they said they would not keep me any longer and I had to go. My parents told the hospital they didn’t want me discharged as I was still a risk to myself. We tried to fight the discharge. I lay on my bed exhausted as I had not slept the previous night. The nurse came in and said if I would not leave in half an hour they would be calling security to force me out and dump me in a taxi home.

My mum, being the fiery woman she is, screamed at the doctor and nurse over the phone and told them if security laid one hand on me we’d be charging them for assault. But in the end I agreed to leave. My family and I decided it was a horrible place to be in that was not conductive to my healing. Meanwhile my mum had contacted some chief psychiatrist legal centre and they were taking action. They were horrified by the way this hospital was treating their patients, abusing their security staff to force a sick patient out. This is not the first time I have been kicked out of hospital when trying to seek help and sent home in a taxi. I will never forget the time I was left alone crying on the floor of the ED waiting room because they would not give me a bed. Not one person asked if they could help me. It was one of the loneliest moments of my life.

I had a GP appointment at 5pm. I was hoping to get another script for some painkillers. I use them both for my physical pain and also to overdose on. I was still quite suicidal. I go to this GP to get these scripts as he knows little about my mental health (I get all the hospital discharge summaries sent to another GP). I arrived in my dirty PJs and told the doctor I’d just come from hospital. Everything was going smoothly, except he wanted the discharge summary from the hospital. He then spied my dad outside and asked him to come into the appointment. My dad then went and blabbed about my overdose. Of course the doctor didn’t want to give me the script now. I was furious. I completely lost it.

“I wanted to speak to Mark on my own!!!!!!” screamed at my dad. I then stormed out of the appointment cursing. I took off down the street but then my blessed friend found me. She had come out from the other side of the city to help me that day. She gave me a hug. We went back into the appointment and she shed some light on what had been happening. She agreed that I shouldn’t have access to these drugs.

“We don’t want you to die,” she said.

For some reason I wasn’t as angry at her as I was at my dad. I knew she cared about me, but my mind does have what might seem like a warped view on all this. I feel like if someone really cared about me, they would let me die so I don’t have to suffer any more. They wouldn’t just let me die, they’d help me die. I wanted a suicide buddy, and I actually found one recently in someone I met in the autistic community. He said he was right there with me, that he frequently wants to die as well and had attempted suicide many times. He was accepting of my choice. He didn’t try to stop me or talk me out of it. He just said it was good talking with me this year, and all the best. I found it so refreshing.

The GP suggested going to an emergency department in another area, such as Monash ED. I went home, threw on some other clothes and cleaned up a bit as I stunk. I then spent the rest of the day with my friend. We had dinner together and I finally ate something. That evening we deliberated on whether to go to Monash ED. There was a certain look in my eye that my friend picked up on. I still felt like killing myself that night. I felt a great deal of guilt about it as my friend had been so good to me yet I still had these thoughts. She told me I am just unwell, and wasn’t offended thankfully. She generously took me to Monash ED, despite hospitals being triggering for her. We hoped they might be better, that they could look at me with fresh eyes without the stigma of BPD. We schemed what we were going to tell them. We did not plan on telling them about BPD, just my eating disorder, rapid cycling bipolar and suicidality.

The hospital was huge and confusing to navigate. It had a big, multi level car park. There was an overall desolate feeling to the place. We finally found the ED. We spoke to a stuttering man at reception and I told him that I’m suicidal. I was given a hospital wristband with a QR code which looked like the Nazi symbol. We were moved into different sections of the hospital, like cattle being led to slaughter. We were eventually moved to a dark section with staff and security sitting at a row of desks facing some empty hospital beds. There was a man on a stretcher who was about to be taken to Dandenong Hospital, which he was protesting. We waited here for a while until two bitches from the psych team came out and took us into a meeting room. They seemed friendly at first, complimenting my strawberry dressing gown. But in the end they were just as awful. They asked for my address.

“You’ve come a long way,” one of them said suspiciously.

“When was the last time you were in hospital?”

“The last few days,” I said.

I didn’t want them to know about the previous hospital. I didn’t want it to pollute their views of me. But they sniffed out the BPD straight away.

“Oh so you get emotional dysregulation”, they told me, as I tried to explain what I had been going through.

“I’m mostly down,” I told them.

“But when she gets up, she gets extremely up,” my friend said.

But it seemed they had made up their minds about me within 10 minutes: just another annoying BPD bitch.

They wanted to know what my suicide plan was. They told me I could trust them and they’re here to help. I ended up opening up to them about what I had in mind. They were the first people I had ever told about my plan. But they didn’t give a damn. They offered me no bed, no help, no ounce of hope and sent me home to die basically. I don’t know how these psychos sleep at night responsible for millions of deaths and suffering. I felt mentally raped and dumped by them. My friend had to leave at several points as she could not stand them. They also got the discharge summary from the previous hospital, which no doubt was full off bullshit about me being a manipulative, dependent, difficult bitch who doesn’t deserve a bed in hospital. So that was that. It was all very depressing and disappointing. I felt like killing myself, but that would be giving these bastards what they wanted. They want people like me dead. They want me out of their way.

The kindness my friend showed me that day was enough to get me through the night. I am incredibly lucky to have her in my life. She notices things about me that other people overlook, and it seems like she’s the only one taking me seriously. I read a quote recently, which made me think of her:

“Recently, someone inquired: “How do you know when you love someone?” My response was instinctive. You know you love someone when you truly recognise them. When you listen, event amidst the chaos. It’s the act of remembering the minute details: the way they prefer their tea, the subtle discomfort they express during a chilly evening, the melodies that light up their eyes, and all those spontaneous comments they made, assuming they’d be overlooked. Loving someone is about being acutely observant. Moreover, love is patient, enduring the ebb and flow of life’s challenges. It’s kind, offering warmth and understanding without expecting anything in return. Above all, love is unconditional, standing steadfast even when faced with imperfections and trials. It’s a bond that doesn’t waver based on conditions but thrives on genuine connection and commitment.”

My friend is incredibly smart. We talked about how my relationship with the mental health system is abusive, and I need to “break up” with them. The difficult thing is that I have had some good experiences with the mental health system, which has got me hooked. This is like the way narcissists and toxic people use what is called a “variable/intermittent reinforcement schedule”. Basically the unpredictability of rewards/love is more effective than a consistent schedule. The narcissist, emotionally unavailable partner, or toxic institution in my case use the same schedule of rewards as a gambling machine, leaving us addicted to winning despite the inevitable losses of such a risky investment. We are left pining for the good times, or the enticing person we thought they were, and continue to invest in the relationship. As Shahida Arabi writes:

“Our brains can become masochists, seeking the very people that hurt them. The unpredictability of when we’ll get our next “fix” of this elusive person creates stronger reward circuits, which leaves us wanting more and more. Unfortunately, the higher the emotional unavailability of a partner, the more exciting he appears to us- at least, to the reward centre of our brains.”

This explains why it is so hard to leave a relationship like this, even if we know we are being mistreated. It’s because we actually become addicted to the toxic relationship.

It’s going to take some time to heal from what the hospitals did to me. When I came home I spent a lot of time in bed. I’ve needed a lot of space, and would scream at my parents to leave me alone. I would emerge only at night when I would hike up and down the mountains in my PJs trying to lose more weight. The only person I wanted to talk to was my friend who went through the trauma of Wednesday with me.

I was at first depressed. Then I was angry for a while, writing and posting angry songs to Facebook. I think the anger is a healthy reaction, and finding my inner fire is an important part of healing. But then I fell into depression again, and a very deep one. I had extremely strong urges to kill myself. This time I was going to tell or call no one. There is a song on YouTube called “Secret” which is a song written from the point of view of an eating disorder. It is about how it feels to have an eating disorder constantly speaking to you. This song also perfectly depicts what it’s like to be deeply suicidal. It is an act you know you have to do all by yourself. You don’t want to tell anyone because you don’t want anyone stopping you. It is an incredibly lonely and dark headspace to be in.

I managed to get out and see a mental health worker on Friday. I was half an hour late due to my OCD and depression. It was all too much. He started talking about getting a job and how I would make a great policy analyser. Sometimes people are too quick to push you back into the world again. I am depressed, still in the midst of trauma and just trying to stay alive, let alone work. I had another appointment with a disability worker later that day which I had to cancel. It was just too much being around these people. The Crisis Assessment Team had also been trying to contact me, and I was ignoring their calls as I no longer trust anyone from the public mental health system. Finally, I gave in. I was sick of suffering and decided to give them a chance. They have actually helped me a bit and are trying to get me an admission into a private hospital, though when I first spoke with them they pissed me off as they just started going on about BPD. BPD is how they define me. They’ve pigeonholed me. Like a cancer, this diagnosis has got its way into all my records, into the blood and bone of my very being. And when you get this diagnosis, no one takes you seriously anymore.

My emotions can switch as quickly as a bolt of lightening. There have been days and nights when I’ve been struck with the worst anxiety. I usually keep people at arm’s length and can be incredibly insecure when people get close to me. I feel like I’m going to burn them out and drive them away and I just can’t shake these feelings. I told my friend I wished I was half as good a friend to her as she is to me. I didn’t really get the reassurance I needed back that I am a good friend. I felt like such a shit friend, and then came all the suicidal urges again like a pack of wild horses. I felt worthless, needy, and not good enough. I feel totally mental being tossed around and around in a hurricane of emotions. I took some medication but it took a while to kick in.

“You’ll be sorry you ever met me,” I texted my friend, before the drugs finally kicked in and I fell asleep.

I am far from well, but I am slowly regaining my strength. I am eating again (though not happy about it). I am finding I am so damn hungry, probably from starving myself for so many weeks. I am going out with my dad again, which initially I was too depressed to do. My dad will do anything for me, and while I don’t have many friends, the friends I do have are good ones. Hopefully I can hang onto these things when I feel like killing myself. Healing comes from friendship, surrounding ourselves with people who value authenticity, and finding our inner fire. I just posted the following quote on Facebook:

I am proud of the many times I have not put up with shit this year.

Healing comes from listening to what we need, whether that’s to be around people, solitude, time in nature, activity e.g. finding employment, or time in bed. It is meeting us where we are at, and not letting other people tell us where we should be at in life.

As I mentioned previously, a big part of healing, for me, is finally breaking up with the abusive mental health system. It has already destroyed 10 years of my life. I can’t let it take my 30s as well. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. I need to stop searching for love and care in these careless, ruthless places. Love is not dragging a sick person out using security and dumping them in the streets. Love is not leaving a distressed person on the ground to suffer alone. The list is endless. These is a great zine I found on an activism site here, and the following quote reminds me of my relationship with the mental health system so much. I will finish this post with this quote.

“In the most mutually abusive relationship I have been in, when I was emotionally fucked with to the point that my entire sense of reality, self knowledge and meaning was turned on its head, I was definitely fighting for my life. He wasn’t about to kill me with his bare hands, but he left me speechless. When someone renders you mute by twisting everything that comes out of your mouth and, when it suits them, anything which comes out of their mouth, you have to fight with your fists. I rarely fought him – only as much as he fought me: he pushed, I slapped. I fought myself. I burnt myself, I took overdoses, I slit my wrists, I thought of murder, I pushed away the people that loved me, I drank myself into a near coma many nights, I stopped eating, I broke things, I got arrested, I tried to bite a cop’s fingers off, I tried to bite my tongue off and I screamed. It was not a vocal scream. It came out of my whole body. A shocking scream that went on for 5 minutes until I ran out of breath and which I didn’t know I was capable of. A scream of absolute, unremitting, unconsolable, trapped, barbaric, voiceless, powerless, historical anguish. It was the only thing that could get through the bars, a sound like a hand held out with no hope that the body could follow. It was the only thing left to say. .

That scream is still there. It is in all the people who know they are fighting for their lives: the self-harmers, the alcoholics, the drug addicts, the parasuicides and the suicides, the victims of domestic abuse, of police abuse, of racist abuse, of homophobic abuse, the undereaters, the overeaters, it is in the throats of kids trapped in nuclear families and broken homes and no homes and schools and young offenders institutes, in the mouths of prisoners and prostitutes, in the bellies of all the millions of people doped up on prozac, lithium and ritalin. It is in everyone, but some are closer to that scream and what it means than others.

If you don’t think you’re fighting for your life, think again. If you know you’re not fighting for your life, maybe you’re on the wrong side.”