“We are billions of
beautiful hearts, and you sold us down the river too far, what about us? What
about all the times you said you had the answers?”
-
P!NK – What About Us
Once upon a time, I was one of you…
I remember the very first time I overdosed and all of the
professionals (Doctors, Nurses, Psychiatrists, Social Workers etc) were so concerned
because from the outside, it came from nowhere. No one knew about the abuse. No
one knew about the voices. No one knew why I would overdose. No one knew why I
would want to be dead. So understandably, everyone panicked, and I was
immediately sectioned before I’d even gone through the A&E process! The initial
concern and panic lasted for about two more admissions/overdoses before they replaced
it with the ‘she’s-such-a-time-waster-and-attention-seeker’ attitude!
The change in attitude taught me that I’d actually been
somewhat… reassured(?) by the initial response because it validated my belief
that something was wrong with me. When I first heard a voice, I thought I was ‘going
crazy’ and when the self-harm began, I knew it wasn’t the ‘norm’ and that it
meant something was wrong. I truly believed that something had broken inside of
me. So, to have professionals also concerned just validated my worry. I guess
you’d think that it might do the opposite and that it’d be alarming to hear
their concern – like when you don’t feel well (physically) and the GP says they’re
worried; it’s scary because it can make you worry that there’s something
serious going on. Talking about that example makes me wonder whether my
opposite reaction is actually understandable because it was mental health and
not physical. You know, people talk about them having the same importance and
priority in healthcare services but there’s no denying how completely different
they are, and I guess I’ve just given an example; there are things like thought
processes around mental health care that may not be there in physical health.
“Hide away, they say,
cuz we don’t want your broken parts”
-
Keala Settle – This Is Me
The time wasting and attention seeker attitude came in the
form of so many debilitating behaviours (on the staff’s part) that ranged from
sarcastic comments, an abrupt nature, and a dismissive attitude, to blatant
rudeness and a refusal to listen. I used the word debilitating because these
behaviours weakened my already precarious mental health condition. I’m not
going to lie; as much as I preach about taking responsibility for your actions;
I definitely didn’t used to! I often blamed professionals for my responses to
their behaviours. The way I saw it was that they left me with no choice but to
cope through self-harming. And to add fuel to the fire; I was convinced that
they knew what they were doing – they knew that if they made that comment I’d
be in A&E getting stitches – but they did it anyway! Did they want me to be
in pain? To be poorly? To die?! I think that feeling suicidal is one of the
most powerful feelings in the world and to behave in a way that validates that
person’s suicidal ideation is so completely dangerous. It’s like I always say
in the mental health training with Northumbria Police; professionals literally
have the – daunting, incredible, and intimidating – power, to influence someone
to come down from a ledge or to jump from it. But when you’re poorly or ‘in the
tunnel’ (as my Mum calls it) you look at a lot of things differently. The way I
saw it, if professionals motivated my self-harm and suicide attempts then
actually, no one could help because the people who – I thought – were meant to
be making me feel better, were – actually - making me feel even worse!
In my recovery (over the last four years) I’ve thought a lot
about the attention-seeking label and have come to the conclusion that it
shouldn’t have such bad connotations. For me, my self-harming and suicide
attempts were a way to make people sit up and go “actually, there is something
wrong. What’s happened to her to make her do this?” I guess it became a case of
believing that there weren’t enough words in the world to do justice to how I
felt so the only way I could think of to convey that to them was by
self-harming and overdosing. And with their new attitude, I definitely didn’t
enjoy the actual attention it brought me!
“We were willing, we
came when you called, but then you fooled us, enough is enough”
-
P!NK – What About Us
I was so lucky though to have survived all of the overdosing
long enough to finally be assigned to some professionals who understood me. My
Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN, Psychologist, and Psychiatrist from 2011 to
2012 were amazing! My CPN was always available for support outside of our
weekly appointments. The Psychologist helped me to understand the
hallucinations and how my behaviours left me in an unsafe and unhealthy cycle.
And the Psychiatrist did one of the greatest things that I’d needed during that
time; she helped me to write and Advanced Directive. To be given the
opportunity to use my well periods to discuss what I’d like to happen when I
was poorly was really empowering and reassuring. It helped me to know that even
when the voices were in charge, no one would take any notice of them and the
things they were making me say/feel. To put it bluntly, when they were loud, I
wanted to be dead but with their silence, came a passion for life. The Advanced
Directive meant that professionals would appreciate that my suicidal intent was
momentary and that actually, I’d like them to do everything they could to save
me from myself. It was because of the Directive that when I overdosed in July
2012 I was sedated and put on life support to enable the Doctors to administer
the life-saving treatment I was refusing to accept.
Being sent to Cygnet Hospital Bierley when they took me off
life support was probably the greatest decision professionals could have made
at that point in my mental health journey. Spending two and a half years with kind,
caring, and specially trained staff was just what I’d needed after almost three
years of the exact opposite.
Some might read this and think that the only thing that has
stopped me from slipping through the net was sheer luck and I’d agree that it
played a huge part in things but ultimately, I’d like to promote a sense of
hope. To read how close I was to being forgotten about, and to now be in recovery
and helping the services that let me down, stop it happening to others. Things
aren’t perfect; there are still staff - and even teams of staff – out there
that remain uneducated and naïve and, let’s be honest, down right ignorant; to
the impact their responses can have but things are improving.
There is always light at the end of that bloody long tunnel!
Lots of love, faith, & hope,
Aimee