Danger In Dominionism

This post which I found under propaganda is interesting to me and I recommend it.  I have a choice.  I can believe I can walk into the embrace of the pastors I love and who love me, and hope and have faith that my relationship with them will make a difference, or I can refer people to this post instead.  Two roads diverged – I’m taking the one most travelled, and losing my own life by trying to keep it, and not in the way I should be.

Colin Dye embraces the model this post talks about.  David Shearman talks about Aristotle.  Hey, what if the writer of this post is wrong?  Then I am further alienating two people I love and who are my life.

Life at Macmillan Close

I am being trialed off my medication at the moment.  I have spoken to the psychiatrist just once in the 4 months I have been here, about two months ago, and he agreed to it.  I told him that I believed I was suffering from grief and trauma issues, not schizophrenia.  I was told by a nurse that if I started to deteriorate they would put me back on the medication.  However, I am still unsupported in grief and trauma issues.  It seems they are watching me without giving me any counselling support.

I’ve had an upsetting week this week, and thought a lot, and put in a complaint.  Since I have been here there has been shouting and swearing and door slamming, from the staff as well as the patients.  When I have complained about the door slamming I have been told that that is just communal living and some people slam doors.  The staff have acknowledged that they do it as well.  In my complaint I said that since we are here against our wishes without the normal choices of communal living I think it is a duty of care issue, not a communal issue.  I said that although the staff’s acknowledgement that they do it as well is disarming, it is still ill-discipline and unprofessional and there needs to be a rule about it, not tolerance.  If this is a place that sick people are supposed to get better a peaceful environment needs to be provided and maintained.  To know you can’t go to the staff about door slamming because they slam doors themselves, and just having to hope for the best, that it won’t happen, is highly detrimental to security of mind and the ability to rest.

Two days ago a member of staff came upstairs calling out my housemate’s name like an excited mate, and when she got to my room and asked me how I was I said I’m not asleep though I would like to be, and if I had been she would have woken me up.  She said sorry she didn’t do it on purpose, and it was 3pm.  I said this is a hospital and sometimes people want to rest and I am 18 months homeless and tired.  This morning I was between awake and asleep when a nurse entered my room.  She didn’t say anything, but when she went downstairs she slammed the door.  I don’t think that is an acceptable way to communicate that you think someone should be awake and out of bed, or maybe she didn’t even think.  I lay there for another hour or two trying to get my mind where I wanted it, then when I got up I thought it would have been better if I had done that in the first place, because I felt better.  But my attention kept darting nervously all over the place, like it would at repeated loud noises and shock.  I’m afraid they are going to want to say that is evidence I need to be back on the medication, rather than recognise that I have said I am dealing with trauma issues and am having to deal with fresh shock and trauma every day.

This afternoon I decided to go to bed and try and sleep a bit before trying to write this blog entry.  Within about five or ten minutes of me lying down ad beginning to feel as if I was pleasantly going to sleep, one of my flatmates started slamming the door downstairs, hard and repeatedly.  I felt a surge of anger and frustration go right up my back.  I lay and listened to what was going on outside, and thought it sounded more like a rough council estate than a hospital, with people shouting and music blaring out, and no one was doing anything about it.  Eventually I accepted the music and felt better about it, but I still thought it is more like a war zone than a hospital.  After a while the same nurse that said it is 3pm two days ago knocked on my door and I didn’t answer.  She came in and saw me with my hands up near my head as if i could be asleep, I felt as if I was in that zone, and she came in and insisted on a cheery ‘hello Susan’, as if insisting that I shouldn’t be asleep at that time.  I believe the recovery experts who say ‘listen to your body’.  It seems to me she has no respect for that, and she isn’t the only one.  These places cause trauma and mental illness, nervousness, fear, anger.  You feel as if you have to keep a lid on your anger and distress because it could well be met with medication, even if your feelings are  justified.  It’s like living with a load of chavs and rebellious teenagers, and that includes the staff.  If a traumatised person feels they need to sleep outside of what might be considered normal hours, they will eventually right themselves if they sleep when they want to during recover – won’t they??  I’m also menopausal.  Rest is good.  It’s natural.  A nurse insisting on making themselves heard by a resting person is bad, unless there is an emergency.

I thought this afternoon that the walls are so thin, people peck at each other in different ways, like chickens, and like chickens our beaks are cut off, by the fear of medication etc.  I get terrified when I show anger, because I know what people have done to me in the past, making notes and putting me back on sections and things.  I hope it is not the same here, but I don’t know.  I was traumatised when I was first taken into hospital, and doors slammed then and people, including staff, shouted and were abusive.  On an acute ward the excuse given was that there were a lot of ill people there.  Here it is not an acute ward and the excuse has been that some people slam doors, that’s life.  I do not feel that this is a place, for me as a traumatised person, to be, especially with the threat of medication constantly waving itself at me if I am not coping.  I am so tired and angry and afraid that I am in survival mode, doing only those things that are necessary to survival.  I’m not washing my clothes or showering.  I don’t go out much.  I have no friends here that I can just go round to their house for the day.  Effectively if I go out other than to shop I’m walking the streets, or having to think where I can go to spend money that I won’t feel too uncomfortable.  Going out already traumatised by your living space is not a good idea.  There are nurses who peer at me and make a big thing of registering the state of my room, like a silent criticism.  Sometimes they seem angry with me.  I have started thinking it is not a good idea to talk too much about things because they would either not understand or not care much.  I’ve started feeling that all they ‘understand’ about us is what they were taught on their psychiatric courses.  As I patient I feel objectified.  There is so much game playing.  I just want to sleep.  I feel as if I have been ousted from my room by the door slamming that happens when I go inside it, and hearing one of my housemates saying ‘ahem’ every time I move.  This particular housemate has been here a long time and she seems to be a bit of a pet with the staff.

People have been talking about the ‘Time to Change’ campaign.  I have thought of getting a tee shirt made saying ‘It is time to change, and realise that some people in mental hospitals have been accused of things that have never come to court’.  Sometimes the staff come on so bright and shiny and super-normal, it seems obvious to me they are trying to prove something about themselves in relation to the patients.  We couldn’t possibly have a heated argument about the rights and wrongs of psychiatry and psychiatric practice.  I realised yesterday evening that we are in the perfect place for a good snowball fight, instead of stressing about the weather.  No one made a move in that direction.  As I said, this afternoon it felt more like a rough council estate, or ghetto or enclave, than a hospital.  One of my housemate told me that te guys next door drink regularly on the premises and the staff know about it and don’t stop it.  If it was me I would get my drink confiscated.  At Christmas I had some non-alcoholic ginger wine and when a nurse saw it on the dressing table she tried to tell me I couldn’t have it because it was alcoholic.  I would love the occasional individual bottle of wine, to cook with and drink.  But I wouldn’t dare.

Esther

She looks at me as if she despises me, every time I see her.  It makes my head feel as if it is being held in a cloud of sedation and I start to feel tearful and like wanting to scream, and I have no way to process all that.  It doesn’t go away, it stays with me.  My housing advocate said she looked at her as if she was angry because she was in her way.  I told her, I get that all the time from her.  If you say anything they don’t take your side and it isn’t helpful to mention it.  I hesitate to say they take each other’s side and all get on your case, because I haven’t really put it to the test.

I was thinking the other day, we have different experiences of our relationship and different approaches.  The staff and I, that is, not Esther and I.  The staff and patients, really.  For the staff, they work with us, and go home.  We have to live with them, no way out.

They talk about flattened affect, but it is our relationship with them,including the constant threat outside, that causes the flattened affect, in my opinion.  And anyway, why is ‘affect’ so important?  What about not being ruled by ‘affect’ and letting your mind come into play?  People are frightened to show their emotions in an unequal relationship.  Either that, or they use them to manipulate, or try and change things whereas the other party wants to keep it as it is.  Try and be yourself in the face of a person in power in close proximity who is telling you you are something negative you believe you are not.  They look as if they feel threatened by your confidence and that bodes badly for you when they are the decision makers in your life.

 

Poetry Please!

I wrote this in an idle moment at my work desk when I was about 26.  I wrote it to Jesus.  Some of it makes me cringe now.  Let’s not go there.  I thought I would take this moment to share it in full, as I can’t on Twitter!

And when I see the love in Your eyes
It melts my heart
And makes me wish
My love for You were deeper
For as I AM
You care for me
And by Your light
You set me free
Burn deeper
To the recesses that I’ve closed for years
Barriers of tears and fears
Let me look at You
And see the key
Your love and life
Enfolding me
And Your Kingship over me.

Stage 2 Medication

Where I am we have stages in medication.  I have just been put onto stage 2, which means I have been given a strip of four bubble wraps, one for each medication time, and my medication is in the bubbles appropriate to me.  I take it away with me at the beginning of the day and I take it, or not, on my own terms.

This is the perfect opportunity for me to not take my psychiatric medication.  I thought about not taking it and took it anyway.  The other stuff I have is anti-inflammatory for pain and stiffness in my upper arms, anti acid to counteract the effects of that, and multivitamins and minerals and omega 3-6-9 oils (vegan, bang the drum and be clear.  Made by a company called Vertese and available at Holland and Barrett).

Top Posts & Pages

I really like this WordPress widget which I have had on my blog for a short time now.  It keeps turning up things I had forgotten about as something someone has recently read.  I think it makes my blog more accessible, and sometimes it is nice for me.  Today it has turned up a post I wrote in 2011, called What An Idiot!, where I was writing about being able to call people an idiot or say something is stupid without having to have a supporting thesis all the time.

Child Brides

I just saw something on BBC News which made me cry.  A beautiful little girl who has been sold by her father to be married to cover his debt.  Although it is against the law in Afghanistan the tribal elders have approved it.  It happens all the time.

I looked for a petition to end it and found one.  It has only four signatures, I suspect because there is nothing the British government can do about this situation.  I don’t know.  Maybe I should do some research on the internet.

Today at Macmillan Close

We just moved back (three of us) to our own house on the close after we had to move out two weeks ago for decorators.  Can’t see much difference myself.  It smells of paint and one of my windows has been repaired.

Last week I wrote Dr Leaske, my psychiatrist, a long letter explaining that I thought my diagnosis should be more around trauma and grief and menopause.  I was hoping he wouldn’t renew the section 3 (I thought he wouldn’t anyway) but he did, and he wasn’t at all impressed when I said that I wasn’t violent and that the things from the community were just malicious slander.  He said he had to take them into account.  So white van man with a nasty streak is allowed to dictate the decisions made about my life.  Dr Leaske talked about building up trust, but really it all seems to be required one way.  Even when I gave my word that I would continue to take the poison if he didn’t put me on another section he wouldn’t accept it.

After we moved this morning I had an appointment with my key nurse.  All the time she was talking and reading me my rights, all I wanted to do was cry.  I believe that would be more healing than any drugs they gave me. She didn’t seem to pick up on that though.  Some nurses vent around me, reacting in not their normal voices when I open my mouth and sound relaxed.  One man actually shouts out, like ‘oh’, effectively.  I find that shocking and frightening.  Also abusive.  It is like psychological rape.  I know I’ve said all this before but this saga continues and elicits the same feelings.  It’s control and domination, and its unprofessional, I think.

I feel what they are doing to me despises me as a human and a woman in grief and menopause.  In spite of the fact that he (my psychiatrist) reduced my medication and agreed to let me come off it and see how I got on, they are still defining me and controlling me as before.  I feel normal and happy and positive, under the grief, if they would just leave me alone.  He wants me to see a psychologist/psychotherapist.  We are at loggerheads but I feel as if I am having to come round to seeing some things his way in spite of that.  I don’t want to deal with my situation under the auspices of the mental health system.

Breaking The Law

I’m listening to Judas Priest, and thinking about their song, Breaking The Law. My thoughts are going like this: Jesus broke the law, the Jewish law, when the disciples went through the field eating corn on the Sabbath, and he defended them. There is a group of people that earns so little for its labour that their employers could be said to be stealing from them. Supermarkets charge so much for food that they also could be said to be stealing from ordinary people. So, if David was right to pursue and overtake and take back everything that had been stolen from his group, are people who loot and ‘steal’ from these people morally wrong? My growing feeling is that it is not that simple.  I know others have been here before me. (This is bold because I lifted it from Facebook)

Testing Listing

• in the beginning
• was the word
• and the word
• was with god
• and the word
• was god
• all things were made by him
• and without him
• was not anything made
• that was made

I remember this from my English literature class.  Not the listing, but the passage.  It was used by the lecturer to support the theory, or philosophical/religious assertion, that ‘nothing’ is a thing that was made.  Giving substance, even in the Bible, that everything is illusion.  It works better with ‘nothing’ than ‘not anything’.  ’Nothing’ was made.  I like that.  If this is made the pivotal idea for understanding the Bible it makes for interesting reading and thinking.  Can we debunk the Bible?  Yes.  By understanding this thing that is said in this way and making it pivotal to out understanding of everything else it has to say.  It still presupposes God though, and that is OK with me.

Edit note 27.01.2012

I have been wondering if I have misunderstood this from my lecturer’s perspective.  He said (whether for himself or not I’m not sure, he definitely liked what he called gnostic – eg William Blake) that the material world, from the viewpoint of Gnosticism, was evil, and that before God created the material world there was nothing, and that it must have been a bad God who created the material world.  The context of this passage goes on to say that Jesus brought light into the world. Maybe because he talked about the world of spirit and its application to the material.  Also because he brought healing and deliverance.  I think my lecturer might say that I might have benefited from attending more of his classes!  I’m not sure if he said that ‘nothing’ was made, as I have said, but I think he did.

Vegan Vegetable Pasta with Blue Cheese Sauce Bake

I just made this tonight.  To say I didn’t have the amount of cheese (Sheese) I thought I had it worked well enough.  I think I made enough for two generous portions.  It was all guesswork, this is a near approximation.

125g    Wholewheat fusilli (penne, farfelle or macaroni would be as good)
200g    Mixed vegetables (broccoli, carrots, peas, sweetcorn, in my case)
25g       Sunflower spread (I use Pure)
2 tbsp   Plain wholemeal flour
225 ml Soya milk
50g        Blue Cheese style Sheese grated (I get mine from a local wholefood shop or http://www.veggiestuff.com)
Salt and pepper to taste

 

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 200 C, gas 6.  Simmer the pasta in a large pan with plenty of boiling water for the time on the packet (usually about 9-12 minutes), steam the vegetables, boil if you can’t.  I use microwave steamer bags.  That way the vegetables cook in self-generated steam and retain their taste.  I bought them for £1 in Poundland or World or something like that.  They take 5 minutes on full power for this recipe.  Otherwise about 10 minutes to steam in a basket over a pan, 10-15 minutes to boil.  These times are variable depending how much bite you want in the vegetables.

While this is happening make the sauce.  Melt the spread over a low heat taking care not to brown it.  Add the flour and stir for about a minute to cook the flour.  Take off the heat and gradually add the soya milk and beat in after each addition to make a smooth roux sauce.  Keep going until all the milk has been incorporated, then return to a low heat and bring to the boil stirring all the time.  It will thicken during this process.  Add the grated Sheese and stir until melted.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

Combine the vegetables and drained pasta in a casserole dish, pour the sauce over and combine.  Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes until the top is brown and crispy.

Serve and enjoy, as they say!

Twitter and Facebook Obsessive

I have recently joined Twitter and Facebook and I am being really obsessive about it.  I’m a bit mesmerised by the numbers in brackets that come up on my tabs – or don’t.  I’m also babysitting that petition I mentioned in my last post.  I’m being obsessive about that as well.  I have noticed that, sometimes when I click refresh, the figures go backwards.  If I wanted to be paranoid I could say that someone is tampering with it.  I can’t think why else the figures would go backwards.

E-Petition for Enduring and Severe Mental Health Sufferers

This petition closes on 20th March shortly after midday.  It is a request that people with diagnoses of severe mental health problems should be excluded from the 2013 DLA assessments in the UK, on the grounds that assessors who don’t know them may think they are well and can cope when they cannot.

I am in two minds about this, but I have added my signature.  The creator of the petition fears that losing benefits will push some people over the edge and there will be more suicides, homelessness, etc.  Among people who are really ill this fear will be justified.  Please add your signature.

https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/35092

Possible Side Effects of Abilify (Aripiprazole)

This is my medication and the leaflet in the box lists these possible side effects:

Common side effects (affects 1-10 users in 100) uncontrollable twitching or jerking movements, headache, tiredness, nausea, vomiting, an uncomfortable feeling in the stomach, constipation, increased production of saliva, light-headedness, trouble sleeping, restlessness, feeling anxious, sleepiness, shaking and blurred vision.

Uncommon side effects ( affects 1-10 users in 1,000) some people may feel dizzy, especially when getting up from a lying or sitting position, or may experience a fast heart rate.

The following side effects have been reported since the marketing of ABILIFY (sic) but the frequency for them to occur is not known:

Changes in the levels of some blood cells;

unusual heart beat, sudden unexplained death, heart attack;

allergic reaction (e.g. swelling in the mouth, tongue, face and throat, itching, rash);

high blood sugar, onset or worsening of diabetes, ketoacidosis (ketones in the blood and urine) or coma, low sodium level in the blood;

weight gain, weight loss, anorexia;

nervousness, agitation, feeling anxious;

thoughts of suicide, suicide attempt and suicide;

speech disorder, seizure, combination of fever, muscle stiffness, faster breathing, sweating, reduced consciousness and sudden changes in blood pressure and heart rate;

fainting, high blood pressure, blood clots in the veins especially in the legs (symptoms include swelling, pain and redness in the leg), which may travel through blood vessels to the lungs causing chest pain and difficulty in breathing (if you notice any of these symptoms, seek medical advice immediately);

spasm of the muscles around the voice box, accidental inhalation of food with risk of pneumonia, difficulty in swallowing;

inflammation of the pancreas, inflammation of the liver, yellowing of the skin and white part of eyes, reports of abnormal liver test values, abdominal and stomach discomfort, diarrhoea;

skin rash and sensitivity to light, unusual hair loss or thinning, excessive sweating; stiffness or cramps, muscle pain, weakness;

involuntary loss of urine, difficulty in passing urine;

prolonged and/or painful erection;

difficulty controlling core body temperature or overheating, chest pain, and swelling of hands, ankles or feet.

Adolescents 15 years and older experienced side effects that were similar in frequency and type to those in adults except that sleepiness and uncontrollable twitching or jerking movements were very common (greater than 1 in 10 patients) and dry mouth, increased appetite, and feeling dizzy, especially when getting up from a lying or sitting position, were common.

In elderly patients with dementia, more fatal cases have been reported while taking aripiprazole.  in addition, cases of  stroke or “mini” stroke have been reported.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~//~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If the symptoms listed are really seen as possible side effects I don’t like the fact that such chances are being taken with my physical health and even my life, no matter how slight the possibilities.  Twitching and jerking are symptoms of tardive dyskinesia, which in the case of Jenelle (see the last link on my Essential Links page) has put her in a wheelchair and is thought by doctors to be irreversible.

It is almost as if listing them in this way makes it OK to take the chances.  But as someone on this drug (and others act like it) I think it is dishonest and the worst kind of bullying to be told that this will improve my quality of life while these side effects, some of them resulting in death or incapacity, are possible.  Most of the time they can’t be bothered with us and they are not interested in how we feel or what we have to say.  That is the truth.  Psychologically and relationally they, among others, have abandoned us even while they have a duty of care.  They force these drugs on us while ignoring our requests and assertions that other things are the problem and there are better and different and less harmful and more effective answers and therapies.

Complaint Sent To Nottingham NHS Trust 12th August 2012

I sent this complaint to Nottingham NHS Trust on 12th August 2012.  I have been promised a reply several times.  The last time I sent an email to them asking for the written response was 28th December as a response had been promised to me for 14th December.  I haven’t received a response to that email so I have just emailed again.

This is the complaint:

This morning at 4.30 am I heard a man coughing in the courtyard outside my bedroom where the cigarette break takes place several times a day.  When I looked outside there was a man I didn’t recognise with the night staff from my ward sitting around the outside table.  I got upset and yelled at them to be quiet, also saying something about promoting sleep, and one of the women started to talk louder and kept it going for about 20 minutes longer, laughing as well.  I was really upset but felt powerless.

 

Noise on the ward happens all the time, even at night, door slamming included, and when I have complained I have just been told that there are some ill people on the ward.  I am also there since my unsatisfactory admission made me homeless from temporary accommodation, and I suspect collusion between the authorities, and I also am becoming ill through sleep deprivation, and also bullying by staff and patients. I can discharge myself when I want to technically, but I have no home to go to, and sometimes I feel as if the staff are giving me a hard time to try to make me leave before I have a home.  I believe they are experiencing problems they have dismissed when I first raised them as I came in and since, and various abuses have taken place which have never been apologised for, including mimicry of voice and gesture and also interfering vocally  from a distance with conversations I have been having with others.

On Tuesday 31st July 3 staff members I have had particular problems with in the past were on night duty and opened the slats on my door at 4.30 am and then switched the light on.  I was already desperate from previous broken nights, and I lay there for a while terrified with my heart pounding as it used to when I was harassed in the night from my upstairs neighbours.  I have had bad eczema on my lower abdomen for weeks, which only happens in extreme stress, and around 5.10 am I was scratching it and it was so uncomfortable I made a noise, and the male nurse and one of the female nurses started a jokey conversation about it in the corridor, as if they were walking along a beach on holiday, I thought at the time.  They have accused me of racism, and the male nurse, who is black [Errol], was then standing in the corridor with the female patient who had been partly responsible for that and who started a major coughing fit when I coughed (part of the mimicry and harassment and domination, she has also sworn at me badly in conversation in the past), then they hung around chatting and he said something about arrogant and she said tell me about it.  Then he went outside and started talking and I was desperate and shouted at him to be quiet.  Then all 3 staff came and stood at my door, one of the female staff, Lucy, with her foot against the door so I couldn’t close it, and asked me if i was going to calm down.  I said i would find it easier if she (Sam) wasn’t nagging me, and she said she wasn’t nagging me, and carried on pushing and they wouldn’t leave even when I said please and said I wanted to sleep.  She is 21 I am 51.  I said she would[n't] speak to her mother like that.  Everything I said she negated and said she didn’t care.  In the end she said something and I said you do that and see what happens.  She asked me if it was a threat and I said yes. She said she would discuss it with the doctor and I said she would also have to tell him what I was threatening and find it in her head without having asked me what it was I was threatening.  I made it clear, several times, that I had been threatening a complaint.

They brought in a big team, including staff from another ward and started insisting that I took medication.  I said all I wanted was to be left alone to sleep and that my threat had been to make a complaint and that I wasn’t a danger to myself or anyone else.  They offered me a tablet which I rejected so they started making intimidating moves to turn me over and inject me.  At that point I said give me the tablets, and they said OK we won’t inject you because you are accepting the tablet.  I said I am not accepting it, you are forcing it on me, then one of them started to speak roughly and snatched my duvet away, saying right inject her and started moving to turn me over.  It was just perversity and an anger or malice I didn’t understand because I had been clear in what I had said.

They refused to give me my duvet back which was on the floor until I had taken the tablet, then they tried to give it back to me as a gift or concession rather than my right, at the same time dumping it on me.

The next night the same thing happened with my room and the light, but an hour earlier.  It has never happened before and no explanation was offered either night.  I was upset the first night at having been woken then talked about abd they bullied me.

I spoke on the Friday to a solicitor who told me it was illegal to medicate me if I am informal without my consent.

My name is Sue Barnett and I am on Redwood 2 at Highbury Hospital.  I also have other incidents and complaints I need to report.

Yours sincerely

S B Barnett

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

I found this article on the internet.  Also this one from the NHS.  So much of it is so close to symptoms of schizophrenia it makes me wonder why someone was lazy or therapeutically incompetent enough to establish that in the first place.  If anyone is reading the links I have posted on my Essential Links Page they might have seen an article on Schizophrenia: A Nonexistent Disease, by Lawrence Stevens, JD.  I have read it, though I can’t remember much about it at the moment.  It refers to a book by Szasz (professor emeritus of psychiatry) – “Schizophrenia – The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry” – in which he says there is no such thing as schizophrenia.  From the outset Stevens calls it a dazzling term which sounds scientific and has charisma.  Please read the whole article, it will be better to do that than to rely on my precis anyway.  It is long, but for anyone concerned with this I think it is worth it and it will be helpful to you.

Section 3

A Section 3 is a prison, in which you are forced to take drugs (literally forced if you will not comply, often with contempt and disdain), which might cause long term damage, whether you have committed a crime, or not.

When it is spent, after 6 months, it can be renewed at the discretion of the psychiatrists.

They have this power in law even if you have not been in a court for them to be given power specifically over you. Many people start off with the police who hand them over to the mental health system .  The police are corrupt, as we see repeatedly, and coercive medicine is inhuman.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

I heard a story recently about a policeman who exposed his colleagues for mistreating someone in a cell, later being dragged into a van by other policemen, twice, and being kicked and beaten.  I wonder how many so-called good cops are prepared to take that risk?  I want to believe there are some.

Symptoms of Schizophrenia

Someone on Facebook gave me the link to this useful list.  I decided to tack on the end that PTSD is said to “mimic” schizophrenia.  I would say all of these ‘early warning signs’ could equally be a part of post traumatic experience.

“Schizophrenia is a challenging disorder that makes it difficult to distinguish between what is real and unreal, think clearly, manage emotions, relate to others, and function normally.” “The most common early warning signs of schizophrenia include:
Social withdrawal
Hostility or suspiciousness
Deterioration of personal hygiene
Flat, expressionless gaze
Inability to cry or express joy
Inappropriate laughter or crying
Depression
Oversleeping or insomnia
Odd or irrational statements
Forgetful; unable to concentrate
Extreme reaction to criticism
Strange use of words or way of speaking

http://www.helpguide.org/mental/schizophrenia_symptom.htm#conditions

Conditions that can look like schizophrenia

• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a traumatic event, such as military combat, an accident, or a violent assault. People with PTSD experience symptoms that are similar to schizophrenia. The images, sounds, and smells of PTSD flashbacks can look like psychotic hallucinations. The PTSD symptoms of emotional numbness and avoidance can look like the negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

Essential Links – New Page

Today I have posted a new page, “Essential Links”, which I will update occasionally if not regularly. It consists mainly of sites which I consider to be essential reading.  It was private for a while and had the first two links already, but the ones I have posted today are antipsychiatry links.  Please visit these sites and read the material thoughtfully, and please check this page often.  I find some of the articles I have read invaluable and in line with my own thinking and experience.

I saw on a site not listed, recently, a photograph of a woman in a wheelchair as a result of tardive dyskinesia, a condition sometimes caused by psychiatric drugs.

Oh – and Happy New Year!

Christian Antipsychiatry

Today I tried to find something on Christian antipsychiatry.  Nothing came up really.  There is no such organisation listed on Google.

I find this disappointing that, in the Christian Church, there is no organised voice that identifies itself with those of us who believe that we specifically have been harmed by psychiatry, and that psychiatry in itself is a harmful thing.  It fits my belief that psychiatric labels are largely a religio-political thing.  It is an iron grip on a fragile soul.

Reading Load

A farewell to Arms is getting really heavy reading for me, being the female that I am.  I’ve been thinking for ages of reading some more Shakespeare.  I’ve got the complete works from the library and thought I would take Macbeth out again.  I had a paperback version which went for a walk.  I think this complete version has no footnotes (I can’t remember if my paperback version did).  It isn’t the kind of thing you can ‘curl up with’, is it, a massive complete Shakespeare?

I’ve also got a book with Marxist interpretations of Shakespeare, so I thought I might try and work my way through the plays I don’t know that it has essays on, then read the essays.  Or maybe I should read the essays first and find out if they are worth it.  If they aren’t I can read what I like.  The essays might also be a window into works I don’t know if I read them first.

Christmas

Have I mentioned that word yet?

Happy Christmas to my readers, and thank you for reading my rubbish – most of it is that.

I joined Facebook last night in an attempt to find a band which is no longer there.  I have 15 friends, about 3 or 4 of which I recognise.  I just put through all my aol contacts on a page without un-checking any of the boxes.  After the first page I clicked ‘skip’ and wasn’t able to recall the other contacts to send out as friend requests.  The friends that came through came through so fast I thought they must be on automatic accept, reject later mode, if there is such a thing.

Today I cooked a chickpea curry with onion, green pepper and tomato.  It was very nice.  I’ve been reading, which has alternately felt like denial and also felt good for me.  I’ve got two books on the go at the moment.  I have started Catch-22 (of course, bit masculine), and today I also started, and am now reading, Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, which I am really enjoying.  Catch-22 I have found funny but it is beginning to get darker, shocking in places, to me.  Like the bit I just read today that obeying orders trumps being able to go home after so many missions and that if they refused to obey they would be shot.  I don’t know how serious that is at this point.  It could be just someone being nasty and on a power trip that ultimately ends with words.

I feel like Scrooge (except that I don’t have a workforce that I am mistreating).  I haven’t bought any presents, I have given a few cards.

Julie is still not talking to me and is slamming doors.  I left a card for her by her cupboard. I suppose she just found it because the response was a lot of angry door slamming.  I wish I hadn’t bothered.  It’s put me against her again.  I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting that.  It is so violent it makes me want to hit back.  I feel violated, literally.  It sends my thoughts reeling and jumbled all over the place, it is like psychological and emotional acid.  It is so violent that I feel groggy and get thoughts come into my mind that are nothing to do with me and make no sense.  Words suggest themselves out of nowhere, as if physically put into my mind.

There is a character in Catch-22, Hungry Joe, shouting himself hoarse at noises and screaming nightly at nightmares.  I feel a bit like him, but I don’t scream now, I have to keep it all inside.  I think Julie must have been really hurt by something which might not have anything to do with me.

‘Talking Back to Psychiatry – Reclaiming Stolen Divinity’

This blog entry is worth reading.  Julian talks about a spiritual crisis experience where he realised we are all divine, that was treated as psychosis.  It speaks for itself, it is a serious bit of reading, if you want to read something which is going to speak to you and engage you.  Please read it.  I found it fascinating.

As he says, the enforcing of drugs ignores what has formed the person and everything they are apart from their inability to handle a crisis.  He says he wasn’t ready for the spiritual experience, that he wasn’t grounded (he was also taking drugs at the time, which might have triggered the experience too early for him).

One thing he said which frightens me is that, after prolonged use of anti-psychotics, the pre-frontal lobe atrophies.  I believe it.  I’m not sure that damage can be reversed, though it might be possible to find ways of trying to compensate for it.

Employment And Support Benefit

Without having received the letter I was supposed to receive I have been taken off Income Support and put on Employment and Support Benefit.  In the process I have lost £100, approximately, every two weeks.

In the meantime I am still in hospital, and because I have no Care Co-ordinator or social worker I am still paying about £150 a month for my storage, although I am entitled to have it paid for me under Section 117 of the mental health act, which is concerned with aftercare.  Having been on a Section 3 before this one I am still entitled to aftercare following that.

Obviously something needs to be done about this, but at the moment I am not sure what.  I don’t know if I can get an appointment with the benefits advisor.  I don’t know why I’m not entitled to Income Support anymore.  Until now I have been deemed to have a serious illness, in spite of all my own efforts to get them to re-examine my claim and diagnosis over the years.

A Time To Mourn

I read a post that was in Freshly Pressed yesterday, which said that the writer was not going to write because there is a time to stop and mourn, and that the Connecticut shootings were that time.  I agree with that, it was an awful tragedy.  So was the suicide of the nurse who took the hoax call, in the UK.  The question is, after we stop, then what?  There has to be a significant outcome to our stopping.

I have felt very selfish and unnatural for not stopping myself, and to be honest I find stopping hard fr something that has not directly affected me.  But hearing the news obviously made an impression and caused feelings of grief.  We don’t just recover from those after stopping briefly, do we?  Surely our lives and attention, our priorities and motivations,  have to take a different direction out of the stopping?

I cannot fight legitimately for my own life while ignoring the grief of others.  So if that grief touches me, what can I do?  As a homeless person on a section 3 in a residential rehabilitation unit of the NHS, awaiting accommodation?

But the point for me is that I have to learn to stop again, and acknowledge the stopping.

Keep The Faith

What does that mean?  When you are woken up at 6.30 in the morning with repeated door slamming and you feel so desperate and isolated that you feel you have no one and nothing to turn to but your blog, which you seem to have made your forever friend?

I shouted at her to stop and she wouldn’t.  Eventually I got out of bed to see who it was and it was Zara and when I told her to stop again she told me to fuck off.  I said ‘you fuck off’, and she kept going.  I’ve said before, our doors don’t slam like that left to themselves, so it seems to be deliberate.  I was shouting so much that two male staff members came to my room and they seem to have this thing about always insisting on the last word.  They aren’t allowed in without permission.  I’m wondering why they thought it was necessary to send in two men. There was a woman with them, but she didn’t speak and I didn’t see her.  They seemed offended that I saw it as intimidation.

Anyway, apparently Zara apologised, but if it had meant anything she wouldn’t have continued, as she has.  My experience just before the slam every time tells me there is definitely a ‘psychic’ element to what I am experiencing and maybe to what they are doing.  I called her a violent, two-faced rabbit.

I’ve been in my room almost all day.  I went down at lunchtime and Julie, who won’t talk to me, did her usual thing of coming into the kitchen behind me, banging something sharply then starting to hum.  It outrages my mind and hurts me emotionally.

Zara is leaving on Thursday.  Maybe she is just giving it large.  But in the meantime I feel quite battered and emotionally raped.  I’ve been told I can have her room when she leaves.  Yesterday she very kindly showed me her room and said I could ask for it.  I had no idea, given the size of mine, that it could be so big.  It;s got 3 chests of drawers, a big wardrobe with shelves and loads of space.

I still feel as if I am being precious, saying things like I feel battered and emotionally raped.  Have I decided to be angry, or is it a response I can’t help in the circumstances?  If I had gone down might it have sorted things out a bit?  If I had taken the brave step of putting audible music on in the first place instead of just listening through my earphones, might I have felt better and would it have helped calm things?  Oh yes, men were shouting at me to shut up.  I just remembered when I heard a man cough outside.  It is exactly like Sherwood was, though Dr Jaffer said it was all in my head, and hence I am being force-fed anti-psychotic drugs.

I feel as if I am burning, inside and out, and that I don’t even have enough strength and confidence to have a shower.  I feel too weak.  I’m hungry, but I feel too distressed and afraid and embarrassed to go down and eat.  I’m hungry but I have no appetite.

When the staff, who also bang the doors, ask if we are OK it feels as if the required answer is ‘yes’.

About mid morning someone was slamming doors and I kept shouting shut up but they kept repeating it.  After one repeat I didn’t shout and they stopped.  It might have been Veronica the cleaner, as she deliberately slams doors and comes on with contemptuous and defiant religious harassment, and also she talks to Zara a lot.  When Zara came back I heard a conversation between them that went something like ‘is she in?’ ‘yes, I can feel her’.  It is punitive and dominating and horrible. Some people would say just laugh.  I feel I am failing not to.  It is very quiet now.  I’m going to get a cup of tea and something to eat.  Maybe I’ll slam a door or two myself.  ’What’s good for the goose . . .’.  I’m not in the mood though, and I don’t want to open myself to further harassment.  Opening myself doesn’t seem to come into it though.  It is something they have decided to do.  The staff have talked to them and they have got worse, if anything, and obviously contemptuous.   It feels like a hate crime.  But my thoughts and feelings about it might not be right.

Anger and Drunkenness

I can’t drink wine angry, I immediately become drunk and emotionally incontinent.  I’m sitting in a hotel drinking a glass of Merlot, and something about the way I was asked if I wanted to order offended me, and I felt drunk within two or three mouthfuls.

Jumble

WordPress has changed its presentation quite radically in its new presentation of Freshly Pressed.  I prefer the old ‘at a glance’ approach.  If I say something it is almost a guarantee that what I want isn’t going to happen in changing back.

I was thinking today that perhaps the reason for my dark thoughts and interpretations and presentations of my situation is the colour and design of my blog, and it might be time to get a new theme. Is the difference between bright and happy and dark and brooding the difference between child material and adult material?  I’ve been thinking I’ve been writing like a teenager with angst, writing dark things like someone trying to trip lightly.  Maybe the style I attempt is too light for the things I write about.

I watched an old play radio video today that I downloaded from Youtube.  4 hours of Tommy Boyd, but the lighting on his face was awful. It made it look as if he had white patches all over his face.  I am sure they could have done better than that, so why they didn’t I have no idea.

The door slamming isn’t stopping.  It is really making me feel ill.  I am lying pinned in terror and feelings of sickness to my bed.  It isn’t just the door slamming, it is the strangeness and contempt. Julie still refuses to talk to me.  I’d like to go and get a cup of tea but I am up here in almost constant shock and feelings of weakness and dread.  My own reactions have contributed to that as much as anything else.

I’m really confused, I don’t know what to do for the best.  The things I need to do I am not sure if I can do them adequately, like write new emails of complaint to Nottingham City Homes and the IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission).

Who am I writing for when I write my blog?  I don’t know any of my respondents. Who comprises my intended readership?  I am largely aware of my stalkers and their responses/criticisms.  A lot of the time I am trying not to sound stupid to them, or I will be made to feel stupid.

I’m thinking about my pastors and their almost caveman-like approach to me, as one of their lost goods and chattels. There is something about David in the Bible who, when enemies took the camp;s possessions, ‘pursued and overtook’ until he recovered everything.  It appears that my pastors’ interpretation of this justifies stalking in their minds.  I don’t think I am imagining it.  Actually, at the moment I do, or I would not need to say that.

I’m sick of church and the thought of it.  When I remember the treatment I got there, especially in the 90s, and the fact that no apology has been given into my hands, I don’t want to go back.  I just want to sleep.  I just want some peace and respect and security.  I want some love.  I never knew a father’s embrace, a peaceful, contented, quiet and still thing.  I don’t think I will find it with any Pentecostal men, I don’t think they would sully themselves or their consciences to give that kind of support and therapy.  But now I feel as if I am being childish and that at my age, even given my background, I shouldn’t need that.  But David kisses his daughter and lets her kiss him, his 40 year old daughter who shares my birthday (I never knew that until a week ago, but David has known it for years and not told me.  I wasn’t close to the family so didn’t ask, but he could have told me when he had my birthday during the radio programme days.  But he didn’t.  It would have been a nice, friendly thing to do.).  I feel I am betraying myself and them by putting this in my blog.  And I feel I am being ungrateful by interpreting a hand up as stalking and putting unwelcome requirements on me.

The last sermons posted on the Christian Centre site are 25th November, the day after my birthday and a failed attempt to go and see Tommy Boyd.  I think they are reading my blog and my communications to Tommy, with or without his permission and co-operation, and they are holding back sermons for weeks.  If they are stalking me I shouldn’t go back, but I have been wanting to for weeks.  I feel really sick.  I can’t get my head together for anything.   Going back feels like the right thing to do but stalking is harmful and against the law, whoever is doing it and whoever they team with.

I’m reminded of a line from a Philip Larkin poem, ‘My mind’s not right’.  I offered that as the key line in a poem in 6th form and it was accepted and affirmed.  That reminds me of when David affirmed my selection of the verse that says Saul was jealous of David, because the Lord was with him and not with Saul.  I’m not sure if thinking in terms of key lines and thoughts and verses is altogether helpful now, and I could wish those things had not been asked, let alone my answers accepted.

PS The man in the ‘cinematic baguette’ post that was freshly pressed soon after I published this does not look far away from Gordon Brown who reminds me of David Shearman.  I’m not sure what WordPress’s purpose was in that.

My New Home With the NHS

Part of the problem with the house is its almost non-existent sound-proofing.  On my side of the house we are right on top of each other bedrooms-wise and the floorboards creak when you move.  This can be heard in the next room.  My next door neighbour/fellow patient can hear when I move and I can hear when she moves.  I get nervous because of the door slamming and wonder what her movement means all the time.  The other lady doesn’t even acknowledge me when I say hello.  The door slamming started 2 days after I got there.  I had told the staff this was a pattern that was following me, but previously it has been insisted that this belief is all a part of what I believe to be my non-existent mental illness.  At the moment I feel weak and tired and my chest hurts.  My blood pressure was taken this morning and a stethoscope held to my back, because I told them I wanted to pass out when I was outside.  She told me to take deep breaths and when I did I started to cough, clearing my airways.  She commented and I felt inhibited.  Coughing and clearing my airways would have been a good start to deep breathing.

I have been afraid/reluctant to write like this about the new place I am in because I don’t want to stir up bad feeling.  But I think the building is largely responsible for the tension in the house.  Doors are made to slam which would not slam left to themselves, and they should be slam-proofed anyway.   It looks as if nothing has been done to make these buildings, which used to be offices, apparently, suitable for the purpose they are now used for.  Also even the largest bedrooms are really small.  Mine is one of the smallest.  It is 2 or 3 paces from my bed to the door.  One of the staff who spoke to me acknowledged that the unit was not fit for purpose, but the acknowledgment doesn’t make it any easier.

It is exactly the same with social housing.  The sound-proofing is appalling. I heard a story on Radio 4 recently where it said that thin walls made bad neighbours.  That is true, definitely. They also make angry, desperate people.  I don’t like to sound strident and political, but the truth is that in the places I have been in we can hear so much from each other’s space it is humanly indecent.  It really is like being packed together like farm animals.

I’m saying all this stuff, but sometimes, when it comes down to it, I feel as if I am being precious and giving myself ‘airs and graces’.  Really I am no different from anyone else except that I have been silenced by intimidation and vigilantism, delivered subliminally.  Knowing that is what is happening makes me too angry to speak.

Relaxation Tape

I am listening to a tape that started off by saying that any sound would add to my relaxation.  I’m sure she can’t have meant doors slamming deliberately like bombs dropping.  This happens here every day.  I’ve reported it to the nurses and the nurses have talked to the other women involved but there has been no change.  I’m beginning to think about stopping respecting the night.  I can also do slamming doors.  The nurses aren’t here, they are in a building across the road.  They would have to get out of bed and walk over there (Oh no, there is a phone in the hall).  This shared NHS house is hell for me, as I thought it would be.  But one of the nurses told me they have done it to people before, and said it isn’t me or my fault.  So why aren’t they ejected if they are making people this ill and unhappy?  I told one of the nurses today that things are so bad in here I can’t cope and I want to pass out and collapse when I am out.  One of the people involved across the landing from me won’t even acknowledge me when I say hello or ask if she is OK.  Somebody I was talking to the other day (not about this) said it was obvious I was being abused.  It’s a shared house on an open ward and the treatment I am getting from the people I am sharing with is making me feel sick but all the nurses ever do is say they will talk to them.  I’m afraid to go down and cook and it is affecting my appetite.  The door slamming is unnecessary and violent and it shakes the house.  I’m even getting pain in my stomach when I try to eat.

Some people would say this is the result of unforgiveness . . .

A Coward Dies A Thousand Deaths

I’ve been thinking that about myself in relation to going back to church.  I have had the same battle every Sunday for three weeks.  I wonder if anyone else can put their hands up to being a coward?  I hear the preaching style and its content and I don’t want to go back, in spite of its historical place in my life.  At the same time I do want to go back.  But if we approach each other the wrong way it could explode in our faces, again.

I;m writing this in a hotel restaurant at 22.27 09.12.2012 UK time.  In Bulgaria it has just tipped over to Monday 10.12.2012.  I was reading in the Times yesterday, which I bought with a coffee, that President Putin wants to rebuild the old Soviet Union under another name, but that the West wants to avoid that happening or slow it down.  I was wanting to go back to Bulgaria ad buy there, but I’m not sure now.  I have heard that Bulgaria, of all the old Soviet countries, is closer in sentiment and politics to Russia than any of the others.  A lot of Russians buy in the country.  When Bulgaria first entered the European Union a Russian official expressed the wish that Bulgaria would be Russia’s Trojan horse in Europe.  There is an anticipated change in Bulgaria’s relationship with the EU scheduled for 2014 which is supposed to bring property prices into line with the rest of Europe.  What we have at the moment, if that is true, is a window of opportunity.  Opportunity for what?  To exploit the average Bulgarian who is selling at the moment at around 10,000 euros?  I can’t see how someone with self respect and respect for the people of Bulgaria could do that to them.  It seems quite a ‘sharp’ thing to do, to me.  After 2014 they could sell for more.

So there, I’ve committed it to writing, that I think it is just sharp business practice.  I wonder how people will feel if this re-establishing of the Soviet Union becomes a reality, if those who have bought will quickly get out.  If I buy and that happens, I won’t be staying.  I suppose he would want to go towards being closed, like before.  What about all the murders under the old communist regime, would they come back, or have lessons been learned?

I’m just writing, for no particularly good reason.  I told myself on the way down here that if I was repentant I wouldn’t be heading for a hotel to drink wine and download stuff.  I imagine David Shearman being angry with me and believing that he shouldn’t talk to me until he sees evidence of repentance.  Do I really want to go back to seeing the rest of the world as Egypt and ruled by demons?  But that is what the Bible says, that Satan is the god of this world, the ruler of the powers of the air.  I have felt loved by some of these people, rightly or wrongly.  I can see myself sitting happily in a congregation and rejecting everything.  I can see myself doing it, happily, it isn’t even a hope or a fear.

Repentance makes amends and seeks reconciliation.  What about everything I’ve said about not being able to be in church because they validate the mental health system and sometimes use it as a weapon or offend by taking it for granted, apparently, that it is right and that the person judged as mentally ill is rightly so judged?

I feel both sombre and happy.  I’m very tired.  Because of where I am at as a woman, every time I feel I have made a breakthrough in understanding how best to handle myself ad my relationships it also hurts deeply that I didn’t know before and then I feel unable to maintain any feeling of having made progress in any solid way.

That will do for now.  A bit more self-display.  It would not be so bad if it didn’t get into the wrong hands as well as kind ones.  Where’s Tommy Boyd?  He’s disappeared off the planet, by the looks of it.  I can’t believe he’s finished broadcasting for good.  It’s only his 60th birthday this year.  I thought he was more professionally committed than that.  He’s just gone, and I feel bereft, as well as anything else.  That sounds stupid and pretentious.  I’m also a bit pleased he isn’t there so I am not constantly infuriated.  I wish he was around for me because I feel I need him.  He was there once, when I sat with him in his car.  I wasn’t, I said no.  He pointed to his chest and said ‘I’M in here’ and looking back I always remember that as very touching and tender.  He didn’t seem to be trying to pull any tricks.  Every time I phoned up he said something to remind me of that night and it was too late, perhaps, that I realised it was possibly an invitation to talk some more.  Although how I could have done I don’t know.  If it was an invitation I didn’t understand that at the time.

 

Why Don’t Vegans Drink Milk?

Vegans are opposed to exploiting and causing suffering to animals.  This article talks about the suffering and exploitation involved in dairy farming.

To keep cows lactating they are made pregnant every year through artificial insemination, and the birth is often difficult and traumatic as the aim to produce large cattle for beef is pursued.  Within 3 days the calf is taken away so that all the milk can go on the dairy market.  This causes suffering to both mother and calf as the bond is strong.  They cry for each other.  A higher milk yield is always sought and the food that goes towards increasing the yield causes acid indigestion.  When milk yield drops the cow is slaughtered.

Also from a health point of view, cows with mastitis are still used for milk, and it is considered acceptable for the pus from mastitis to be drunk as part of the milk.

Sketches From the Bus

This man sat next to me on the bus the other day and I felt him breathing and it calmed me down. It was a good feeling,  I just remembered it because I am playing Neil Diamond on Napster, Sweet Caroline, where he says how can I hurt when I’m holding you.  Warm, touching warm.  My breathing came into time with his and I wished it was something that was a part of my life regularly.

Another man sat near me on the bus in a different day and my reaction was completely different.  Because he looked like David Pawson, who is or was a lot into male authority.  I’ve seen a couple of people who reminded me of him.  I wondered if I am missing something, not having a personal male authority.  The male authority is supposed to be loving and caring and enabling rather than dominating and restrictive.  Sometimes I wish I had one,  But I felt this man’s presence and decided I didn’t like it and when he got off the bus he looked me hard in the eye, which is what I get a lot here, and I said some men think every woman s theirs to look in the eye and it isn’t true, it is abusive. But I might have been the one who was being abusive, I thought afterwards, and the poor man might not have had all these ideas like David Pawson, whose model is partly the protection of the woman anyway.  Right doctrine is concerned with right behaviour, and I know that, at the moment, my hormones make me weaker than most men and in need of protection.  Obviously it can go wrong if it gets overprotective and restrictive.  A woman’s wishes matter.

Can You Spare Change

Someone dressed as a lion said that today as I passed them,  I thought I didn’t have any and didn’t respond, as I was just past him anyway.

But I immediately started to think about that familiar request differently.  Can you spare any change.  How about, ‘please change’, ‘can you spare any life change’?

I thought what if the people they access for change were to become accessible as people, full stop?  People tend to stop people they like the look of, what if the person were being asked for a life involvement instead?

God Is So Close He Is In Me

I just realised tonight that when I was trying to involve God in my need He was somewhere in a level above me hearing but not ‘with’ me as such.  I decided to experience Him closer and I began to feel stronger.  Eventually I got to my breath and not feeling quite able to breathe freely until I realised I can breathe because God is closer than my breath.  He is there supporting it.  Then I moved on to I can care as well as breathe.

I thought afterwards that some confident atheists might just experience it as their sole selves without any need to refer to God.  That isn’t me though.  For me it is about having God with me.  God with me.  Not someone else or my supreme self-confidence.  The question is how much are other people involved in my experience of this?  Does that experience have to go further than just the values and wishes of my mind?  It is largely out of past experience of practising the presence of God, but what I felt this time and understood went deeper than I think I have known it before.  And it started from realising that I was wrong to put God somewhere above me.

A Taste of Freedom

I went to the Pizza Express in King Street today.  I started off with dough balls with Chardonnay, which I didn’t like much at first (the Chardonay) but it grew on me.  I wasn’t going to have anything else but I ended up having a Fiorentina, spinach, cheese, black olives, egg.  Something snapped inside me.  I felt very drunk but I knew it was just a severe emotional problem.  I’m not mentally ill, I just have severe emotional problems.  Apart from anything else I am 14 months homeless now, coming up 15  months.

I feel emotionally wrecked.  I thoroughly enjoyed what I ate.  They say food is an emotional experience and it was for me.  It was great to have egg, and I sat there thinking I could just go vegetarian.

Maybe I have seen too much militant vegan stuff.  Freedom, real freedom, is the freedom not to harm.  I can’t cope anymore.  I have been vegan for over four years now and my experiences in Bulgaria didn’t break me.  Perhaps because I could get some really nice seitan there.  But homelessness in the UK began to break me ages ago with things as small as using the room milk and eating the biscuits in hotel rooms.  Also the tricks and judgmentalism of the vegan providers in the UK.  I feel completely spent.  I’m so tired, and I have to present every day for a drug caled aripiprazole.  I am experiencing tardive dyskenesia, facial muscle twitches.  Your face expresses what is going on in yor mind, and my mind’s normal working is being interfered with by this drug.  I’m in a house now and feeling suppressed and bullied.  I don’t feel as if I am allowed to sing, and they have complained about my music.  I feel as if the bad relationship is my fault.  Music and singing is part of my self-healing.  I feel completely desperate.  I really want to come off my section and off the drugs.  The best thing about this house is that I can cook for  myself.  But I had more freedom to play my music on Redwood 2 than I do here.  I’m writing stuff to Tommy Boyd which I have been taught to believe.  I do believe it.  It doesn’t make things feel better though.  I’m in love with him, or the idea of him, I swear.  The house is part of another in-patient ‘ward’.  I feel I owe him the best I can give him, and to value his best towards me.

Striking Poses

Here’s one: because I am getting on in years I am entitled to some of the luxuries of life, and to establish the lifestyle I have always wanted.

Yesterday coming home – sorry, back to the hospital; I must be getting institutionalised – I thought that was a lie put out by pension and financial investment providers.  We aren’t entitled to anything just because we are getting older and feel we have always been entitled to it.  Not even respect and facilitation of the lifestyle we would choose for ourselves.

Is that true?  Is that really true?  Because at the moment it feels such a desolate thing to say and believe.

To bring it back to my situation, I am being told that they want to transfer me under my present section to shared housing which comes under another hospital.  I have chosen, by default or otherwise, to live on my own. Knowing the kind of harassment I have had towards me in places I have lived, I am afraid of it springing up in my actual living space and turning really nasty, maybe even dangerous.  We, I and my proposed housemates, are not people who could expect to be taken seriously if we said what was happening, because I, at least, am not being taken seriously by the psychiatrist now.  I am getting tired.  I would like some peace and protection and safety on my own terms.

But I’m not entitled to it just because I am aging.  Or am I?  Have older people, like myself (I will be 52 next week) been demeaned a little bit too far?  There we are, I am striking a pose again.  I am tired, I am grief-stricken, I am menopausal.  Is a safe and peaceful living space, and a little respect and self-determination, too much to want and aim for?  What is this third age?  Is it a new age of helplessness?

Some Homework For New Readers

Put ‘Monarch Mind Control’ into my blog’s search and watch the Youtube video.

Yesterday, Today . . . Forever???

Yesterday I had my managers’ hearing, and they decided to keep me on a section 3 and ignored everything I had to say, though they took a good long time over their decision.

Spoke to John Butterworth, Benefits etc adviser, today.  He was nice and friendly and reasonable and helpful.

At 5pm, dinner time, today, Annie came and said that Dr Malik wanted to talk to me about a Section 206.  Not knowing what it was, I was scared.  Turned out that it was to tide them over the period where the 2nd opinion doctor is overdue, so they can medicate me without my consent.  First he asked me if I would consent and I said no, that I was only taking oral medication because otherwise I would be really treated like just an animal, and that forcing medication onto non-consenting people was more akin to veterinary medicine than anything to do with humans.  He said they would use a Section 206 then, and I said that was his choice, which it is.  I hope one day before I die they will be brought to book for all this.

I didn’t get to open the reports for yesterday’s meeting until after it had happened, because I didn’t know what they were when I got them on my bed just before going in.  I am wondering why things seem to be going the same way as they went in London where I always got the papers an hour before the meeting, when for the tribunal I had here I got the papers in good time.

The Trial

I am sitting in a first class carriage to London and have just finished reading the chapter called ‘The Uncle – Leni.

At this stage I think K is completely boring and self-absorbed, and I have more sympathy for the Uncle and the advocate and the director, and nervousness for K.  Leni’s approach to K’s situation is almost religious, if not entirely so ‘you have to acknowledge your guilt, you can’t argue, remedy your faults’.  I find myself feeling like this quite a lot, in most confrontational situations, that there is an element, an overriding element, that just wants to say sorry and make peace.  I’m confusing myself here.  Personal and class interest, class as in class action.  I’m not sure how much I can realistically give ground if I am to come out of this with any sense of self that I recognise.  An apology wouldn’t lead very far with people who are determined to see me as mentally ill.  It wouldn’t ultimately help.

Etc.

The Trial  So far K has been visited on by people in his flat telling him he is being tried but no crime has been cited.  So he is confused and paranoid and evasive of proper legal action.  He is playing detective and is trying to be self-reliant.  My copy has a quotation on the back from a Daily Telegraph review which says ‘This compelling, prophetic novel anticipates the insanity of modern bureaucracy’.

Pro Choice

In All In the Mind, BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday, they were talking about a new venture in Manchester where patients who would traditionally be treated with anti-psychotics, or anti-psychotics and talking therapies, are being treated with CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) alone.  The programme has several testimonials that this is working for those people.  It acknowledges that it doesn’t work for everyone, but that neither do drugs work for everyone, and stresses that it is about choice, which it says the NICE guidelines say should  be given to everyone diagnosed with schizophrenia.  The programme acknowledges that while the NICE guidelines say this, many people diagnosed with schizophrenia are not given this choice.

There is a bit near the beginning about the USA presidential elections. It lasts a short while and the above follows it.

I didn’t know about the NICE guidelines.  Maybe the team here interprets them as meaning you should be given a choice of medication.  My situation has not felt right to me for a long time.  The only choice I have been given, which is no choice at all, is oral or injection.  I am being forced to take drugs.  As I have said before, literature on our boards says that this trust does not tolerate bullying, fear and other such things.  I quoted this to the doctors and they didn’t care.  One of them talked about me being abusive when my speech became heated, totally blind, so it seemed, to what they were doing to me.

The decision makers at Highbury Hospital think they don’t have to be nice, or that niceness is all right for moving on, once the abusive decision has been made and is being enforced.  They should not be moving on like that regardless and without me.  If I am living in unreality, it is their unreality that I am being required to live in.  That one unacceptable little thing which I am visited with twice a day.  These people are not trustworthy.

My Website Design

Most of my comments go to the spam section of my correspondence, and I have stopped looking on the whole as I think there is probably a good reason.  However, it might be that my settings are too tight and that I have designed it that way.

I have noticed that some people like my site and are asking me if I designed it myself.  The answer is no, it is a theme on WordPress called Motion, by Volcano.  The only hand I have had in its design is the choosing and placing of widgets.

Thank you for liking my site.  I like it myself today, but I tend to feel that when people praise my site they are being sarcastic.  Certainly I like reading other sites which are plain white background, or at least brighter than my dark blue.

I noticed a whi;le ago when I had much more spam than usual that there were a lot of copied comments praising my site.  It reminded me a bit of organisations I have belonged to – well OK, the church – when they have said about writing to MPs that we could use a form letter.  I’m afraid that I have dismissed their sincerity, rightly or wrongly, and some of them were very praising or grateful, it seemed.

Please forgive me if I have wrongly left things in spam which were sincere comments and appreciation.  I suppose the same should go for criticism as well, but I am getting heaps and heaps of praise and I am suspicious of it.  Again, sorry for those who really meant it.

I had a conversation with my advocate today and discovered that it is possible to complain about the tribunal hearing.  I asked her, and she said it was the first time anyone had asked, but yes it is possible.  Otherwise it is a bit like having a bin lid shut on top of you.  People (including me) freak out or go into decline because they don’t realise how many rights they do have.

Redwood 2, Highbury Hospital

I’m putting weight on so Dr Jaffer wants to change my medication.  In the meantime we had hotdogs for tea, or sausage, chips and beans, followed by pudding.

The woman who screams and shouts, reportedly because she is deaf, Chris, a male nurse into religious harassment and mind games, was talking to her at 10.15 onwards near my room, with me feeling as if I was being sprayed with acid.  He was doing it in the open regardless of my feelings or anyone else’s, when he could have left her in peace (and the rest of us), or encouraged her to go to her room with him, since it was obviously causing at least me distress.  She was as sulphuric as the woman who used to live over what was my temporary accommodation, but Dr Jaffer is insistent that it didn’t happen to me there at all, even though here it is all over again on the ward.  I was so upset I was shouting at them to stop, saying things like ‘steal my home then bring me into an environment which is an exact replica’.

I’ve got a manager’s meeting Wednesday 14th November.  I hope they will see their way to being more reasonable by then.  Dr Jaffer has not told me she has changed her mind about nothing really happening.  Chris calls himself a Christian.  He did a quiz which I only became a part of because I happened to see it in passing.  In it he talked about pride, and baby animals, the sphinx.  He said it was compiled by the staff.  I tried a few times recently to say hello to him but he turned away so his gaze was somewhere else, before saying hello.  At the time I thought it was like trying to train a dog.  He calls people in my hearing like ‘yip, yip’, here girl style.

Housing has said that it might be down to the therapeutic decision as to whether or not I can be allocated a home.  There is little, in my opinion, which is therapeutic about this place.  Occupational therapy is supposed to be therapeutic, but I find it controlling and judgmental.  I don’t know what their stance is at the moment but I need it to be something better than keeping me homeless in hospital while I have to keep paying about £160 a month for storage.

Psychological Football

I’m always better when I go out.  Yesterday I didn’t go out because I wanted to save money.  Having just bought a month’s top up for my internet dongle I am down to £5 per day until next Wednesday, when I get my DLA.

Have I mentioned that there is a deaf lady on the ward who screams and shouts at the top of her voice?  I got in in time for dinner so I wouldn’t have to spend money on food and almost as soon as I walked through the door, as I was having a conversation with one of the staff, she suddenly exploded right near me, and I just felt shock waves, as I do every time she does that.  I screamed myself to let the shock out.

Going back to money, it is really hard for me having 5 hours a day off the ward when I have no home to go to.  Everything I want to do is going to cost money, especially if I want to eat.  If I use the free internet facility at places I feel obliged to buy something.  If I was at home it would not cost me nearly so much for a cup of tea/glass of wine and a sandwich.  At the moment both the housing people and the hospital are maintaining that they are waiting on each other before I can be housed.  Tomorrow I have a meeting with my key nurse and the housing advocate.  I hope some progress has been made.

Calling us mentally ill if we don’t believe that about ourselves is a visceral, mind-burning thing.  To then have people making fun of the way you speak, clashing pots and pans at significant intervals, and competing with you for your own breathing and speaking and generally acting like pack animals is more than you should be expected to deal with.  But that was what I had at dinner time.  It is open season for mockery.  Jess was scowling.  I see them hugging and sharing the love with each other as they leave, but some of us don’t even get a real personality to speak to, let alone love.  Today Linda was in the kitchen, and Liz and Luke.  It appears they thought my upset was hilarious, if Luke’s reaction was anything to go by.  It is war, nothing else.  When dealing with people who do not recognise their right to label people that way, mental health staff are engaged in a civil war with captives they hold and torture with drugs and other forms of torment.  I see their anger and sometimes I think I shouldn’t trust them and other times I think I should trust them.  It isn’t going to happen though.  Because I am writing this, and they are reading it.  I am fully convinced, after several instances that were too close to be ‘just coincidence’, that the police are monitoring both my blog and messages I have sent via my phone a couple of times.

As I came off the ward I spoke to someone on the building staff and it was obvious from his response to me that he had no time for anything I had to say.  I had thought he was a decent person, but his voice was full of derision when I spoke to him today.

There is a nurse called Vymla who has a couple of times burst out with ‘hi honey’ either to me or ‘on the telephone’ when I have been around.  Something in the tone of voice made me feel it was deliberate.  On the day that I was first due to be assessed for a section 3, having just a few days before discovered that I had been in hospital for nearly a month and none of my relatives knew, because although one had been nominated as closest relative, it came back in the paperwork that no one had been nominated, I was really upset because I was being given only 3 or 4 hours notice with no one knowing I was even there.  Vymla opened the office door and said she was sorry she had to open the door, but I wasn’t shouting loud enough.  I told her to stop being sarcastic and she said she was never sarcastic.  Am I supposed to laugh at this later when things have calmed down and take it all with a pinch of salt?

I don’t think I’ve mentioned Vymla before.  There is another one called Annie who comes at me with faces, it is really grotesque.  One day just as I got back, when the olympics were on, she got me in a long conversation and followed every change in expression in my voice.  I started doing the raise at the end of my sentences, like we have learned from Australia, and she matched me move for move.

I managed to get the first assessment for a section 3 moved to a few days after, maybe Monday where it had been Friday.  They weren’t willing to give way at all until I brought out a pen and paper, then suddenly it all changed.

My last section before this one, a section 5(2) involved a Dr Singh who acted as if he was giving me the third degree.  I hadn’t met him before.  He said, and Liz backed him up, that I had said something I hadn’t.  At that point I wished that I had legal representation and witnesses, but apparently you can’t get them for an assessment.  I forgot his name part way through and asked him to remind me and he was very aggressive, demanding of me why I had forgotten his name, I shouldn’t have forgotten, I had forgotten other things as well.  But I answered all of his questions correctly about the day, date, time, who is the prime minister (though I had to think about that one, I had Margaret Thatcher in my mind).  What I am saying is that the assessments can be, and in my experience have been, a free space for bullying and belittling the patient when neither advocate nor solicitor is there to see.  I think I should have been entitled to an advocate and I can’t remember why I didn’t have one, but as the law stands at the moment I am only entitled to a solicitor after the decision has been made to put me on a section.

Then they act as if what they have done is a perfectly normal way to behave in any relationship.

Someone recently said you don’t get any peace until they have you on drugs.  It seems to me that fits my experience, that they want you on drugs, possibly it makes them feel better.  I asked at one point if I could have the section 3 without the drugs, if they were worried about me leaving hospital with nowhere to go.  When they get you on drugs it seems like ‘fight over’ in many ways, for them.

WordPress

Mirrors me often, is cruel when it can be, and has just made freshly pressed out of something called ‘frankly, my dear, no one gives a bleep’.  It is hard, dear reader, to believe that there are some people who are not playing a cruel game.

And, And

I’m reading Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince and Other Tales’ and he doesn’t recognise, in this form of writing at least, that an ‘and’ should not start a sentence or follow a comma.  I have spent a lot of time trying to observe that law, when I have, but I like Oscar Wilde’s usage better.

Josh T Pearson

I’ve been listening to Josh T Pearson, Last of the Country Gentlemen.  I first heard him sing ‘Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ’ on the Robert Elms Show, then later the same week on the Jools Holland Show.  Where it talks about trying to make him suck out some disease he can’t even begin to see, and teach him how to speak in the hope that it would break some curse, I thought a lot about Tommy Boyd and how I ‘related’ to him.  He could have written it for me but he didn’t, he wrote it about his own relationship.  It made me think so much about Tommy Boyd I even took down my page with his name as the title.

I think there are Christians who would be offended by the lyrics, as I am sometimes.  But it communicates pain and confusion so effectively I can’t be offended by it overall, when I listen.

Today’s Dinner and Matters of the Heart

I was thinking today about a couple of people we have on the ward.  One lady cannot speak intelligibly after an accident and/or damage/operation on her brain.  Another is said to be deaf.   For both of them I think this is the wrong place for them to be.  It is frustrating for them and all of us.  The lady who can’t speak has learned to speak a few words, strengthening my belief that rehabilitation of her speech is possible.  I am not aware that she is getting any support or therapy towards that end.  If my awareness is accurate it is obvious that, having not been a party to any decision on things at that level if any has been taken, I don’t know why.

The lady who can’t speak started ranting at me when she reached over me and put her sleeve in my dinner at the hatch. For all I know she might have been saying ‘sorry’, but all I knew was that she was shouting and wouldn’t stop, right next to me, with staff standing by and not intervening.  I told her to stop talking at me like that because she knew I couldn’t understand her.  I thought I heard one of the domestic staff say ‘bitch’, and I said ‘I’m not a bitch, I’m sick of abuse’, and staff standing by and doing nothing.  What are they doing, standing by and watching it unfold before deciding whether or not to stop it?  Luke said he didn’t think anyone would be calling me bitch, and he should know, in that situation, he was standing right next to the domestic that I thought had said it.  I’ve heard other things like that as well, so I’m not discounting my own understanding – angry at me and despising me for standing up for myself when they don’t stop the woman ranting at me.  Why?  I came away feeling and believing that Luke was just playing the role of the nice guy, even if he didn’t do anything to help.  They started giggling and laughing behind me, among themselves.  They rebuild themselves and help themselves relax while ignoring us.

I asked another patient if she watched ‘Doctors’ at 1.30pm weekdays on BBC1.  I told her that yesterday there were definitely 2 of the ‘staff’ characters recognisable from here and that they had done exactly the same thing with staff in London, and that they were blaming me when I had already told them from the beginning that this was happening.  For trying to act responsibly I have been told that it is evidence of ‘(my) mental illness’ and medicated into exhaustion, while having other people pull shocked disapproving faces at me and calling me bitch – or using the word against someone else and me mistaking it for being aimed at me.  Both are equally unacceptable.

Someone else was saying, before that, that she had been sent the same sort of food for weeks running, and I sympathised with her, saying they shouldn’t employ someone in a place like this who doesn’t know how to cater properly for different diets, because this is not a hotel.

The girl I said was being bullied in one of my last posts has become dependent on everyone rather than being the strong, forthright person she seemed to be when she first came in.  We all pipe sweet pipings in the end.

I moved rooms a few weeks ago.  My old one had a fan or something really loud right outside, and the cigarette break.  I’ve moved to the quiet side.  There is a man in one of the buildings who kept crying out ‘oh’, loudly and pathetically.  People kept trying to stop him.  One day there were two of them, one of them ended up crying out ‘help us’. I’ve had that on my mind ever since but for some reason I’ve only just got round to writing about it.  A woman in the ward told him to ‘shut up’, women from here were imitating him and ended up shouting ‘we love you’.  I shouted to him to shut up at least once.  When I was upset a man shouted at me to shut up.  This place is awful.

I Don’t Like It

This trashing and hatred of Jimmy Savile.  He’s dead.  He was as much a victim of cover-up as anyone else in his situation, there at the BBC.  Look at the poor, scrawny thing!  He was a victim of cover-up and too weak to control himself under the accusations which never came to fruition.

That’s what I think.  Hypocritical Britain strikes again.  He was failed, in his lifetime. He and his victims were not the only victims.

Look at this NSPPC report for professionals for this year’s figures for child abuse.  They start with 1 in 4 and work downwards, for children up to 17 years old who have experienced sexual abuse from an adult or a peer.

I love children. Who doesn’t?  But I am a victim of harassment calling e a paedophile, which I have seen and heard close up, and that makes my attention towards children seem exaggerated.  Not to mention the fact that some people seem offended if you do NOT give their child, hitherto unknown to you, some sort of attention.

I would not choose to do something which I knew to be harmful to a child.  I am in my fifties and menopausal, without children.  All of this put together makes being around children incredibly difficult for me.  I hardly know what is normal and what is not, but I feel I am beginning to learn to relax around children and their nurturers.  But some people are still snipers, emotionally.

I was too afraid to write like this or speak like this when the Gary Glitter case happened.

I have been in abusive power situations/  Saying ‘no comment’ in a situation like this does not show you have something to hide or that you lack remorse.  It shows you do not trust the representation of authority you are being called on to answer.  Some of them play games with your head. You can be rendered incapable of showing remorse, other than just in words but sometimes that far also, by fear of the situation which thinks it has a right to demand it.  Some people think they are so clever that all they have to do is make a subliminal grab at you and you should capitulate and you are morally deficient if you don’t.  We all know too much about our rights these days to be happy with something like that, I think, and about abuses of power and arrest targets and everything.  People who are thinking about their rights, having been previously abused, will be locked off from subliminal pointing and mining.

That is what I think, it is also my experience.

Observations and Disturbing Happenings on the Ward Today

There is a lady on the ward who has been getting quite upset.  Talking about staff getting to go home and buy things on dirty money, talking about slurring her character.  Last night the staff listened to her in silence, this morning one of them was talking back at her.  She was saying they were slurring her character and she said she was going to complain and that she had before and would do so again,  Jess kept saying ‘good’ and another patient standing with the nurse was saying to her ‘do you have one’ (character), and made another comment as well, and Jess sided with her saying ‘pinch of salt’ to her about what this other lady was saying.

I’ve been there.  It hurts, it’s frightening and it shouldn’t happen.  The lady was saying that she wanted a transfer because she was being bullied by staff and patients.  It certainly sounded that way this morning.  I’m not saying it because I am perfect, but because I am equally vulnerable in this situation.

This evening I started singing, quietly, ‘the king is in the all together’.  I’ve never realised its full meaning before.  At first it wasn’t intentional.