Remember the fear, remember the pain

Remember how they are turning you insane

Remember delighting in all things above

Remember you’re fighting for passion and love

Remember the tree in the forest so red

Remember the day you ran screaming and bled

Remember the fight and the battle not won

Remember by god, remember my son

Now it would be easy and more palatable for all if I wrote this section saying that I was ill and the services did their best.  But the services sectioned me when I was well and made me ill.  You can’t un-experience psychosis, but you can learn not to think about it and to live with it.

I wrote that poem to myself as a reminder that strange things have happened and that the mental health services were making me more unhinged.  I had had this bi-polar diagnosis thrust upon me when I didn’t recognise it from my youth.  A bi-polar diagnosis is a very common misdiagnosis of autism. Every meeting with them felt like a battle as I tried to convince them I was autistic and not bi-polar. 

I’m like a warrior poised for battle

Sitting

Waiting

Sitting

Thinking

Knowing that I might die

Weary from the war already fought

Thinking that this may be the time

I don’t come back

Sitting

Waiting

Sitting

Thinking

Ready

Planning

It’s been so long

It’s been so hard

The battles fought

The battles lost

A glimmer of hope.

Here we go

Over the top

One last push

Fight

Onwards

Stand

Shot down

It was an amazing adventure, right up to the 4th time I was sectioned.  It had been 2.5 years since the last time and life was starting to go well again finally.  For 2.5 years I had been under the mental health services, which each meeting I went to wondering what more I could do before they would consider me well.  Each meeting hoping for discharge “You seem really well, we won’t need to see you again” but it never comes and you are left wondering what you are meant to do.  They kept asking me if I felt better, but never explaining what “better” was,  better was how I was before they sectioned me, but that wasn’t a correct answer.   But I did start to feel better, though those around me still treated me weirdly.

I sit here and I hate myself

I don’t want meds, I don’t want “help”

It used to be a better day

Before they sectioned that away

Before they stripped me of my soul

Spent weeks and months and years

Convincing me that I was ill

That I was wrong, Somehow undone

I drank too much, I screwed too much

Somehow my brain just didn’t work

Funny that it seems to me

It always had been fine

I’d got my grades, I’d done my job

I always had performed

A crucially upon it all

I liked my deranged mind

And now there’s anger in my soul

A pain I can’t abide

A hardness and a broken heart

An innocence destroyed.

But then it crumbled and being under the mental health services meant nothing.

I have done my lean engineering green belt training, excelled during the training course and been given the chance to lead a project to get my official qualification.  I was excited and nervous and wanted someone with faith in me nearby. Only most of my friends and family still treated me like I was and had been ill and not that a terrible injustice had occurred.  The one person who didn’t, was my ex.  He was an ex junkie, well recovered, working as some kind of database front end person.  He wanted to go back and talk in rehabs of recovery, but they would never have let him as he still drank and smoked weed and took Mandy once a year at festivals and this did not fit in with the abstinence only approach of the NHS addiction services.  In his mind, there were plenty of things he didn’t do every day and he just added crack and heroin to the list.  He was also the very monogamous and jealous type, a slight squeeze of my bum by a good friend led to an unstoppable rant  in a pub once and us having to leave a social I’d been looking forward to for a long time early and there had been more than one row where I had to call the police.  As I’d previously tried to break up with him, he had smashed my phone twice, a glass and a lamp and he had even once phoned 111 on me reporting me as having a mental episode and needing to be taken away.  

So if everything was going well, why would I go back?  Because it was going well and I wanted someone to celebrate with and everyone I knew and loved was different around me now.  They didn’t smile when I got excited, they looked worried.  Dave was the reverse, he painted a picture of a beautiful life together with a cottage and a baby and would leave me for work with the words “Go be a person who means business in business”.  He pushed me to be better and succeed when everyone else just told me to stop.

When I made the decision to go back, I knew he had it in him to kill me, great love involves great risk I believed.  And I believed I was due great love.  I also knew that if I had a strong bond with my sister that all would be fine.  So I invited them up to spend the evening with us.

Unbeknownst to me, she called him that afternoon and told him not to come because “Robyn isn’t mentally strong enough”.  She didn’t talk to me about any concerns she had, she just told him that I was mentally ill.  From the moment they arrived, something was off and having been in dangerous situations with him before, I feld.  I made it halfway across the field by the time he caught up with me.  He pinned me down to the ground and pushed down on my neck hard and I thought this is it, I’m going to die.  But I wasn’t ready to die, I was ready to fight for my life.  I tried to convince him that if he channelled his frustrations into sex not violence that we would have a better life. And I masturbated in an empty car park to try and get him to fuck me not kill me.  When I thought I was sure I was going to die, I found a packet of diazepam in my bag and put all of them in my mouth, if I was going out, I was doing it by my own hand not his, I didn’t think they’d be enough to kill me anyway, maybe just enough to knock me out and that might save my life, I didn’t swallow and he forced them out of my mouth.  A couple walked past thank-God and the police arrived soon afterwards.

They put us in the same police car, can you believe that?

He walked, I got a month in the loony bin.  Noone spoke to me about why I was there, they even let him come and visit me there.  I never saw my section notes, I’ve never seen any of my section notes except the first one and the 6th, which simply said “Has a medical condition that needs to be managed in hospital” nothing more.  

A have made requests for my section notes 4 times to the mental health services, they have never given them to me.  They say they don’t like to let people see them because they are triggering.  They are only triggering if they are not true.  Noone is triggered by the truth.  I believe these notes mention the masturbation; so charge me with public indecency in an empty car park then.  The only way they could have known is because he told them.  If I’d gone to court I would have had my chance to tell my side of the story and I certainly wouldn’t have got a month inside, a caution probably at most.

He tried to kill me and I got sectioned.  I’m sorry the story only gets lighter from here.  And don’t hate on my sister either, she’s also an innocent victim in all this. 

When the police spoke to me afterwards about whether I wanted to press charges or not.  They told me that the witnesses couldn’t be contacted, they looked like crack heads so I guess they didn’t really want police involvement and that it would be my word against his with the emphasis on the unsaid “and you’re crazy so no one is going to believe you.”  I probably should have said yes, had my day in court, I desperately wanted it but I didn’t want to ruin his life at the time and when you’ve just been released from a ward, you don’t have the strength to fight authority and authority was suggesting that I really shouldn’t make a fuss. 

That was when I first realised that your word means nothing when you’re diagnosed with a mental health condition.