Mental Health Hospital (continuation of last post- Medication...)

Note: This is a pretty intense post and I hope people keep an open mind and don’t think too harshly of me for some of my actions. Also it’s a long post, but there’s a lot here that people can learn from. It will hopefully help you see how easy it is for mental health to spiral out of control and why it’s so important to be understanding.

On arrival I was introduced to a few people and shown the room I’d be staying in. I don’t really remember much about that first introduction, but I was impressed by the niceness of the ward. I stayed in my room and pretty much crashed out. Again I don’t really remember much except that I didn’t do much at all. I pretty much stayed in my bed for two weeks I think.

   I was mostly in hospital because of the mental health, but my physical health was terrible as well. They weighed me in the first few days and I was eight stone. This was because I had barely eaten and was being sick a lot. I knew I had probably lost weight, but I hadn’t realised it was so bad. For those first two weeks I was able to rest and do nothing and therefore able to sleep loads. That, plus being empty of most emotions, allowed the anxieties to vanish, even though I’m not exactly sure how it worked. Over the first two weeks I managed to get my appetite back and eat a bit, but I was very very depressed. There just felt like no hope at all, but I tried to get better and get my health sorted. I do remember each day was a massive effort. This was a mixture of depression and the physical health and fatigued. I remember having to crawl to the shower and spend nearly an hour trying to wash.

   Eventually the initial exhaustion wore off and I was back to a relatively okay state. I had managed to put weight back on and by the end of the second week I was socialising on the ward with the other patients and staff. Despite appearing a bit better I still had no hope for the future and every time I thought about the future I couldn’t see any chance for improvement, or more specifically- the time and effort it was going to take to try and achieve my goals was more than I could give. Such patience and balance just goes against who I am and who I want to be. I’ve tried over the past five years to be that way and it just didn’t work. So this pattern of trying, and it not working, had rooted itself in my head so I was convinced it was never going to get better. It’s just a natural mental response to the pattern I guess. When there’s a pattern that occurs so many times you expect it to stay the same. This became a barrier and I was convinced there was no point. It led to overwhelming suicidal thoughts, yet again, and I tried to fight it but couldn’t. Plus I was feeling numb to everything else and the past barriers of family and friends, which usually kept the extreme depression at bay, was completely gone. I won’t say what I did, but it was pretty disturbing. I wish I was stronger and could share a story of complete triumph and resilience, but with my mental and physical health so battered at that point in time it was just too easy for me to break under the pressures of my depression.

Once again I felt no regret or remorse. In hindsight this should really have been a sign that something far deeper than the initial health and anxiety problems were going on. I was too messed up to see what was going on, and even though I was in a mental health hospital it was far too complex for the staff to see the big picture that was going on. Especially when they had so many other patience to deal with; and there’s also the fact they didn’t know me well enough to see how messed up and uncharacteristic the detached behaviour was. I could never fault them. The nurses are/were incredible. I couldn’t have asked for better support or care, and I owe them more than I can ever repay.

   At the end of the day, it’s my own responsibility to make my choices and keep my behaviour in check. However, it was too late to see the consequence of all the years of building up walls and defences, and after the Sertraline overdose I think I finally switched that logic/emotion balance I’ve spoken of so often to the logic extreme. I think to protect myself from various other emotional pains over the years I’d built up the walls and this was effecting my ability to feel remorse or guilt for my actions. The problem was I no longer had any emotional attachment to the world around me and it was getting worse day by day.

I was put on watch for 24 hours and then once again I tried to fix my behaviour. It lasted a few days, but once again the same pattern of despair was there. I did my best though and pushed through as I was waiting for the endoscopy. The endoscopy happened and it came back as everything fine. This was a complete shock to me. I couldn’t understand how this could be when I felt the way I felt in my throat and stomach. It was like someone had told me the colour purple was actually red. My mind caved in on itself and I stopped eating and just wanted all the confusion and pain to end. I was just beyond fed up. I lay in bed for two days in my own head, listening to music and audiobooks too. At the end of the two days my mind tried to understand how the endoscopy could have come back as normal. But being so mentally messed up by this point my mind invented a really wakkadoodle theory that I believed a hundred percent.

   The theory goes something a bit like this- That I had experienced everything I needed to over my life and because I couldn’t actually help anyone the way I wanted, or even myself, I had nothing left to give this world. My mind said that was okay though as I had done so well under such pressures at I’d experienced and it was now time for me to move on to the next stage of my existence through not eating. Writing it down now seems very strange, but at the time I completely believed it. I also believed that this experience was not real. I had become so detached that the only way my mind could understand things was to see this life like a test and like a computer game. That this environment and experience was a fictitious construct designed to teach me all that I needed to learn before death, and I had reached that point and time. The learning I had achieved had needed to be a spectrum of emotion (how I was as a child/teen) to the complete opposite of logic and no emotion (how I’ve been changing since the health struggles to the extreme I now was). When this thought took root I believed it and continued to resist food and took minimal drink.

   I also felt true to myself and who I wanted to be for the first time in a long time. I felt that the last five years of trying to be balanced and patient and having to make sure I didn’t do too much was just not me as a person. I’m the type of person who wants to be busy and active and achieve things but I couldn’t do it the way I wanted because of my limitations, and I just don’t/didn’t feel I’m being true to me and who I want to be by being this way.

    I planned to let myself fade to nothing, as I had done all that was required, and soon the pain would be over with one last test of not eating. After a few days it became a struggle to put up with everyone’s constant effort to get me to eat or drink more, but I continued to resist. I actually also felt a lot lot better in regards to my health and I didn’t feel sluggish and fatigued the way I have for the last five years. It was actually wonderful to be able to spend a whole day being pretty active and not feel completely drained or need to nap. People continued to try and encourage me to eat and after a while I realised I couldn’t resist much longer so decided to leave the hospital and find somewhere peaceful and quiet to just fade away.   

   I climbed/jumped the back fence and made my way to the train station. I got the first train that arrived and it took me to Cardiff. On this journey I decided it would be nice to find a beach. Once I was in Cardiff I saw Swansea had a beach so made my way there by train. I went to the beach and just lay down and listened to an audiobook. The hours passed in emptiness and eventually evening came. I booked myself into a bed and breakfast and lay on the bed there. As I lay there my mind thought about what I was doing. My thoughts told me I was making it too easy on myself and that after all the hardship I had experienced it was cowardly and wrong of me to run away and make it easy on myself. This thought took root and I switched my phone on and decided to make my way back to the hospital. After a train journey and taxi trip I eventually made it back to the hospital at 1am and I went straight to bed.

The next day I was still empty and felt no remorse even though I had put my family and friends through hell. I still couldn’t wrap my head around eating food so resisted this still, thinking that in time I would still fade away.  At some point over the next couple of days I had an appointment with my doctor and nurses. The doctor told me I would be discharged in a few days if I didn’t start eating and engaging in getting better. He said I wasn’t trying to get better and need to change. I was a bit confused as deep down I knew there was a lot of messed up things going on in my mind as I tried to deal with my circumstances. Discharging me seemed like the worse thing to do, but I could see his point. That same evening I tried to push myself to eat, but it felt like a failure if I did and I couldn’t do it. I lay in my bed and tried to understand why I was so messed up and doing what I was doing. The why was the most important thing, because if I could figure that out maybe I could fix it.

   It took many hours of fighting various contradictory ways of thinking and thought patterns, but eventually I thought about something I’ve mentioned in a previous post. I thought about my emotions and how I didn’t feel them anymore. That my emotions were the strongest barrier against the depression because I would project how my family would feel if I wasn’t around and that was always the strongest barrier. I realised that until I got that back I was still going to feel empty and not part of this world and want to give into the depression.  

   I clung to this thought and realised I had to get my emotions back somehow. Eventually I fell asleep. The next day I thought more about tapping back into my emotions and realised the idea of a punch bag and allowing myself to vent might be a good start. This also gave me thoughts of trying to fight and accept my circumstances again so I thought about eating. I realised the hospital wouldn’t let me attempt my venting unless I was healthier. I spoke to a couple of nurses and explained my theory and willingness to try this. They agreed it was certainly worth a try. So digging deep, and fighting against the feelings that I was failing some kind of test, I began eating again.

I took it slow and within a day began to feel sluggish and sick again. This was frustrating as it had been so nice not to feel this way for the ten days I hadn’t eaten. Granted, towards the end of those ten days I was feeling weak, but it had been nice not to feel sick and tired. I fought against the urge to not eat and just napped when I needed to and accepted the mild nausea. The desires to fight grew some more and I clung onto the idea that it was better to eat and feel sick etc than let the depression win. It was also hard though because the whole point in me controlling my emotions and being logical over the years etc was so the sickness and exhaustion that came from expressing negative emotions like sadness, guilt etc wouldn’t happen. I had to use the same thought, ‘that it better to feel the emotions and be sick etc than to be detached and giving into the depression.’

   The first real instance of letting myself express and feel my emotions was when my parents came to visit a few days later. What they said was harsh and fare, but full of love. I focused on resisting the automatic response of blocking my negative emotions and letting myself feel guilty and sad for what I had done, and rightly so. I was able to cry and express some sorrow after they left. The next day I did feel very sick and this was annoying as it reminded me why I had tried to limit and control those emotions in the first place. It’s so much easier not to feel those negative emotions, but has obviously gone too far and it has caused some very disturbing problems. With this done I did start to feel more rooted and connected to things around me for some reason, and because of that I now have some idea of how to go about unravelling the really messed up stuff that developed since the Sertraline overdose. If I can get some more of that emotional attachment sorted I can go back to perhaps figuring out the other health stuff as that is obviously still there at the end of the day.

  

(Written 28-6-15) I didn’t get to use the punch bag, it just never happened, but I have been letting myself feel more of those negative emotions and it has helped root me back to people and life, and connected/anchored me to the things that are important. It’s not been easy though, as I’ve felt more anxious since feeling these emotions, more tired, more sick and not sleeping as well as I was. This makes me want to slip back to the detachment, but I have to make I don’t. The most important thing at this stage is making sure I rest enough so I can feel better and not slip back to detachment to protect myself, because that’s a worse outcome then the sickness. But I just find it so hard to rest. It’s been about a week and a half of letting more of the emotions out and I’m not feeling physically well, but emotionally more connected. For example today (28-06-15) my brother, his wife, kids and my nana came to my parents and we had a family day. Yesterday I was very apprehensive, as I hadn’t seen them since before my trip to Swansea and I know I had hurt them very much. I made sure I didn’t suppress that guilt and remorse and once again let myself have a cry. The actual day, today, was nice and important as at several points I was sad for what I had put them through, and all that I nearly gave up. That happiness from being with members of my family was always so important to me and on the positive side, I felt that happiness while being able to see my nana, parents and brother and his family. The more time I spend with my parents and family the more I will be able to feel the reality of what I put them through and then be able to feel the emotions I need to and focus on letting them out. In time I’ll hopefully get back to a point I can let that guilt go in a healthy way, but if it keeps me rooted to this life then I’ll always hold onto it in some form or another.       

And that is all the mental and physical health stuff that has happened in the last couple of months. Right now it’s time to try and enjoy the positives of making it through, but embrace the negatives and experience them for what they are, and realise that even negative emotions have their place, which I think I’ll discuss at a later point. So as I was saying, time to focus on the future and the positives. One positive experience here has finding motivation in my writing again and this can be read in my other blog.

   The most positive thing to come from all this is that I now have a support network that understands my health issues; financial support; and a foundation to build upon. This is thanks to my family and the hospital staff, and one nurse in particular who went above and beyond the call of duty to help me out. I owe her and everyone so much. Ultimately, my life has been saved by these people and the staff at the hospital. They gave me the care I needed and the environment that helped me eventually figure out why I felt so detached, and the theory to help it.      

I’m now due to move into my new place (29-6-15) and will have by the time this is posted. I have a new support network with some lovely people and I’m looking forward to building relationships with them. I’ve spent a night in my new home a week before I moved in and it was more difficult than I thought it would be, but I managed to control the anxieties and apprehension of being back in the big bad world. It’s currently the night before I move and I’m both looking forward to moving and not looking forward to moving. But at the end of the day I’m ready as I’ll ever be. It’s going to be hard to leave though, as I’ve made some amazing connections to both patients and staff. I also feel I have a place here because now that I’m a bit better I’ve been able to spend time listening to people and supporting them in little but meaningful ways. I know that when I leave here I’m going to lose that feeling and have to find a new environment where I can find that feeling of contributing to the lives of others in a positive way, but that will come in time. 

(1-7-15) I’ve been in my new house for two days and although some of the anxieties and depression have crept in I’m doing okay. It’s been a busy couple of days and I’m very tired, but once the foundation is sorted it will be time to look for some voluntary work to build up my confidence and find an environment in which I can feel like I’m contributing.