hsphaven

Dear medical model,

At first I felt understood by you. You gave me words for who I am. You told me I am not bad, I am sick. You told me you can fix me like you fix a broken arm.

Now, you abandon me. You tell me you won’t walk the journey with me. You tell me I am “well” and our time together ends here. You tell me you feel useless when you are not experimenting on people with pills. You can’t see how important relationships are, how talking with my case worker and knowing he is there for me through both the good and bad is actually what heals. You are smug and paternalistic. You tell me you know what’s best for me. I question whether you really knew me at all.

Sometimes I find comfort in taking my medication, for it is something you taught me. It is a connection to you and your people who saw me through so much, like the way the sun’s warmth still lingers on the land after it has gone down. It is a way of keeping you inside of me. Other times, I lower the dose of the medication you insist I need and I take amphetamines because I know you don’t want me taking those. You thought they made me manic and psychotic. Well fuck you. I will do what I like now.

I keep your appointment cards. One day when you are gone I will come across them and want to cry as they remind me of you. I will hang onto them like a child and her blanket. Or maybe I will burn them, and try to forget we ever met. There is something seriously perverted when the people who are meant to look after you end up damaging you the most.

“Favourite person” is a term which is used in the BPD community to describe an intense bond we can form with a person. They make or break our day. They are the centre of our universe. We are addicted to them. Losing a “favourite person” is one of the worst things I have ever been through. As Polly Scattergood sings in “Remove All Traces”, it is like a candlestick. At first it burns so brightly, then it melts away so quick. In the darkness no one holds your hand no more, and suddenly you’re more alone than you were beforehand. Continue reading “Losing a “favourite person”” →

I thought I’d be safe when I first met you. You were a guy, unlike all the other mental health workers I’d had. How wrong was I. You held a knife behind your back, and now the same person who built me up is tearing me down, stabbing me and just watching me bleed. I didn’t think it’s possible to break somebody who’s already broken. But you stamp your foot over the shards of glass that lie before you. Shards of me, maybe even shards of your office window I imagine breaking. You rub them into the floor, break them into more and more pieces… crumbs, like the love you strung me along with. You and your clinic were a death sentence. I wish I’d never stepped foot in the door now.

I don’t know when I got attached exactly. Sometimes it hits you straight away like a train. Other times it’s insidious like a cancer growing slowly inside of us, and by the time we discover it, it’s too late. You were a constant in my life for years. I saw you every fortnight and you sat with me in every appointment with the doctors. You became a part of me, like my shadow. You were the highlight of my fortnight. The centre of my universe. The reason I got dressed. A safe haven. Now this safe haven’s walls are collapsing, and I am left alone in the warzone my life is, smoke and destruction all around me. I cry like a child, reach for you, look for you everywhere, but you have vanished in the dust. You leave me here to die. I wonder if you ever really existed or you were an imaginary friend I conjured up in my head to feel less alone.

There is so much stigma around BPD, especially from professionals. Earlier in the year I presented to the emergency department suicidal. I waited all night to be seen and then was seen for ten minutes, told hospital doesn’t help “people like me” and sent home. Another time while in the emergency department I was next to a man with self-injury. He was told by a nurse he was taking up the bed of someone who was “actually sick”, unlike him. He protested and then was chemically restrained. I thought my case worker had a better grasp of BPD, but lately his attitude towards me hasn’t been at all compassionate or understanding. It began with the day he and my doctor started talking about discharge. I was so distressed afterwards that a member of the public found me catatonic on the nature strip outside the clinic. I lay there unable to get up or speak. The man called an ambulance. I should have been taken to hospital, but my case worker came out of the clinic and intervened in the process. He told them I had “Borderline Personality Disorder” and “ASD” and he was not concerned about my mental health. As a result I was sent home to suffer alone. Continue reading “BPD stigma” →

“Oh you told me I was stronger, but I can’t remember how to be strong without you.” Margot Todd, “I’m Not Ready To Say Goodbye”

The world keeps spinning on. Another Christmas. Another year. But I am standing sill. All the meaningless greetings wash over me like the tide. “Merry Christmas”, “Happy new year”, “Have a safe new year”. They are all empty words which people need to stop saying because this is not a happy season for many people. I’m sure I’m not the only grinch out there. I don’t want to have a “safe” new year. I want to be dead. Continue reading “Christmas blues” →

I keep asking myself why do I keep falling for mental health professionals? It always ends in heartbreak and trauma. These people are unavailable to me in any real life sense and I always lose the relationship altogether. That is when I discovered Susan Anderson’s podcast on “Abandoholism”. Basically, some people are attracted to the unavailable. The podcast goes for 48 minutes and explains how this can turn into an addiction. I have written about addiction to narcissists and emotionally unavailable partners before here. I talk about the variable/intermittent reinforcement schedule of these people which gets us hooked more than stable, predictable love. Susan mentions this in her podcast. She also includes some other interesting research. She explains that in the abandoholic brain, the amygdala associates love with insecurity/fear of loss. She then goes onto share some research which shows that separation in a relationship creates a stronger bond, and abandoholism and trauma bonds are basically opioid addictions. This research was with mother rats and their babies. Those rats who were separated formed a closer bond than the rats who were not separated. The rats were then given Naloxone, the drug used to block opiod drugs such as heroine (what a fucked up experiment, I know). When given Naloxone, there was no difference in the bond between the rats who were separated and those not. The Naloxone had blocked the opioids leading to the bond. I believe a similar addiction can happen with self-injury.

Susan Anderson’s podcast can be purchased here.

I’m still no further in actually healing this, but I learnt a fair bit in 48 minutes.

There are at least four different ways the body can respond to highly traumatic or stressful situations. With my current trauma I have been taken into the “collapse”/”shutdown” state, which is when the nervous system decides it cannot escape the threat, cannot overpower it, and cannot make it lose interest. It is a state of complete helplessness where the only thing left is to disconnect from ourselves and our surroundings so we don’t feel as much pain. It is a response which looks extremely disturbing to onlookers, which is why somebody who saw me like this a few weeks ago called an ambulance. I looked as though I’d overdosed or something. I lay on the ground not speaking or responding. He turned me over and my muscles flopped meekly to the ground like a rag doll. Usually I’d be embarrassed to be causing such a scene, but I was so out of it and did not care about anything anymore. It all felt like a bad dream. Continue reading “Responding to trauma: the “collapse”/”shutdown” response” →

I feel myself slipping. Slipping into the underground world. When you are in this much pain you will accept relief anywhere. I want heroine, but I don’t know anyone or anywhere who has it. My friends are not part of this world which is enticing me like the deceptively calm waters of a rip, pulling me so far away from the shore that I barely know who I am anymore. I heard there is a man in the neighbourhood who does drugs. He works as a logger, frequently bringing wood home and chain sawing it or grinding it in his machine, subjecting the whole neighbourhood to his incessant noise. He has kids who are just as loud and obnoxious and love riding motor bikes around the yard. Apparently he even owns a gun and has threatened the neighbours with it before. I used to hate him, but now I think about knocking on the door and asking if he can help me. Continue reading “Desperate and invisible” →

My doctor said she would listen to me and include me in their decision to discharge me. Apparently they hadn’t made the decision yet. But somewhere amongst all the calls to Lifeline, ambulance calls, police calls, hospital admissions and hate letters I’ve written to them it seems like they’ve made their decision to discharge me. They probably made it before that appointment when they started talking about discharge. At the end of the day they will do what they like to me and the many others they “help”. They will replace me with another client and move on with their miserable lives while mine is destroyed. I wrote a letter telling them they can go fuck themselves. Then I called my case worker and begged him not to discharge me. Continue reading “Someone to stay” →