Shopping with Binky

BINKY and I just went on the most marvellous shopping spree in Oxfam (for those of you not au fait with the British high street, that's a high-end charity shop) ~ where we both purchased new trainers (that's "sneakers" to you Americans) and I decided to buy myelf a book collection: The Perrin Technique: How to Beat Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/ME by Dr Raymond Perrin; Nobel House by James Clavell and Fame by Tilly Bagshawe. Intellectual titles, all three!

Then we met a crack-addicted prostitute who had just been in a bitch-fight. This was Agatha, my friend Paddaddster's woman... Binky kept laughing because I've been "gauwching" today. Gauwching is junk-speak for "heroin-induced slumber" but it's not really as straightforward as that. I've not been sleeping all week. And every time I wake up, I feel like my stomach has been scrubbed out with liquid drain cleaner. I had to eat a 500g pot of fruits of the forest pro-biotic yoghurt this morning in order to feel better and it did work a treat. I can't believed I stooped low enough to take nasty heroin again. True, my knackered-out body feels some need. But my mood has been far too superior ever to require chemical stimulation. The natural highs of hypomania far outstrip any chemical substitute.

We went to the council offices to get my pensioner's bus pass. Binky kept telling me to keep still and not say too much. She's complaining that my ear infection manifests in a even louder voice from me than usual. Then she said, "Actually you should get up in the middle and walk around saying some stupid things. Oh no. You'll probably do that anyway...?" She says I'm still hypomanic, but not as hypomanic as yesterday. I think I had about six or six-and-a-half hours' sleep last night. Binky passed all my paperworks across the desk then said this is my friend who is really unorganized. Here's all the letters you need and the passport photos. He should have sorted this out a year ago." The lady who dealt with my claim said I ought to get a letter telling me to pick up my pass from the local Post Office in six-to-eight weeks' time.

It's taken more than a year to sort this Freedom Pass. Deshane, my old Support Worker told a bare-faced lie about having attempted to get me one last year and come up against the problem of my being housed by one London borough and yet resident in another. Having checked the present paperwork, there's no way that could have been an issue, because short of asking for proof of address, no other details of one's place of residence impinge on one's application whatsoever. This Deshane is the one who had the impertinence to declare to my psychiatrist that he thought I had obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he referred to as "COD" (surely "COD means "cash on delivery"..?) There was a real pregnant pause in the meeting, which Deshane didn't notice and then my shrink said "Well we're working under another diagnosis." Schizoaffective bipolar disorder being about as different from OCD as cheesecake from jumbo saveloy.

I should be eligable for this pensioner's bus pass on the grounds of "severe mental illness". When my neonatal-looking GP, Dr Lovelace umm'd and arr'd over the forms I pointed out that when manic last year I reached a point where I literally could not read at all (which was absolutely true: why do you think I feel so traumatized by the excesses of that "episode"...(?)) then straight away she said "leave the form at reception and I'll have it signed for you within a week. Do you understand now why my attitude to this disorder is so mixed? On the one hand it opens the door to undiluted euphoric, rapturous transcendent, mystical experience... on the other, it's really disabling and demeaning. And I'm particularly unimpressed by the prefix "schizo". As y'all know, I thoroughly enjoy much of my mania, so I don't want to give that side up. Surely at some time in the future they'll concoct a mood stabilizer able to eliminate depression and yet keep me mildly hypomanic all the time...? Because if "recovery" is going to mean years of mild depression with dragging tiredness, boredom ~ in other words a half-baked, half-cocked "recovery" then I'm not sure how much "better" I wanna get anyway...?

I just love this "bounce mix"; 17 minutes in it gets really bangin' (...)... and 50 mins 30 seconds... and 51 minutes.

I must go and eat a Jogobella raspberry yogurt 500 Calories in 500g ~ so I'm really eating good. This stuff settles my stomach like nothing else in the mornings... Well I simply MUST GO and do a Damn Great Gauwch as well. I've not been sleeping properly all week and I REALLY NEED TO CATCH UP...................






BANGIN' 3-HOUR SCOUSE HOUSE/BOUNCE/DONK-MIX NOVEMBER 2011...




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Working Out What to Work At

I'M IN A FUNNY MOOD TODAY ("today being yesterday, Friday). I got to reading books and listening to music and watching Helen Mirren starring as The Queen (yet again) last night and didn't realize how late it was until I saw the foreign satellite box was showing me a time of 2am. Then I went to bed in hat, coat and scarf (because it's that cold and I can't afford to keep the fanheater belting it out all night)... only to wake again at FIVE A.M. unable to sleep. I thought I needed more methadone so I drank that... and went into a long internal rant of the type I usually only make when I have some serious complaint I want to make (usually to the methadone clinic) or some ranting blog piece I want to post but the computer isn't there and I'm rehearsing what I'm gonna say. Or I'm becoming manic. I carried on ranting in a most irritated fashion inside my head till past eight o'clock and then distracted myself by phoning the DSS ("DWP" as they call themselves now) to find out when my benefits are getting paid. Suddenly, at the sound of a kindly human voice, I was most cheerful and chatty. I'm now getting my money on Tuesdays, not Mondays, which put me in terror of the electricity running out on Emergency, so later that morning Binky lent me a tenner.

When I'm on my own I feel stone cold normal. But whenever the phone rings, or I'm in the company of another person ~ whoever that may be ~ suddenly I'm acting and feeling half-drunk: lively and verbiose. I just wish I could keep this good mood going all the time. [And I'm trying to keep careful track of my moods: hence these notes.]

I got to musing about my True Job Prospects (and not the illusiory ones; I mean, if I truly had my pick of professions I'd go for Head of State (obviously ~ and not for a mere four years like a poxy American president ~ it would have to be a lifelong position to suit me... if not hereditary). And if I put my talents to full use, I'd be a bestselling writer. Plus a magazine editor and publisher. And a maker of fine fragrance. And a jewellery designer with lines on sale via Bulgari (for the real stuff) and the home shopping channel (for cubic zirconia). My other ambitions are to design a bestselling board-game and a computer game. To appear in a French film. To release a hit single and make an album. And to become a great poet with my works appearing on teeshirts, mugs, fridge-magnets etc (far better way of making money out of poetry than books! Who buys poetry books nowadays?) And to make bestselling poetry CDs with the poetry performed against a backdrop of whooshing ambience with chirping birds, whalesong etc in the background. These are just a handful of my ambitions. And they are real ambitions. You can think what you like, but with half a chance I will go for them all ~ and I'm fully intending to contrive that chance myself.

But failing that: working for someone else. How the hell am I meant to explain on whatever form I have to fill in (and surely it's NOT the initial application form; that would be just too brutal) that I'm supposed to be a schizophrenic manic-depressive? Who the hell's going to want to employ me then? That's why I need this chat with the temp agency. I'm going to walk in somewhere and give the unvarnished truth (no drug references though, and no medical details except the names of the conditions, of which I have to inform potential employers, in order to qualify for protection under the Disability Discrimination Act 2005. So I was thinking about this, and musing on what the hell would happen if I suddenly became manic enough to believe I can say and do precisely as I please no matter who's watching? Or so depressed I can't be bothered to change clothes or shower for weeks on end? And my life and the prospect of anything better seemed such a morass that I switched off and switched the TV on instead...

Somebody somewhere, please give me some perspective on this. I'm not really mad, (...) right~~? I could go mad again... or I could not. I still hear voices every day, but they're not the ultra-real voices ~ utterly indistinguishable from a real person right next to me telling me things wonderful or irrelevant about myself and the world... I know my voices now are not accoustically real. Example: yesterday the following information beamed at me from the pavement: You are looking wonderful! So I told the pavement, Oh yes I know ~ even if I do say so myself! But I knew this was a psychic dream, not the reality of ordinary people. As long as I can keep the two realities: that of relatively low-grade "symptoms" and that of everyday working people, separate then surely I should be fine enough to work amongst the People myself..?

What should I do? Should I follow my heart, my head or my Dreams? I want to commence writing a novel. But which novel to write? I have ideas for at least four that I could pen tonight. And another ten more ready for next year... I'm only hampered by a wavering sense of morality plus my own inextricable laziness. But ~ ha! ~ come to think of it, I know what I'm writing: VALERIE: THE PRISON EMAILS ~ my "respectable" Australian heroin-addicted narcotics-trafficking housewife and mother's outermost rants.

OK so it's all settled ~~ but before I get a book advance big enough to buy a four-bedroom flat opposite Harrods, should I get a "normal" job too? And can I even do one? The more I think about it, the more terrified I am. I remember office politics. And I remember the stultifying culture of enforced "normality" that prevails in the corporate workplace (two of my old jobs were with large corporations, the type of place that uses its own custom-made software so a weeks' IT-training is required before you can really begin...) Akh. Ukh. I don't know I don't know I don't know. And the British system is NOT kind or understanding to anybody who ever needs to vacillate between work and benefits (which I really wouldn't want to do, but face it there's a chance I might HAVE to...) plus I haven't even considered the fact that I'm still on methadone, still sporadically chipping at the Heroin, still not clean from that drug. I don't drink. At all these days. And I touch no other intoxicating substances apart from heroin and caffeine (the caffeine gets me way more out of it these days anyway)... what am I going to do? And what if I have a cup of tea at work and it makes me suddenly go bipolar?

SOMEBODY GIVE SOME ADVICE, PLEASE!

Music ~~~~~~~ Barber's Adagio for Strings
I love this tune...

William Orbit/Ferry Corsten mix



Longer version of the same (sans video)



Sung version by the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge with transcendently beautiful, mind-expanding cosmic visuals by NASA



Illustrated: Birds of Paradise animation...

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The Help That I Need... And Do I Really Need It ... (And What Is It Anyhow?)...?

AT THE WEEKEND, after I'd got a bit over-exuberant and what she likes to call "really manic" but I would categorize as "a bit hypomanic" (no way was I "really manic" in doctorly terms; I was just a bit elevated in mood; a little hyper) my friend Binky told me I really need more help from the mental health services than I'm currently getting. It's true the first thing she did on my arrival was to insist on laundering my clothes, which I thought were clean but she definitely didn't. Then I had a shower in her heated bathroom, which meant that I spent longer than a couple of seconds in there. And on coming out and changing into grey jogging bottoms and a fuschia pink teeshirt that she insisted was red but it wasn't ~ it was most definitely pink ~ I have to admit, I felt a whole lot cleaner. That is, cleaner as in less dirty. Not altogether clean. I never am and never feel "clean". But maybe that's my inner drug-addict being honest, hey.

One of the Support Workers who works at the Supported Housing where Binks lives listened as I told the story of how I ever came to the attention of the mental health system at all. That was to do with a drought in the UK's heroin supply and a sudden attack of mixed mania and psychosis coinciding with the "first day of the rest of my life"... that is, my first day clean of the terrible weak and adulterated heroin that was going around in those days. And how I never really recovered over the following weeks. Because I was keeping a diary with a four-point mood-scale going upwards and down and was scoring +1.5 and -1.5 on the same day. +1.5 means a very noticably elevated mood and hyperkinesis similar to the effects of speed. -1.5 is a very sour, depressive mood. +2 on this scale means full-blown mania, +3 is psychotic mania, +4 is a quasi-delirious state with disorientation and confusion ~ as bad as mania gets. The very maximum on each end would be a plus or minus five.

In the first flush of psychotic mood disorder I went up to about +3.5 and down below -4. I remember the aerial falling off the top of my TV and it staying that way, with barely any picture, for two days because the television was merely an object upon which to fix as I stared into space. After about six weeks of rolling moods I suddenly went sky high and this is where I hit a +4.99, about as high as you can go.

But these days I'm still scoring plus and minus 1.5s. I was +1.5 on Saturday afternoon. My self and my house are getting ever further into disarray. [I never stay high; it's the change of direction that throws me every time. I never know where I am, where I'm going.] Binky somehow knows that my living space is in dire need of clearing and cleaning, even though she's never set eye on it. She needs a knee replacement and so rarely walks further than the nearest busstop, and when we meet at home it's always her place.

In a moment of empassioned despair I went and telephoned Naomi, the lady who used to run the Dual Diagnosis "Nutter Club" (as I called it). I'm not her patient and she knows I'm only phoning for advice. I would never expect practical help from her: she's far too snowed under by all her other cases... She returned my call this morning saying the best thing I can do, to get more help, is say to my GP that I need a psychiatric referral ~ or more to the point, to enquire as to where the current one has got to. When I turned up feeling depressed about two months ago, she said she was referring me to a psychiatrist. The other option is to ask for help via the methadone clinic; but Naomi underlined for me how prejudiced psychiatrists can be against drug users (that must mean they're prejudiced against most of their patients as most people with ongoing mental health issues these days are drug-takers, if not full-blown drug-addicts like me...)

She reminded me of stuff I suppose I already knew in my heart: that if you want help for depression, for example, you shouldn't downplay the "suicidal ideation" nearly all depressives get. I just don't like talking about stuff like that; unless I really feel bad in the moment I mention it, I nearly always feel separated from my own feelings and myself when I do so, so there's a good chance I'd have to hold myself back from laughing. I can't take myself seriously the way I'm "supposed to". I just can't. Well I'll try... but I wonder what I think this doctor can do..? I don't want any more meds or drugs. The one thing I think might help is counselling... I mean, I hate to admit this, as counselling has always been the knee-jerk response of health professionals of all persuasions... but who knows; maybe it would help...? It's true I still feel traumatized by the mere fact that I went totally fruitloops barking bonkers in early 2011. I certainly do not feel I've had any closure on this issue.

Binky says that what I need is the same manner of Supported Housing she lives in. And that I need a social worker and a thing called a CPA which means a Care Plan Approach ~ a written contract-type billing of what treatment I can expect and call upon when and from whom, especially in emergency. Because as far as I'm aware I have nothing like this. No community nurse I can get in touch with. All I know about handling emergency situations is that I'm meant to present myself to the nearest mental hospital's emergency department. Where they seem deliberately to keep everyone waiting for hours, as if the long waiting time is going to put anybody off when actually all it does is severely annoy some already annoyed people and help further to unravel others who have already passed their wits' ends.

So really, No. No true help is available anywhere. Maybe I would do better in a Dual Diagnosis Service (geared towards mentally deranged drug addicts) rather than the one I go to, which seems to be geared to the needs of people whose main issue is the drugs. Giving up the drugs never seemed to help my mental states in the past, which is why I'm somewhat doubtful that just giving up heroin is really going to do much good to my mind. It'll probably do my body far more favours. The two street drugs most associated with mental ill health and addiction are cocaine and speed in all their forms, neither of which I've touched in I don't remember how long. In many cases, cannabis is probably worse for a person's mental health than anything else, including crack. Which is a big reason why I loathe the stuff with such passion.

All that spliff-toking has ever done to me over the past few times, scattered as they were over many years, was to bring on paranoid psychotic symptoms without any redeeming features (such as elevated mood). The last time I smoked cannabis was a complete accident that happened because I'd been collecting cigarette butts from a nearby bus-stop and found what I'd taken for a nice fat rollie and not really noticed the herbal flavour until my mind was already enrobed by amnesiac paranoia. Then there's alcohol and "alcohol is a depressant so that's what's probably making you depressed" as many people told me... So how come I've felt equally bad, and sometimes more so without the drink..?  I don't think heroin helps me... Naomi did say this morning that she thought I'd probably been self-medicating bipolar disorder for years with heroin; and yes it did used to seem to stabilize my moods. Which it doesn't do any more. So apart from its inefficacy, I want rid of that stuff because as a member of my family once pointed out, it has killed my creativity. And it certainly has. In the early days of addiction, heroin might make a person feel more creative. But I don't think they usually are any more creative, in terms of the number of things created and their quality...

Naomi asked what my exact label was and when I told her "schizoaffective" she said she feels I'm far more towards the bipolar side of that diagnosis than the schizo one. Which puts her in accord with everyone else I know. Neither I nor any of my friends think of me as "schizophrenic". In fact the only person ever to use that expression has been my GP, who doesn't seem to perceive any meaningful difference between schizophrenic and schizoaffective. Well from what I've seen in others there's a wide gulf separating the two. Schizophrenia is an ongoing psychosis characterized by disorders of thought. Schizoaffective bipolar disorder, which I'm supposed to have, is an extreme disorder of moods with some schizophrenic features. There's a second type of schizoaffective disorder, which Binky's supposed to suffer from, which involves severe depression on top of schizophrenia. The doctors seem to have successfully medicated most of her depression away but schizophrenic features persist. If you get her talking on the right subjects, she can sound completely delusional...

Binky also says some weird things that are basically her shit. Eg that if I read too much about my own alleged condition the doctors will alledge that what I'm telling them is the result of my researches, not my experience. Well this cannot be true as I wasn't well enough to pick up any knowledge about what schizoaffective disorder actually was until I'd recovered enough from last year's episode to be clear-headed enough to actually take any information in. And between that time and this I haven't seen any psychiatrists at all. Also some of my most extreme experiences are barely touched upon by any modern texts ~ I only saw them described in Victorian textbooks I was able to access online. Plus the way I'd describe my experience and the way it tends to be expressed by others are very different. Example: I have experienced my thoughts exploding into starbursts. I've never heard anyone describe it that way. Other people talk of "racing thoughts", but that symptom never happens to me until the mania is so severe I'd be having difficulty communicating. Binky talks of racing thoughts she says she experiences in the night but I cannot relate to whatever it is she means. A person who comes home in the early hours of the morning only to find they've lost their keys might characterize their thoughts as "racing" ~ but that's nothing at all like the racing thoughts of mania, which are literally in such extreme fast-forward you can barely catch hold of a single one without it exploding into scores of others skedaddling in all directions with the utmost rapidity. So it's almost impossible to say what you're thinking about at all ~ the subject has changed so many times, the original point totally lost. You can't even remember where you've been, let alone how you got there...

Ho-hummm you see I have got on this subject YET AGAIN. And WHY? Because there is no closure. All I want is some validation and maybe some explanation... of what on earth it is that has been happening to me.

As for this "help" that I supposedly need... what help? When? How? And WHY??    


Illustrated: (1) digging one's own grave (which is what you do when you tell anything to a psychiatrist...) (2) fuschia pink (3) hyperactivity (4) Vanilla Ice with Madonna

HERE'S SOME MADONNA
Watch the very beginning... why do you think she wants to start her concerts with readings from Revelation..?



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Binky Telling Me I'm a Cuckoo Clock ~ Plus: "A Bitch Called Sandy"...

BINKY keeps telling me I'm "really mad" and I keep telling her I'm not. I mean, I'm not paranoid, not depressed, not anxious even and so what if I feel high nearly all the time? I'd taken heroin in the night and hadn't slept so when I went round Binky's at 7:45 this morning, I was a bit hyper. I was trying to think up names for my fabulous clubnight and she kept getting offended by my wonderful ideas like "Slut Vagina". [I would never give my club such a vulgar name; it just seemed like a good idea at the time...] And when I took to recording random snatches of conversation. So for a while I was thinking of naming my star-spangled party "Are you on that toilet for long? Because I really need to go." ~~ I think that would be a brilliant name! The other top two favourites were "Gnome Brigade", "Dillory Pillory" and "Itchy Swines".

So what does Binky mean when she says I'm mad? She seems to think I ought to know, but I don't. Everyone in her house is insane anyhow, because it's a psychiatric half-way house. And yet when I loudly said I'd been hearing voices in the night again ~~ and I mean all of two voices saying no more than two words each ~ nobody was willing to take on board the fact that yes, I might hear the odd voice now and then ~ but no, I most certainly am not clinically crazy. Especially compared to the rest of the nutters I know.

Grizzeller, the one guy in Binky's house full of nutty girls is in such consistently slow motion that if, for example, you wanted to visit the house at 9am and knew he'd be the only one in, you'd have to phone in advance at eight to give him enough time to shamble along the hallway and get the front door open. Now that is bonkers. I am not!

When I was talking to my very young and beautiful GP, Dr Lovelace about the inconveniences of psychotic breaks and happened to opine that "hearing voices is supposed to be a sign of madness," she quite inaccurately corrected me saying, "well, hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia". Well yes, of course it can be that, but it can also be a sign of bipolarity, a sign of psychism (clairaudience) and a sign of nothing at all! I'm really surprised Dr Lovelace doesn't realize that 15% of bipolar 1 patients hallucinate. Hallucinations are not, per se, signs of schizophrenia. In this country we have a national Hearing Voices Network brimful with people experiencing daily extra-sensory perceptions and the majority of them claim not to be mad, and do not experience the symptoms of psychosis (paranoia, incoherent thought, great difficulty engaging with life).

The British Mental Health Foundation obviously know their stuff. Binky insists all her voices are absolutely accoustically real. Well many of mine aren't. When I really was mad they did sound exactly like invisible people speaking next to me, but nowadays they're more like random words precipitating from an idea-saturated atmosphere into my consciousness:

It is also common for people to hear voices as if they are thoughts entering their mind from somewhere outside themselves. This is not the same as a suddenly inspired idea, which people usually recognise as coming from themselves. These thoughts are not their own and would seem to come from outside their own consciousness, like telepathy.

This isn't precisely my experience, but it's similar.

When I tell Binky I may be "just a bit hypomanic" she says, "you've been hypomanic for two weeks now". And when I point out that hypomania is just very mild mania, she says, "then hypomania is mild madness". You see?! Every move I make I'm already snookered. That girl has been in the mental health system for far too long and she knows too much.

Then she takes issue with me for wondering aloud what is wrong with other nutters and why they act the way they do. Well that's just me being me, I'm afraid ~ always fascinated by what makes others tick...

Hey! I'm not doing Christmas alone with an Iceland sweet chili chicken pizza this year because I've been invited to Binky's for Xmas Lunch with all her cuckoo-clock friends. How brilliant is that?! We're even allowed vodka, which has been banned for the rest of the year after Binky got me to buy two half bottles, drank the lot and then ended up lying in bed throwing a near-delirious pity-party of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. It was really not pretty.

Speaking of alcohol, I idiotically went and wasted 95p on a can last night which I mixed with my Polish fruits of the forest drink. I had one single sip and now it's sitting in a giant mug untouched and untouchable and I don't know what to do with it now. I'm very much into the waste not, want not philosophy and cannot in all good conscience pour it down the drain. Like I've said many times ~ although yes, I did used to drink enough alcohol not to be consuming any nonalcoholic drink at all and to be getting daily blackouts. But on the other hand I never had that "once I start drinking I won't stop until I'm passed out cold" thang going on, like most alkies seemingly do. I was your archetypal "top-up drinker" ~ drinking to keep a moderate level of intoxication going through every waking hour. Not to plunge myself into oblivion. Even with the drugs, most of the time, I wasn't using gear in pursuit of unconsciousness, but as an escape from pain. Now that I'm no longer in constant psychological pain I feel far less need of the gear. See it's all deep, psychological and mysterious.

At yesterday's anti-drugs group we had a cheeky chappie with what are nowadays termed "mental health" troubles but what always used to be called "emotional problems" ~ from what he said, his primary problems appeared to be anxiety and depression. This might very well be the "vanilla" version of mental illness, but let me tell you, anxiety/depression is just about the most unpleasant psychiatric affliction going. It's much more unpleasant than manic-depressive psychosis and of course the doctors take anxiety far less seriously than psychotic illness, which makes no sense, as severe anxiety is far and away more intolerable than any psychosis I've ever experienced. The doctors never, ever take it seriously, and they will not prescribe anything for it, except drugs along the lines of Prozac ~ which always made me many times more agitated than I'd been before. Anxiety doesn't generally agitate me. When it was severe, I was frozen in terror. As the psychologists say, it's "fight, flight or play dead" ~ which is very true as I always played dead. Though I've never seen a person with an anxiety disorder fighting. If anxiety really did make you fight, the mental hospitals would be full of people with panic disorders under Section for fighting instead of "flighting", or playing dead like me!

Anyway this guy with the terrible affliction happened to mention to me something about confronting the issues that have caused or fuelled my past depressions. What issues is he talking about? Do I even have any? Binky says yes I do; I said, "do you mean my massively unstable self-esteem?" and she said yes. But post-psychotic trauma aside, I'm not sure I have the type of issues that a skilfull counsellor could tease out of me so that in the future I'm going to magically not be depressed. I'm not sure my depression is like that. If it were mostly issue-based then how come the first sign, and usually the most prominent symptom is massively increased time spent asleep? Can a thorny tangle of emotional hang-ups really make you sleep more? And how come half the time I actually feel better than usual? So my mood is now elevated ~ and what has become of my issues now? Are they actually making me feel happy? Or is another set of personal hang-ups doing that? Or is it just that when I'm on the hypomanic side simply more in touch with my own fabulosity and that's what makes me feel fabulous all the time? Because that's what I think is going on...

Righty-ho it's ten past six and I have to go to Iceland to get a sweet chili chicken pizza. Writing about it has made me wanna munch it! With cheese-flavour coleslaw as a side-order. I luuuurve cheese coleslaw! I barely slept last night and must catch up before I fall asleep at the screen...

What's happening with Sandy, this humungous great tropical storm they said might flood or flatten New York? Is it really that bad? And why, if it only made landfall around midnight London time. With the time difference currently a mere four hours, that means New York was OK until eight at night their time, so why close down the subway and the stock exchange all day yesterday? Also, with New York being so low-lying, I don't understand why they hadn't long ago built seal-up-able subway and road tunnels to prevent any storm-surge getting into them... I woke up yesterday morning feeling so incredibly repentant for having been too excited about the idea of a giant hurricane hitting a major metropolis and not having my thoughts with the householders and the businesses who will suffer because of it. I can sometimes be incredibly shallow and I really felt guilty for having not taken Hurricane Sandy seriously. Also I wrote a comment to my fellow-blogger, Syd saying "so you live in South Carolina? Isn't that the land of hurricanes?" ~ no sooner had I said that than that Sandy appeared and I was terrified that Syd would get blown away because of what I'd said.

So all isn't right in the world. I keep thinking of all those people in New York, New Jersey and so on who will be dealing with massive flooding and power cuts. I mean, it's disconcerting enough when the power goes down for just a couple of hours and it's candles time and no television but what happens when a whole metropolis goes down for days at a time?

I used to be in touch with a recovering addict named B Melons Lemonade, who was right in New Orleans and actively addicted to heroin when Hurricane Katrina hit, destroying not just the infrastructure of the city we all think about, but its drug supply network. B Melons was so traumatized by events that she went down with a pretty nasty case of PTSD which is by all accounts one of the nastiest mental illnesses going...

I pray that New York and everywhere else in the path of this so-called "Frankenstorm" will be OK... 

Night-night everyone, wherever you are ~ and BE SAFE!...

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New Television Laughter Mockery

BINKY, my mentally challenged schizoaffective borderline personality friend, was laughing and laughing her head off when I told her all excitedly doing an "I'm going to piss my pants any moment!" voice about my gigantic new television. How big is it? she said. Twenty-one inches! Then she nearly pissed herself laughing so I said so how big is your telly then? And guess what it is FIFTY TWO INCHES. No wonder the screen looks blurry up close. And how come if it's HD it doesn't do the Freeview HD channels? That's a bloody rip-off. And it is capable of crisp visual production because when you change channels the bit that says "BBC1 ~ not in HD you fool!" is really nice and you can't see any dots in or around the perfectly smooth lettering.

But my TV has a really crisp picture all the time and I will not be laughed at!! It's the best kind of telly you can get, with a perfectly flat GLASS screen (so you can stub cigarettes out on Moira Stewart's face without danger of a permanent mark obscuring one's enjoyment of Downton Abbey at 9pm on Sunday night. But unlike a modern telly, which is like a picture in a frame, it has a GINORMOUS cathode ray back, meaning measured back to front it's deeper than it is wide. Anyway I love my telly. And I've got to go. Oh we laughed and laughed this morning/this afternoon/whenever. Then she said to me "say something really loud in a Scottish accent when you go out" this was to meet the drug dealer for her but I'm not using any (seriously). So I did the only

Scottish voice I am capable of, which sounds like a nest full of baby eagles with Jimmy Krankie squarks being molested by a psychiatrically disturbed jackal. Very excitable indeed.

Here is Jimmy Krankie's Susan Boyle impression.

O yeah and I forgot to end the story. A very flustered Australian member of staff (in the halfway nuthouse where Binky lives) was down by the front door saying what's wrong what's wrong. Thinking a giant argument had broken out. Ukh.

And anyway ~ back in the 80s 21" used to be as big as tellies ever got!



Jimmy Krankie back in the 80s at the library...



Illustrated: A manic smiley because I'm still in an elevated mood; Not Pinky but a Chinese girl in a pink dress displaying a 52" telly; back in the day ~ Moira Stewart along with a guy with really terrible bus driver's glasses like I used to wear; the venerable Downton Abbey... featuring Dame Maggie Smith and if you're American by the way, you have to watch it on PBS ~ how patronizing and demeaning for such a classic show! Far as I know, PBS is a channel for programmes that are too foreign, worthy and irrelevant to everyday American life to be shown on the proper networks!, which in my opinion, Downton Abbey most certainly is not!!! It features Shirley McLaine as the Countess's mother for one thing... And maybe they should bring in Warren Beattey as an ageing, libidinous gardener to knock off Lady Mary...?

Hey, and then they could bring in an episdoe featuring an edwardian clap clinic! (not because I think Warren Beattey has the clap but his character would do... o yes and syphillis... did you know tertiary syphillis of the brain used to make a person die deliriously happy, according to an old psychology text i once read...

By the way, why don't manufacturers of computes make up new keys featuring question and exclamation marks with commas underneath? Because they are certainly needed...

£26 Shopping Spree

WOW, this morning I went wild in the pound shop courtesy of my friend Pinky's debit card (she was with me debiting it; I didn't steal it!) I bought 3 random DVDs, a CD radio play of Little Britain, four greetings cards and about fifty rollerballs and gel ink pens in various varieties then we went to some sportswear shop where she told me I desperately need new jogging bottoms as the old red ones with permanent fag ash stains and burn holes make me look "worse than a homeless schizophrenic" (I am paraphrasing her words) so £9.99 ($16.02) got me new ones with white lines down the legs but they aren't Adidas. And I also paid £5 ($8.02) for a red teeshirt which is very unlike me. Ordinarily I am totally averse to buying any item of clothing costing over £3 ($4.81). And then we went into Argos, the shop that sells everything where I fell in love with a £45 ($72.17) 14 megapixel stills 5x optical zoom 720 pixel video all in one camera by Fuji in blue but that has to wait.

Wow, I haven't gone on a shopping spree in ages, even if it is only a £26 ($41.61) miniature one. And yes it probably had something to do with me not sleeping well at all last night ~ waking up countless times every hour ~ then being hyper and loud all morning. For some reason I ran round Pinky's house asking everyone whether they watched Downton Abbey. But they're all mental there anyhow so nobody cared. Then I wanted to take a snapshot of the chief care coordinator of Pinky's sheltered housing and she kept saying no and why am I so obsessed with Tamara the chief care cooridinator... oh blah blah. O well I have to run. I have an appointment with Destiny!

Take care everyone. Good day sunshine!... yeah!!!


Illustrated: a blue Fujifilm 14 megapixel camera a bit like the one I want...

PS: I don't know why the Downton obsession, except that Lady Sybil (illustrated below with the chauffeur she married) died last night giving birth to their first child and it was terribly sad...

Mental Patient Faux Pas

I WAS strolling up a certain street today when I saw a woman approaching who always wears bright pink. I know her from the same mental ward Binky was locked up in for a month. Soon as I saw her I yelled "SHE'S OUT!" And couldn't work out why she blanked me. Or why her boyfriend gave me a dirty look. Then it hit me: she didn't want me shouting her business in front of the neighbours so I felt like a right berk.

Re the word "faux pas" btw I would barely ever trouble to pronounce it "foe pah" unless I were in the highest company. Usually I say "forks pass", as if a person has got into difficulties with a cutlery drawer.

How the hell am I ever going to give up heroin? I've just bought 2 more bags. I was only on that street to score. See: lies and hypocrisy all the way.


PS If you're wondering about the relevance of the picture ~ I do too. It just happened to come up when I googled "faux pas"




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17:42 hrs... TIME FOR A MUSICAL BREAK!

OPUS III IT'S A FINE DAY
Doesn't Kirsty Hawkshaw look like a right trip-head? My ex-housemate, who went to school with her, said she was a "real prissy virgin"..!

 

I think Kirsty looks far prettier with hair...


KIRSTY HAWKSHAW: IT'S A FINE DAY 2002 TRANCE MIX BY MIKE KOGLIN
I'm not sure the new tune mixes with the old one very well. But still I like this...



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Binky and Berky, Dr Lovelace and Helene Fischer

I AM thinking of changing my friend Pinky's name to Binky. So it's now "Binky and Berky". And Berky was a berk: she went and killed herself, leaving Binky totally bereft. And to be honest, everyone thought that spelled the end for her, too.

Ukh: I don't know what is happening. My sleep is getting WORSE. I either wake up what feels like far too early, although some nights I've slept eight hours which is supposed to be all a person needs. Last night I managed to fall asleep in the most uncomfortable position on the couch, with the telly babbling in German (which probably helped me drop off).

Then I crawl into bed and cannot sleep at all!

So I went out and scored heroin at 1am.

Managed to fall asleep ~ or gauwch out, as the junkies say ~ whilst trying to wash out the syringe under a running tap.

Went back to bed ~~~ and STILL could not sleep. And when I did, I had that horrible sort of sleep, when all you know is that time has gone past, but you don't actually feel like you slept at all. I never experienced anything like "proper" sleep till it was well past dawn. Then I did fall into a comatose slumber, waking up at 2pm. Which I think is most louche of me.

I didn't even want to get up at 2, but I did. Also, I can always tell when I'm all slept out. And wow!~ I thought I was depressed no more. But as the next three hours passed, like a dingy old photograph, it developed itself. So now I feel a bit ugh. I'm not super-depressed, as Anna Grace put it. O crap, and I just remembered I have to see Dr Lovelace tomorrow at the super-early time of 9:15. That alone will probably put me in a bad mood. Then she's going to think I'm depressed worse than I am and send in the headshrinkers.

Anyway I found a singer named Helene Fischer with an excellent voice ~ better than Celine Dion. She was born to German parents in the Soviet Union in 1984. Which makes me feel really old. In 1988, the year BEFORE the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet government mysteriously allowed her family to move to Rheinland Palatinate in West Germany. (I thought they never let anyone out..?)

This is AVE MARIA with lyrics in German.
By the way, I was wondering why the tune is so good: it's because it was written by Schubert.




*******

I'm Sorry

I NEVER WENT online intending to talk about death. I had nothing in particular to write; I was posting off the top of my head. And all this negativity. Ukh. It's all too much.



One bit of good news: they seem to be about to let Pinky out of the mental unit because she is completely back to normal.


****               Here's another Ave Maria Yes it is Celine Dion... (sorry!)     ***

I Hate Weekends

UKKKKHHH WHAT A WASTE OF TIME. It took me all day just to get up. Properly. I actually got up at around 6:30am because I know when I'm not going to sleep any longer. Then I watched some French crap and brooded. Then I switched to American crap: some Danielle Steel mini-drama about a beautiful woman with very fake looking blue-eye contact lenses whose ancient husband is terminally ill falls in love with another man. Halfway through I started leafing through a book, but it was still OK.

I tried going back to bed in the afternoon because I felt so ill but it was a waste of time.

My friend Pink is back in the nuthouse. Transferred back from the unit that gave her skin-grafts for third degree burns she inflicted on her leg by deliberately setting herself on fire. I cannot handle going in there today because 1 she is confined to her room with her leg in splints so no smoking and 2 I cannot face having a shower.

I keep forgetting I am actually (theoretically, at least) taking an antidepressant every single day. For what good it does me. This afternoon I started feeling desperate enough to go and hit doctors I don't know with a sob story about having come down from Manchester with a plane to catch and how I desperately need my Prozac (to induce a manic episode) or Dothiepin (to OD and hopefully die). I think I'd go for the Dothiepin because it's meant to be stronger than Prozac anyhow. Dothiepin is a tricyclic antidepressant, the only type that is worth ODing on. Because you really do go into the classical Danielle Steel drama style unconsciousness. Then you start fitting out. Which knowing my luck would attract my fuckwit neighbours, because fitting people can involuntarily scream. Then you have a heart attack and hopefully never come back. Dothiepin is now known as dosulepin, apparently: see ~ I would have got busted straight away asking for a drug that hasn't even bourne its own name for 20 years...

Well I don't want to die. I just want to get out of here because I am boiling hot. I have a dr's appointment on Wednesday anyhow. The "antidepressant" I mentioned being on is actually an antipsychotic (Seroquel). If I'd been popping real antidepressants I'd have gone star-rocketing up a long while ago. But Seroquel does nothing. It is only recommended for bipolar depression because bipolar people's brains are so fucked they cannot tolerate any normal drugs at all.

Well I've got to go. Sweat is running down my back it is disgusting. I hope your weekend was a hell of a lot better than mine.

Anxiety and "Issues"

I HAVE banged up one bag of Lovely Heroin today and feel no better for it; I have one bag left. And don't even know if I want to take it.

Yesterday I felt horrible in the morning. Depressed and anxious. Then I took heroin and felt fine. All afternoon. Pinky asked if I was hypomanic. Come nighttime I felt OK and phoned my family.

All night long I slept deeply, only awakening once to pee out some of the three litres of lemonade I guzzle each day. I no longer drink alcohol at all.

So I got up at twenty to one feeling sour and blank and confused. Sometimes it pains me just to think.

Pinky has been transferred from mental hospital to burns unit where's she's awaiting surgery. When she set fire to her pyjamas last week, she burnt her leg so badly she needs SKIN GRAFTS. She's right across town so I don't get to see her for a couple of days.

People keep confusing me. The things they say; the things they feel. I don't want to take any of it on board. Eg Pinks talks about me as if I'm seriously ill. I don't like that, and I do not believe it.  If I mentioned it at all in real life, I would say I'm "a bit bipolar" but she says I'm "really bipolar" which is no longer true. There is nothing wrong with me any more. Apart from that I'm my old miserable self.

Dr Lovelace, the GP, says I should not take on the identity of "schizophrenic". I would not want to associate with a condition I do not have anyway. I said my moods are who I am. But mental illnesses are not and never will be "me". Yes in the past I have parrotted ideas that I've read. But psychiatry to me is like a religion: an object of fascination, not belief.

I'm totally off tea. I started feeling panicky earlier today and that makes me feel I should be shot dead. Anxious people are useless people ~ incapacitated by misplaced energy that crushes the heart. I loathe anxiety above every other mental state. If I get anxiety back, I will kill myself. Caffeine makes all this worse. It's just like the after-effects of crack cocaine ~ another drug I loathe.

There is nothing much more to say. If I analysed it, I'd ask myself why I should blog about feeling crap. The only reason is that I would keep a journal anyway. Saying these things in public is confusing enough. I know some people think I should just kill myself.

My blogfriend Bugerlugs, who has a cyclothymic nature anyhow, went on a beautiful two-week break to North Wales but came back not just depressed but panicky on top. I held back my opinion that anxiety is the absolute pits of psychiatry, sheer living hell.

And when her GP prescribed Prozac, I kept quiet on what fluoxetine would do to me: make me agitated, angry and dysphoric and a whole lot worse. My last experience with an antidepressant (mirtazapine/Remeron) was catastrophic. I never want to go near anything like that again. The stuff I'm now on (quetiapine/Seroquel) is for bipolar depression. But it's also antimanic and antipsychotic. So it shouldn't set me off on a psycho episode.

I hope Bugerlugs is OK. She sounds better. Her biggest problem now is a furry pingpongball-with-eyes robo-hamster who's been on the lose for nearly a week. They're tiny, flighty and much faster than normal hamsters. So it's like trying to catch a wild house-mouse. Except roborovskis are even smaller and pingier. And when on the lose, they switch to wild mode and don't want to be picked up.

Ukh. See that theory that distractions improve the mood doesn't work.

I keep thinking about Bugerlugs and what I said about anxiety. When I make these sweeping statements I'm talking about me. If Bugerlugs put a gun to her head I would be gutted. I don't want Bugerlugs to die.

As for this heroin (the other thing Bugerlugs and I have in common, apart from uneven moods) ~ I don't know what to do.

Earlier today, I ended up turning the issue over in my head. Telling myself it is destroying me: I have to make a break from it sometime.

Then I tell myself I will stop tomorrow. But I'm not naïve. When I think I've spent too much money, I'm able to put my fixation on ice for some days. So I've done a few days heroin-clean. But that day, the day that I still have a yen for gear and the money to get it ~ that "tomorrow" never comes.

Last year there were many days when I had the money but not the desire to use. My worker was asking me last week what has changed between now and then but I don't want to talk to some drug-obsessed drug-clinic worker about my mental equilibrium. Last year I had an "elevated" mood for weeks on end. This year I haven't been so high. I tested myself, by using again, and the habit came back. It's nowhere near as intense as it once was, years ago. I can do a day or several days on just methadone without climbing the walls.

And I want, I really do want to be drug-free and that means methadone-free as well.

I'm also aware that heroin is doing my mental wellbeing no good at all. For years it salved my misery. But now, it either switches my mood so I feel higher hours later than when I first took it. Or it does nothing much at all. Whatever it's doing to my brain cannot be good.

For a long time I was averse to methadone because I thought it would damage my brain.

I know what I have to do. That is: to give up all drugs, prescribed and otherwise. Then maybe my brain could be OK.

My family have said that if I leave the drugs ~ all drugs behind, I should be OK. I never used to believe that. Mainly because I wasn't OK before I went on heroin, so I didn't assume I'd be OK afterwards. But I never even had the chance to try Sobriety out ~ never gave myself the chance.

This is my single goal. To live drug-free.

Maybe next year I'll have some news to tell you...

Until then I can't promise not to put up a whole load more miserable posts. Sorry.



Illustrated: I couldn't think up an illustration, so I went abstract; I found this graph by accident but it shows something I've long suspected ~ that heroin is far more popular here in Europe than across the Pond...

MUSIC
I wanted to put up SOMETHING... but what?
This is an old trance classic,
AGE OF LOVE: AGE OF LOVE (JAM & SPOON MIX)
It has a PROPER VIDEO...



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Mental Issues

I SLEPT a long, long time on Wednesday night, but last night, although I went to bed exhausted around 10:30 I woke again at 4 and could not, and barely even tried to, get to sleep again. I had a plate of two-day-old "wild mushroom" stuffed pasta with broccoli and cheese beside me that I've been finding increasingly revolting. Partly because I was stupid enough to buy stuffed pasta even though I knew I had been going off it. Partly because I've lost my appetite enough to be able to go on just one meal a day for the past few days.

I made a mistake, by the way, in yesterday's depiction of a severe manic spell: the starbursting ideas I mentioned may be irrelevant. That I can vouch for when memories are examined under the steady glare of sanity. But at the time, everything seemed ultra-relevant and important and sparkled so dazzlingly it was all too compelling and THAT is why I got so lost in the blizzard of my ideas. It was absolutely impossible to separate wheat from chaff, to examine any one idea and most especially to think out a stream of consequences in stages. Which meant that when truly stupid ideas grabbed me (example: to take a flying leap through the upstairs window) the full folly of my compulsion never dawned on me until many weeks later. Which I still find really disturbing and I'm extremely glad my Dad brought me up NOT to be impulsive. If I had been an impulsive person, and had given in to just one of the deluded ideas upon which I thought at the time I ought to act out, I'd have got into trouble deeper than I could ever have imagined. I can just imagine Advocacy for the Prosecution painting me as the most evil person alive, when I was too ill to calculate anything and most especially to analyse or think out the consequences of anything further than one single obvious stage.

Books and websites say a manic person is extraordinarily distractable. That may be; but it felt to me like I could not keep my mind poised enough to focus on any single topic at all without every possible eventuality bursting out at me all at once so that I was swept so far away, I'd forgotten my destination anyhow. And found myself completely lost, but just as happy to be in the new place as wherever I had been, or been going... Couldn't say anything succinctly. And if there was an and, but or because in the sentence I seemed to get blown so badly off course that I'd start out saying one thing and finish saying many things utterly different and unrelated. The psychiatric social worker who interviewed me in the mental hospital, where Naomi, chair of the weekly Nutter Club (a dual-diagnosis meeting for drug-addicted people with serious mental issues) had driven me. Nothing to do with wanting to get admitted. I didn't want to go into hospital. All I wanted was somebody to bear witness to the state I was in, because I hadn't slept in days, hadn't been to bed for about 48 hours and counting and knew something about me was Drastically Different. My mood, for one thing, which was high and kept going higher, in complete contrast to the various shades of unhappiness and depression I had floundered in for years...

I wanted someone to vouch that my fluctuating mental state was real. And not an exaggeration or a lie. Because that's how I felt: that for years I had being taken for a liar, someone who felt it necessary to embellish my own experience and turn run-of-the mill depression, which millions experience, into something more fascinating. When in actuality I was doing all I could to downplay my increasingly extreme moods, lest I end up with a terrible diagnosis with a title like Bipolar, swinging round my neck, like a Gold Medal from Hell. Then of course the consultant dual diagnosis specialist told me I had "manic depression and schizophrenia". And despite my "elevated mood" and excitement, I was devastated. I had only just come to terms with the notion that I might actually be a manic-depressive junkie. Or worse still, if I listened to the voices who told me this: that I really did have schizophrenia. That's the only time I've ever got home after a doctor's appointment and cried. All afternoon long.

I don't consider myself a special case: especially crazy or confused or complicated. Every time I have found myself with one sickness or another: Depression, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Psychosis ~ I have known another person who's had what I have, only far worse. Pinky is probably the most tangled and traumatized psychiatric case I have ever met. Her Borderline Personality Disorder is severe and it seems to me that at least 75% of her pain and suffering is caused by that, and not clinical depresion and not her enduring paranoid schizophrenia. She's now on TWO antidepressants: Venlafaxine (Effexor) on top of Mirtazapine (Remeron), both at maximum doses, which they never prescribe anyone unless they're truly in dire straits. Two weeks ago she was so upset, almost screaming in mental torment and agony. Yet there was nothing I could say or do that would make her feel any better. She only ended up in hospital because she did something impulsive and the police bundled her in there... Now she has a massive burn on her leg, which is at least second degree, because it's broken out in gigantic blisters. It's only bandaged, so she tells me, because another patient troubled to do that for her. (But how did she get hold of the bandage?) The nurses did nothing. She never even got to see a burns specialist for two days, because the nurses could not be bothered to care for her, even in the most basic way. She set fire to her pyjamas. Which to me seems to be another sign of the impulsivity powered by her Borderline Personality Disorder. Which fuelled her depression and psychosis, creating a complete emotional mess. Apart from being burnt, she seems about as well now as she ever gets; that is: she would probably pass as "normal" to most people. Less than a week ago she was definitely not "normal". Wandering about in a daze. Repeating her sentences over and over. Too frightened to go in the lounge, because she said the TV was talking to her directly and telling her what to do. I can cope with my friend, because she is my dear friend and has nobody elsewho can help her, eg withdraw money without thieving it from her, bring in cigarettes, without which she would go into true meltdown. Etc etc... What I couldn't cope with was the heavy atmosphere on her old ward. The other patients seemed extremely disturbed compared to times past when I've been on mental wards. Eg FOUR patients on one-to-one supervision. Tired-looking nurses stationed outside open bedroom doors, all in a row. I've never seen that much one-to-one "care" (though it's pretty obvious they don't care. Don't care at all.)

When I told the doctor how stressed I felt, she asked me whether Pinky had anyone else who could help her and I said no. That is the most terrible thing. Her best friend, who I named "Perky" committed suicide and we all thought that was the end of Pinky, but she survived, because she is a Survivor. She just hates being alive, because life has dealt her the most dreadful hand of anyone I have ever met. When a person who already has paranoid schizophrenia gets extremely depressed, to the point where they don't speak to anyone any more, they call that schizoaffective disorder (depressive type: my type is bipolar). So on paper, our diagnoses sound the same, yet our experience is vastly different. She has had far worse depression than I've ever had and for longer. Yes I have gone right down to the bottom, but I only stayed there for hours and days (in different episodes). Pinks has been depressed into stupor for months on end and had to have ECT. That's why I didn't see her as that severely ill this time round, because she was still able to communicate. People with extreme depression usually barely speak or even move at all...

O man yet AGAIN I end up on the same subject. I'm just finding it hard. Really hard to deal with this. I force myself to go visiting when really I don't want to go visiting at all. Now that she's in company of less disturbed people it's a lot easier. Over the years they seem to have tightened up their procedures so that only the very most desperately disordered (or dangerously deluded) people get admittance to a ward. No matter how upset a person might be, if they're not judged to be a suicide risk, or a danger to others, they probably won't get let in. No matter how much they beg, plead of cry, they are turned away. And the staff who do it know that if they misjudge a situation, they may well be the very last person that patient asked for help. Another sad truth is that psychiatrists cannot really help people who are "just" upset, or stressed past breaking point, or bereaved. Even if they're really, really upset and suffering intolerably. If it's not mental illness, doctors usually can't help. They can treat schizophrenia. Ordinarily they can bring down a manic episode quite easily. Clinical depression they can treat with a choice of over forty antidepressants, or mood stabilizers (there are four main ones) or antipsychotics (about 28 types) (quetiapine, which I'm on, is a treatment of choice for bipolar depression, because it does not elevate the mood the way antidepressants do ~ which can easily trigger a manic episode). If all else fails, there's always ECT. But no way in hell would I ever submit myself to that, no matter how bad I felt.

But my point is, I've seen extreme cases of psychosis clear up entirely within a few weeks. Yet people who come in to escape bad relationships, or bereavement or simply because they cannot escape loneliness and pain, probably will not be helped, and that's very sad...

I've heard people talking about antidepressants just "taking the edge off" the symptoms, but cannot relate to this. Whenever I've taken antidepressants for long enough, and it only takes about two weeks, my mood improves distinctly and depression vanishes completely. (Which kind of implies some chemical imbalance was the cause and disproves the notion some of my old drug workers liked to harbour, that I was only depressed because I was addicted to heroin). The problem tended to be that I became too hyped up and excitable (and sometimes, plain agitated). Then the last time, when I took mirtazapine, after the brief 7-day high I went crashing down, far lower than I'd ever been before I took the pills, and ended up in a terrible state for over a month. It was my old druggieworker who took one look at me and said "it's those tablets you're on" and sure enough when I stopped them I improved drastically.

The one single good thing about having a nasty label like "schizoaffective" is that if I ever do become seriously ill or desperate, I know that psychiatrists will take my case seriously because I've got the second most serious psychiatric condition there is. (Schizoaffective disorder is said to have an outcome worse than ordinary mood disorders, but better than schizophrenia.) So if I do ask for help, they turn me away at their peril. I've not only been turned away from the psychiatric Emergency Department in years past and told to come back when I was "actively suicidal", but TWO psychiatrists have summarily chucked me off their lists. The first time I had the impertinence to SMILE while recounting how dysphoric I had felt and I suspect that doctor (who had never seen me before; he was taking over another doctor's clinic at the University I used to attend) assumed I must have been stoned on cannabis. Which I was not. I was only reacting to his manner. I had the not-uncommon condition named "smiling depression". Most of my laughs and smiles back then were faked anyhow. The second time a medical student didn't seem to know what to make of me and so called in her supervisor, who was a notorious hater of junkies. He told me I was on so much methadone that antidepressants wouldn't help me anyway, which was an utter lie because I did get successfully treated with mirtazapine once. It was the second and third times I tried to go on it that I became hypomanic and all the trouble ensued... All that was BEFORE I got any diagnosis except depression, then CFS, then depression again ~ and I spent years knowing "something" else was wrong, yet no idea what it actually was... So any trust I had in psychiatrists has been long-since lost and even though my last one was a very good doctor, as a group, I don't trust them at all. Dr Lovelace is booking me an appointment with a shrink. As much as anything, I think I really should see one as it's been eighteen months since my last appointment and I can't tell Dr Lovelace that it happened in a methadone clinic as I don't want "drug addict" back on my notes...

Where am I going from here? I don't know. I'm just trying to say, there is one good thing about having a horrible psychiatric label pinned on your forehead and that is if you need desperate help, you're more likely to get it fast than someone with a less "severe"-sounding label like "anxiety and depression". Even though anxiety and depression is far more horrible than any schizoaffective episode I've had. When my depression goes very low, I feel so dazed and out of it I'm almost anaesthetized. But the depression I had when I was younger was more horrible. I didn't want to die, and so I lived in terrible pain. I was a loner and yet I could not stand to be alone. So I would go visiting people who weren't my friends, get there and have nothing at all to talk about. So I'd sit in the corner, silent, wondering how anybody could think up any conversation at all. My university years were the pits. It's just amazing that I managed to make friends at all...

Well I have to terminate this long and rambling piece here. If you're wondering why so much psycho-talk, it's because I have spent so much time on mental wards visiting my friend, and it seriously started to do my head in... But I think I'm better and she's better now. So that's good. If I can only get my sleep and my mood back to normal, because it's still too low, then all will be FINE!


ETTA JAMES: STORMY WEATHER



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