A Friend in the (Mental) Hospital is a Friend Indeed...

BINKY IS IN the psychiatric unit. Yet again. So is her friend Janet. Janet is almost unrecognizable. Really down and withdrawn and not even the "mentally ill" self she was last time I met her in the hospital. Binky however is her normal self. Talking at the top of her voice and screeching demands and remarks at all and sundry when she's in a bad mood. Then being in a good mood and being quite reasonable. You know all this is doing my head in. The LAST place I wanted to go this afternoon was a nuthouse. The staff, well one member of staff, was being really off with me. People are being off with me all around. 

Eg yesterday I was trying to buy ice lollies from Morrisons. I needed lollies because I was so roasting HOT inside it was unreal ~ like heat inside my body. Then I HAVE to go in the shops; the shops have their heating on full. So I feel absolutely horrible, with a river of sweat pouring down my back. So I try and buy these lollies, but just when it's time for 76p change to come cascading through the selfservice machine it decides to break down. The guy on patrol of these ridiculous "unexpected item in bagging area" devices tells me to go to customer services to get my refund but it was nearly 6pm and I had to get my methadone out of the chemists + I desperately NEEDED to eat an ice lolly just to cool down, so I stormed out. On the way out the security guard started being all solicitous. I have to admit that, despite my bad mood, I thought he was trying to be helpful and help me get my 76p refund. But no. He kept banging on asking for my receipt. I yelled at him that I did not need a receipt and pointed out 76p man. Who said yeah yeah so they let me out. Far unhappier than before. So I get my methadone then come back, having eaten 2 of this lolly 4-pack, a bit calmer. But the woman at customer services treated me like some sort of nutter. Maybe it's because I was eating an ice lolly in front of her in January, who knows but I was boiling hot and sweating STILL. Anyway 76p guy had vanished. Eventually I found him at the other end of the store but he studiedly ignored me. Ie saw me and pretended not to so I gave up there and then thinking it was well worth 76p just to get the hell out of their furnace of a shop. Then I went home. 

But I'm not very happy with anything or any one. Eg the council putting letters through my door about window maintenance. I DON'T WANT MY WINDOWS CHECKED. But they insist so I'm making an appointment for February. I might tell them I'm in the Scottish Highlands and cannot come down before then. You know. And Binky. Everybody = driving me crazy. This is what no drugs does to you. People always think I'm together when I'm on heroin. When I'm off it, they think I'm a drug addict (which is of course true, because I'm a methadone addict when I'm off heroin). And yes the strapline at the top of my blog IS accurate because this blog IS about my life after heroin. What kind of a life it will be, I cannot imagine. Even my own family seemed to assume (over the phone) that I was out of it on drugs during the period I used no gear whatsoever for weeks/months (no idea how long: not into day-counting). (They never actually said they thought I was using, I just got the impression that was their suspicion.) When I went mad about 3 years ago, I wasn't on any drugs, except, eventually antipsychotics. And a tiny bit of methadone. You know I'm pretty sure I know what caused all that madness in me: it's because heroin is a psychic insulator. It closes you down and wraps you up. It always made me feel centred and much more stable than off heroin. Just as a fur coat makes you feel warm in the arctic. Take off the coat and it's no surprise you've suddenly got frostbite. Doesn't mean fur coats "cause" frostbite though.... Do you follow? The drugs that actually make you go whacky all of a sudden are all ones I hate. (Ie everything except heroin and benzos.) Benzos are stuff like diazepam and I get that prescribed in tiny amounts for emergency use. It's diazepam withdrawal that makes people lose the plot, but I've never been addicted, so I can't ever have been in benzo withdrawal... What am I banging on about...?

Ukh it's Binky she makes me feel all UNcentred and agitated. Despite being my dearest of dear friends. I find going into nuthouses rather disturbing. Especially when the staff seem to be treating ME like a nutter. Which she encourages by speaking to them about me in psychiatric terms. Yes it's Binky that I caught labelitis from, at one point. She knows all the labels and very often speaks in labels. Most mental patients these days do. Ie it's not at all unusual to hear a person on her ward tell a nurse "I've got suicidal ideation again"... It's spread into our culture... Psychiatry is the Great Religion of our Age.  It validates and makes sense of the central unhappiness most of us feel living in such a surface shallow hypocritical unstable economy...

If ONLY she could never go in hospital again and never have another meltdown then I might... just might... be able to forget all this nightmare of psychiatricality. I'm so sick of the whole subject. + the groups they pushed me into going to via the methadone clinic, which encourage excessive self-absorbtion (I think). I'd rather think of things outside... Which by the way I have been doing a LOT, by means of my art and literature, but I can't post art up because I don't know how to. And I can't post up my literature, because it's copyright and I intend to sell it as a proper publication. Once it's all finished and ready &c &c &c...

Anyway my biggest problem at the moment is Binky I don't know what we're going to do with her. She's so unstable it's unreal and I can't handle the stress.

Anyway I've got to go.

Sorry for all this burbling. I have really mixed feelings about all the subjects discussed above. Especially "mentality" I just want to FORGET all about that madness stuff, but am never allowed to. Because of Binky going crazy and ending up in the madhouse over and over again...

PS: Hey did you know Michael Jackson's brother Jermaine has a son called Jermajesty Jackson. What a name!!

Illustrated: madness animated; perspiration; window cleaner; Jermajesty Jackson (poor kid; +, like all the rest of the Jacksons, excepting Katherine, Prince, Paris and Blanket, he got nothing at all in Michael's will)...

Today I Met The Only Bipolar Girl I Know

... and she is fantastically beautiful.

I WAS down the Druggieclinic early because I'd gone to bed by midnight and yet somehow managed to awaken at 6am feeling crap.

A single cup of tea was enough to set me off all morning with Anxiety on top of Depression.

My Druggieworker wasn't in and there was no way I was going near the Group Session he always wants me to go to. I've attended the 12 sessions I undertook to do and no way in hell am I going near any groups again, except the legendary Nutter Club ~ the Dual Diagnosis (mental+addicted) support group that my own Consultant Psychiatrist cancelled. I'm writing in to tell him how he has disposed of my one source of support. Throughout Psychotic Break #2 (mid-January) last year Naomi, the group leader, was my single source of any practical help. Without her intervention, I might not even have got diagnosed.

My family, who live 100s of miles away never saw me, only heard me on the phone. Usually in the evenings when my mania was lulling ~ and a lot of online friends who know me via my blog ~ all said a lot of wellmeaning but seriously confusing things. People who knew me and actually saw me were in no doubt that I had completely lost my mind. One friend who hapened to phone me when I was in utter meldtown one morning, drove straight round with his wife, took one look at me leaving the house doing the best sane act I could manage ~ and burst straight into tears! I have absolutely no idea what was so upsetting, because I was feeling fantastic. They wanted to take me back to theirs but I pointed out that I was getting up each morning at 2:30am and wouldn't go back to bed for anyone. The psychiatrist told me after the fact that I should have been in hospital during that period. It's the most seriously ill I have ever been. I just could not help it.

Today I saw the only Drugs Worker who actually seems to care for me. This one comes from Germany. He checked my urine ~ only methadone and "morphine" (heroin) showed up. He kept asking what had gone wrong this weekend because I seemed down in the mouth and I kept saying I was fine. I keep my mouth shut and turn up my lips at the corners, as if half-smiling. I told him how much I'd gone off alcohol. So he added to my notes a breathalyser reading of zero. I told him how pissed off I was to be so anxious. He seemed not to credit how badly a single cup of tea can affect me. So I mentioned how, earlier this year, four cups flipped me out into hypomania, depression and paranoia for half a day. He mooted the idea of counselling but I told him I've had a lifetime's worth of that. I complained how four hours' interviews with the mental health nurse (more than two years ago and before I ever got the "schizoaffective bipolar" label) had left her with the idée fixe that it was some anxiety disorder that was bugging me. Despite my making the repeated point that I'd not had morbid anxiety for over a decade and a half, that I did not feel keyed-up, or a panicky grip round my heart. What I did feel was irritated, angry and overloaded with stress ~ an entirely different syndrome. When I'm anxious I want Valium. When I'm irritated, I don't. She gave me a helpsheet written for the me of twenty years ago! A person who wasted huge amounts of nervous energy turning over the same useless worries all night.

This morning was a tea-induced aberration: I DO NOT HAVE AN ANXIETY DISORDER. Or a Cluster C Personality Disorder, as she wanted to believe. (I do like that nurse, but she's too clever for her own good.) The personality disorders questionnaires I filled online (always in (hypo)manic states, as I would not ordinarily bother with such crap) said I was schizotypal and borderline! Doesn't mean I have any personality disorder at all. If the symptoms come as episodes, as mine do, it's called an "illness". Personality disorders develop by the late teens, manifesting as constant personal characteristics ~ hence that label: "personality disorder".

Then I mentioned how anxiety pisses me off a hundred times worse than any other symptom ~ extreme depression, "voices", manic meltdown, whatever...How anxiety is taken as a sign of weakness, never ever taken seriously by any doctor and how all sufferers should be shot through the head ~~ purely as an act of kindness. Which is as much as I'm prepared to say on the shameful matter.

Back in the waiting room a beautiful woman appeared. She didn't remember me, but I remembered her. I remember her because we ended up in bed together. (Long story). She is the one person I've ever met outside a clinical setting who has bipolar disorder. I told her what happened to me last year. She went and described my big manic episode for me: completely over-excited and hallucinating/~~ etc. She'd taken a big overdose of her meds at the weekend: 80 risperidone pills. A real recipe for feeling totally shipwrecked if ever there was one...

Then I went out to score heroin. Yes I'm still in thrall to the Killer B. ("B" is what we call Afghan brown.) Now I no longer drink, it's the last of all drugs... And I wish I'd taken Rachel's phone number...


Illustrated: this is the Spanish singer Jeanette Dimech. But she bears more than a passing resemblance to R...

MUSIC:~~~~~~~~

PORQUE TE VAS
Jeanette performs her biggest hit (the title means "Because You're going") at the Eiffel Tower, Paris...



KLF ft. TAMMY WYNETTE: JUSTIFIED AND ANCIENT (STAND BY THE JAMS)
I luuurve this track, it's so entertainingly kitch ~ know what I mean..!



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