Eight: A Cigarette is Like a Kiss

A return to the personal.

A cigarette is like a kiss.

Each toxic puff wastes dizzyingly

Into the stratosphere,

The light getting shorter, you fight for breath

Alone in the fag-end of morning.

One kiss is never enough.

Cling to my lips in familiar grip,

Cling and never let me go.

Who hears  our kisses,

Who holds us to account?

An-ever changing sky watches, receives,

Arranges its clouds in storm-spun silence.

Taste, and taste again the death of morning.

Let you into my heart, my mouth, my lungs

You burnt out too fast for a possible last time -  

But It  did happen.

I  have the smell of you.

The Personality Police would be happy with this one, I think.  It ticks all the borderline boxes.  Which is fine, since it’s a nonsense diagnosis anyway.  Is it not the case that I feel only what every other bloody human being on this planet feels?  I love my transience and despise it at the same time, I want to hold on to all that keeps me fixed and safe,  but I have to let it go or risk a living death.  Somewhere in the holding on or the letting go lies the problem.  It is a problem for me.  But I won’t accept that it could ever be solved – no one has the solution, just the offer of a thicker skin.  And that will come to me in time.

Last week (when I wrote the above) was an angry one.  From (another) letter that I didn't send, the following:

I am horrifically angry at the moment.  I feel let down by everyone and everything.  It disturbs me how angry I am.  I’ve been having some really nasty, graphic thoughts.  Violent images that seem to leap into my mind from nowhere like dreams (I wish they were).   One of these flashes involved me turning up to the Tavistock in a wheelchair, having amputated both my legs.  In another I saw myself  slash one of [ my consultant psychiatrist in the adolescent unit's] arms.  Possibly exhaustion is the cause.  My conscious mind doesn’t usually make such savage leaps to the unacceptable – of if it does, it contains the violence firmly within the boundaries of my own body.  I enact my fury bodily without ever really having to confront it.  Sometimes I think self-harm is the safest outlet for me after all.  The safest for the people who I co-habit this planet with too.  Something must insulate the live wire, or impede the flow of current it conveys.

I come to this conclusion, and then I remember Dylan Thomas: 

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Rage for raging’s sake, even if all I will ever have to make a fuss about is a storm in the smallest of tea cups?

Instead of sending the above to my therapist, as intended, I ended up writing a letter to the psychiatrist aforementioned.  When I left the adolescent unit, she told me that I could write to her and that she would always write back.  Over the years, I have written less.  I had sent her one letter previously this year.  But we are now well and truly in anniversary month (My Dad would have turned 52 today, and next wednesday is the 4th anniversary of his death), and I wanted to send her a card.  Enclosed in the card was a letter, mostly focusing on my achievements and other positive aspects of my life, though I couldn't resist whinging a bit about the psychotherapy funding situation.

I'm still reaching out, however cautiously.

Five - A taste of my own Medicine

Last night, my phone alerted me to a text message at 1.30 in the morning.  It was from a girl on my course who I have got to know slightly over the past few weeks – let’s call her Ellen.

The message read: 

“I’m in hospital, taken an overdose”.

Ellen and I originally got talking when she sat next to me in our first workshop of the current term.  She was in one of my classes last term too, and she told me she had been really worried about me when she saw a bandage on my arm.  Apparently she had tried to catch me up after class to ask if I was okay, but I was walking too fast (I do, particularly when I’m on edge.  Ellen has bad knees so she didn’t really stand a chance).   I was surprised that she had noticed, and rather gratified that she cared enough to worry.  Despite the very obvious signs of self-injury I display, including one memorable day last term when I was really out of it and walked around campus with clothes soaked in the arterial blood I had spilled the night before, no one here has asked any questions.  I do appreciate the respect of my privacy, but for me there is a fine balance between an intrusive and an uncaring reaction. The fact that not a word was said by anyone about the scars on my arms had an unexpected isolating effect.   In some ways, I think I have grown reliant on remarks from others about the scarring to affirm my more hidden suffering.  I have felt for a long time the existence of a “split” in myself, the emotionally unstable hurting core armoured by a shell of social enthusiasm, rational capability and intellectual interests that seeks to distract and divert attention from the “real” me.  But while this attention is terrifying, I also crave it.  It proves that I exist, or at least, that the part of me that is often overlooked exists.  When this recognition or “attention” does not take place, it has a greatly destabilising effect, barely discernable at first but increasingly apparent over time – last term, it got to the point where I felt SO divided, SO unacknowledged that I began to doubt my sanity.

This is a rather long-winded way of explaining that Ellen’s interest was valuable to me, and that I felt disposed to encourage a friendship between the two of us. There was (and is) however, a complicating factor.  Ellen of course has her own problems, problems which I have come to realise she presupposes I can intimately identify with. I have come to expect the appeals “You know how it is, you know what it’s like” to pepper a sizable proportion of our conversation – which, more often than not, is about her.  Ellen is diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, as well as depression, and I do wonder if the nature of our exchanges has something to do with this.  It may be a case of pot and kettle to suggest that she is particularly self- absorbed, but while I too tend to feel my existence as particularly isolated, I (perhaps overly) compensate for this by showing a pronounced interest in other people when I spend time with them.  Ellen feels that she “does not exist” when she is alone, that she needs other people to make her exist.  When I am on my own, I am all too real – it’s the rest of the world that disappears.  If it is possible to form such a comparative hypothesis, perhaps then this  explains why Ellen is “larger than life” (she has informed me that people have told her she comes across as “intense” and “frightening”) around others,  the only time she is able to realise the concreteness of her existence, whilst I am overwhelmed by other people’s needs when I engage with them, to the extent that in order to recuperate, I have to cut off from a recollection of these completely when I am alone.

The more I think about it, the more it sounds like two sides of the same coin – though I do not think I fit the diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s, I think Ellen could quite easily be diagnosed with BPD.  The irritation, as well as concern I felt when I received her text message was an important reminder of how my poorly integrated outside and inside worlds have worked to cause a lot of damage to my relationships, hurting those who I fail to realise (until too late) love me.  Ellen is fine.  The overdose she took does not sound substantial enough to have caused any damage, if her reports of the lack of medical treatment she was given in hospital are anything to go by.  Ellen, I think, wants me to help her, if only through the understanding she thinks I possess of how she feels.  She offers, unasked, details of her self-harming behaviour and watches closely for my reaction.  I cannot help but be responsive, but I am very wary of getting too involved.  For various reasons, which I won’t go into now, I think some of her recent behaviour has been modelled on what she knows of my history.  A few days ago, before her recent overdose, she told me she had once again taken a few too many of her citalopram pills.  I was bemused, and asked her what she had wanted to achieve – assuming she knew, as I do, that (whilst not a great thing to do) a small SSRI overdose is not particularly dangerous.    I can’t help but wonder if my reaction played some part in the fact that last night she appears to have taken paracetamol as well as citalopram.

I am annoyed partly because I hardly know her, and in some ways I do feel the text was an imposition. I was also angry because it took no account whatsoever of my possible feelings, and gave me only enough information to make me feel worried (disproportionately, considering the situation wasn’t in the end dangerous) and powerless.  It did make me think, though, of how my own self harm and suicide attempts must have affected those close to me – if I felt the way I did about Ellen, who after all is only really an acquaintance, how much worse it must be if you have a greater personal investment in someone who seems to behave towards themselves, and towards you, in such a cruel, careless way.  Those are emotionally loaded words, and my anger towards Ellen was almost entirely an emotional response.  While it may not be the most useful reaction, it is human – it is human to hurt when someone, particularly someone you love, hurts.  My experience of re- gaining consciousness in intensive care, hooked up to a million tubes, my mum, her face ashen, standing over me; or of my mother telling me how my Dad (he was still alive then) had cried when I was being treated for my first serious overdose and they were still waiting to find out if I would pull through, has a flip-side.  A flip-side which is at heart no less caring, but requires more insight, and in my case personal experience of being on the other side, to understand.

It is the frustration with a friend who has once again put herself in hospital, the friend you were relying on that weekend to come to see you on your Erasmus placement abroad.  It is the bewildered, frightened fury you feel when she goes out to celebrate a birthday with you only to spend an hour vomiting in the toilets of a bar and then sits down in the middle of the road, and you have to call an ambulance.  It is my mother’s terror, as she finds me hurting myself once again – the terror that provokes a hysterical “you don’t have to kill yourself; I’ll do it for you”.  It is my therapist's questioning of why I am “tormenting” her by making her watch me lose a dangerous amount of weight, yet again.   It is all this, and so much more. 

Thank you, Ellen, for helping me to see.

Four: When Doctors Grow Up

An odd dream last night has set my mind off along familiar tracks.

The scenario was a review meeting with a CMHT consultant and CPN, a meeting which in actuality is due to take place at 9.15 this morning.    If I don’t manage to drag myself away from the laptop and into the shower soon I’ll miss it, which would not be a good thing considering that the appointment has already been twice rescheduled, and after today the psychiatrist is on leave for a month.

It will be only the second time I have met this particular doctor, hence the reason why, for me, it is quite interesting that I should dream about him.  Even people I see regularly take a while to appear in my nocturnal fantasies – my therapist took a good few years – and I very rarely dream of acquaintances.  A bit of background:  the first appointment with this doctor took place after I moved here from London, and was referred on from one CMHT to another.  I think I wrote about it in the previous entry – anyway, it wasn’t fruitful.  I took away the feeling that there wasn’t ANYTHING they were prepared to do to help me, which was a bit of a shock to the system considering I have been under psychiatric care in one form or another for the past five years.  Then, the next appointment, twice rescheduled.  Although the new team had previously discharged me this was supposed to be a CPA meeting, made necessary by the fact that I had cut dangerously twice in one week (at this juncture, I’ll refrain from going into what happened in any more detail) and been placed under the Intensive Home Treatment Team – whose supervision I “escaped” by going back to London for the Easter break.  Before I left I promised them I would come back for the CPA a few weeks later, but when it actually came round to it I did not feel safe enough to travel up alone (being at my Mother’s saw a drastic decline in the cutting behaviour, since she won’t tolerate it in the house), and I gave them notice that I would not be attending only a few hours beforehand.  I spoke to the CPN who would be in the meeting on the phone.  She did not sound at all pleased, but said that they would go ahead and hold it without me, and schedule a review meeting for when I came back to university.

This meeting was supposed to take place last Friday.  I was in the right city at the right time for it, but I went to the wrong place.  I assumed it would be held where the initial assessment had taken place, since the letter regarding the review had been sent from this address.  Wrong.  Ergo, a pissed off CPN and psychiatrist whose time I had once again wasted.  Third time lucky?  In the dream last night, I told the doctor I am due to see today how contrite I was about the missed appointments, but he refused to believe me.  He said that psychopaths were incapable of remorse, and when I insisted that I was truly sorry, suggested that since such people are very good at saying what they think others want to hear this was just further evidence of my pathology.  I’m pretty certain the language in which the dream content manifested had something to do with this article, which I read yesterday.

The underlying conflict between patient and doctor, however, the tussle over truth which is the patient’s own but which must be relinquished to clinical authority, is an old anxiety of mine.  It was there right from the beginning of my “psychiatric career”, if I may so term it, but it seemed to grow more urgent with my transfer from child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) to adult psychiatry.  My experience of doctors at this time saw a dramatic turnaround within a matter of weeks – the time between leaving a secure child and adolescent unit and being referred on to a CMHT consultant, since I had turned 18 during the hospital admission.  During the 9 months I was in hospital my father had died, and the consultant I was under worked closely with me and was very involved in my care.  Admittedly, these were unusual circumstances, but even as an outpatient my community psychiatrist had been far more “on a level” with me than I could ever expect to find with those who worked in the adult service.  (Adult service, adult sector… my terminology has unfortunate connotations but you know what I mean).  Take, for instance, the issue of address.  Although I knew my psychiatrists’ surnames and professional titles, I was introduced to them by their first names, something which made them approachable and more inclined to win my trust.  On my first admission to an adult ward, which again took place no more than a month after I left the child and adolescent unit, I asked my consultant what his patients called him.  He was a nice man, friendly and more personable than many of the doctors I have seen since, but he reacted with astonishment to the question.

  “Dr [last name] of course”, he said.  “What else would they call me?”

A new boundary was established, one which I have never since transgressed.  The naming problem is but a small matter, however, symptomatic as it may be of the dynamics a patient may expect in such professional relationships.  Of far graver consequence to me was the treatment of my “illness”, which was now termed as such and given a formal diagnosis.  Indeed, this psychiatrist told me that it was a condition not only of my discharge but of everybody’s that a diagnosis was received – the computer system was set up in a way that demanded it.  I was incredulous of this at the time, and I’m still not sure it was entirely true.  During this and subsequent hospital admissions I encountered people who struggled with difficult social circumstances and sometimes had troubled histories, but who had never before come under the remit of mental health services. Once their “problem” was confirmed to be of a social rather than medical nature they left hospital as quickly as they arrived.

I had a different experience.  Although I was treated with a wide range of medications during my adolescent admission, including anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, so-called mood stabilisers (also used to treat epilepsy) and benzodiazepines, my psychiatrist refused to formally diagnose me with anything other than depression.  I had done some reading and noticed that one diagnosis, “borderline personality disorder”, seemed to describe me pretty well.  My doctor disagreed.  She told me that she was dubious about personality disorders in general, particularly “borderline” which nearly everyone could be said to display traits of, traits which were anyway particularly pronounced in young people.  Our personalities were still in the process of developing.  She said that there was a real danger that I would be diagnosed with the disorder by a CMHT psychiatrist, but this worried her and she would not pre-empt it.  At the time I did not understand why – I was in fact annoyed that she withheld from me a simple explanation of what was “wrong”, an explanation she could easily have provided.

It turns out I didn’t have long to wait.  I was indeed discharged from that first admission to the adult psychiatric ward with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, a label which in my view has led to many assumptions and treatment decisions which have been ineffectual, if not detrimental to my so-called mental health.  That, however, is a story for another time.  The title of this blog entry was “When Doctors Grow Up”, which is supposed to suggest  the strange phenomenon whereby as a mental health patient your transfer from child to adult services pre-supposes not only a radical progression in your own development, but an abrupt change in the people around you and the way you must relate to them.  Strangely, given that the treatment I received as an adolescent was more intensive and thorough that that which I received from both inpatient and outpatient adult services, there seemed to be more room in CAMHS for development and growth.  More “wait- and -see”, more “maybe you’re like this now, but your current difficulties do not have to define you or the life you will go on to lead”.  I can only speak from personal experience of course, and the treatment of children with, for instance, psychosis-based illnesses may well be different. 

But back to my dream.  There was certainly no wriggle-room in the fantasy doctor’s condemnation of me to psychopathology.  Furthermore, this diagnosis implied not only that my current behaviour was pathological, but that there was a right and “well” way to behave, and that a responsible practitioner’s job involved hypothesising an illness to show the patient how he or she had deviated from the prescribed path.  Psychiatry as a form of social control is by no means a new idea – Foucault amongst others wrote far more sharply on the matter than I am ever likely to be able.  But if it is true that doctors in adult psychiatry take on a more controlling, educative role, based on behaviour based medical theories than those in child psychiatry, there seems to be an issue still to address.  My treatment as a “child” seemed far more modern and progressive than that which I have received as an adult.  Whether it was more successful in terms of outcome, I don’t wish to speculate.   I only know that I sensed the people I worked with had belief in me and hope that I would come out the other side – that I wouldn’t be stuck inside their box forever.