EARLY INTERVENTION IN PSYCHOSIS TRAINING
DUMFREIS
LIVED EXPERIENCE TRAINING SESSION
GRAHAM MORGAN
MAY 2022
The first appointment: how do we prepare: what do we expect: issues on acceptance and surrender: building relationships.
My first appointment, it was so far back in history a long, long, forty years ago and yet I remember it vividly. It was a good ten years before getting a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
I was at university and couldn’t cope with life. I had few friends and no one to confide in. I hated, quite unreasonably my family. I was absorbed by the pointlessness of life and by the works of people like Sylvia Plath or Albert Camus and Nietzsche. I wore raggedy clothes, talked in a whisper and was disillusioned by the wonder of learning that I thought university would represent.
I didn’t know I wanted to make an appointment. I didn’t prepare for it or expect anything. It was not an expected or calculated thing. I had spent the evening slightly drunk trying to slash my wrists and was desperately ashamed and disappointed and frightened because though I itched and ached I was not particularly damaged. I was lonely, I was lost, I wanted to die but in retrospect maybe I just wanted to be loved and hugged.
Going into the doctors surgery was terrifying. I didn’t know what they would do or what I would say. I walked back and forth in front of it for at least half an hour. I sat on the wall to the premises and I wanted to cry and I wanted to go home and then to my astonishment I walked through the door.
Even more to my astonishment the receptionists must have seen me anxious in the street. I was not made to sit amongst the other patients. I was sent straight upstairs to a door on the right. An old sort of voice asked me in and I sat and I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t think, so in desperation I pulled up the sleeves of my shirt and showed him my wrists.
He was warm and he was kind and very, very, reassuring. I was sent along the road to what appeared to be a hospital for students which I am sure we don’t have nowadays and there I stayed and rested for some days and let the bewilderment and terror of the last few months ebb slightly softly away. Occasionally a psychiatrist spoke to me but mainly I slept and sometimes I talked to a young woman who was in for similar reasons to me.
I won’t talk of the next couple of years of treatment, somehow they don’t seem to help here. I will fast forward to when I was twenty eight. My son, who I adored had been born five months ago; he was everything, as was my wife but I was so, so, tired. After an absence of six years the thoughts of self harm flooded back. Initially we tried to get help from psychology but then it was like the sky had changed and I realised that I was possessed by evil, that the very blood of me was infected and would destroy those I loved. From every sparkle of sun, devils beamed thoughts into my head.
I remember the journey to my GP when I hid in the well between the back seat of the car and the front seat and I remember walking into the doctor’s room and somehow I couldn’t speak yet again. My words were halting and jerking and my arms were twitching and waving in the air and then I was in hospital and then I was on a section and my wrist was in bandages, as was my hand. Again I will always remember the doctors kindness and softness and her calm as she phoned the Royal Ed to say I needed admitted. I will remember her presence, her warmth.
Some months later after a helter sketler of life I remember that I was not surprised when I had an appointment with my psychiatrist and they told me I had schizophrenia. It didn’t surprise me. I don’t remember the doctor who told me. It lasted about five minutes in total. I walked into outpatients, was given the news and walked out with a leaflet that I quickly lost.
Acceptance or surrender is an interesting idea. I have been through it a few times. To start with being told I had a real live illness and was not just some disgusting person was a revelation and a relief and so good for my parents as I had blamed them for every scrap of sadness I had ever had and they were reeling with the shock that rather than being loved and thanked for all they had given me I blamed them for the fact that I sought death all the time. They now had something at last which meant they did not have to ache with the blame and the guilt it is so easy to feel.
There was something reassuring in a diagnosis and also something I did not take to kindly. I have reacted in different ways to it over the years. Sometimes it is a neat convenient explanation to explain myself to friends and acquaintances. Sometimes it is reassuring to me when I know that really I am the epitome of evil, a sort of knowledge that if this reality I live in is not true; I can relax and maybe accept what is done to me and believe in the knowledge of the people who try to help me. Sometimes in the past I have ventured down the don’t you label me route, the don’t define me route but nowadays I wish I could believe in those very definitions.
And the people who help me. I don’t know. Trust is a huge issue for me. I do not understand the motives of the people who have been in my life for the past forty years to jag me, speak with me, comfort me, assess me and section me. I hope that they are there because they believe in the importance of what they do and the need to gain my co-operation. I wish that was the case and to be honest, time and time again I have seen the evidence of this in the people who peer into these most private parts of my existence but I always, always, worry. I am alive to any suggestion that they are bored, or don’t like me or don’t think I deserve the help they offer. And yet at the same time I am desperate for signs that they do value me or care about me.
It must make it difficult for them. I think as a rough guide it takes at least a year for me to become willing to speak openly, to believe they care for me and it needs them to demonstrate time and time again that they can breach my silence and my lack of openness until finally, when they do I can relax and sometimes even look forward to when next I see them, begin to think about what I might say to them. Unfortunately it is often at this point that they move on and I never see them again. That is my final and yet most important message
– we have been told over and over and over again that we are the victims of people in power, that our history is one of exploitation and oppression. You can’t look at a drama on the TV about mental illness without seeing distorted images of us but even more distorted ones of our helpers who come off consistently badly and fuel the rage some people have for psychiatry. I think this stereotype makes most of us very anxious and ready to react badly when we know we are about to see someone who works in mental health.
I have met a few people I really don’t think should work in this field and who have harmed me but to be honest most come with an attitude I can only, in retrospect, think have made a huge and positive difference to my life.
So the trite silly message: I am all too human and I can be frightened and I can be wary; do please try to get beyond that initial apprehension because, at the same time, I will be craving the possibility that I can be comforted and treasured and maybe even helped to a better life.
Thank you.
(Photo, geilstone gardens may 2022)
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