Reality bites

I know there’s no miracle cure for depression. I know that I’m experiencing a lot more good days than I have for quite a while, thanks to the new medication, and that I can’t expect the bad ones to vanish altogether, especially not so quickly.

But why do the bad ones have to feel so bad?

After starting the week feeling pretty good, and enjoying some quality family time, I’ve felt myself being dragged back down over the past few days. I haven’t done anything to hurt myself, and that is progress, but if I had been on my own on Friday night, I’m pretty sure I would have done. Right now, I’m sitting here feeling almost like I’m vibrating with anxiety and, well, just desperation to feel NORMAL again.

Bad days that follow good ones are harder to deal with, somehow. On the one hand, I should have that hope that they are just that – bad days – and that I know I can have good ones, too, and more and more of them. But they feel so overwhelming, so paralysing, and the contrast between good and bad makes the darkness feel even darker.

I tell myself that this is bound to be my reality, at least for the time being. It took me a long time to get so ill; it’s going to take a long time to get better. I tell myself that I am not where I was, even if I’m not yet where I want to be.

It’s hard, though. I feel so vulnerable, so needy.

Yesterday, driving Tom to scuba, I clung onto the steering wheel and prayed so hard for God to take this away from me. It feels wrong to pray for healing because I know that that may not be His plan for me, and I’ve learned and grown so much as a result of this whole messy experience. But I want Him to. I want to be healed. I want to wake up feeling okay. Not just once or twice a week, not just for a few days in a row. Every day.

I want to be able to get through a weekend with my children without having to spend an afternoon of it in bed.

I want to be able to tackle work with confidence, instead of self-doubt and panic.

I want to have energy, life, enthusiasm.

I want to be able to be with my friends without feeling like a burden, or that they’re only spending time with me out of pity.

I want to live without the uncertainty of not knowing whether I’m going to wake up in the morning feeling relatively okay, or stuck in the pit.

It’s a difficult reality to live with at the moment.

Not brave

I really should think things through.

Sharing my blog post seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but it’s triggered a huge low.

I can’t cope with being called brave and strong.

I am neither. I am the least brave person ever.

I really don’t deserve anyone’s sympathy. Not when I’ve pushed my whole family to the brink, scarred myself for life, wasted NHS resources through my own stupidity, put my children on the social services register.

The positive: I don’t feel like I want to harm myself. The medication is doing something right there.

I do want to hide, though. Hide and never come out.

Everyone’s comments have been so lovely, so kind, and so entirely unjustified. I feel a total fraud. Me, a blessing? Me, a shining light?

No.

I don’t know how I’m going to face everyone on Sunday. I feel so exposed and vulnerable and I only have myself to blame.

I hope and pray that this feeling will subside over the coming days and I’ll get back to a position of stability again, because right now, I feel like I’ve taken several hundred steps backwards.

Why didn’t I think it through?

Stigma

Mental illness and stigma seems to be a big thing at the moment, both in the media and personally. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said to me, ‘You wouldn’t feel ashamed if you had a broken leg, would you? Being depressed is no different.’

But it is. It is different.

Because here’s the thing. If I had presented at A&E with a broken leg, I wouldn’t, four weeks later, have found myself answering a phone call from social services.

That’s what happened yesterday, and it’s shaken me right up. It’s not the first time; I’ve had contact from them after every previous hospital admission. But the delay this time lulled me into a false sense of security, and meant that the call yesterday came as a proper shock. Especially when they started asking for my permission to contact my husband, GP, the children’s school…

If I had broken my leg, I wouldn’t be seen as a threat to my children. They wouldn’t be deemed to be at risk if I were unable to provide the optimal level of care while I was recovering. I wouldn’t have social workers phoning their school to see if their teachers had any concerns about their wellbeing.

That is why I feel stigmatised by my mental ill health.

I do not believe that at any point, my children have been abused, neglected or ill-treated as a result of me being ill. I have personally been at risk, yes, but I honestly don’t think they have been. They are, and have been throughout, well fed, well groomed and well dressed (usually in a princess costume, in Katie’s case). They get to school on time with the equipment they need, and are collected on time. They participate in after-school clubs, and although there have been days in the holidays where we’ve stayed at home and watched DVDs, I’ve also taken them to Legoland, Chessington, parks, beaches, the cinema…

More to the point, I am so keen to make sure they are *not* affected by my being unwell that I have done absolutely everything I can to protect them from it. I’ve never done anything to put myself in danger when I’ve been home alone with them. I keep my arms covered up with long sleeves, even when swimming, so they don’t see my scars. They haven’t seen me cry, not once.

And above all, they are loved. Whatever I feel about myself, whatever messed up biochemical stuff is going on in my head, they are loved so very much.

So it hurts. It really hurts to have strangers passing judgement on my ability to care for them. It hurts that we are now a ‘safeguarding issue.’ It hurts that my confidentiality has gone out of the window, and that the staff at school now know that I’ve lost the plot – something I would much, much rather have kept private. It hurts that I know very well that there are certain people who don’t trust me to spend time with their own children.

This is the truth of mental health stigma. Once you’re mentally unwell, you’re labelled as being a dangerous person, a disordered person, a person who is incapable of looking after themselves or others.

I’m facing the fact that even if I get completely, totally better, even if I recover 100 per cent and never have another episode of depression again – which is, sadly, statistically unlikely – these labels are never going to leave me. Someone, somewhere is always going to perceive me as a threat, no matter how hard I try to overcome that.

That’s stigma.

Spirals

It’s indicative of how bad things have been that I haven’t written anything for so long. I know I’m not in a good place when writing is no longer therapeutic but impossible. And things have been bad. Late-night-breakdown, thwarted-suicide-bid, A&E-trip, crisis-team bad.

The outcome of all of this is that I was pushed up the waiting lists. I’m now having weekly psychotherapy sessions, and seeing a psychiatrist who has – praise God – changed my medication to a regime that seems to be suiting me much, much better.

It’s a spiral, though, this recovery process. The upward bits take so much effort, whereas it’s all too easy to slip down again. At the moment, I’m struggling with the contrast between good days – of which there are a few more than there have been for a long, long while – and bad. I know that overall, I’m heading in the right direction, but what I have now that I didn’t have before is a sense of panic when a bad day follows a good one, a sense of, ‘hang on – it’s not working after all,’ of, ‘it’s no use – I’m never going to be better.’ Before, everything was just a flat, bleak, dark, heavy low, and while I am, of course, glad of every single good moment, negotiating the ups and downs is something new to get used to.

I’m also struggling with the new meds and what I’m doing with them. I’m noticing that my mood takes a definite dip towards the end of the afternoon, and I suspect that a single daily dose of venlafaxine, taken in the morning, is probably not quite enough to keep me stable. I’m getting much, much more sleep, thanks to the chlorpromazine – almost 10 hours last night – but that sleep is plagued by frighteningly realistic dreams of being sectioned, having my children taken into care, etc etc etc. And I am tired, so, so tired, despite the improved sleep quantity. Which then has knock-on effects on my relationship with Ian, specifically the fact that I am just too exhausted to contemplate sex just now.

Talking of Ian, things are awkward. I have effectively killed off his trust in me, to the point that he is keeping my medication locked in his car glovebox and has taken the lock off the bathroom door. He’s also confessed that he’s been unloading his worries onto his mother. I understand his reasons for all of these things, but none of them make me feel great. I just hope that in time, when things are more stable, we can get back to a position of trust.

So, this is me now. Doing better, but also tackling a whole new terrain. I can see a lot of positives: I feel more able to be open with people about how I’m feeling; I’m recognising my limits and when I need to just STOP and go to bed for a couple of hours; I’ve realised that I have to give myself a quiet 24 hours to recover after psychotherapy. But there are also big and scary things. Self-destructive thoughts that are never far away. Feelings of intense loneliness, and of being a burden. Guilt at what I have, and still do, put everyone through. Paranoia that people are only sticking by me out of pity.

Things may be better, but they are still hard, and I still feel pretty raw and vulnerable. There is, though, a glimmer of hope that things can be better still. I’m holding onto that.