“How could Maroondah discharge me like this?” I wrote to my therapist at 5:11AM on Sunday. “I was so depressed I couldn’t even shower or get changed. I wore the same clothes the entire 6 days I was there. I tried to kill myself multiple times on the ward. I was suicidal the day they discharged me. I’ve been mute for a month. Now I’m home I’m trying to medicate the lows with ADD stimulants and now my brain is melting out of my fucking ears. I can’t sleep, I can’t look after myself, I sit on the laptop for 15+ hours straight, day and night and I get headaches all the time. I don’t know what the fuck this is but it’s not just a fucked up personality. But that’s all they see, an annoying bpd bitch who shouldn’t be kept in hospital or else she’ll become dependent. No other patient is treated this way. I feel like maybe there’s something really wrong with me medically. Like my nails break all the time now and I get bruises all over my legs and I have no idea what from. I probably have scarring all over my brain from a lifetime of trauma. They should have organised an MRI for me in the hospital, and they should have made sure I got a quiet room rather than leave me behind a pathetic blue curtain where I was going mental having to listen to everyone else’s conversations. I didn’t get much sleep there either as they were waking me up at 8am every morning to offer me a tablet of olanzapine full of shit like talc and does fuck all for me anyway so I refused it every time and asked them to stop waking me but they kept doing it. So I was kinda glad to go, but I’m not ok.” Continue reading “Descent into madness: The Matrix come to life”
I am writing this post backwards. This short introduction is actually the last thing I’ve written, now that I know what the post looks like. It is a bit of a different post to my usual posts. There are three things I talk about in this post, and I have broken them down into different subheadings as my mind’s all over the place and I’m struggling to write a cohesive piece.
Touch starvation-
Harlow and Zimmerman (1959) were some of the first researchers to show just how important touch is. When given the choice between a wire-mesh “mother” that held a bottle and a soft cloth “mother”, baby monkeys preferred the latter. Touch is the very first way we experience the world and is the foundation for our physical, social and psychological health. Loving, meaningful, consensual touch is important for the following:
- Pain regulation (touch releases endorphins)
- Emotion regulation
- Mood
- Relaxation
- Sleep
- Reading faces
- Recognising emotions in self
- Expressing emotion
- Physical growth (“failure to thrive” is the pediatric term for stunted growth/weight)
- Immunity and recovery from disease
- Prosocial behaviour
- Connection to others
Former inmate Brett Collins shares his experience of solitary confinement with ABC, which can be found on YouTube here. The deprivation of human connection and touch, also called “skin hunger”, is essentially a type of torture. It kills, just as physical abuse or starvation kills. And prisoners are not the only people who experience it. You don’t need prison bars to make a prison. Sadly many people in our society are having a remarkably similar experience to Brett Collins. One election some politicians in my country even suggested having a minister for loneliness is it so widespread. A lot of this boils down to the shift from a collective culture to an individualist one. With this shift, we have seen a movement against co-sleeping, where sleeping separately is said to “teach” infants how to manage on their own. Technology is another factor. A lot of people got a taste of touch starvation during lock down. Continue reading “Touch starvation, mania, and dissociation”
I was discharged from PAPU, the four-bed, short stay psychiatric unit in the public hospital, two days ago. In total they gave me six days there, which is a lot longer than they usually give me, though still not enough. I was terrified I would be set up for more rejection when the private hospital sent me back to the public system. Usually the public hospitals just keep me overnight in the emergency department and send me home the next day, or give me a maximum of 48 hours.
During my fifth day there, I saw Dr Michael. He told me that management was putting pressure on them to discharge me.
“I didn’t ask for this,” I would tell the doctors. “I didn’t even want to be here. I wanted to stay at Delmont.” But Delmont wouldn’t take me back.
Michael told me that not talking made it hard for me to participate in the groups in private hospitals, which was total bullshit as there is not much interaction in the groups anyway.
“People need to stop discriminating against me,” I told him. “You don’t tell someone who doesn’t hear they can’t have a hospital stay. I’m fucking sick of it. Both public and private. There is ways around it like people who are deaf or blind.”
Continue reading “Self-esteem and standing on the edge of loss, again”
Since returning to the city I have been full of rage as scorching as wildfire. I struggle to recall the past week and cannot put it into a coherent narrative, so all I’m going to do is go over some of the texts, emails and things I’ve written which I have copies of. Continue reading “Everything good turns to shit”
“You build me up, you break me down. My heart it pounds, yeah you got me. With my hands up, you got me now, you got that sound, yeah you got me.” Ke$ha – TiK ToK
It is the first time I’ve been able to blog since my last post a week or so ago. It’s felt like the longest week of my life. I feel like I could write a whole book on this week alone. The disturbing saga continues, without resolution, like a piano with endless keys which just get lower and lower.
The psych ward only gave me two nights, even though I asked for longer. They wanted to dump me in a facility called PARC, a non-clinical mental health facility, which people stay in for a week as a “step down” from hospital, or a “step up” from home to prevent a hospital admission. But there were questions about my medical stability. I was barely eating and the hospital wanted to do a blood sugar level test which involves pricking your finger but I was scared of the test so refused it. The nurses said they’d come back in half an hour. I then got in the shower when they came to the door to avoid getting the test done. I was so traumatised in general- by life, by the way they just wanted me out when I was acutely unwell- that I became mute. I am still speculating on what is causing my muteness, which I will discuss later, but whatever it was, I just couldn’t will myself to speak. The day of my discharge one of the doctors came in and told me PARC wouldn’t take me if I wouldn’t speak. I felt like she thought I was being manipulative and could blackmail me into talking. I brought up The Shutdown Dissociation Scale research paper on my phone and showed it to her. One of the symptoms is muteness. There is some more great information about the different responses to trauma on this page.
“We don’t follow that here,” the doctor said.
She said if I didn’t go to PARC they’d just be sending me home. I couldn’t believe it.
“So you’re just going to send me home in this state?” I wrote to her, with gestures of disbelief. “This is discrimination against people with disabilities.”
Becoming non-verbal is common in autism when we become overwhelmed, as is shown in the series Heartbreak High, with one of the autistic characters, Quinni, becoming mute for a while after her horrible girlfriend put her through hell.
“I’ll get your discharge papers ready,” the doctor told me. “Have a good day!” Continue reading “Negligent hospitals, mute, trauma, autistic burn out and the fight for freedom”
So I begin the next chapter of my disturbing saga. I’ve been thinking lately I just cannot get better in this city. I stopped having all those trippy experiences at night, but I still felt like rubbish the next day. I was depressed, I had no motivation to do anything and I felt like I was being crushed by this heavy cloud which wanted to release rain but couldn’t. I wondered whether 5G was impacting my sleep and health. I wanted to get as far away from civilisation as I could get, so I started looking for houses to rent in the country, and thought about going back to the farm I did a working holiday at a few years ago. I stayed in a church, a beautiful piece of architecture, which the owners had build at the bottom of their property. Other people would book it for functions, though, such as the ayahuasca ceremony I wrote about here. There is no where else on the property I can stay while other people are using the church. I thought about just booking the church permanently and living there (it’s only $25 a night, and $50 weekends and is completely self-contained), but I didn’t want to “hog” the church and prevent the ayahuasca group from having ceremonies there. So I went to message the leader on Facebook to ask if he was still running ceremonies at the farm. I then noticed he hadn’t posted anything for a while and I wasn’t sure if he was still using Facebook. I then searched his organisation on Google to find a contact number. Their website had disappeared, but what I did find was this article. I was shocked to learn a man, who I think I actually knew, had died at one of the ceremonies. The leader is now facing criminal charges for negligent manslaughter because they didn’t call an ambulance when he became extremely unwell. Continue reading “A shocking discovery”
Following on from my last post about my sleep paralysis and other trippy night time experiences, I found this article about “spiritual emergencies” which was a great read. It talks about the intersection between psychoses and spiritual experiences. It reminds me of one of my favourite quotes which is that shamans swim in the same ocean that people with schizophrenia drown in. Continue reading “Molested”
My sleep seems to be getting more and more terrifying and bizarre. I keep getting trapped in other realms/dimensions and am not able to wake up. I call out but I’m stuck behind a veil and no one can hear me. I reach for the light switch beside my bed but no light will turn on. I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep. On Sunday night when it happened again I felt like something was coming for me from the sky outside. I had the choice to die, to go with it or fight it. And while I want to die all the time, when I had death presented to me like this I didn’t want it anymore. All I could think of was how I hadn’t told my dad that I loved him enough. It wasn’t a nice place I was in. It wasn’t a peaceful place. I believe I’m experiencing some kind of demonic, spiritual oppression. I was being led to death. I wondered when my dad would find my dead body as I sleep so late; he probably would have thought I was sleeping, but this time I never get up. I finally managed to snap out of it. I had been hyperventilating and sweating. I then woke up my dad who I live with crying and telling him I’m so scared. Continue reading “Sleep issues, sleep paralysis, terrifying nights, trapped in dreams, demons, dissociation, little space”
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