Gulliver Unravelled

“There’s gonna be a revolution. It’s totally going to happen. I ain’t got a flicker of doubt that this is the end. This is time to wake up.” Russell Brand

So, Russell, I’m awake. My eyes are open and have been open for some time, but I wonder what part I am to play in this revolution and I fear that destroying and rebuilding our political landscape in such dramatic a fashion may obliterate much of the foundation on which a new political paradigm must establish itself. Such uncertainty mixed with justifiable animosity toward the political elites has left many of us in a state of furious inertia. I have many fears: my fear is of what could happen if we make a serious challenge to Western ‘democracy’; what will happen to those who are vulnerable and in need of stability and certainty to anchor them, because living with a mental illness in a time of uncertainty is too dangerous a thing to dismiss. It isn’t enough to buy into some vague notion of revolution. We need change, that is self evident, but the change the vulnerable in society deserves is one that speculates and does not shatter the glass houses of the elites in the hope that something wondrous will emerge in its place. When you speak of an end, Russell, you pierce my heart with a poisonous dart, for I ask for consistency and support; I haven’t got the mental reserves to await this change for the better to come out of the ashes of the now. Perhaps it is true that what we are doing is “not dramatic enough, not radical enough”, but my revolution is a fight against stigma; my fight is against social isolation and marginalisation; my fight is with myself. My revolution is to wake up in the morning and know that I am safe.

Can this revolution speak for us?

In his seminal work Madness and Civilisation, Michel Foucault states that, in the modern world, madness is not just internal or pathological as it was once perceived: an important component of ‘madness’ is the impact that social pressures have on the mind. These pressures operate on the internal family dynamic which dictates how they treat the designated ‘mad’ members. This is a result of a trickle down effect: social pressures placed upon society and the family lead to pressures being exerted on the vulnerable in order to contain or detain individuals. An underclass emerges that, whilst being treated for being ill, their rights and position are reconstructed. For Foucault, society should be accountable to the mentally ill, not the other way around: the tongue of the mad (in his case, he cites Nietzsche and Goya) speaks out against the restrictions that seek to bind it. This is as true now if not more so than it was for Foucault in 1961.

I wonder whether this ‘tongue of the mad’ will have the space to assert itself within the landscape of an emergent new paradigm.

 But isn’t revolution oh-so-exciting for those who seek chaos out of suppression? We look to an idol to show us the way. The idea of revolution now has a recognisable face: the now ubiquitous V for Vendetta mask. I understand the need to hide. I understand the urge to operate under the cover of another’s voice. But for me a mask is real, because living with a mental illness and exercising my political will exist on two separate plains. I want change. I don’t want to have to worry about whether the NHS can absorb increasing numbers of patients suffering mental distress. The recession itself has had a deleterious impact on resources through cuts in local authority social care and restrictions on NHS funding. It is a continual march toward tragedy. And I am furious and terrified. I demand that this be addressed and that service users be the primary voice that drives change and improvement. We won’t stand for this ‘give with one hand, take with another’ approach anymore to appeasing people in the public sector. And I resent the fact that I cannot exist in the system because the funding simply does to exist to acknowledge the long-term impact that having bipolar disorder has on my life. While the term ‘remission’ gives the illusion of well-being, for some this is incredibly frightening because they can disappear from the system completely. ‘Remission’ is a convenient term for those who wish to claim that the system works “look at all this cured people!” The certainty of a caring society is now in doubt because each person is an increment of social capital, not an individual with needs. Will this imminent revolution address this problem head-on? No. There is no egalitarian system that can sweep this aside; no system to pick up those who have vanished and slipped through the cracks.

The psychological impact of uncertainty

I am isolated. The impact that my illness has had on my life has at times been profound. Do I wish for my voice to be heard? Damn right! Do I think I am being heard? I do not. There is not only a disparity of wealth in our current political environment, but there is a disparity of esteem also. I am not, and never claim to be, wholly disadvantaged. I am not completely disenfranchised. I have benefited from an outstanding education and have reaped the rewards of hard work. But when I chose to walk away from my career because I no longer felt I could sustain my sanity is a sector that, perhaps rightfully, did not have the resources to absorb someone with a precarious mental illness. Living with backhanded support for fear of stepping over an ambiguous red line was living with covert discrimination and this is worse than overt stigma. I felt uncertain about every action I took, every conversation had in my absence. I was destroying myself. I was destroyed. So I elected to resign amidst the damage done.

I entered a world of monstrous ambiguity and challenges that I had not envisaged. This is what millions of people experienced every day and now I had joined the ranks of the voiceless and, yes, I too found myself disengaging from politics because I recognised the impact Whitehall’s impotence and apathy had on the greater society. I went from naiveté to cynicism. From supercilious prognosticating to silent rage. And I worried more than ever that stigma would cause more problems. When you drop out of system, it is often impossible to get back in. And so I slipped inexorably into crisis and within three months of my resignation I entered a dark and dangerous period when I seriously feared for my life. Had I disenfranchised myself? Was I now just an inconvenient statistic? Will society ever truly trust and integrate those with a mental illness into a system with so many systemic problems? A system that will need repairing brick by brick in the wake of this new revolution.

So, Russell, this revolution promises so much. Will the marginalised find their voice? Is there such a thing as egalitarianism? No one can answer those questions because jumping each hurdle reveals a new problem. Do I fear for the security for my community? Absolutely. But I want guarantees that a revolution cannot give me. Our revolution is our emancipation. The ‘tongue of the mad’ must be heard.

How did I recognise that I needed help?

One night I was wandering along Tottenham Court Road. Typically for me, it was very late at night few people passed me in the street. Those that did were Londoners who knew the rules of eye contact: look to the left, look to the right, look at the floor, but never look anyone in the eye. I like that convention.

It was 1999 and I was in my first year at university. My roommate had gone home for the weekend and I was at a loose end, so I went for a potter. I felt trapped in my room. The air felt stagnant. I had the sense that I would suffocate. I felt tearful and decided that being away from the room (a place that I had decided might be possessed) would give me an open space to relax. I popped a mixed tape in my Walkman (Walkman!), put on my headphones and stepped out into the darkness. I had forgotten to put a coat on, but the wall of cold that hit me, making my eyes feel all spiky, was such a relief. For a brief moment, I felt emptied of the sludge that had built up inside me.

I didn’t have a route planned. I knew I would end up at the Virgin Megastore because I always did, but as I passed by Borders I was struck by a book in the window, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, with its giant eye (Winona Ryder’s – a new cover to tie-in with the film adaptation) staring back at me through the glass. The word ‘interrupted’ seemed to strike a chord. Yes, that’s what this feeling is: something has been interrupted. What or why were not important; the word itself seemed to clasp me. I walked into the bookshop and pulled a copy from the shelf. I sat in a chair and began to read.

What struck me most wasn’t that the patients were crazy, quite the opposite. They all seemed, to varying degrees, familiar. Yes, they were at the extreme end of an experience I was yet to have, but whatever it was that called out to me from behind the glass of the window that night, made me feel as if at least someone out there shared the chaos and confusion I had felt through my teenage years.

I bought the book and finished it an hour later, but when I put the book down I felt bereft. Things felt resolved, inasmuch as the distance between Kaysen’s time as an inpatient on a psychiatric ward, and her writing her memoir, appeared to have lifted some of the truth from it. I didn’t believe that time could be that much of a healer. For me, this horror I was experiencing was permanent. Writing a memoir and being pragmatic, philosophical, about such a painful and confusing time was anathema to me. Since then I have returned to a chapter here and there, but I am detached from it and on some level resentful that the closing portion of the book has such clarity and insight. Perhaps it is a tribute to its essence, however, that the film has a special place in my heart.

Maybe it was the wrong time to find the book. Perhaps because I was still so hopelessly confused about what was wrong with me, I wasn’t willing to see that diagnoses and treatment are only an aspect of living with a mental illness. For me, a diagnosis was a death sentence. The GP that mooted the possibility of my depression was still a memory that was repugnant to me. But I simply did not understand ‘depression’. I needed to find a voice I could get on board with. And then I found them: the voices that created form and substance.

I am certainly not the only person to collect memoirs and autobiographical fiction, but when you start to collect, you collect and you read and you ruminate and you tangle yourself in knots. Is this me? Do I do that? And the answer kept coming back to me: yes, I feel like that and, yes, I have done a lot of those things. The common feature of these tomes was depression and finally I found something that could articulate the pain I was feeling and direct me toward understanding that my agony had a name: depression.

 “…now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.”

(Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, 1925)

 “…because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

(The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, 1963)

 “The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”

(Darkness Visible, William Styron, 1989)

 “Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it’s the worst.”

(Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel, 1994)

Once I had found the words, I could then start to reorganise my thinking and understanding of what had been happening to me for such a long time. Thanks to the words of others, I now had a new vocabulary, but it took another three years to speak up and seek help. It wasn’t until 2002 that I realised time was running out, I had to bite the bullet or I would certainly die.

“Do you think you might be depressed?” And I replied, “yes, and I need help.”

This was not my finest hour. I’m ashamed to say, that when this was mooted, I was insulted. I wasn’t curled up in the corner crying under a sheet. I came to school. I did my work. I hadn’t fallen apart. I didn’t leech the energy from the room like a mood hoover. I thought depressives were malingerers or merely an cinematic construct. Depressed people were extremely annoying and I had no patience with them at all.

Except that I hadn’t met any depressed people. I hadn’t met any because depression isn’t something that comes up in general conversation. Depressives are the silent faces in the crowd. They don’t stand out. No one shouts it to the heavens that their lives are suffused with such darkness they thought they’d die or take their own life just to escape said darkness. If they do reveal themselves, it is because they are desperate and need help, now. It is the consequences of such despair that becomes the feature of many mental illnesses and this shapes how people perceive those with such illness. This, in turn, informs how they are presented in the media. So maybe I was being disgustingly naïve, but I was seventeen and perhaps should be forgiven for being influenced by the acceptable face of the ‘weeping, suicidal depressive’. I had met depressed people, those 1 in 4.

This face of depression still persists in some quarters, but the statistics suggest that depression in young people is a serious and pressing problem:

• 0.9% or nearly 80,000 children and young people are seriously depressed
• 0.2% or about 8,700 aged 5-10 year-olds are seriously depressed.
• 1.4% or about 62,000 aged 11-16 year-olds are seriously depressed. (1)

In 1996, it was still something that could be dismissed as just a word. It certainly wasn’t something that I spoke about at home. Looking back, my GP had seen something in me that I hadn’t dared to explore. Up to this point, I had excused a lot of my behaviour as a consequence of various familial factors, but the extent of my behaviour could not be easily explained away as mere teenage angst.

The more important thing for me was to find a way to cushion and mitigate the effect of my moods and impulses because I recognised that they were often the author of many of my questionable behaviours and rash decisions. I tried sitting still and letting my mind go blank, but meditation took me away from pressing matters. There were no pressing matters, but my brain told me that there were things I might miss if I sat there for any length of time. So, meditation was out. I tried baking, but I got bored after the fifth tray bake. I read a lot, but I did that anyway, so it wasn’t going to get me through the blackness. I listened to music, but I had to listen to the most bleak and maudlin music I could get my hands on. I listened to ‘The End’ by The Doors over and over and over again. I wanted to hear Jim Morrison confess “my only friend, the end” and I felt he knew me and that we had a kinship. I didn’t particularly like The Beatles, but I’d listen to the opening bars of Strawberry Fields just to hear John Lennon sing, “Let me take you down” (I’m sure I’ve read this somewhere else). And then there were various metal and grunge bands that fit the purpose. And the ‘angry women’. All this just made things worse, but that was the point because I wanted to hear the confession of what I perceived as lived experience. I wanted someone to say “I’ll run the gauntlet with you.”

Did I want to get better? Well, I had dismissed my GP’s suggestion. I didn’t think I was ill; I thought I was fundamentally flawed. I didn’t want help for something that I didn’t think I had. But there remained the question of how to manage myself (ill or not) because I felt in the grip of something that would eventually kill me.

I have chosen to write the following as I have finally begun to accept and address this as a problem. I know that it is both a symptom and a cause.

I like to drink. And at some point it moved from enjoyment, to it seeing it as the only viable panacea. 

It all started in the summer of 1996. My friend had a post-GCSEs party and we were all expected to bring a bottle (or in my case many bottles). Up until this point I had had the odd drink, but nothing that felt problematic, as it was infrequent and sanctioned mostly by my parents (the odd tipple, or an ill-fated trip to a wine-tasting festival – all very middle class!). But in the vacuum that opened up after my GCSEs, I had too much space. I had lost some of the structure and foundation that tenuously held me together. My life began to lack nuance. So many decisions needed to be made, but all I wanted was for the noise to stop. 

Up until a couple of years ago I had assumed that racing thoughts, ‘head-music’ or ‘earworms’ and an impulse to STOP-GO were something that plagued only me. But it was during the summer of 1996 that I felt unable to manage the overload. It was as if half my body was swimming in a pool of thick tar and the other half was in the middle of a blitzkrieg. Then the STOP-GO turned to into something that more obviously resembled depression. Everything just stopped.

A heaviness fell upon me and I felt like I was beginning to corrode. No longer was I being propelled forward; instead I was sat, still, subject to malevolent forces that hated me and made me hate myself. The lights were turned down. I felt so sad I wanted to be sick. I was frightened to touch things because everything felt hyper-real and poisonous. I lost confidence. I’d had these feelings before, but the slow build up that started when I was about twelve had suddenly exploded and infected every pore of my body. I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I’ve slipped out of synch. I’m broken.

I banged my head against the wall. I crawled under my desk in my bedroom because I felt so unsafe. I stopped talking to my friends and sat staring into space. And I hated myself: a pure hatred, as if I had discovered that my mortal enemy was in fact myself.

Depression for me is like catching a fleeting breath before being punched in the chest. Something starts to envelope my head, wrapping itself around my eyes. A silent scream builds and deafens me. And then it’s like falling. I hate myself. I see no future. Everything is too sharp, too bright, too loud. And the feeling of ‘wrongness’ settles into the space; a space which was formally inhabited by a more productive, less fatalistic me.

All the medications that I have taken in my adult life have only marginally tempered my feelings of ‘wrongness’. I return again and again to the conclusion that I don’t deserve the space I occupy on the planet. And I return again to alcohol to supplement any other forms of treatment. Sometimes I will go for a year without ritualistic drinking, but when I perceive my medication to be less effective, I panic and return to using alcohol as a crutch. On a couple of occasions I have determined that it would be easier to die from an overdose if I washed the pills down with alcohol, therefore ensuring that I would be too drunk to panic at the realisation of my own demise.

Depression for me has been marked by periods of moderate drinking (this estimation may be an understatement). Mania has been marked by periods of excess. Up or down, I needed something medicinal to contain my emotional spillage. I won’t feel like this anymore! I need to blunt this flood or else I will drown!

Does it work? Sometimes I believe it does. I tell myself that one glass of wine is OK because it smoothes the edges. I want to put parts of myself in a cage. But what I’m really searching for is a way to lock up the depressed me and unleash the hypomanic me. I like hypomanic me. Depressed me misses hypomanic me. But depressed me cannot fill the void that hypomania leaves once it’s run its course. Depressed me is “default me” and this is the core of why I feel often as if I am undergoing a slow death.

“Do you think you might be depressed?”

Yes. Depression is something that feels so recognisable to me that I frequently believe that “depressed me” is the real me. Depression isn’t just being gloomy and negative. I am not a malingerer. I am sick and depression is a symptom of a cascade of emotions I can’t contain or manage on my own. How I deal with my emotions has to be strategic; it has to be the symbiosis of medical support and focused attention on recovery, but recovery is not at the bottom of a glass. 

Over the past year, my friends, family (and my psychotherapist) have often asked me whether I would consider writing a blog. My initial and usual response is that I have lots of things to say, but end up saying a lot of nothing. Who would want to read a regular catalogue of musings and rants from someone who, for the most part, simply CANNOT STOP TALKING? Who would have the patience to follow me down the rabbit hole?

The major stumbling block has been deciding the tenor of the blog: did I want to talk through the things that baffle me the most; to explore the struggles I have had living with a mental illness and accepting that I’m bipolar; is it a vehicle to have a bit of a natter? Who is this blog about? Who is for?

This blog is for me.

This blog is to ‘own’ (I hate this term) the aspects of myself that I both love and loathe. I often break myself up into discrete strata; sometimes they are like tree rings; most often they are permeable layers that pitch and warp under pressure. Sometimes I feel like a fractal. Sometimes I feel like film of molten metal. Whether I am any or all of these things, from moment to moment, is incredibly important to me because they affect how I understand the world. I am not particularly complex, although sometimes I think I am. I am not special, although sometimes I am convinced I am. I am not perfect, although sometimes I have to fight the conviction that I am plugged into some encompassing truth only revealed to me. I am a perfect lie.

This blog is for me to unpick fact from fiction and to admit when I am having trouble discerning the difference between the two.

Fact: I am Emma.

Fact: I am 6ft tall.

Fact: I have two wonderful (and long-suffering) loving parents.

Fact: I have been lucky in so many ways.

Fact: I have achieved things, things that have surprised me.

Fact: I have a small, but extraordinary, group of friends.

Fact: I have a job that I love.

Fact: In 2005, I was diagnosed has having bipolar affective disorder.

Fact: I take upwards of 8 tablets a day to control my symptoms.

Fact: I have been hospitalized on account of my illness.

Fact: I am ashamed of my illness.

Fact: I am not ashamed of my illness.

 ***

Fiction: I am in Hell.

Fiction: I am a genius.

Fiction: I am stupid.

Fiction: I am beyond repair.

Fiction: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Fiction: If it ain’t broke, make it awesome.

Fiction: I’m burnt out and useless.

Fiction: No one appreciates how amazing I am.

***

On the face of it, numerically, I have more things that I call ‘facts’ than those that I believe to be ‘fiction’. The problem is that the facts and the fiction are so closely linked. It isn’t simple for anyone to have perfect clarity about what is or isn’t true, but the main feature, or symptom, of my bipolar is that each fact or fiction oscillates and is more or less ‘true’ dependent on my emotional state. When I’m symptomatic, I cannot disentangle these threads. And this is often very distressing.

For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with my emotional reactions to things, or reactions to nothing at all. I had sudden and inexplicably extreme reactions to things and these often turned into phobias or immovable objects in my mind. Sometimes I’d have thoughts cascading in all directions and had a ravenous collector of knowledge that I believed had some grander significance. Learn all about sharks. Learn all about the French Revolution. Read every book, article and news item about UFOs. Learn everything about the Kennedy Assassination. Watch every wildlife documentary on the television (even the most banal ones). Draw everything. Paint everything. Panic. Rage. Cry. Stay up all night. Produce pieces of art that took others days to complete, in less than four hours. I became increasingly paranoid that there are conspiracies around every corner. I felt raw. I felt pursued. I felt possessed. I was spilling out all over the place. I felt alone.

One day, after having successive bouts of tonsillitis and fairly vague flu-like episodes, my GP broached the subject of depression. “Do you think you might be depressed?” I was disgusted with the idea…