Brother in Christ - A poem for a man who made our lives better

Dedicated to a brother in Christ, someone who made my life in a particular church and community much better.  That was in the late 1990s, a very different life than the one I have now.  He made all our lives better.  Those who know will know.

Brother in Christ

We were pastel attempts among Jesus Army Reds.
We’d sit innocently among brothers, take the piss,
And hang onto every insistent word of Noel Stanton.
We played games to endure his often abusive drone -
When we weren’t lying back in the
Far field of the Cornhill among the rebellious;

The half-lost sheep with their sickly stone weed stench.

Back in the Vineyard, always overcooked cabbage.
Or undercooked.  Rarely right.  Except when
A goddess gave out never-ending flapjack.
The Rockfast Prince frowned daily
At our impressions of our infallible pastor.
“Pumping, Pumping, Pumping.”  “You Fools.”
“You Idiots.”  “God hates covenant breakers.”
And apple crumble desserts every day.
Apples, grade two at best.  Picked lovingly,
Without pay, begrudgingly, from New Creation orchards.

We’d laugh.  At the stolen cars,
The knife wielder, the bad mechanics,
The unfortunate missing link, the craziness and compassion,

And at Stanton himself.  Unwavering.  Firebrand.  Fraud?
We sang the songs, lost in worship

Then rolled in hysterics at the crap ones,
Or the day 2000 people stuck pieces of paper
To themselves with one printed word: “YES.”
Which most of us didn’t mean at all.

We laughed.  I remember it, the unrestraint.
Laughter above all the pain.
Laughter triumphs over control and coercion.
Laughter wins.  Survival in the laidback cult.
Laughter.  Give me back laughter.
My friend, say it isn’t true.

Laugh again and sing with us.
Come back, and ride the Jesus Army
Double decker buses though they drive no more -
Like you.  Pained, tormented,
Lost.  You, lost.  Today I wish you heaven.
I wish you peace.  Brother, I loved you.

Pumping.  Pumping.  Pumping.  In your voice.
Your face, your smile.  Your excitement.
I remember it all and do not hold back my tears,

For you.  For endings, for despair.

Rest in peace, bruv.  Bless ya, bro!
No more demons.  No more gods.
All exorcised by a ending.  Life too brief.
I would forget your ending
And remember only laughter.

            Died 7th March 2020

An Autobiography In Twenty-Five Lines of Poetry

Something written in the Chilli writing group last week.  I may write more poems with exactly the same title, each one an autobiography.  Or a facet of an autobiography.  Perhaps on another day I'd write a very different tale of the same life.  I remember holding the cupboard door handle firmly sometimes.  Not so that I could escape.  Rather, so nothing and nobody could break into my safest space.

An autobiography in twenty-five lines

From beginnings, I swept my life under the carpet,
Knight move patterned, rule crossed rooms,
Dreamed of disappearance.  Through the cracks
Of heating vents into the pipe world, warm,
Washed, safety in silence, family free.

Cupboards too, watching imagined lights
Play honestly behind closed eyes
Shut out terror in wardrobes,
Among photographic smells, buried under coats
With a failing torch, unfound, under stairs.

Wake me up from escape.  Only protect
This multitude from memory, the half-certain
Smiles, the blank faces, black and white
Child actor, blanker still in eighties Kodachromatic
Colours.  Knife scratched out even at Christmas.

Growing in freedom, meaning found in fallenness.
Willing slave to God, insecticide sprayed self,
Neglected among weeds.  Baftas languish on a shelf.
Dusty, walls cracking, bleeding into Prozac,
The first of a million slow deaths.

From endings, carpet ripped, naked threads.  Rape stained.
The house sold, chapters closed and burned.
Mistress of postponement, created her world in seven years.
Tigers eyes; diamond cut; a scarless resurrection.
Washed, safety in self-worth, finally free.

How I Lost Hope By Looking to Therapy As THE Solution

I'm going to share some words written a year ago today. Things were not good. Six months to the day later we had an idea about whether we'd gained enough mental stability to take one very short course. Today we got notice that the certificate for another qualification was ready to collect. We also burst into tears at the optician which wasn't good. However, we went to a writing group, discussed a forthcoming trip to London, and went to the theatre. All of which was good. I'm not going to define the day by the part that wasn't good.

Why am I going to share these words of pain and despair when they're not happy?

For one reason only. Something that I've learned and absorbed in the last year. Because a year ago one of the major reasons for distress was a waiting list. I'd been promised therapy would begin at a certain time and I'd placed hope in that therapy. The specialist DID therapy was what I needed. It was the solution, the way forward, and nothing much could improve without it. But then I was told the original promise wasn't true and that I probably had longer to wait after waiting so long than I did at the beginning.

That's something I see quite frequently. Hope and power placed in a mental health service. Hope and power removed from the mental health service user, or the person hoping to become one. I see people in despair because they are not in the service they need, receiving the therapy they need. And so they think, at least on some level, that there is no hope.  I also see people in despair because they reach the top of the waiting list, receive some input from services, and life has not been solved.

In the last year I've learned this to be a bullshit way of thinking. The service may help someone lots. It may harm them. But outside of the service, the structure, the particular view, the NHS mental health strengths and weaknesses, there is always hope.  In the end, healing has to come from within, whether or not there's a psychologist to guide parts of the way.

How have I learned this? Simply by doing so much work for myself, outside of the structures. Simply. That's a very inadequate word for something that wasn't necessarily simple at all and which was difficult.

The tailored DID therapy comes in three stages. Firstly, stabilisation. I've worked so hard at that, without therapy and continue to work at it. Thirdly, building a life. I'm doing that too, achieving and creating realistic short and long term goals. Secondly, direct trauma work. Now that's the one that I almost certainly would need help with, had I not decided that this isn't the right time for it.  Trauma therapy is definitely safer with wise assistance.

I'm not saying services are bad things. I'm not saying that they can't be very useful. They can help us in ways in which it would be very difficult to help ourselves.

I am saying that not being in a service is not a rational cause for despair or hopelessness. I'm saying that we are powerful, incredible people who can learn to do more for ourselves. I'd also say it's tough and that learning of our power can take time.

I am saying that the despair I felt a year ago rose up, at least in part, from an idea that was wrong. The idea that I couldn't sort out a lot for myself. It turned out I could, even with this diagnosis and truth that was so difficult to come to terms with.  I ran out of hope.  I forgot that hope is contained more within us than in the therapist's office, no matter how good that therapy may be.

As for the mattress, I still have it.  One of these days I'll get something much better.  The night after that day will be bliss.



Another day cancelled. Started rough but doable with things arranged to look forward to. Worsened. Eventually blotted from the calendar including all five places I wanted to be at different times. The first two were cancelled anyway.

Please send pink fluffy unicorns. Actually don't. On this day they'd only poop on the carpet and I haven't got the ability to clean up unicorn poop right now.

Please send fairy godmother therapist / sleep magician / healthy but tasty food I don't have to think about resulting in a third meal of tears today / access to nonexistent support / or even some kind of drug to take some crap away without fucking me up like any drug so far invented does.

Please send miracles. Please send a mattress that isn't crap and wasn't part of a £45 secondhand double bed. Please send the ability to adequately look after myself long-term. Please send functioning skills so I can get house things fixed some of which needed fixing the day I moved. Please send curtains and curtain poles fitted at my windows.

Please send a crisis team that isn't rubbish. Please supernaturally enable my GP on Wednesday to find me help that doesn't feel too far away to survive for.

Please don't tell me it'll get better. I've heard that for all my life. Today I won't believe you.

Please don't send me your thoughts. Or your love. Or light. Or bloody universal vibrations. And definitely not your prayers to a God I don't believe in. Your prayers help you to feel better about me but they don't affect me. All of those things in a social media message are of less use than the crisis team saying to drink yet more tea.

Please send lift to the wilderness tomorrow where my head will quieten for a while.

Please send hope. Right now I've run out.

Please send a head that is only typing as another distraction having lost the energy and focus for others. Please take away the destructive thoughts.

Please send hope and belief that I can get through to whenever therapy begins. November they say. But who knows?

#struggling
#SafeHugNeeded - a rare thing

Woman in a Mental Hospital, 1914. It Would Have Been Me

[A post written in December 2018. Later I wrote a fictional account based on what I'd read in hospital records.  I still haven't typed up the story, which exists only in a notebook that was part of the Heads and Tales mental health heritage project.]

A content warning for this because it's got graphic, intense descriptions of mental hospitals and the lives and case histories of people in them 100 years ago. And it's not easy history to bear. If you're feeling at all sensitive, feel even more free than usual to not read.

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I went back to the Tyne and Wear Archives two weeks ago with other participants of the Heads and Tales mental health heritage project to view some more documents relating to mental health history in the area. Some of what we can see as part of Heads & Tales isn't open access and there have been lots of behind the scenes negotiations to gain permission.

For example, official patient records from early in the twentieth century. We got to see some a fortnight ago. There were more today.

I found 100 year old discharge records from a mental hospital in Sunderland more troubling than those of a mental hospital in Newcastle.

Perhaps it was the very different way they were written. Perhaps I was just reading on a different day.

I am emotionally exhausted tonight at the stories of dozens of women, all of whom I felt strongly for.

The records are from 1914.

One of the illness descriptions started that the woman was worried because her husband had gone away to active service. Later she felt sad and had trouble focusing on her work (at home).

That's not an illness.

That's a normal human reaction.

Some of the women were - if the records are accurate - ill and in need of help. Some kind of support. We'd want them to have plenty of adequate medical help today that they might or might not be able to access. But I think some others weren't ill, at least no illness we'd understand as an illness - even in a society where a quarter of us end up diagnosed with mental disorders.

One woman seriously damaged her hand in the hospital by banging on the walls of the padded cell they put her in to try to get her to calm down. She was there for days. I've talked with someone this year who spent time in a padded cell. She said how distressing and frightening it is there and a little of how the experience affected her. She would have done almost anything to get out. But this woman's actions in 1914 were taken not as a normal human reaction to being locked in such a place but as a sign of greater mental illness. Eventually she was calmed down after hours in a "warm" bath. I hope it was warm. 100 years ago a warm bath in a hospital could be scalding as if they still wanted to cure you by balancing the humours.

And then there were the women who dared to get out of their hospital beds. The notes never spoke highly of them. We've thankfully lost that idea that women who are "mentally ill" should stay in bed for long periods. Even then it was a throwback to the feebleness (supposed) of Victorian women.

There were of course the usual delusions and hallucinations about god and the devil. Even that may often be a normal human reaction in stressful times. Certainly most voice hearing and seeing things isn't psychosis and we all have some odd views. Should these unfortunate Christian women have been locked up almost automatically? I could only think that I'd read of pretty much the same delusions and hallucinations in the writings of St. Teresa of Avila and many other saints. Except they weren't called mentally ill. They got canonised and Teresa got called a Doctor of the Church by Catholicism, one of the few women to have that honour.

Reading between the lines and thinking of later accounts by survivors of mental hospitals and asylums it looked as though many of the women achieved their discharge not by being cured of anything but by learning to cooperate, play ball with the system, not cause any problems for anyone.

Unfortunately that's something that too often still hasn't changed. I read similar reports not from 1914 but from this decade.

And every one of those women was another person. Not just words on a page written by a string of doctors.

Today I found every one of the stories hurt inside but I didn't want to stop reading. I wanted to pay respects to each person even if all I could do was read their case notes before forgetting their names and nearly everything about them.

Is that enough for them, for their mental and sometimes physical suffering, for their lives and memories? No.

But there isn't anything else that I could do. If only there was a greater way to celebrate and hold up these women - and the men too, listed in one of the books of records from Newcastle. Perhaps one day there will be. Perhaps too, the archive we're gathering records for - a big computer job next year - will help state the history better.

We can't name names. We can't take pictures of the records. Of course not. But perhaps in time we can do something.

Tonight I ache. For them. And, if I am honest, for myself too.

Because I know that had I been me in 1914 the greatest likelihood would be that I would have been in a mental hospital too, over and over again. Or in an asylum for a much longer period. Even ignoring what they would have thought about my gender they would have had plenty of contemporary reasons to either admit me or imprison me and to force me to remain confined to the grounds or even to a bed.

If I had been me living in 1914 I would now only exist as sets of patient records being read in an archive room by a few people who would have forgotten my name by the evening.

Three Austerity Lies. Poetry Written While Free

New soundbite lies:
"Austerity is over."
You're all rich men now.

The hungry woman:
No cash, no hope. Her heart broken in
Each regular poverty period.

Her blood: not enough
To make a Tory turn to love,
Find a fair repentance.

Austerity lies
On each of us. Steals our days,
Brings endless night.

The above poem was written in three minutes at the end of a period of free writing in a writing workshop at Chilli Studios, a creative space in Newcastle for people with mental health difficulties.

There were three sides to her story.
You each only listened to one.
She's like an elephant to a blind Buddhist
But you only get turned on by her legs.
Or her eyes. Or the way you think she hears
And responds when her ears flap.

Three mistakes. Three misapprehensions.
She won't come home with you
Until you see who she really is.


Those words were written in the same workshop during the final five minutes in which we wrote freely about the number three. We may return to numbers in the next workshop. These words also came from those minutes. Again, create your own interpretation.

Lost in the jungle.
I can't even climb trees.
How will I find a way out
Without a chance triangulation?

Three ways to escape.
Three treks. Three points to position.
Three bundles of a girl's confusion.
A tree creeper who misunderstands directions.

The Joy of the Lord was Part of my Trauma - Faith, Change, and Recovery

Words written in October 2019.  My new therapist is now my old therapist.  I postponed the deep trauma therapy that we'd have been undertaking because the time isn't right for it.  The time may never be right for it and I may find that I never need it at all.

CW: Religion. Religious harm

I was asked a simple question by my new therapist today. "How has your faith changed?"

Here's one part of a possible answer:


I am glad that "the joy of the Lord" is no longer my strength.
In too many places I was told by the sincerest of believers that it was.
Furthermore I was told that not feeling that joy was sin.


Depression was stigmatised.
As a tract said, "Depression is caused by sin." REAL Christians know the truth so won't get really depressed.
"I was depressed and I prayed about it and God took it away, so I don't know what your problem is." Someone I'd never met phoned me across a country to tell me that.


Anxiety was stigmatised.
"Do not worry. God knows the sparrows so nothing bad can happen to you. Not really. So repent of worry."


Sadness was stigmatised.
"What right have you got to be sad when Jesus did so much for you? Accept his holy will."
Or in my Catholic days, "Offer all your sufferings to God on the cross of Christ, joyfully, happily, for the sake of the prayers of Mary and the Pope."


Humanity was stigmatised. At least, a large part of our humanity. Many religions do that. Much of the new age teaching does it. Even some bad pop psychology books do, influenced by anti-human spiritualities and by cultures based on aspects of anti-humanism.


"Deny your negative feelings. No sadness. No fear." And either all guilt and all shame or no guilt or shame depending on the path.
"Deny yourself. Didn't Paul fast, and suffer gladly, and pummel his body? The church itself is built on the blood of the martyrs and the prayers of monastics. Keep building."
"Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad ..."
"Here's your spiritual prescription. Just read these Bible verses three times a day and you'll be joyful in a week."
"So why don't you pray about it?"
"His yoke is easy and his burden is light. So if you're suffering you're rejecting his gift and his presence. Your salvation is at risk."
"Depression is unbiblical. God's calling you to repent and trust in him."
"Trust in the Lord. He'll sort everything."
"Trust and obey. For there's no other way to be happy ..." I can finger pick that song on the ukelele!
Or from many sources, including the best selling Christian book in history, "Hate yourself."


Yes. Hate yourself. You're a wretch. Every day you heap more sorrows and pain onto Jesus as he hung on the cross. No matter how much you live the faith, turn back to Christ.


And of course, "Queer is bad. Gay is bad. Transgender is bad." Sometimes even, as in my first churches, "Pray and be healed if you're struggling with it." I'd already crushed my gender many years before so this was only encouragement to perpetually crush any tiny suspicions. It also caused me to live in a way damaging to other people.


I believed. Lived my faith with all I could give. I thought I knew that I only had to live the faith better and I'd be exceedingly glad too.


So for twenty years the "God of life" killed me as I daily tried to crucify myself with Jesus that I might live. Or not, because that life wasn't particularly worth living.


I was already quite crucified. Otherwise I'd never have been vulnerable enough to hear the "good news" that a God would save me from the eternal flames I deserved.


No. The joy of the Lord is NOT my strength.
I am my strength.
Friends, relationships, creativity, soft toys, nature, and much more are my strength.


But God? No. I've left God and so been freed from that man-made "law of sin and death." My God, if anything is sin, was sin. My God was death.


I didn't know "how much it cost to see my sin upon the cross." I know now. I'm still in a process of recovery from my religion. Only since leaving have I learned more about how much it messed me up and how many other people have been messed up. Often they were messed up by people like the one I spent two decades trying to be.


Unfortunately if I say these things to Christians I'm usually told that it's because I didn't have or live the right faith. Either because I didn't give myself to it well enough, which is a lie from the imaginary hell, or because I had the wrong idea of God and should come back and serve the proper version.
The idea I had was the one received. I know now that it was definitely wrong but that doesn't mean another version of God is right.


I am scarred by faith. Scars adding to those I already had. And all the crappiness of my religion still lurks in my head ready to accuse. All the dogma too. So when I was asked today how I found God my head screamed out against the Arminian heresy! It's highly annoying that several years after making a final break with the church my head still leaps to do these things and it throws "godly" accusations at me too.


Recovery is hard.


Recovery is possible.


Recovery is worth it.

She Ran - a short poem of escape, despair, and laughter.

A short poem, drawn my life.

She Ran

She ran.

Farther, faster than she had ever dreamed was possible.
To escape herself and her past she swallowed every performance enhancing drug.
She gave everything she had to racing,
Sometimes sprinting, the wind blowing back her hair;
Then painfully stooping, her body conspiring against her.

Eventually, exhausted, she could run no more.
She stopped. Despair mixed with her sweat.

Looking back she noticed how beautiful the mountains had been.
Looking forward she met herself, embraced, and learned laughter.

Memories of My Granddad and His Boots of Compassion

If he was still alive, my granddad would be one hundred years old. Forty years ago I played him the song on my cheeks! Thirty years ago the whole family gathered with many friends for a relaxing day of the kind loved by that side of the family, where people were people and nothing else mattered much.

I wrote these words just before his 100th birthday, coincidentally. They weren't connected with granddad's centenary. I was at a writing group and we were asked to write about our childhood's and the happy memories. Right now thinking of my childhood does not feel safe. But granddad came to mind as a place of safety, one I wish I'd been able to know better.

The words were free written on paper in fifteen to twenty minutes. Not all of them are true but most are:


Boots of Compassion

My granddad tested me with logic puzzles cobbled from Lewis Carroll. He’d challenge me with the possible ways his red dipping bird would perpetually make motion, sticking its beak into a cracked cup of water, the handle glue-fixed for he never threw anything away.

He’d tell jokes that weren’t funny about men with one-armed ladders, baker shop confusion and the problem of madeira cakes, or enthuse about the ticking of metronomes and words he claimed defined a kind of eighteenth century vase.

Then granddad would smile as he dug up another prize vegetable for the flower show, ready to be auctioned with his skilled patter and gavel after learning whether our family had triumphed over the Crawfords, our horticultural, culinary, and child’s plasticine garden rivals.

He spoke with the gentle calm of a Gandhi and was excited life had no meaning beyond the present time, Flatland was a place, and windmills still turned in the Sussex Weald.

His hair curled white and his grin at repairing, Heath-Williams like, every gadget and gizmo and wire wrapped chopping board was a revolutionary strength.

Later we found radioactive paint and drawings by German prisoners, treasures in attic corners, tied in string from another world.

He let us climb in the trees, play cricket on the green against the old beech tree with a bend in the trunk and invite us back for fudge or gooseberry fool from the prickle bushes I later killed by mistake.

Granddad, in old plain clothes, blazer jacket with holes, each worn thread a mark of pride in the way he’d risen in pain and hunger from pauper peasant to professor, the cleverest man in my world. A man I never understood.

He’d make puns and punch and perfect tea from loose leaves in a pot he’d owned for forty years, the spout and handle not original but replaced from jumble sales. Not a colour match in sight by we were rhapsodic at the smell of coffee beans and the thrill of the rare days when the soda stream worked.

Then we’d be off, no pressure, no expectation, no calls to be someone else like I’d heard elsewhere, and we’d walk. A thousand miles it felt like when I was eight but it was only two, including the Ifield Quarter Mile and the house where Foxe and Penn preached.

Sunny days and they were in my only safe place, the one I think of without flashbacks of harm.

Granddad was the coolest man on earth. Friend to all, campaigner of community, the brightest spark in the village. He wore love on his sleeves, compassion on his boots, and acceptance on the frame of his ancient, wire string fixed glasses. The star of Ifield.

If only I could have realised as a child, already living as someone else, that his logic tests had meaning and that meaning was generosity. I couldn’t see him.

I see him now. My granddad. My friend. Wittgenstein’s too.

He finished his autobiography and died an hour later, leaving us rich for what he gave.

Reasons To Stay Alive. Reasons To Live.

A Reason To Live - written one year ago today

Someone asked if people can think of a reason to live. My without thinking answer is below. If you could copy it and then post it back to me on the days when I'm posting that I want to give up and not live this life any more that might be a good thing. There are too many days when I feel that. But the reasons still exist. None of them have wandered off when I can't see them - and I truly can't. Mostly rational thoughts are beyond me in the worst times.

In worst times I am utterly incapable of seeing that beyond the mental health crap and all the things I can't do, I have kind of an awesome life. Limited in many ways by my health but kind of awesome too. Some days there's an incredible struggle to find a reason to live even though there are many.

My without thinking about it much answer:

A question I ask myself frequently having had thoughts of suicide every day since at least the start of last year and at times back through most of my life.

Sometimes it's stubbornness. Sometimes it's hopefulness. Sometimes it's holding to not wanting to hurt people who would be hurt if I left. Sometimes it's that there are good days among the bad, days of sitting on rocks being alone with the sea. Sometimes it's the chance to hear one more decent song. Sometimes it's the cat who visits me. Sometimes it's the knowledge that where there are pens or paper or art supplies there is the chance to create something from nothing. Sometimes it's looking at all the photos I've posted and remembering.

Sometimes it's straining to hold on to - and sometimes this seems almost impossible - that while my 18th psychiatric diagnosis of DID looks both correct and more of a challenge than the previous 17 and while help is still a long way off there's still a lot of good to be found, a ton of good people, singing, walking, listening to birdsong, drinking hot chocolate, finding something cool in a charity shop, eating sometimes at Magic Hat, free things, the existence of places like Chilli Studios, the way the drift floats on the Tyne, the sun through the Plessey Wood trees. Plenty more. And plenty more to be found even when it doesn't look like there are.

Sometimes I look at how surprising life is. How this permanently depressed, totally scruffy, homophobic, resolutely straight, obsessive traditional Catholic who could pray 6 hours a day and still feel bad for not being religious enough, determinedly neurotypical man who moved to Newcastle couldn't have foreseen pretty much anything about how life is eight years on. Anything is possible. Even the impossible. More surprises can follow.

Some days I would not be able to begin that list. Some days I can only see the dark, hopelessness wins, and sometimes it might only be guilt that carries me through. Nevertheless the reasons are still there even if covered up by dark places. Some days I'm telling the world I don't want to be here and it is bloody hard to still be here. Some days I only survive because I don't want people to hurt.

They're all reasons to live. But in the end we need to find our own reasons because we're all utterly weird in different ways. And the reasons are there. I can promise there are reasons.

Reasons to Live - Written Today

Staying alive was worth it.  I wrote that I had thoughts of suicide every day.  That's no longer true.  Sometimes a thought arises from old habits, old thought patterns.  It's just a thought, not a reality.  There are still limitations but everyone has limitations.  That's okay.  There are less limitations though than a year ago.  Not because the world has changed or because I am a different person but because I have grown in confidence and in self acceptance.

Surviving the worst that mental health distress threw at me or which I built up myself through ways of thinking was hard.  Afterwards, in this time of relative peace that may or may not be lifelong, I am fabulously glad that I didn't give up.  There are things in my life now that I couldn't have contemplated during those months and years of wanting to die.

I've heard people argue for assisted suicide to be available for people with mental health distress.  I'm strongly against this view because I know that I would have taken that option had it been available.  I know friends who would have taken it too and are now very glad to be alive.

Stay alive.  Please.  Read Matt Haig's book if you're up to reading.  It's in short sections so that makes it easier.  Read this post.  And on your days with less distress write your own reasons to stay alive.  My reasons aren't necessarily yours.  Matt Haig's reasons aren't necessarily yours.  Your reasons are yours and I'd encourage you to find them whenever you're best able to find them.

Nobody posted this back to me last July when I came, again, so close to dying.  I couldn't see it either, hidden somewhere in the months old haze of Facebook.  I post it back to myself now, and to you too.

I promise you that you have reasons to live no matter how hard mental health distress may be for you right now, no matter what's gone wrong in your life recently or in the distant past, and no matter what new austerity or punitive benefit the government announces this year.

Stay alive.  Please.  Not for me.  I won't know who has read this post.  Stay alive for yourself because I promise you deserve that much.

Living My Best Life Now, Two Years After Asking "Do My Medications Help?"

Two years ago.  I was suicidal every day.  I was taking prescribed psychotropic drugs.  And I was enduring a range of hallucinations, some of which were highly distressing.

I'd begun to read more critical writings about psychiatry though and had begun to ask questions about myself and the way my mental health had deteriorated even while taking the drugs.

I'd already made two attempts to stop taking Trazodone, both of which I'd aborted very quickly because the withdrawal was extremely hard, verging on utterly unbearable within a couple of days of removing one capsule from the daily dose.  Trying to get off my pills and capsules seemed to be an impossible goal.

But I'd had thoughts running round my drug affected mind and wrote this:

Do my medications help?

I don't know.

My mental health was struggling, largely while getting all the ramifications of an autism diagnosis straight in my mind. I thought that would be easy. It wasn't. So I took a drug for the related anxiety. Then I had to take another. Because after a lull the anxiety was back in abundance.

Generally since that point my MH has been worse, and I can feel drug side effects too even this long into taking them. I'm more sluggish, there's some lost focus, and an appetite gain that's led to weight gain too. Heck, I have more anxiety and panic symptoms than I had before my first dose of Trazodone and the later addition of Pregabalin.

And all those hallucinations? Well they're not on the lists of common side effects so medics want to treat them as something separate. But I wasn't seeing purple men and ghost armies before taking the medicine. My only other really big hallucinations period was while taking tricyclic antidepressants. I was assured there was no link and was given antipsychotic meds. I didn't take them. I took myself off the tricyclic instead. And the hallucinations vanished. Magic!

There are other symptoms I could talk about too.

I've been doing a lot better recently but it's very, very hard work. I have to fight for everything every day and have pushed myself hard in the last 2-3 months. Considering how bad the autumn was I'm doing incredibly. And then add on the stresses of moving house and the end of a treasured relationship and it's more incredible still. There's a long way to go and I know there will always be difficulties but I'm a long way in the right direction too. I am determined to keep doing incredibly and to see what happens. Being autistic means I will always have a somewhat reduced capacity and a range of issues - that I so often mask well. I may also always have other problems, or may not. But I remain determined. Life will be lived and enjoyed. I will progress.

March begins. There is much to look forward to. Much determination. A diary that's getting to be more full than it's ever been. Almost. But I'm also mentally knackered from the hard work and have cried lots this morning. And all the while I feel slightly in a drug created unreal state.

Are the medications actually helping? Have they been helping since that the novelty of that initial drugged feeling of calm wore off? Is any remaining anxiety relief outweighed by the sense of the unreal?

I don't know.

Am I long term worse off with medication and is it tackling underlying causes at all? Certainly the stresses that led me to ask for a low dose of something (a dose later increased) don't even exist now. At least these medications haven't screwed me over like so many others did.

Trouble is, the side effects of missing even one dose are obvious. Miss two and I feel dreadful.

That's withdrawal not underlying mental health but it's also particularly distressing. They say you can't really be addicted or dependent. I beg to differ. Coming off meds is hard. But at least, when the time comes, there shouldn't be brain zaps like I got when I had to cold turkey off fluvoxamine or else face liver failure. Yeah, not fun.

Much to consider.

The image I posted with those words.
The sun sets behind the gates to Heaton Park.

Consider it I did, concluding that I needed to get off the drugs and see what remained once I was off them.  I worked out after further reading that they weren't tackling the symptoms of a mental illness but were affecting my brain and my life in ways that were harming me more than helping me.

I researched drug withdrawal and discovered resources and suggestions that could help me.  One resource I've recommended many times since then is the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs, written by Will Hall and published by the Icarus Project.  I recommend it for the information it contains, the pointers to further information, and for the fact that it's free to download.

Even with the help and by tapering my drug reduction in wise ways my withdrawal process was very difficult.  I didn't have the brain zaps like I'd experienced before.  At least not many of them.  I was fortunate in that, far more so than someone I met a few weeks ago for whom the brain zaps have never stopped.

Uncovering a complex traumagenic dissociative disorder half way through the withdrawal process made things even harder and it took a long time to come to terms with it.  There were a lot of tough times, not helped by the length of waiting lists for specialist help in the NHS.  Too many people have first hand experience of those and the effects of funding and staffing gaps.

Some people fully supported my withdrawal from psychiatric drugs.  Some thought it was absolutely a foolish thing for me to do.  And some were angry with me, even taking it as a personal attack against them for taking their drugs.  But, even though I was suicidal every day for another year, I did not regret my decision for a single moment.  Not even when suffering the worst of the withdrawal.

Eighteen months ago, after a taper that might have been better off slower, I took my final dose of a psychiatric psychotropic drug.  Apart from one diazepam tablet taken on a particularly bad night last year after uncovering some trauma related to rape.  Sometimes a pill to temporarily ease the pain can be a very useful thing.

There were plenty of bad times.  One year ago today I wrote:

Tough day for head.

Nearly phoned crisis team this morning. But they're crap. So I didn't.

Got to something this afternoon but walked out silently because I felt so very rubbish. Wasn't coping well at all.

Tonight is as this morning. Not phoning the crap crisis team because I can make a mug of tea without their advice. There's really not a lot they could do anyway.

The image I posted with those words.
A tree in Heaton park.
Even on the worst days I forced myself
to live as well as I could manage.

There were times when both I and my wife were more worried about my prospects of staying alive than we've ever been before.  There have been lots of bad times in the years we've been together.  Those two years of daily suicidality were the worst, even though in some ways I was more comfortable with myself than I'd ever been and even though I kept pushing forwards, determined to live and have experiences and freedom beyond anything I'd had before.

Two years on from that day of asking whether my "medications," as I still called them, helped I can say for certainty that they did.  Initially.  From the start they masked and suppressed elements of the distress I'd been in, making life easier for a while, something that most of the drugs I was prescribed hadn't done.

It wasn't because they were tackling an illness.  It was because they were dampening some of the difficult parts of my humanity, in much the same way as they would act on a person who would pass no psychiatric diagnostic test - if such a person exists at all as the criteria for illnesses that aren't illnesses become ever wider.  In effect the drugs were covering up parts of my self.  That did help for a while and life was more bearable.

Until it wasn't.  Until I got more ill as a direct iatrogenic (medication caused) result.  Until I needed more drugs to achieve the same suppression effect.  Until my brain adapted.  Or was damaged.  Until the initial mental and emotional wounds festered more, untreated.  Then the drugs contributed to greater problems, as they can do in the long term to many people who then have to decide whether to go through the bitter pain that may be involved in healing and acceptance or whether covering everything with a drug is a better option for them.  There may be merit in both approaches.

Two years on.  I'm free of the drugs.  Free of withdrawal.  I think mostly free of the long-term damage various prescribed drugs caused to my neurochemistry.  I think.  It's impossible to know for sure because I can hardly remember what it felt like before the damage began in the early 1990s.

Two years on.  I am accepting of the dissociative disorder, so accepting that it almost ceases to be a disorder and becomes a benefit.  I have not been desperately suicidal since July 2019, having had my first day without even a suicidal wish in April 2019.  I am definitely not mentally ill and mostly don't even believe in mental illness or the medical model that's currently so influential. I know there are still diagnostic criteria I meet and labels that experts could apply to me but those criteria can never imply a medical illness and most of them are scientifically quite meaningless.  That doesn't mean I will ever downplay distress.  I know distress far too well to ever do that.

Two years on.  I am beginning to be able to rebuild my life.  In many ways I am beginning to build it for the first time.  Six months ago we had the idea that we might have gained enough stability to attempt a small, short, easy course of study.  We'd tried it a year ago, arranged through a mental health centre, and had to drop out quickly because we couldn't cope with it at all.  We tried again and this time we are capable.  So far we've taken seven exams and we'll take four more in the next few weeks.  Seven months after that idea we'll have completed four courses and be half way through two more.  My last exam result was the best score for that exam that anyone studying at the college had ever had, their first ever perfect mark.

As a result of study I'm looking forward to life.  I recently had my first job interview in twenty-three years.  I didn't get the job but my mental health is now such that I could try.  I'm going to be arranging a voluntary work placement, probably with Oxfam, in order to gain experience and fill the gap on my CV that was the only reason why I didn't get that job.

There are other things happening too.  It's a far cry from struggling to find any hope and fighting with suicide every day.  It's a far cry from near constant hallucinations and a drug induced sluggishness.  It's a far cry from living in fear that I will kill myself and for making those around me live with the same fear.  I'm realising too, with some regret, what might have been had not my mind been so crushed in childhood and adulthood.  I'm realising that I am capable, that I can learn and study and do so much more than I ever believed of myself.  And I have learned far better to radically accept the difficult parts of myself, of which there are many.

Such a lot has changed in the last two years.  There is still work to do.  I recognise that.  As of last month I'm not a "mental health service user" or "client."  I may have to return to the specialist centre one day and undertake trauma therapy.  I may not and now definitely isn't the time for it.  I'm still healing from self rejection, from religious trauma, from sexual trauma, from the years of having to act out most of my smiles.

If a suicidal thought surfaces that's now a worst day and I know not to entertain it or let it become my focus.  If there's a hallucination it'll be because I'm very tired and just having the sort of totally non-psychosis hallucination that most people have sometimes.  If I need to cry, I know that's okay.  If dissociative parts have to take over for a while that's okay too.

Two years on from asking whether the medications help?  Life, for all its complexities, is simply better.  No regrets.  Some incredibly hard work to get to where I am.  Probably more incredibly hard work to come.  Yet healing is better without a mask.  Healing is more certain when you can see the wounds.  Healing is more satisfying when you can lovingly embrace the brokenness that had been concealed.

I have no regrets about getting off those drugs.  Only an assurance that it was the right decision.  It's absolutely been worth it in every way.