The day where I’d leave Melbourne and return to the country approached. I had teed up the new caravan to rent. I had teed up transport. I bought doonas, heaps of hot water bottles and a bag full of heat packs so I was better prepared for the cold, all while unwell. I kept waking up to a peculiar hammering. It was usually just a few bangs and then would stop for a while. One day, I heard three bangs, the number which I seemed to be seeing everywhere. I read a very scary post on social media once where someone reported hearing three knocks on her door at night. Another member said that it was demons and her death would be imminent. The number three is a very significant number spiritually, as seen in the Holy Trinity. I was convinced the number meant something. In fact I was convinced everything meant something, that there was hidden signs and meaning in the light flickering, the smoke detectors malfunctioning, etc. Continue reading “The psychotic descent continues: part 2”
Part 1. Fleeing the city to live with mice
My time away in the country just got worse and worse by the minute. I couldn’t get rid of the mice in the caravan which would keep me awake all night. My friend and I carried a mattress down from her house one night and I slept in the annex, a room adjoining the caravan, but the little shits were in there as well. They kept running through the room all night. I was so exhausted I couldn’t even get up. Continue reading “Reality makes you mad”
Dissociative systems has become a bit of an interest of mine, and I am writing this post to take my mind off how much discomfort I am in physically. Most people will be more familiar with the terms “Dissociative Identity Disorder”, or “multiple personality disorder”, but “dissociative systems” is actually the term the community tends to prefer. The word “system” is used to describe the collective that lives in the one body, and the term is less pathologising. Many members of the community do not see this as a “disorder”. It is a highly creative and helpful way of dealing with unbearable trauma, usually starting in early childhood, and many members do not wish for it to go away. Attempting to treat it through “integration” is like murder. Continue reading “Dissociative systems (aka Dissociative Identity Disorder)”
“Depression is
Living in a body
That fights to
Survive, with a mind
That tries to die.”
My dad has always said that full moon really knocks him about. He reports a “crash” after full moon. Apparently emergency departments are bursting on full moon. My friend and I definitely felt the recent full moon. We were both extremely depressed.
I have been journalling for a week now, and it’s painting a pretty grim picture of my life. I don’t fall asleep until sunrise and sometimes even later such as 10am. I am distressed pretty much every day and I experience deep, frequent lows where I rate my mood as 1/10 or 0/10. Depression has become normal for me. I have no quality of life and at this point life has become about surviving the days and trying to minimise my distress until I finally die. Continue reading “Full moon”
Last night I had the worst sleep. I woke up all the time, interspersed with dreams about my old psychiatrist dying and the feeling that I was dying, something that has become a common experience for me, especially when I try to sleep. I also dreamt about escaping to the countryside, as well as people my age superseding me career-wise and becoming doctors. I dreamt about a girl I used to know in high school. In my dream she had become a psychiatrist and I was helping her run some kind of retreat in the countryside for kids with mental health issues. I was no good with people, and decided I’d be better off caring for the animals on the farm. Continue reading “Excruciatingly sensitive”
“Imagine living with a scream inside you.
And the scream is yours.
And no one else hears it.
That is grief.
Imagine living with a scream inside you—a scream that is yours alone.
It’s loud, it’s piercing, and it reverberates through every part of your being.
And yet, no one else hears it.
Grief can make the world feel so distant.
You might be in the middle of a conversation,
but your mind is elsewhere, caught in that scream.
What does a silent scream even sound like?
What would it sound like if someone else could hear it?
Perhaps it isn’t really a scream but a feeling
with sound, one so raw, so painful, so excruciating
that there are no words to describe it,
so it becomes a sound, a noise, a vibration
that rages through our entire body, screaming,
The scream of grief.”
– Author unknown
I spent most of my day in bed lethargic. The lethargy was actually a welcome relief from the restlessness and agitation that rips apart my insides every day and especially every night. I got a text from my dad thanking me for the various adventures we’ve been on together. It sounded like he was expecting one of us to die soon.
“Dear Zoe,” he wrote. “Thankyou for all the “adventures” you have taken me on ! Thanks for Philip Island, and taking you down there – to run away from the wretched police, and the stupid psychiatrist at Chandler House. Taping my torch on the back of my car, so you could follow in your car … Thanks too for taking me to see Margaret’s place, and her “church”. Thanks for checking out Bendigo, with me, and meeting Dr Julia Bourke… Thanks for “Wet & Wild” … rafting down the Yarra at Warburton. Thanks for inviting me to that place past Sale, where you stayed (with the woman who couldn’t stop talking), where I almost lost her dog, on one of my long walks. Yep, … we have been on some great adventures together ”
I didn’t know if the stress of seeing me suffer for so long, which has led me to isolate, no longer speak and lash out at him, was driving him to suicide. I didn’t know if he senses I am slipping away and may not make it through another year, or even to the end of this year. But tears welled in my eyes when I read that text. Continue reading “Losing things, OCD and more on dissociation”
“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”
hsphaven 