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Mental health

My psychiatrist passed away

“He was a big character, chaotic, charismatic, and fun. With a big heart. He lived a big life, too short. And now he has left us with a big hole.” James Oliver, Revi Nair’s colleague and friend

Today I found out that my old psychiatrist, Revi, has died. First I was in shock, and then I cried. I watched his eulogy online. I don’t know why. But it’s a great eulogy and helped me understand him more and what draw him to psychiatry. He wasn’t just a great psychiatrist but a wonderful human being with a huge personality who cared for all living beings, from stray cats to humans, all his life. He said some things to me I’ve longed to hear all my life: “I want to take care of you”, “something has to be done, things can’t keep going like this” (in reference to how bad my mental health was). Well they can and they will. What a horrible end to yet another shit year. I didn’t actually have that many sessions with him. I was referred back to the public system as he, like most private psychiatrists, felt I was too bad for the private system. But the public system/case management service won’t take me back. I was going to get the GP to refer me back to Revi. I don’t actually feel psychiatry (or even psychology) has a lot to offer me but he was a kind person and I feel there is a place for some aspects of psychiatry, like short term benzo use. I don’t know what I would have done yesterday if I didn’t have any diazepam. I wouldn’t wish panic attacks on my worst enemy. Well the GP gave me twenty more tablets of diazepam today. I was hoping for more, but the drug is highly regulated and he worried the system might knock me into red if he gave me a pack of fifty. Hopefully I don’t keep having more panic attacks. I slept better last night.

I can’t believe Revi is gone. Everyone loved him. His office was always so warm and welcoming. And his laugh… omg his laugh. There are not many psychiatrists like him around.

I seem to lose everyone as the year comes to an end. I remember my very first therapist who I saw for two and a half years and was like a best friend to me terminated our relationship in December. I have never managed to get back on my feet and have remained in a deep depression for a decade now. My current therapist is about to go on holidays, and I don’t know if I will ever see my NDIS worker again. He told me he wanted to cut back our sessions as he felt I was too dependent on him. He then told my parents he couldn’t handle all the distressing messages I was apparently sending him and has now gone off on stress leave.

I will need to rely more on my friends this next month. I don’t like to lean on my friends too much as I don’t want to burden them with all my stuff. I will probably spend a lot of time on my own in nature this next month, which I feel I need to do.

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Panic attack

Yesterday my anxiety escalated into a full blown panic attack. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this level of anxiety.

I was scared shitless. I was scared of just about everyone. I was scared of my dad coming home. I was scared of sleeping. It reminded me of the time I was put on a compulsory hospital order and had police hunting me.

I ended up taking off into the bush with what diazepam I had left and a tshirt and shorts to change into. I was wearing nothing but my dressing gown over my underwear. I’m lucky I didn’t have an accident on the way there. I was dissociating, weak and barely able to feel the car pedals. I felt trapped, suffocated and furious when the traffic banked up at one point. Continue reading “Panic attack” →

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Descent into madness: The Matrix come to life

“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” →

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Touch starvation, mania, and dissociation

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” →

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Self-esteem and standing on the edge of loss, again

avalon grey

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” →

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Everything good turns to shit

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” →

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Negligent hospitals, mute, trauma, autistic burn out and the fight for freedom

“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” →

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A shocking discovery

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” →

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Molested

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” →

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