My Recovery Story

Moray Wellbeing HUB 2018

Hello I have been asked to talk about my recovery story, which is difficult as I am sceptical about the word recovery and some of the philosophies attached to it.

Without getting into it too much; I worry that the emphasis on personal responsibility and hope and individuality is a slightly suspect neo liberal import from America which is a good way of blaming us for our problems, restricted our access to services and is in some ways a modern way of getting fellow services users to tell their peers to pull themselves together and if I look at it another way, use that phrase of ‘living the best life in the presence or absence of symptoms’ then that is what all of us do. I have never met anyone who consciously sets out to live the worst life – so in that context recovery is just the story of how we live our lives and what seems to help us and so nothing new at all and finally when using the word in its normal sense, many of us don’t get better and therefore don’t recover and so I am sceptical.

What I can talk about is what gives me the quality of life I do have which I imagine is what you wanted to know anyway.

I have a diagnosis of schizophrenia and depression and anxiety and I drink far too much alcohol. I have been treated against my will for the last ten years and yet I think it is that very treatment that keeps me alive.

I think I will go back many years to when I was in my late teens and early twenties and talk about those things that have kept me going, stopped me giving up completely, helped me find something approaching joy.

I did not speak really in those years; I was thin and anxious. I lacked in confidence but didn’t realise I did. I had spent most of my childhood at a boy’s school and was just getting to find out how to speak to girls and women. I was just discovering I was an adult and not only an adult but a man adult but found it so embarrassing buying razors that I used scissors to shave with and I was idealistic. I didn’t know what I was idealistic about but I was idealistic about making the world a better place in some vague way.

I had gone to university to study Natural Environmental Science as I wanted to be an eco warrior. Unfortunately I found identifying different grasses and sedges and rushes incredibly boring and not half as fascinating as I found Sylvia Plath’s poems and existentialism and nihilism. I never did understand those philosophies but they were a very good way for me to intellectualise the fact that I was so shy and lonely and insecure and maybe also messed up by some aspects of my childhood that I wanted to die.

Self- harm became routine for me, at first I did not know it was self harm, I just thought I was failing to kill myself. In some ways it was a relief and in others when my arm was throbbing and itching and the blood drying I felt just awful; disgusted and ashamed and miserable but it was a very good way of expressing physically the pain I was in emotionally.

And what helped? Long drunken conversations with one of the few friends I had. A student hospital when I was desperate and later one of the old asylums when I took an overdose. My GP was good; he listened and was warm, was there. On occasion he was less good when he said he wouldn’t see me again if I carried on cutting myself and when he told me not to phone the student helpline as they were so alarmed when I did phone them that they did not know what to do and had to get support for themselves.

However the key thing that got me into a good place was to find meaning and activity, through volunteering for a half way house for young people. It gave me purpose. It made me feel I had value. It put me in contact with new people who became my friends. Later I helped set up a drop in centre for young people run by young people again, more purpose, more value, more sense of camaraderie and belonging. Simple things that then and now make a huge difference to me.

I had been diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder by then and though my life was looking up; my gaze was always to the ground, all my thinking was squewed to the negative and then it all changed with two major things that happened.

One was sailing across the Atlantic which was breathtakingly beautiful and exciting and the other was meeting the person who became my wife, on that trip. In those early days and years of our relationship everything really did become rosy and shiny. I looked forward to the day, looked forward to life. Illness and misery were distant issues for me.

And now zoom forward. My marriage was wonderful for a time. I got a job in advocacy which was brilliant. I became well known in our small world of mental health and activism. I had a son who lit up my life but I also believed I was evil, that I was possessed by spirits, had been taken over by a devil and was part of the ending of the world.

Working flat out was strange, getting no sleep when my son was born was strange, being in one of the first jobs of its kind in the country with little knowledge of how to ask for or accept support was difficult and meant that I spent a lot of time either in hospital or off sick.

And what helped here were: my son and wife, the friends I had made, the fact that I didn’t lose my job and still had an income. The fact that in my line of work it was almost an advantage to have a mental illness, also being compulsorily treated to ensure I did not kill myself at those times when I was determined to die and much as I find it hard to say, being given a medication that blunted the reality of my thoughts.

But twenty years later; hopes can wither and die and joy can turn sour. The wonder I had with my wife failed in my heart, but the first stage in my journey to recovery and the point at which my life at the same time would turn irrevocably worse was about 13 years ago when I said to my CPN that I no longer loved my wife, and that I would no longer do exactly as she told me, no longer accept what she did to me.

And I do not know how such things happen with love and intimacy and I am very sure that my obsession with work and changing the world was a huge catalyst and my need to drink and my ongoing unbearable silence would have contributed. But our relationship became toxic to the point that I lost count of the number of times I had glasses of wine thrown into my face, the number of times I was kicked or punched or spat at, the number of times I was called a schizo, the fact that we never had friends to visit because I was too boring for them to see me.

And I say this was my liberation because I stopped accepting this, however the increased pain the conflict of my distancing of myself from my wife meant I spent a lot of time in hospital under a section. This was always good in that it stopped me from dying, stopped me from injuring myself too badly but was not an experience I would like to repeat and leaves a sense of bitterness. I will never forget how betrayed I felt after being sent home for a weekend on pass and when I explained that my limp on my return was because my wife had smashed a coffee table over my knee and the psychiatrist just said I was a complex individual and did not pause to think such things shouldn’t be happening to his patients, that maybe discharging me early into her care was not the best idea he had ever had.

I finally left my wife not long after a psychiatrist told a close friend that they thought my life was in danger and with that I entered the most dismal part of my life because by leaving my wife I found out that I had also left my son and all of our joint friends and all of my wife’s relatives. I have only seen my son twice in the eleven years since I left my wife.

It was the most incredibly bitter separation. I lost about hundred thousand pounds in the divorce settlement and I went into hospital again for a number of months, was put on a Compulsory treatment order and was also dealing with the loss of a partnership of over twenty years which even if I had initiated the separation, was still hard to cope with.

And what kept me going? What meant that I now have a better life than I used to? So many things kept me going. First of all my CPN was brilliant; someone with whom I could talk about things I couldn’t talk with other people; someone who understood ,to some extent, what I was going through and was not fazed by my beliefs.

Having to take medication has been vital in some ways, as it keeps me alive. I am still not sure I should be alive and would not take the medication if I could but if someone makes me take it then I feel free not to be responsible for the fact that I continue to live.

But there is so much more than that- I fled to Nairn when I left my wife and there I made fantastic friendships and was rarely out of my various friends houses, either cooking, talking, walking the dog or going to the café, babysitting peoples children, drinking wine. Those few years were like I had entered adulthood for the first time. I made more and more friends, learnt how to deal with living on my own; the dealing with the bills, organising repairs and getting new furniture, buying a new house.

I had never really done that before. I discovered the joys of charity shops and got all my clothes and books and cd’s from them.

Finally having my own house; a tiny one but one in which I could do what I wanted to do in it. It felt like freedom, I might lounge around in my dressing gown for all of a Sunday just eating crisps, or get up early to go the harbour arm and watch the sun rise. I revelled in the natural world; taking long walks along the river; watching the crows in the fir trees, the herons and the occasional kingfisher. Seeing trout rise in the peat dark water, walking along the beach in the winter where every ridge of sand was frozen – it soothed my mind, relaxed me, made me soft and warm.

And re-establishing proper contact with my family, my wife had disapproved of all my relatives and so it was a revelation to start to visit my brother and sister and their children and to find that I revelled in their company; found joy in getting to know my rapidly growing up nephews and nieces. And finally mending the breaches of love that I had had with my parents; especially my dad. Getting into a routine, while he was still mobile of taking them on tours of the highlands when they came to visit. That was the single best thing I have done in years, both learning of the way they have always been there for me even when I have been obnoxious and reforging a love and connection I thought I had lost.

And travelling around the place, going to visit Jenny in Ullapool for the book festival, joining the crowd of writers for our regular writing weekends in Achmelvich youth hostel, visiting Maggie and Anita in Strathpeffer for tea, and John and Marianne in Drumnadrochit. I may have been sad and miserable and full of thoughts no one else agreed with but I had started to try to live my own life, I had things to do, things to look forward to and finally was looking after myself instead of expecting other people to do so.

And of course work continued. I worked too hard but had a wonderful time; met amazing people, realised I wasn’t as bad at my job as I sometimes thought I was, was awarded an MBE for services to mental health and made service user contributor of the year by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

And finally; learning the joys of writing and self- expression and creativity, for me the ability and desire to write, gives me great pleasure.

The last couple of years have been wonderful and exhausting. Yesterday I posted on facebook that I hated schizophrenia but even that is maybe a revelation and a waking up. I had known but never emotionally connected that terrible emptiness, that void and absence, that just not being alive, that lack of curiosity and spontaneity with schizophrenia and even less with the drugs I take but somehow I do now. It makes me profoundly sad, far, far, worse than so called delusions or suicidal thoughts is this emptiness, this lack of feeling. If it were not for Wendy my new partner, her children and Dash the dog, I am not sure I could face the rest of my life living like that.

But as it is I do have Wendy and her family. Even having to take the dog for a walk does me good, having to look after the children and not expose them to my darker side does me good, cuddling Wendy, being teased by her and loved by her transfoms my life.

I now work for the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland. I don’t get paid much but I only work part time which is wonderful and takes me away from my ability to overwork. I have a boss whose main task in her managing of me seems to be making sure that I have a good work life balance and don’t get obsessed with work. I get PIP which helps. I have been reunited with the majority of my ex-wife’s sisters and their husbands and children and I am slowly, very slowly making new friends now I live in Argyll.

I have time to write, to do author readings. I have started to exercise and eat less of the unhealthy food I got so used to so although I am still not quite at a healthy weight I am not actually obese anymore.

I am hugely privileged – my last CPN was wonderful but she started a new job a month ago. However one thing I didn’t like was that she said I was exceptionally high functioning – it is a bad and patronising and alienating word but equally it is true. I may spend much of my life in silence. I may say I want to die every day. I may lack that energy and motivation to just do stuff but I am not so damaged by it all that I cannot work, or cook or manage my life. I do not spend all my time alone in my room. I have a family and friends that accept my difference. I have the mental health support most people don’t have even when they are desperate. I have money; a house and love and I have a life where I have something to believe in because if other people had the opportunities and support that I have had then maybe they could have some of the joy in life that I do.

I am still, despite what I say, obsessed with changing the world. I would love to see new and effective treatments for those people who suffer more than me but equally there are things we could do in society to change life for so many people. I do not want my friends to live in poverty, I don’t want to phone them and find out that I am the first person who is not a professional who they have spoken to in days. I don’t want them to have to decide whether to heat the house or eat. To be so sad and low that drugs and tobacco offer salvation. And I don’t want them denied the support and treatment that might give them the chance to find that spark of energy and hope that means they finally managed to tidy the house, throw out the rubbish, get dressed and take the risk of inviting a friend round for tea.

And I have a job that in some small way is about trying to make some of this happen, few people can be as lucky as me to be able to work in a field I love, with people I really like, doing work which I believe in and get praise for, I am pretty lucky really.

And that is a collection of some of the things that make my life wonderful for most of the time. I may have been on a CTO for the last ten years, I may have a mental illness that will last all my life and which on average means that people like me tend to die twenty years earlier than other people but I have more than I would have dreamed I could have had ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago.

Thank you.

For more information on the Mental Welfare Commission visit : https://www.mwcscot.org.uk/