“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”
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”
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”
It’s been another week from hell. My period finally came, which was a relief as I get terrible PMS. I was getting migraines all the time, felt breathless and weak, and had to cancel things I had on. There was one night I kept having shitty, fucked up dreams as well. In one I was being raped. Then in the dream I was left with stroke-like symptoms, slurred speech, a drooped face, and inability to walk. My dad called an ambulance in the dream but the healthcare system was so bloody negligent they wouldn’t send one, which is something I have sadly experienced in my waking life. No one would see how bad I was. In my dream my glasses came off and disintegrated and my mouth was full of metal bits. I tried to spit them out but I swallowed some. I woke up. Then when I finally managed to fall back to sleep again I had another nightmare. This time I dreamt that someone knocked on my front door at night. My dad went to open it but I told him not to. Continue reading “Back in the psych ward: trigger warning, animal cruelty”
After a bit of a rough start, I am finally getting the respite that I need. I am staying in a motel set in a quaint garden. People often have weddings here. I have been the only one staying here the past few days which has been lovely. Below is a view from my window. Small birds with long, thin beaks often stop by and suck nectar from the flowers on the bush.
Continue reading “Loss, home, space, solitude and developmental trauma”
In the aftermath of that night I overdosed, I’ve been hiding away as I deal with the wreckage. It’s been a few months and I still have a tremor and heart issues. My heart literally aches and it races when I change position. I’m also not able to sleep on my right side as I hear and feel the pulse in my right ear pounding. All I want in this life is to feel comfortable in my body, and if I could take back what I did I would. Sometimes I wish it had of killed me. I have suffered enough. Continue reading “Post-OD update”
I dream that I am in a psych ward with the only friends I had at high school. I dream constantly about high school. It was over a decade ago now. I dream that I still have more exams left. My final years were extremely stressful. I put so much pressure on myself to achieve, and it is frightening to feel like those years are not over. On the other hand, I have other dreams about high school where it is not over and I’m glad about that. I’m glad because I still have a chance to do things differently. You might wonder why I would want things to be different when I was school dux. I may seem privileged to you. But beneath my overachievement I was deeply unhappy and lonely. Becoming dux and getting a scholarship to uni didn’t change that. I studied a course I hated and I can’t get a job with. What I wanted more than anything was friendship and love. Being dux and not having any hecs to pay back, while great, has not made life more fulfilling. I have spent the last decade unemployed, single, in and out of psych hospitals and wanting to be dead. I wish I could wind back the clock. I wish I hadn’t of walked away from the school where people (like Sara) did love me because of those who did not. It is something that haunts me to this day.
hsphaven 