Advances in technology enable us to connect with people all over the world in seconds. Increasing facets of our identities reside in the online realm, packaged and edited and floating on the aether. Are these merely fake phenotypes, or do these elements of who we are serve any beneficial purpose in a world in which growing mental-illness diagnoses leave us feeling isolated?
I see so many items on social media, which call for us to ‘stand together against suicide’ and seem so worthy at first sight; yet how effective can they really be? Another element of access to social media is the dwindling of one’s concentration span, the propensity to scroll through statuses when procrastinating some important task, like ironing or cleaning the bathroom floor. I imagine I am terribly productive when thus employed: a philanthropist, no less, peering into snapshots of other people’s lives. Indeed, I feel I know some of these people, without ever having met them face-to-face, so similar are we in life experience, humour, musical tastes, fitness regimes and so on. But, when my hormones do what they so often do, and lead me to want to cut myself, take to my bed, or weep from somewhere deep inside myself, sites like Facebook only go so far. In darker times, I wish for a fairy Community Psychiatric Nurse, so unable do I feel to tackle even the simplest tasks in life.
As much as I know that I am not alone, and that there are people out there suffering just as much as me, these serve as only momentary pinpricks of light in the darkness; what comes home time and time again is this foggy-headed fatigue, coupled with the shoulds with which my mind continually jabs me, with the net effect that I feel like a casualty rather than someone able to do life, and a strong desire to take to my bed sets in.
After brain-injury, there is no substitute sometimes for lying, with my eyes closed, in a darkened room. I don’t remember doing this in the hospital in the month immediately after the accident, but I am told that this was something that the staff observed me doing: my brain was worn out with looking and seeing and hearing and smelling and moving, it was ‘too much information’ coming in and going out and, apparently, visitors were surprised to find me lying still in as much darkness as I could manage, with the curtains drawn around my bed as well as at the windows of my hospital room, the lights off, the door closed.
Ever since, there are times when that is simply what I need to do. It isn’t about sleeping; it is about giving my brain a rest. I felt super-tired yesterday afternoon and, when trying to help my son to restore a smartphone, being asked repeatedly for a password and user name that I couldn’t pinpoint was too much for me. I said, “I’m sorry my love, I’m too tired.” My lovely son understood, and said, “That’s okay, Mummy; we can try again tomorrow; if it doesn’t work, I can always have this as a piece in my (‘phone) collection.” I have made sure to tell my son as much as I reasonably can about my ‘funny brain’. He knows that I take my meds because my brain doesn’t make enough ‘feel okay’ chemicals, and this makes it feel very sad. He knows that I have to take my meds to help my brain to work better, and he knows that I am waiting to hear from a neuropsychiatrist to whom I asked for a referral months ago.
In fact, my psychiatrist recommended it years ago, but the GP surgery didn’t act upon it. In a recent meeting with the senior partner at my local surgery, she said, “It isn’t mandatory for us to act on these suggestions,” because, “We aren’t sure whether the letter-writer is already on to it.” You need to check, I said; if I am not feeling well, I’m not able to chase these things and, importantly, I haven’t always been copied in on correspondence, so I had no knowledge of the earlier recommendations full stop. This was because, when I first met my psychiatrist, I was having a breakdown, and it just escaped my already preoccupied, tired mind to ask about being notified. A simple oversight, but one which has been rectified because, it turns out, I needed more help than I knew and could have accessed it, but for the reticence on my GP’s part when it came to checking on these matters. They can only do so much, I suppose; funding cuts and quotas and increased patient numbers take their toll on an already well-worn service.
A few years ago, I broke my left elbow. I know now, in retrospect, that I have never been quite ‘right’ in the head. I had been in an ill-fated relationship for a couple of years and my mental health had already declined – although it wasn’t so evident, because I continued to function, cycling to two jobs, and to my AA meetings, making sure the rent was paid on my studio flat, albeit whingeing miserably most of the time. Returning home from a holiday at my mother and stepdad’s house in Portugal, late at night and feeling gloomy, I neglected to look where I was going when we stopped at a supermarket to buy a pint of milk. Seeing that I was about to walk through the wrong gate, I moved my body in order to mend my trajectory and found myself, suddenly, lying on the floor, like a Roman at a feast, on one side, propped up on my left elbow. Well, with an intense pain which caused me to make that intake of breath we see so often in toddlers when they fall, which precedes a yowling cry. However, during this intake of breath I looked up and, seeing two security guards, felt immediately embarrassed and said through gritted teeth, “My elbow!”
I got up and decided to go and get the milk, chastising myself for a wimp about the pain. After a few footsteps, I felt my vision turn to fizzy dots and had to lean against a magazine display counter. This reminded me of several incidences from my junkie days and so, when I caught my breath, I decided to go back to the car in case the security guards thought I was on drugs.
My ex seemed none too sympathetic, but trudged off to get the milk and, when we returned to his house, something made me take my watch off and, when I got into bed, I fell asleep immediately. Waking the following morning I found that my arm was swollen and that, every time I moved, a jolt of pain seemed to crack my elbow. I therefore carefully held this arm with the other one, visited the toilet and found that, as long as I didn’t move it, the arm didn’t hurt. I found that, by leaning the left elbow on the table, I could type easily enough, and sent an email to my boss to say that I was going to try and come into work, except that I had hurt an elbow and three men (my ex, his lodger and my Dad over the phone) had suggested that I get it checked at A&E. “I’m so sorry,” I had emailed, “I’m sure it’s nothing, but my Dad, my partner and his lodger are on at me about it.”
It turned out that I had a clean fracture right across the olecranon (pointy bit of the elbow) and the hospital admitted me because, they said, I would need an operation to ensure that the two pieces of bone healed together properly, else I would, in later years, suffer from terrible arthritic pain. Thus did I have to occupy a hospital bed for a week, so that I might get the operation sooner rather than later, before the bone healed in an impractical and inappropriate way. It struck me as scandalous that a perfectly healthy person should be taking up a valuable bed, when it was clear that other occupants of the ward were far more frail or elderly, or both.
During a telephone call to my Dad to update him, when I admitted to feeling fearful at the prospect of an operation under general anaesthetic, my father said, in his mellifluous radio-advertisement voice, “My dear, while the NHS is administratively and bureaucratically in a terrible state, the people on the front line – at the coal-face – are highly trained. You couldn’t be in better hands.” I was surprised that he didn’t end this sentence with the phrase bon appetit and, when I impersonated this to Cara, in the bed at the end of my row, who had had her appendix removed and now, unfortunately, had MRSA, she literally pissed herself laughing.
So, when I say that the NHS is a clunky, badly-administrated old dinosaur whose interdepartmental failure to communicate is exacerbated by incapable technology and higher costs than is necessary due to the list of “Trusted Providers” of machinery and telecommunications, unchanged since the Stone Age, and overimportant receptionists, and harassed GPs, you need to multiply that to the power of several hundreds to arrive at some idea of why and how so many people (myself included) slip through the holes in the net. There are too many holes, ever-widening through lack of money, time, and expertise coupled with exponential increases in patient numbers. This is partly due to ‘Big Pharma’ – the creation, by pharmaceutical companies, of greater pill-dependencies rather than healthier people; but it also means that there has grown a shadow-realm in which we can’t be sure whether people’s symptoms are genuine or not.
Unfortunately, in this country, between prescription-proliferation and the declaration of so many disabled people as “fit for work”, it is all too often individuals’ deaths that have confirmed the diagnoses. I do not intend to be one of them, and it is to my merit and advantage that I am a trooper, a fighter, a Stubborn Cow. I have survived several things, in one lifetime which, on their own, have killed many people; and perhaps, for me, this has proven to be a Baptism of Fire rather than signatures on a death certificate.
The advantages of the technology to which most of us now have access is, perhaps, the ability to reach out, in a way, to other people in a similar situation and this, perhaps, sustains me when the light fades and my mind tells me that I am alone. Technology gives me a forum on which I can live up to that persona that I create and nurture in my brighter moments. I am grateful for this accessory to free speech that enables me to process the things that happen to me and formulate, I hope, a better response.
Fascinating Purgatory - A Guided Tour 