Wednesday

I WENT TO the damn group yesterday but it was no good, so I left. My shiny new worker did say if it's not for you it's not for you. I'm not up for talking to a room full of people I don't know. In NA you can say your piece or not say your piece, you can wander in and out as you please, you can arrive late and leave early if you like. And most NA meetings seem to be candle-lit these days. This group by contrast is glaringly lit, everyone is in a circle, so people can look you up and down. You have to "check in" (that is introduce yourself). Then they wanted us to speak again! I was not up for that, really not. There's no atmosphere of recovery in the clinic's own group. In NA I'm the dirtiest person in there. In this other group I was pretty much the cleanest. I don't need to be dragged down. I want pulling UP.

I'm taking that risperidone because weirdly I do feel better on it than off it. It's not like antidepressants that take a week or more for even the first stirrings of a mood change. I always responded to antidepressants quickly. That was the trouble. Within 2 weeks I was often high. Not normal but high. I loved this so much I kept it quiet from doctors for years, knowing it probably meant "bipolar". I was terrified of the word "bipolar" so I suffered depression using nothing but heroin. Heroin seemed to work at the time, though I suspect it counteracted depression in the short term and definitely stopped me cycling, it actually kept me in the depressed mood state. I'm now very cynical about what "benefits" heroin might have brought me. I am sure I would be better off if I'd never tried it. Schizoaffective by the way means bipolar that gets psychotic enough to count as schizophrenia. So I think of myself as manic-depressive. There's another type of schizoaffective that only involves depression and that's said to be more severe. The mania actually counteracts some of the schizophrenia, because schizophrenia makes you very apathetic, disorganized and withdrawn. I'm withdrawn in that I hardly socialize. Professionals I have talked to in the past have been fooled because I was more articulate than a person with my problems is expected to be.

Today I have to clear out my rubbish yet again. I was doing OK until I went hyper, then gave up on the idea. Not by thinking "I can't be bothered" more by thinking of 10,000,000 other things that were more fun. Any elevated mood stronger than just borderline actually makes me more disorganized not less. Though I have tons of enthusiasm for many things, it mostly seems to dissipate ~ like spectacular fireworks ~ before anything ever gets DONE.

Script error on this page yet again. I think this computer has it in for me. My own machine is in hiding, waiting on a miniature screwdriver that I can't afford till Friday.

O by the way I tried drinking and I tried using gear on Monday, the day I felt worst. The gear did nothing to me and only after 3 drinks did I feel better. I'm not going back down that route. To alcohol and drug addiction. No thanks. So yesterday and today I'm clean.

Back to Brushwood

I'M REALLY INTO THESE BRUSHWOOD DOGGIES now. Even the sign 柴 "shiba" in 柴犬 shiba-inu has a little brushwood tree, a 木 ki, in it. Put two trees together 林 and you get a wood. Three trees make a Japanese forest 森.



Shiba-inus remind me of HM the Queen's cogis:





Originally I wanted a giant wolf-like 秋田犬 Akita-inu. They look like huge furry shiba-inus. They're used in Japan as police dogs...



Little and Large: haven't they got furry ears!



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Grrrr: I wrote this crap earlier and just wanted to save it, but blogger wasn't having that, so you get it. I'm sorry....

I found an interesting book down the library called You Don't Have To Be Famous To Have Manic Depression by Jeremy Thomas and Tony Hughes

They make some perceptive points about addiction:

Nicotine patches no more match up to the early morning hit of the first cigarette ... than swallowing a dose of methadone matches up to jacking up a decent dose of smack. Nicotine patches and methadone have a lot in common. They keep addicts off the streets, stop them injecting/inhaling, and keep them in thrall to their drug of choice.
p251

There's a good section on schizophrenia, though why on earth anyone with bipolar, which used to be called manic-depressive psychosis, needs an explanation of what it's like to be mad is beyond me. Lots of people with bipolar type 1 hear voices, though you wouldn't know that from reading this book.

With a brain prone to schizophrenia come accompanying talents and insights. For example, some people with schizophrenia have an almost uncanny way of sensing how other people are feeling. If the gift of manic depression is energy, the gift of schizophrenia is sensitivity.
p283

That's my problem. I feel too sensitive, most of the time. Heroin is a psychic blocker: it made life very much more comfortable because I no longer felt too much.

On diagnosis:

To be diagnosed a manic depressive goes to the very core of who you are as a person. It is difficult to feel good about a diagnosis that reaches into your very soul. Furthermore there are no external signs to mark the condition out as special, to get the ordinary sympathy for illness or to provide even a hint of what you experience. Suddenly, medication becomes a permanent part of daily routine. Doctors and psychiatrists become privy to every personal fact andableto judge each personal experience...

Depression is the wages of mania. Lack of energy reflects exhausted mental batteries left for dead after the multi-millennial light-shattering firework display that was the preceeding days and weeks.

It is doubtful whether the brain ever truly recovers from an episode of mania; the world never looks the same again.
p228

When I glance over recent posts and see statements like: I cannot imagine anything that would make life worth living, I wonder if people understand what I was getting at. I meant I look to the "future" and see nothing. I cannot imagine living as some supposedly functioning independent, successful individual. Because I never did. I did jobs, but the only ones I could get were very low-key compared to the ones my grandmother thought I should have been doing. Then again my grandmother had this idea that being clever somehow got you a good job. It doesn't. Employers are looking for people full of confidence and bullshit, which I wasn't. Which is how I ended up in jobs supposedly "beneath" me. I just wish I'd gone for something I truly enjoyed and done graphic design or painting and decorating. Lots of graphic designers have been put out of busiess by the ready availability of design software, meaning small businesses just do it for themselves. There's still work for painter-decorators, just not as much of it. I'm not qualified for any of this (you don't need qualifications, do you?)

Did you know the suicide rate in manic depression is around 20% compared to around 10% for normal depression.

That's because on top of the depression, manic-depressives are suffering from something akin to hangover syndrome: when you look back to things you did in the exalted state and ask yourself: what on eart was I thinking? My Mum knows someone who lost her house because she gambled everything by hiring out an enormous warehouse with nothing at all to put in it. The woman had thought she was on the way to becoming a multibillionaire business success. She knows someone else who got manic and randomly went calling on people up the street, inviting himself into their houses for Teletubby tea and trotterdonkey Sunday roast. See that's what people do. Then they come down and have to face the consequences of being high: bad debts, malaria, repatriation costs, veneareal diseases and it's all too much. No wonder they want to commit suicide. Talking of malaria, I know someone who pretended to have schizophrenia so he didn't have to work (which annoys me, because it makes me think I should be living in a cardboard box. The government keep saying they want to cut all sick scroungers off benefits. So what are they going to do? If the government get their way, there will be over a million sick and disabled people living on the streets. When that does happen, I hope they feel proud of themselves.

Anyway, this person who pretended to have schizophrenia had a brother who was indeed a manic depressive, who married a Thai bride, not by looking in a catalogue, but by actually flying to Thailand and falling in love in a remote village where he and his wife lived happily in a thatched hut. Until malaria swept through the village and nearly killed everyone.

Strange thing about Pretending to have Schizophrenia Guy was: he most definitely WAS extremely neurotic. He just wasn't psychic-psychotic the way schizophrenics are.

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Sorry about all that.

I had a tired day. Got up. Went chemist. Scored an ineffectual tiny bit of heroin.

Waste of time. I've only the last dregs of a habit remaining.

I bumped into someone this morning with a carrier bag full of chocolate. He'd shoplifted from a supermarket ~ an entire sehf-load and was about to sell it on. How dumbfoundingly naive I used to be! Not realizing that when a small shop mysteriously stocked up out of the blue on brand-name headache pills, batteries or fairly traded chocolate it often meant they'd bought it from somebody who had pillaged Sainsbury's!



If I were a doggie I'd look like this sleeping...

IT'S HALF PAST SIX. I'm about to go out to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. First one in nearly 2 weeks.

Buggalugz sent me a wondrous Tales of the Riverbank link. Tales of the Riverbank is about a hamster, a rat and a guinea swine who go on adventures by the riverbank where they live.

I particularly like Hammy's scenes in the diving bell and the toy aeroplane they ride in.

You can see two episodes if you scroll down to yesterday. Am I the only person having problems watching Youtube screens I've already embedded? When they don't play you can click the lower righthand corner and bring them up on a separate page; then they tend to play.

Last night I was in bed by 6pm; I slept right through and woke up in a bad mood, having forgotten to take methadone. So I took it and spent two hours feeling like a manic-depressive ice-block as I irritably waited for it to take its tardy effect. Then I went down the Post Office, got out some money and crowded home and watched Jeremy Kyle. By 10am I was so miserable I only wanted to go back to bed, so I took off my trainers and went to bed with coat and hat still on, where I stayed until 2. Deshane came round but I had no idea who was ringing the door-buzzer so I paranoidly declined to answer. I thought it was the council calling by to persecute me.

At 2:30 I got a call from my friend Pinky (Perky's ex) who wanted to borrow £20. So I lent her £20 and got her to score for me, which she did. The gear she was buying sounded crap and I would have cancelled the order if only she'd described in advance how lousy it was.

Anyway I took it home and banged up in my foot and now I'm in a better mood than before. I'm still going to NA. Everyone who has any association with AA or NA assumes I'm a terminal drunk when I reveal to them that I'm still drinking and that I drink every day and that I can't stop. By "can't stop" I mean I can't go a day without a single drink. I don't mean that once I start I continue knocking it back until I collapse in a cataleptic stupor. I had drink when I woke up this morning, but aside from one single swig, I couldn't face imbibing anything bar chicken and vegetable cup-a-soup (with croutons).

Because Pinky has the most miserable and upsetting life-story I've ever heard I offered to write it up as a book for her ~ and to my surprise she said yes. I'm also penning my own life story. Not because I think it's at all interesting, but because I want my family to profit from my misery when I die. I only had the idea in a fit of suicidal angst and thought the coroner's report would make a fantastic epilogue to my life. Maybe I shouldn't be saying this but I've told you everything else. I don't really like analysing what I did when and why, which is of course what you have to do to write a memoir. That's the stumbling block I encountered last time I tried. But if I don't write it and I die, my life will have been in vain. I want my family to profit from my death. And if I don't die and it does come out in print, I'd use the cash to get a private script for injectable methadone and morphine pills. Oral morphine is used as a private treatment for those who don't respond well to methadone (like me). The sustained release tablets need only be taken twice a day and would make you feel as though you'd hit up heroin at some indistinct time earlier. Rather than the spurious hold methadone has over you (complete with sweats, mood swings and hallucinations) morphine is well known to give addicts "a better quality of life" than rubbishy old methadone. I'd only ask for methadone because when prescribed privately you can ask for injectable 50mg/1ml amps which are of course far more likely to quench the urge to use on top as you've already had a hit. The NHS used to give out injectable methadone to intractable cases such as mine, but as my worker confirmed, nowhere in London does nowadays. In this day and age you're only allowed a chance if you go private, so it seems.

I don't mind methadone triggering mood swings, by the way: just as long as they're manic ones not depressive ones. Or that I don't get too manic, or too irritable. That's the only bad thing about mania: it's too unpredictable and uncontrollable. It isn't happiness (a good mood, versus a depressive bad mood) ~ it's excitement and excitement doesn't always feel great. I'd still rather be manic than depressed. Only a week or so ago I was so hyped up I was laughing uncontrollably at every opportunity. And there seemed endless opportunities for laughter. Now there are none at all and I fear over and over again that I'll have to give in and submit to mood stabilizers.

I can't read or watch or think about anything to do with ordinary life because everything makes me irritable or angry. Because it's not done right. The only things I can stand to occupy me are the Japanese language and hamsters. Everything else annoys me. So if I carry on in this bad mood I should be fluent in Japanese in no time at all.

I finally found a proper textbook (typically no accompanying CDs are available) that teaches the language from scatch in its proper script: that is, in standard Japanese orthography: kanji with hiragana and katakaa as appropriate. Not all in kana, like some Japanese textbooks. It's called Japanese for Everyone by Susumu Nagara and I found it here.

I also wanted to order Electroboy by Andy Behrman and The Quiet Room by Lori Schiller while I was at it. Both are psychiatric memoirs. Electroboy is about bipolar mania; The Quiet room is about schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (nobody appears to understand which). Probably I shouldn't be reading stuff like that, but I thought it might inspire my own drugs memoir. Electroboy has two covers: an electric yellow one, with the title in huge capitals, which I really like; and a really soppy arty one. If I wrote a book like that and had another manic episode I coudln't promise not to turn up at the publishers and shoot whoever OK'd that ridiculous cover between the eyes. It shows a really stupid face wearing a black hat, which is supposed to represent a the electric couplers on ECT machines. (ECT being a treatment for acute mania as well as depression; hence the title.) Poxy book covers are, in my opinion, an even worse crime against nature than cup-a-soup without croutons.

By the way the author of Electroboy claims to have taken huge amounts of cocaine while manic. How the hell he was able to do this and engage with life in even the most desultory way I cannot understand. One day when I was hyper I drank five cups of coffee in a row (I thougt I was tired). I then spent what felt like several days roaring like a wild animal, so deranged I had lost the ability to think in English. If I had taken coke in that state I doubt I'd ever have come back down to earth. (Some might say I still haven't.)

Well I'd better go. I have an NA group to attend and a memoir to ponder over (lots of thinking, no writing; that would be me). I've decided to write it as quickly as humanly possible just to get it over and done with. Apart from the money I'm only writing it as a cautionary tale to put the impressionable and destitute off ever experimenting with drugs the way I did. I don't think my life is fascinating and I don't think it's unusual. I just think I could tell the story well. If I set my mind to it. Pinky's story is far more interesting than mine. I'm really surprised she said she didn't mind her real name going against it. I'm not putting my real name on mine!


TALES OF THE RIVERBANK

THE DROUGHT
Hammy gets rained on and looks really cute



SAY CHEESE!
GP, the guinea swine makes a camera and a white guinea swine in a top hat takes everyone's picture...
ps has anyone noticed how Hammy looks like he's about to keel over from sheer exhaustion at any moment?
Hamsters are nocturnal and this was shot by the glaring light of day...

Rhubarb and custard pie..!

I WENT TO NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS YESTERDAY... at long last! I arrived there late (as per usual). I found myself having to sit right at the front with people behind me (as per usual). People in the meeting were making me paranoid (as usual). And I missed the chair (as usual) ~ that is my favourite bit, when somebody tells their life story about getting on drugs, getting off them, what happened and why. I love the chairs. I didn't say anything but the guy next to me piped up in newcomers time to say he'd just come outof the lunatic asylum with depression and was being treated by the Nutters At Home psyche team. I was really glad to hear that.

Then a woman spoke up about taking her friend's mother into hospital. Her friend's mother was seriously ill with... schizophrenia. I'm keeping my mouth shut about being schizo. It was quite a revelation to realize it's not a crime to be mentally ill at NA. That's certainly how it felt when I had prominent "issues" of my own. They all thought I was on drugs and more than one told me so. They never listened to anything I had to say, eg if I told somebody afterwards, "I can't take any drugs now" they'd interrupt "of course you can't" probably meaning "because you're like me, and taking drugs will set you off back on the road of addiction". But that isn't why I can't take most drugs. They make such an obvious mess of my head I'm averse to touching them again. Addiction doesn't come into it. Nauseated loathing and aversion very much does.

It's day 2 of my pill-popping escapade. Even though I posted about going back on them last week, I held off, hoping for a hypomanic miracle that might lift me on my own.

I still have distracting thoughts around the exterior of my mind ~ mostly on the right hand side. They're not as loud as the voices even yesterday, so maybe the pills are working. I bought some Valium to wash them down. Why Valium? Well you try taking heavy antispychotics without it. Having to stay awake while your brains are chemically coshed really isn't pleasant and 4mg risperidone from nothing really does feel like concussion ~ minus the headache, but all the brain-whirling dizziness, confusion et cetera all the same. It's not the pleasant wooziness some smackheads seem to enjoy, it's an overpowering feeling of being bashed on the brainbox. I wish the Nutter Club was still going so I had a forum to complain about this to people who understand. I only took 3mg risperidone yesterday, thinking it might make me a little less wuzzy. Tonight I'm thinking of taking all 4 again, but I'm scared of being out of action tomorrow. On Monday I felt done in for the first half of the day. Almost too unsteady to want to risk walking up the street. With time all these side effects diminish, except for the effect risperidone has on sleep. It doesn't make you go to sleep, so it's no good for initial insomnia. But it does keep you under once you get TO sleep.

My friend Buggerlugz has EIGHTEEN tiny roborovski hamsters pinging in all directions in tiny hammy lairs. They keep breeding and having trotterdonkey babies. One is named Reggie, another is named Anchovy. I think Anchovy was meant to be a boy but she's a girl. I thought my "Baby" Itchy Roborovski was a boy at first and persuaded her to walk around on a CD case so I could check this. She was most offended at being examined in this manner and bunnyhopped on the floor and would have pinged away if I hadn't chucked a towel upon her.

And did you know baby hamsters are called Pups. They look like baked beans with paws?...?





Here's Bashful, Itchy and Spherical in one of their old nests before they died. They had about five or six nests on the go at once. Itchy is the drowsy one who looks like she's been nibbling at the risperidone... She used to hear voices saying "Have you been trotting on your wheel?" and "come here you furry swine!" but they weren't schizophrenia; they were me!

I've been scoffing Mr Kipling's rhubarb and custard pies with Cornish Dairy ice cream. They're really nice. Yes I decided to break my diet a bit. There's something really miserable about depriving yourself of food. I lost about 11 pounds but Valium Marilyn's scales aren't very good. You have to bang them twice then clamber upon them. Marilyn has lost a lot of weight, having been in hospital; she looks like a little old lady now. She's depressed because her Mum and Dad both died a few years ago and their house was her refuge from Nasty Old Life... and it's not there any more. Her son stole 3 or 4 strips of temazepam 20s off her. We had to go right through everything looking for them. He's in his late 20s and still smokes cannabis ~ hashish would you believe. Why on earth anybody would voluntarily smoke that psychosis-causing gunk is anybody's guess. Marilyn rants about how harmless it is, yet she never smokes it. There's even a "Cannabis is Food of the Gods" type movement that believes spliffs should be used in mental healthcare instead of stuff like Valium. The sort of people who believe this have never tried Valium and never had a mental health problem. If they had, they'd know cannabis is the LAST thing any psychotic person with half a brain would want to smoke... though having said that I do recall clearly how the 2 favourite drugs in the mental hospital were 1: cannabis (by a long way) and 2: CRACK COCAINE... the 2 street drugs most liable to bring on extreme paranoia are used recreationally by paranoiacs themselves! But not all these people get full-on symptoms in every conceivable way. I once asked one whether something had ever happened to him that happened to me when I went mad ~~ and he looked at me like I really had a screw loose! His symptoms were probably more extreme than mine in many ways... but just different.

Yesterday's NA really helped me focus on WHY I want off these drugs I'm so hooked on. People remind me why I want to stop them, by telling how their lives were messed up.

I pingpong between believing heroin should be legalized and on sale from vending machines and thinking that all addicts ought to be executed by lethal injection (of heroin).

I still have a huge mark at the top of my thigh like a cigar burn. Originally it had a pussing head, but now it's scabbed over. I picked the first scab off but a beautiful second scab has appeared. There's a huge volcanic lump under it that I keep squeezing in the hope some pus might ooze. But it's totally dry. It's not disappointing not to have an abscess, but when I do have one, I most certainly get value for money out of it, with all the kneeding and squeezing and pus-milking.

This song was going round my head as I walked home from the chemists in a thunderstorm:



MADONNA: WHO'S THAT GIRL

Back on the (legal) drugs ...(!)

I DECIDED to go back on antipsychotics tonight.

I keep hearing voices in my head jabbering in Northern accents. Jim Royle saying "my arse!" over and over. They're not hallucinations, they're kind of really loud thoughts from outside. But they didn't happen when I was sane. And I know they're supposed to mean I'm mentally deranged. The pills can block them out.

Also the risperidone has some sort of blockading effect on the heroin hit. It doesn't stop the nasty stuff working but it somehow makes taking it not seem worthwhile. So that's a good thing for me.

The reason I stopped taking it was that I was feeling incredibly flat and I thought risperidone was responsible. Then I began feeling depressed on top of that and risperidone is not a mood stabilizer as such. It did make me feel a lot less manic, but I'm not manic any more. So I wasn't sure whether or not to continue with risperidone. So I stopped it. And slumped into a pit of depression.

I was remembering what happened in full-on mania. My brain did everything bar melt on me and drip out of my ears down my neck, hissing, popping and fizzing as it drooled in luminous fingers down my back! Not good. The in-between hypomanic stage was good. That went on for several weeks and prompted my doctor to write to my GP telling of my "elevated mood". The only other detail I remember from that letter was "paranoid ideation".

My Mum wrote to me threatening that I'd get chucked out on the streets. My head was confused enough that I kept thinking she wanted me out on the streets. Or thought I was supposed to go and live there. She thinks that because my doctor mentioned schizophrenia I must have at least 2 personalities. She says some course she went on many years ago taught her this. Whoever taught that course needs shooting between the eyes. I only have one personality. That person might be quite warped and I don't like it very much. But it's only one person. If I could turn myself into somebody else I'd be overjoyed.

Originally I wanted a manic episode back. This had as much to do with being depressed and despairing of ever being "normal" as actually wanting to be so-called "ill". I didn't see much choice in the matter. So I wished the mania would hurry up and come back.

But now I'm feeling out some dimly-lit middle way that might somehow lead to happiness.

I woke up this morning with my head still dreaming. The Royle Family were having a loud conversation in between my ears as I wondered what on earth I was supposed to do. Life seemed so overwhelming. Then I told myself I just had to keep clearing and cleaning my house. Every day. Do a bit, every day. Don't think. Don't think too much. Don't think about it. I only think when I'm unhappy. Unhappy thoughts. So don't think. Just do it. Then when it's done you can think up something else.

So that's my plan. I've been spending hours asleep. Yes the sleep pattern has come back. I slept all afternoon, then went to bed around ten at night and slept through till nine in the morning.

So here's my plan for today. I'm still fighting unhappiness (if the truth be told). And if the truth be told further, I could do with some of that hypomania back: heightened mood and energy. Trust me to get it back only for one bloody day! That has happened before. I costed out how much it would've cost me to go that long on cocaine: £2-300. So that's a good coupleof hundred pounds worth of free high. You've got to look on the bright side.

I'm wondering how Anna Grace is. She was detoxing off heroin in her parents' empty home last I heard. Only her tiny terrier Elle for company. Then she started going manic. But her mood cycles quickly so she's either stuck to the ceiling or feeling a bit down or very down by now. Being as no post has appeared since Friday I'd assume she's down rather than up.

She's taking all these meds for bipolar disorder and they still don't seem to sort her out. Taking an Addreall (dexamphetamine) prescription from another doctor might have somethig to do with this. My own doctor said taking speed on top of bipolar was highly unadvisable. (I only asked this purely for Anna's sake; I haven't bought any speed since 1993). O yeah apart from Dexedrines purchased on the street in 1999. But I'm not into speed. It never agreed with me. Sent a clinically depressed me into comedowns so bad I could barely function at all, at the worst of it. Then the last time I did it, having found a great lump of it at a bus stop, a few lines taken on Monday evening had me speeding away into Wednesday and beyond! That was several years ago when I was still living in a crackhouse. Drugs like that and me don't mix so I stay away from them. So I don't know why Anna takes it. Something to do with an attention-deficit diagnosis as a child. ADHD and bipolar are said to present fairly similarly in children, with bipolar being more severe. She was taking uppers in her childhood (amphetamine and ritalin are supposed to calm down hyperactive children)... then surprise surprise had severe mood swings in adulthood. In fact 50% of bipolar 1s have a known history of substance use disorders. As do 50% of schizophrenics. So drug-use and mental illness are inextricably intertwined. You're only diagnosed after several weeks of symptoms while drug-free.

Well it's my goal to break away from all of this. I'm fed up of being arguably mentally unwell. And unarguably a drug addict. I'm trying to focus my head on more positive things. I'm pondering how I might make a book out of Valerie, the China White Heroin Queen of Australia. She has plenty to say for herself. If I can get a 300 page manuscript out of her, I'm sure Harper Collins would be delighted... wish me and Valerie luck with the inspiration..!

PS I just read this back and it looks like I don't know what the hell I want. I want to be OK and I want to write some amazing books that make me a fortune. And I don't want to be addicted to any substance at all. So those are my goals in life.

PPS I just went down Morrisons for corned beef and cheese coleslaw. It’s my first tin of corned beef in three or four days so I’m doing really well on that score. I was hoping for the Royle Family to accompany me down in my head. But they didn’t. Deserted me just when I wanted them most? Does anyone else get that? Voices in their head repeating catchphrases, telling jokes? I only remember it happening to me after I’d been in the nuthouse at least once. The first 2 times I only stayed in a week, then they chucked me out. I’m scared if I ever go in again they won’t want to let me go. But I could do with a little holiday sometimes. “A retreat” as Bipolar Becky once called it. I don’t want to go in the nuthouse now, but if I get offered it again I think I’m going back in. My head is too confused about what I’m doing with my life. That “breakdown”, if you want to call it that, really threw me on my head. I only use phrases like “mental illness” because it sounds so insightful and grown-up. Really I didn’t feel ill at all. I felt like finally I was in touch with my real self. I was in a really good mood. And the world felt unreal. Which is all, if you think about it, a pretty idyllic state to be in. You could argue that medication has ruined my life and brought me back to a sallow reality. Like waking up in the bath of near-freezing cold water you tried to drown yourself in, floating in a white haze, miserable and still alive. That’s how I see reality. And I want a better life than that.

SO COME ON you nutters! (Or normal people. I heard normal people hear voices too, there's even an international Voice Hearers movement for those who do; link given below...) I want to know whether you get voices in your heads? Or outside your heads? Or both? If so where and how loud? Do they come in from outside? Or do they hover in the air floating? What do they say? What do they sound like? When did they start? How often do they come to you? And is it supposed to be to do with any sort of so-called illness? If so what label? And do you wear the label round your neck like a Jim’ll Fix It medal? Someone I knew with a borderline personality disorder used to do that and I saw other people seemingly confusing diagnosis with identity. Put me off divulging anything of note to a psychiatrist for years, did that.
ANSWERS PLEASE!! + Y'ALL CAN TAKE PART IN MY NOSEY SURVEY (ABOVE)...


LINKS:~~~~~~~
Hearing voices movement: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement ~ with links to national orgaizations
Hearing Voices Network (UK) http://www.hearing-voices.org
Interational Movement: http://www.intervoiceonline.org

01:01 hrs. I hope Anna Grace is all right. Not a peep from her since Friday....

Thought for the day: 7am

IT'S just before 7am. I've been up since 10 to 5. Terrible trouble sleeping. I keep waking up again and again in the night. Even when I try and get my head down my brainbox is chattering shite at me. Random words and phrases pinging about. It's like listening to a deranged band of nutters chatting down the mental hospital bar. Radio GaGa.

When I woke up the second timme I watched an episode of the Royle Family and had a fag. Then I pondered on why I had been so depressed. A lot of it had to do with me having a breakdown that turned everything upside down, then finding out I was labelled a schizo. My parents think I have taken it to heart too much. But what would you do if you found out you were a schizophrenic. Hearing voices and all. I haven't heard any lately, apart from the odd murmur. The walls don't talk these days. Point being: all my hopes for a future had instantly vanished. All I could see was myself half mad and overweight, off drugs but terminally lazy. Watching television for the rest of my life. Basically the life I've got now going on for ever. When I was young I had dreams and ambitions. I wanted to get in the Guinness Book of Records. I never thought I was a schizo. Even being bipolar was bad enough. I kept those mood swings hidden from doctors for years. Until they got so extreme I was just annoyed at having to accouht for why my life was a mess (on forms etc), writing "depression and drug addiction" in the medical box and knowing that was far from the entire truth.

I'd just about got my head round the fact that I appeared to be a type 1 bipolar (that's the nutty sort who hear voices); Katherine Zeta Jones is bipolar II which means horrible depression and hypomania which is an exaggerated good mood. Anyway I'd just got my head around the idea that I might actually be a manic depressive, when the doctor tells me I'm schizaffective! Manic depression and schizophrenia at once! I was totally stumped. Despite my persistent elevated mood that one really shut me up. I'd been jabbering away in that office not caring that I was mad. I was really careful not to give an overblown impression of the hallucinations. Left all the best ones out (parking meter turning into a really fit police woman; spectacular full-colour Northern Lights type display in my own house; Barrack Obama talking to me; fantastical psychedelic movies popping out of the walls etc) I never told him any of that. In fact I was quite careful to underline that nothing nutty happened all the time blah blah blah. I couldn't lie. I wasn't in a state to discern what was relevant from what wasn't so I just told all...

Loads of successful people have been bipolar. Ted Turner, founder of CNN; Beethoven; Lord Byron; Vincent Van Gogh; Virginia Woolf to name just four. Bipolar disorder is really trendy. Nobody's scared of it any more. I could still be a successful writer and be invited to lots of bourgeois dinner parties with bipolar. Schizophrenia is a totally different kettle of fish. How many famous schizos can you name? Apart from that bloke from the film A Beautiful Mind?? Yeah don't tell me: I'm going to have to be the first.

Well this is what was on my mind. And all I could think was how schizos are fat and slobby and lazy (basically what I am now). And how, even when I kicked heroin, I was never going to be OK. And how I would live the rest of my life on corned beef, methadone and daytime television. And how I might as well end it all now on the railway line. And how even if I didn't do it now (British trains don't run in the early hours) my lifetime odds of death by suicide were running at around 80%. I wasn't depressed when all this came to me. Just thinking clearly.

So I don't know how to fix my problems. But I'm still not taking heroin and I am cleaning my house.

Anna Grace is clucking off heroin. She actually wants to detox, and the detoxing has given her a manic episode.

I'm neither manic nor depressed. Just undulating. I get really excited over nothing. Then really depressed and want to cry. Then really tired. Then I can't sleep. You know: an in-between stage.

I hope Anna Grace is going to be OK. I thought she was going back down the methadone clinic. She said the local one wouldn't take her on because of her bipolar issues. They insisted on a 90-day rehabilitation sesh before they'd consider her. Anna was all set for a stint in a dual diagnosis place when she bottled out. I'm no-one to talk about bottling out of rehab. I was in twice in one year and ran out the door within days of entry, both times. I wouldn't mind a rehab full of nutters as much as one full of criminals. The criminal type all look down at me these days for having mental problems. Having been in both rehab and the nuthouse, I can vouch that nutters are far easier to get on with than crackhead junkies. At least nutters go mad in different ways. Addicts are so same-same-same they're frankly boring. I couldn't handle going nuts again in front of a bunch of junkies. That's what happens to me in rehab. So I'd have to go to a dual diangosis place, wouldn't I?

I hope Anna does manage to sort her problems. She never seems happy without drugs. Never was happy on them either. She's done far better than me as regards sticking to programmes. I never gave in a clean urine test until literally this year. Anna actually reduced her methadone, switched to Suboxone, which is an excellent treatment for anyone genuinely ready to be clean. She actually followed through on Suboxone until she was 100% clean and serene and sober. Still was miserable afterwards though. I don't know what Anna wants in life. She's been writing memoirs.

I wanted to be a writer too, but I much prefer fiction to fact. That's why Valerie flows from my pen so much more easily than my boring old self. As well as Valerie there's Boomer and Bruce and a new character I've invented but I'll let this person speak for themself when the time is right.

I know this post says nothing knew. But it's what was on my mind tonight. It's half past seven now. I don't know whether or not to go back to bed. I can get to the methadone chemist in the hour. Then that's today over and done with.

WISHING Y'ALL A FANTASTIC WEEKEND!!

My Experience With Bipolar Schizoaffective Disorder: Mental Situation Explained

LOOKING BACK OVER MY LAST FEW POSTS, how miserable was I?! Misery and suicidal ideation left, right and centre. Yes I have been very unhappy of late. I basically feel ill all the time. And yet I don't feel I'm depressed. I feel like nothing is wrong with me, that I'm a time-waster, a malingerer and a fraud and I don't deserve help. Yet looking at my life I'm in desperate need of something. Most people would call it "help". But how can I accept it?

I question why on earth I ran to a doctor in my "elevated mood" of yore.

But that isn't true. I didn't run to any doctor while manic. What happened was I went manic-depressed ~ BOTH in the same week. The walls started talking to me LOUD. I had the most severely mislaid lost weekend of my life. My sense of hearing suddenly went ten times more acute than normal. It was like living in a house without walls. Everything anyone said or did in any room I heard full-on, like the bizarrest radio play. Everybody on the street. My next door neighbours even. I heard conversations, chatter, sex and a sawing noise like somebody constantly going at a piece of wood. When cars rushed down the street they whooshed echoing into a cyberdelic vortex of sound. And I was hallucinating auditorily vividly. At one point I heard voices speaking Spanish and Chinese. At another it was as if somebody had strewn fifty or so radios all on different channels spewing music, spouting speech all babbling and jangling at once. My mood zoomed and soared and I saw visual spectaculars: the northern lights in full colour in my own living room. This is the most floridly psychotic I have ever been. Although I'd woken up feeling so dire I lay on the floor for four hours before eventually mustering energy to get out of bed, have a cursory shower and heave myself up the road to collect methadone.



I couldn't sleep all weekend. Neither could I eat. I remember drinking tomato soup straight from the tin, cold. Something that looked like a cross between fur and grass was growing out of the top. I knew it wasn't actually there, but that didn't help it go away.

Up and down, twisting in and out my moods dipped and soared. I was cycling in what psychiatrists call a type of mixed bipolar state. And I wasn't on drugs. I was NOT on drugs, this is how my brain reacted to "normality". This is what kept me using for so many years. Untoward mental symptoms, only now they'd gone truly spectacular.

The next few days I felt not only down but injured. I curled up in a chair by day seeing visions of myself in prison, full of guilt, imprisoned for the rest of my life. I didn't want to die: my life was over already.

One day I was perfectly blank. Another day I was depressed. Some friends came round wanting to score. I was totally averse to drugs by this time. They used my dealer and I partook nothing. But I got into their car and experienced a rush like suddenly coming up on Ecstasy full-on. I couldn't stop babbling.The more stressed I got ~ and I got very stressed indeed ~ the higher my mood soared. Nothing this intense had ever happened to me before.

I knew that first weekend that something had gone drastically wrong. I phoned my Mum who was already shocked, having seen me bombed out of my head on dodgy benzoated heroin. She had phoned my druggieworker in horror so they had a dialogue going. I told my Mum to tell my Worker I had been hearing voices. The worker called me on Monday morning. I got a psychiatrist's appointment that Thursday. Seeing a psychiatrist is always stressful. I was particularly stressed. On the ride down a black girl was very obviously talking about me and insulting me repeatedly. I was very angry and kept my hands to myself though I felt like throwing her downstairs. I paced back and forth in the medical building, knowing it would hype me up but destroy anxiety. By the time the doctor saw me I was more hyper than I realized. If you want to see the state I was in watch the video on my sidebar "manic episode: Trisch goes nuts" ~ I was in that type of state. A markedly elevated mood, racing thoughts, rapid speech. Knowing the doctor wanted to know what happened, how much, how long, how intense, what it felt like, how I felt, I told him all this in one uninterrupted stream of consciousness. He only asked three questions in the entire session. To my ranting banging "you can't say I'm manic; I've only been like this six days and the diagnostic criteria say seven" he replied "what do you know about schizophrenia?" I answered "it's not caused by a mood and it's a psychosis"... At home his question came back to haunt me and I wondered whether I did have schizophrenia. And I cried.

I stayed off heroin, went down into a depression. Went back on heroin for a week. Wasn't impressed. Back to methadone. My mood was still cycling. One Sunday I was depressed, hearing voices and wandering aimlessly on the streets, too unhappy to enter my own front door. I went home, slept and woke up the next day in a markedly elevated mood. I remember queueing for my money in the post office. By the till they have shiny bags covered in rainbow holograms. One had acid-smiley faces. I was transfixed by the bright colours and depth of texture. I felt wonderful and sensual, the way I used to on Ecstasy. Though I would never in a million years have dropped an E in order to appreciate goods in the post office!

I'm not sure I slept that night. Next morning my hearing had gone hyper-acute again. A man turned up on our garden path jabbering into a mobile phone about having moved my bed around. I lay there thinking WHAT??! All day, I felt irritable, angry. As I was about to leave for NA I heard two voices. In one ear "nervous breakdown"; in the other "schizophrenia". Schizophrenia again. This put me on a real downer. I stomped down the road, caught the bus and endured loud conversations about my background, my reputation, my school records from other passengers. At this time I was getting well meaning but off-beam comments telling me to go to NA or AA every single day. I don't think anyone realized what I was actually going through. One person even said "I used to hear voices too on my way to meetings" this same person criticized me for sitting in a meeting for five minutes then upping and leaving. Maybe their mental condition was markedly different from mine. But hallucinating floridly and poor attentionspan tend to go hand in hand. We were cooped together in this meeting. Everyone smelled of periods and semen. I thought the man next to me was going to pick my pocket. The man giving the chair kept staring at me. And the meeting was so packed there was a chair in the way of the door. I couldn't stuck this out for nearly 20 minutes and eventually left, causing marked disturbance. But I didn't care. I just needed fresh air.

I didn't sleep at all that night. My mood soared higher and higher. My house was a mess and I was supposed to be cleaning it but I couldn't focus myself enough to clean anything. There used to be a dual-diagnosis meeting I always referred to as Nutter Club. It took place once a week. Naomi, the lady who runs it is expert at dealing with people with severe mental health issues. Most people there seemed to be bipolar. A couple of schizophrenics turned up, but they say far less. Naomi had met me and we'd spoken in depth a few times over the previous couple of years. She knew that I believed I had something bipolar going on. Not necessarily bipolar disorder. But I was definitely on the so-called "bipolar spectrum" as it's very trendily known nowadays.



I remember her saying one time between the florid stage of my condition and my actually getting a diagnosis "you know and I know that it's not drug-related but you've got to stay away from everything so the doctor knows that too". This particular comment came back to haunt me. On the one hand I didn't want to be thought of as a druggie timewaster, going nuts because I'd used too much. On the other I was terrified of the term "bipolar disorder" I didn't want the label slapped across my forehead. I didn't even consider that it could have been something else, something worse...

I was in such a state this day I went to the nutter club. I had been dancing about my kitchen in a state of disarray. My clothes were dirty, my hair unwashed; I was thoroughly unkempt. I had great difficulty getting myself and my keys and my Oyster card (for the bus) and a little bit of money and my phone all in my pockets with my brain flying all over the place at several thousand miles per hour, on no sleep (which I didn't really need, though it felt strange to someone used to sleeping sixteen hours or more a day in my depressions...) I arrived at the nutter club thinking my mood was fairly normal, that I was just a bit hyped up. In a group with three other nutters I was unable to contain myself from laughing hysterically. People tried to talk and I kept stopping them saying WHAT??! They might as well have been talking backwards: gibberish. Naomi said "look I think you need to be seen by a doctor" so the meeting closed early and she took me to the mental hospital which was just down the road. I kept asking "do I have to speak as slowly as possible and not wave my arms about?" (ie not act manic) she said "oh no they're so full you don't have to worry about being sectioned" (involuntarily committed). The only thing that could have got me sectioned, as I understand it, would be direct, focused threats of violence or active suicidal behaviour with a specific plan. I was seeing this doctor because I had known for years that something was wrong, that I'd had bipolar symptoms and nobody listened. Nobody took me seriously. i got the distinct impression they thought I was lying. Trying to make myself seem more interesting.

In the mental reception my mood soared higher than ever before. Naomi introduced me to a colleague who looked just like a woman off the television. I peed in a cup and sure enough: no speed, no crack, no cannabis. Nothing except heroin METHADONE and benzos, both of which are downers, not uppers. The benzos were from my attempt a week earlier to give up alcohol for once and for all. But I never managed it.

Naomi and TV Girl said goodbye and I was left with a depressed middle aged man and a depressed black girl who kept phoning someone and screaming her boring personal problems down the phone.

Meanwhile my head was going more manic than it had ever gone before. I went through double doors to a corridor where the walls and doors and ceiling were echoing with scores of conversations. My head went from racing into complete overdrive. The words in my head broke off. So that "I'm going too fast" might stop with "going", the "-ing" broke off: ing-ing-ing-ing-in-in-in-INININININ" whooshing round with spectacular speed.I was losing my mind and the only way I could keep a grip was by yelling these syllables as my head disintegrated into random noise.

I calmed myself down by running through the alphabet out loud ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO.... over and over again. Pacing back and forth avoiding the bad letters. A is for acid, that's bad. B is for brown ~ heroin. That's bad. C is like the sea. It's brilliant in the sun; it's calm. That's good. I flew through them quickly and the black girl was staring at me. I didn't care. And I knew the nurses wouldn't be observing me.

Eventually I saw a kindly man who introduced himself as a psychiatric social worker. He pointed out, very patiently, that we had 45 minutes to take my entire psychiatric history. This was quite some challenge. When was I first depressed? In childhood. In my teens. It first became a major problem at university. Suicide? Yes twice. This got me raging about tetracyclic antidepressants. I took 8 pills and a bottle of vodka. Then I thought "fuck it" and downed a bottle of sixty heavy strength lofepramine. I puked them up almost straight away. The coating was still on the pills in the vomit which was everywhere. All over the floor. On my clothing. Down my hair.

If only I'd gone for Prothiaden/dothiepin I might be dead now. Merely touching on this subject sent me crazy with pent up anger, self-hatred, frustration and rage. I had to enumerate every upsetting, depressing experience. Being yelled at on railway station platforms by people who thought I was going to jump. Being waved at BY THE DRIVER of a high speed train. I've mentioned this before but it gets me to this day. How did he see me? How did he know at close to one hundred miles per hour that I, acting as normally as anybody in such a situation could, wanted to kill myself under a train?

When my depression reached one of its all-time lows I had a persistent idea that the train would hit me and I wouldn't really die. I'd just lie on the trackside in the cold, in the rain, in agony forever, trains rushing past and nobody ever healing me.

Having to dredge through this psychiatric history in the highly impressionable manic state was traumatic beyond words. Now that I FINALLY have a psychiatrist and proper notes and a diagnosis etc etc etc I should never ever have to go through this again. If I ever had to do it in an emergency situation I think I would walk out rather than seek treatment. It's just not worth recalling all that. People seem to assume that I dwell on my past. But I don't. I only dwell as I write. Then I'm in another zone.

Mild thought echo: age 23. Mild antidepressant-induced hypomania: age 23. Natural hypomania: age 27. First heard voices: early 30s.

A long, slow, slide downwards.

The psychiatrist looked stunningly beautiful. Her legs were shiny. The lights outside looked amazing. She asked more questions; this time about the present: how fast was I? How high? How irritated? How many voices? What did they say? How little sleep? She prescribed zopiclone 7.5mg ~ the best sleeping pill I've ever tried.

I walked for two hours then took the bus home. This night I slept for all of five hours. I hadn't slept this long in days. Next day I was even more euphoric. I felt grandiose and grand. I was out of this world. The world was left behind. I hate this world in both phases of my "illness" I never want to be in it.

The mania intensified until I felt like a tiger roaring. I swaggered up and down the streets. When people crossed me, as they often did, it was sufficient merely to glare at them. They seemed to spring backwards. People seemed to make way, clear paths, back off. Yes they looked terrified, but that was a new thing and it felt fantastic. A confirmation of my higher power.

I was obsessed by energy and power. My willingness to drop drugs turned into an aversion for drugs of all kinds. Taking crack or E or speed was the saddest thing you could do. By this time I'd gone higher than I'd ever been on any drug. The drugs seemed a pale imitation of reality. I tried heroin towards the end of the mania and it did little except make me sleepy and racy at the same time.

Over the weeks my mood went through a roughly seven day cycle. Seven days flying high; seven days lower. Sometimes hypomanic, sometimes vaguely depressed. Then up again. I thought this would never end.

My first few days of mania were by far the most intense. My psychiatrist prescribed the antipsychotic risperidone. As I came down gradually over the weeks it began to eat away at me that I didn't even know the name of this very obvious mental condition. I thought it was bipolar. I could see that I was high sometimes; low at other times. Surely that was bipolar disorder? No. The S-word returned to haunt me. SCHIZOAFFECTIVE. That's what my doctor, a consultant psychiatrist, thinks I am. Meaning I matched the full diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia and mania simultaneously. He said my psychosis was more florid than most manic psychosis. I think he also recognized my longstanding issues of self-care. People have long been deceived because I'm articulate, that because I'm able to talk and to touch type that it somehow follows that my house will be in order, my life will be in order that all will be perfect. it's not perfect; it's a mess. During the worst of my illness I couldn't even handle money. I just lost it. Keeping track of my housekeys was a major hassle.

Most people who go manic feel sociable and sexy. I felt neither. I was just as reclusive manic as depressed. I tried to use my hyperosity and energy to clear up my scruffy house, but I couldn't stick with it. Unsociability and avolition are key characteristics of schizophrenia. If you can be manic and still have these things going on they're extremely deep seated. Realizing this has done nothing to help my recent depression. I know I can't choose my illness from a psychiatric Chinese takeaway menu. Though I cried because I had schizophrenia, there are still a thousand physical illnesses I'd less rather have. By itself schizophrenia isn't necessarily a horrible condition. It makes me feel dissociated, unreal, bizarre and poetic. Occasionally I feel paranoid, but nearly always in public places. When I'm on my own I'm OK. It's a big reason why I keep myself to myself. Other people only bring me down.

I've been feeling depressed for several weeks now; it's not the worst depression in the world but it will not shift. It won't go away. It's eroding my self-esteem, making me feel worthless and guilty. Making me want to be dead. I've spent years in this state, so it's like Welcome Home.

This is the state that kept me using heroin for so long. I used every day I could afford to last week. Which puts me into desperation. Addicted and stuck, not coping, back on heroin a drug that I gave up for weeks on end during mania... back in the morass. I can't cope. I don't want to go on. I really can't cope, I'm not coping at all. I'm thoroughly dirty, living in a mess that the council send a sterm lady once a month to complain about. I'm waiting to be housed in a mental health hostel because my coping skills are so bad. I'm 39 years old yet life is reelling backwards. I've done the exact opposite of scrounging. None of the help that was meant to be out there for me came until I had a full-blown psychotic break. I know of people who have faked schizophrenia and psychosis to get housed, to get sick benefit and DLA and they make me so angry because even getting to my appointments feels like a major stress, yet these people are acting, they're quite capable. That's why I feel like I should be dead, I'm only a drain on society. If they cut off my money I couldn't work because there's no job you can do at your own pace. No job that accommodates someone who sleeps more than sixteen hours and NEEDS that sleep, every single day when the depression intensifies. I'd have to keep myself clean and tidy and get there on time. I can't handle looking people in the eye. I deceive people on the phone because I modulate my voice, but I can't do face to face when Im sick.

The jobs I'd most like to do are writer of novels which I'd be able to do even when quite sick. Even when I can't focus to follow a book by another person, I'm able to write ~ as you see from my blog. I don't believe I'm the greatest but I do have a uniqueness and that's what I'd aim to harness.

In more down-to-earth jobs painter-decorator is one I'd like to do. Many years ago I had an intuition that whatever career I went for, it'd have to be low stress. This coincides with all the advice I've read about schizoaffective disorder. Stress makes my condition very much worse. In mania I literally feel something like an accelerator, foot to the floor and a WHOOOSH!! In a normal mood, which I'm hardly ever in, I get horrible anxiety. And I still can have psychotic experiences when I'm in a normal mood. This is how my condition differs from bipolar disorder, where the psychosis occurs only at the polar extremes of mood. In depression everything feels like too much and I can't take it on.

Anna Grace and I have a lot in common. Anna has several years' history of intravenous opiate abuse. Tar heroin, white heroin and Dilaudid (prescription hydromorphone) being her favourite drugs. Her mental diagnosis is bipolar disorder but she's like me. Nearly always noticably up or down. Hardly ever "normal".



Most people with bipolar have episodes, which last weeks. But they end and the mood between episodes is neither low nor high: it's totally normal. But Anna and I are always depressed and when we're not depressed we're manic or at least hyper. We've both had psychosis. Neither of us function very well off opiates. Only problem is, Anna lives 3851 miles away in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We would like to live together in New York City, but short of a massive lottery win, whats going to make that happen?

Anna is my cyberwife. She's cheating on me with some guy called Jess who does bootycalls, as she calls them. Of course this isn't unfaithfulness, there can be no chastity or commitment over 3851 miles' distance. Still, if I meet Jess in a manic episode I will punch his lights out.

Now you've read some of the story of my mental health. I'm not always sure I'm ill. When guilt gets me bad I can feel like I deserve unhappiness. When I really get severely depressed, which is rare for me, I believe I'm in spiritual crisis rather than depression as such. In the lowest of the lows life is over; there is no life. My highs took me higher than drugs. A feeling of connectedness, of spirituality as my thoughts exploded in starbursts. Impervious to weariness, my body seemed to be turning from physical flesh into spirit. That's what I wanted most of all: to be out of this world. As I say, I hate this world at all times. I don't want to be in it, I want to be out of it. It's the only way of coping I know of.

MANIC EPISODE: "TRISCH GOES NUTS"
Knowing she was going to spend all day cooped up in a car, she was letting off steam before a road trip... The comments at Youtube contain a lot of doubters but this is the only film I've seen captures true manic behaviour:~


FUN WITH BIRDS ON THE BEACH
... and here's the sane Trisch with some very entertaining birds



PS: I've found a new blog by Jane, the mother of a freshly detoxed addict who's troubled by anxiety, depression and insomnia. He's opiate-clean but in a very vulnerable situation. Check out her blog and give Jane some moral support: http://janeinsearchofsanity.blogspot.com.

Better off Clean

ANNA POSTED UP A TRIBUTE TO ME today. We are both in bad moods. Anna has got herself a habit and is miserable over having swizzled her Dad's pain pills in order to stay sane. I'm in misery because I've been using heroin again and it's not helping. I've only just realized it DOESN'T HELP. I wish it did but it doesn't. I put what I put yesterday in italics when I'd just taken a shot. I captured what I think when gear is flooding my system. That I can't live without it.

And yet I did live without it, for the best part of three months I went day in day out with no heroin. I might have been raving mad, but I survived. I actually felt better being mad and not on gear than being sane and on it. I don't know what that says about me or gear, but it surely says something. Just as miserable on it as off it. I have to hold on to this. There will be no money to use tomorrow. Or the next day or the next day. I'm not starving myself in order to use heroin. I'm not committing crimes. Not spending all day trudging the streets. And I'm not going back to begging. I'm tired of it all. Drugs have taken away what little stability I had without them.

But it's not true to say I was a well-adjusted kid whose life was ruined by heroin. Before heroin came along I never had the life I wanted. I'd been diagnosed with depression and chronic fatigue syndrome. I'd lost the best years of my life already when heroin and easy access to it finally came along in the latter half of my twenties.

Heroin gave me a feeling I'd never had before. A sense of contentment, of confidence and stability. The first thing the daily use of heroin did was to even out my previously unstable moods. Suddenly I was living on a very comfortable flat-line. However faked up it may have been, this new-found "happiness" was too intoxicating for words.

The "happiness" story has come to an end. I use now because I'm an addict and I'm miserable on methadone. I always said I'd be willing to live on methadone, no matter how miserable it made me ~ someday. That day is now. Somehow must learn to live unstable and unhappy.

Being off street heroin has never helped me before, so I don't expect it to help now. Remember what happened last time I gave up and went straight to methadone? I had a very obvious psychotic break.

Over the years I've cut out all the substances that obviously disagreed with me: cannabis being the worst offender by far. It precipitates psychotic-type attacks which encompass all the bad aspects of craziness with no fun. Pure paranoia, insecurity, unease. Speed I hate, it's like low-quality coke. The high is short-lived and the comedown jagged. Ecstasy I loved but strictly at dance parties only and though it gave an amazing experience that sstarted disagreeing with me also. I saw maggots writhing in my contact lenses case and had no option but to take out my lenses and insert them into this seething pot of pus. LSD was too strong for me. The trips were spectacular but they blew my brains out. My acid-phase ended nearly 20 years ago. Mushrooms I only took in moderate doses, enough to feel euphoric and stoned, not enough to be tripping anything like full-on. Ketamine was interesting but you're on your own with that one. It's very intense and not something I felt the need to experience too frequently. Snorty coke I never got on with. Overpriced crap. Most of the time people who couldn't really afford it were sniffing up rubbish and convincing themselves they were high. Perhaps the stuff worked for them, but it barely ever worked for me.

Crack cocaine did work. A kind of "ultimate high" but I had no intention of ever making that a part of my lifestyle. The thing about an ultimate high, to my mind at least, is that unless you're somehow going to disconnect and float there for all eternity, you may as well let yourself come down and cherish the experience. It only needs to be experienced once. Crack only hung around so long because crack is supplied by heroin dealers and a lot of people I knew were into it. I only say I was addicted to it because the tiny bits I smoked and speedballed (tiny bits of rocks to pep me up; the ultimate high idea had long gone out the window) were difficult to give up completely.

Heroin is the only drug I went nuts over. The only one I contributed far more money towards than I ever intended. The one that took over my life, that I coudln't stop repeatedly coming back to despite everything. Heroin heroin heroin. Heroin turned me from a drug-user into a drug-addict. I drink because alcohol complimented heroin's effects. Heroin. It all revolved around heroin.

I wish I'd given up drink in that manic episode when it barely did anything to me and I could barely feel it. I couldn't feel heat, cold or hunger. I barely felt drugs either and I did use heroin a couple of times while manic. It barely touched the sides.

The concept of post-addiction "serenity" came to me from Narcotics Anonymous. I suppose what I'm after is stability more even than serenity and NA don't understand that. They expect one to be morose and depressed without drugs. I came in hyped out of my brains so they all assumed I'd been using. My family seem to think my mental problems are all down to drugs. I think they have been exacerbated in a large part by drugs. But they're not the common or usual outcome of drug-using such as mine. If they were, then NA, the drugs clinic and so many others wouldn't have been so bemused by my manic behaviour. Manic behaviour would be normal for drug-addicts. And it's not. Drug addicts take drugs to get high. They don't get higher off drugs than on them and remain that way cycling up and down for weeks on end. I've met a few people who developed bipolar or psychosis on giving up drugs; but that condition stayed with them for as long as they stayed clean. One had depressive psychosis and killed herself. The other is bipolar and self-medicates with drink as well as a drawer full of mood stabilizers, antipsychotics and sleep meds. She hasn't touched gear in years, wouldn't go near crack. And yet the mood swings continue. So I don't know.

I had a good doctor (I'm now in the process of getting my "care" moved from one provider to another so I haven't a clue where I presently stand....) From our very first consultation I discerned this one's good as psychiatrists go. That first time he was talking about personality disorders because I'd had an assessment and nothing concrete flagged up. Then I had a series of intense mood swings, went paranoid, then grandiose and was seeing visions and hearing voices. Knowing this was considered "abnormal" and that I had to live in the "real" world, despite my personal unreality, I ran to the doctor so at long last someone could see what really happened to me. I thought he would say I had a substance-induced disorder.

But no he told me I had a mental illness, and it's not even bipolar. It's bipolar plus schizophrenia. How's that for a double-whammy. I looked up this guy's credentials. He's an expert at addiction medicine and dual diagnosis, holds a teaching post at a top London hospital and practises privately on Harley Street. He happens to be the consultant psychiatrist at my local drugs clinic and that's how I met him. I looked up the symptoms of schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia. (Bipolar I already knew something about; depression I knew quite a lot about, having had varying grades of depression for years.) Schizophrenia is so difficult to pin down; I don't think anyone who thought they might have it could ever diagnose themselves; it's only when somebody says you have it that you can see this and that and the other characteristics are me. And they are. So I don't know what to do about that one.

I could try ignoring it and hope it might go away, but I can now see I've had certain symptoms for about seven years. I'm talking about the so-called negative symptoms (apathy, avolition, unsociability etc) more than the positive ones (thought disorder, hallucinations). My life has been in chaos all this time. A different chaos to drug-addict chaos. Addicts can put themselves together when needs must. I just give out this vibe I can feel other people picking up on. That's what bothers me the most. Whatever I do I never seem to pass as normal. I'm not talking about online I'm talking about real life where people read my face, my body language and judge me and keep their distance. I need to learn how to act normal. How to stare people straight in the eye, even though it hurts. Et cetera et cetera. A couple of people said to me I ought to keep better company. But in general I keep no company at all. Nobody is welcome at my house. I'm too paranoid to let them in. My home is my lair. If I were a caveman I'd be at the front door, waving a firebrand at wild bears.

I realized not long ago that I've not made a single new friend in about seven years. I've lost one good friend (for good). People don't want to hang out with me any more. Or perhaps they see that I don't want to hang out with them. I don't get lonely and I only feel truly comfortable on my own now. And my friends are cyber ones thousands of miles away. Anna is nearly 3000 miles away and she's my best friend in the world. So you see, in order to be "well", I need a personality transplant. And this is now what keeps me so depressed. Knowing it's not good enough being me; that I need to become someone else. Or else I will never pass through those magic doors marked "success". As for the doors marked "normality" ~ I avoid those ones at all costs!

Just gabblling (as per usual)

0220 WELL I WASN'T HALF RAMBLING on earlier. I was going into one because Deshane who is a mental health type personnage is coming to my house tomorrow (actually today, this afternoon) and I know I'm not feeling "right" so all that confusion with vivid references to mental disorderedness is me stewing because I'm stressed out.

I don't know whether to go to bed tonight or not I feel a bit "high" as doctors call it. (I don't really call it high but in the nuthouse the nurses used to say "we think you're getting a bit high" as an excuse to give a pissed off person with bipolar disorder who was JUST A BIT ANNOYED AND JUSTIFIABLY SO just as an excuse to wrestle him to the floor and slam a needle full of haloperidol in his arse.

I'm allergic to Haloperidol if they gave me that I really would get upset and sue. No kidding. I was in such a state on FIVE milligrams I got carted into hospital in an ambulance for not being able to walk any more. It was that serious, no kidding. If they DARED give me that I would take every measure of legal action, including assault charges because I know they will try and play mind games with me in there and I know I will probably end up in the nuthouse sooner or later. I don't feel like I'm coping that well and I get tired of looking after myself the way YOU would be tired of looking after a young toddler who keeps turning on the oven and leaving taps on etc. I don't do those things but that's the point it's what I DON'T do that causes problems. I don't do anything unless it's absolutely essential so this is my issue with "self-care" as they call it. Just being able to tell you doesn't make things any easier, any better or any different. Ill-informed and ill-trained people hav been taken in by my impression of normality for so long now I'm not about to start acting "ill" to be taken seriously they can either believe me or not I'm not putting any effort into any kind of mental health "performance".

You have to bear in mind I'm diagnosed with thee most complicated serious mental disorder there is with the widest range of symptoms of possibly ANY mental disorder so being happy can mean I'm actually manic, being quiet could mean I'm depressed or withdrawn, being normal might mean I'm plummetting in mood and just happen to me "euthymic" (in a normal mood) during the snapshot of time for which they see me. I'm getting tired of myself like I say and if anybody does make the offer again I will take them up and go in the nuthouse. I almost regret not going in when I was asked before but they would have medicated me away to nothing. British hospitals seem to be heavier on meds than American ones. You hear stories of physical restraints etc in America they are VERY seldom used here and only when absolutely necessary and only as a last resort. The first resort is medication, always medication and I don't want to be on heavy meds. I don't really want a mood stabilizer. He gave risperidone, I think, to establish whether I had a schizo-thing going on with my affective stuff. I think that was his reasoning.

I decoded what he said in Psychotic Appointment Number One when I was saying I didn't fit into diagnostic criteria and he himself said "what do you know about schizophrenia?" which did my head in so much I cried. Just thinking I had schizophrenia made me cry which is very unusual for me I wouldn't usually cry over something like that but I did over that one. Anyway he also asked whether I'd been OK for any length of time in the past 6 months. 6 months is the diagnostic time you need to have been ill to qualify for schizophrenia (or schizoaffective). I didn't realize what he was getting at and naively said "no I haven't been OK? What you mean all day? No." Bear in mind I had dealers ringing ME asking where I was! Not the other way round.

I'd lost it so bad I couldn't even score without a big load of stress. Literally everything in life stressed me so I avoided literally any engagement with reality outside going to get methadone, going shopping for essentials and going to horrible but essential appointments for methadone.

I have had problems that I now realize are this illness for a good five years straight. Severe problems coping with day to day life which both I and my drug workers just thought was can't be bothereds. But every single time I tried (and I did try) to snap out, to do a new thing, it just fell flat, didn't work, led to more distress, disappointment, dysphoria. And I was depressed enough already. That's why they started believing I had a personality disorder. I had a mental disorder I was self-medicating pretty successfully. Heroin really did work as a mood-stabilizer and antipsychotic. It was particularly good at levelling out my mood. I remember when I first got addicted, realizing there were no more hills and valleys just a flat line. But that flat line wasn't entirely flat it inclined downwards and I did go into the pits, just more slowly and I stayed down there a long, long time.

So this is more of me spouting on about mental shit I know. Think of it as unedited autobiography. I want my family to have stuff Ive written in case I die. Then they can assemble it into something publishable and hopefully get tons of cash from my death. That's what I'm hoping. A dead junkie makes a junkie's life story SO much more saleable. Hey imagine if someone made a film of my life?! I want Brad Pitt to play me.

OK I'm off now. I might even sleep ~ woo! Take care y'all...

Far better than earlier

MY ACCIDENTAL "OVER" DOSE IS WEARING OFF. I am 90% sure I took 8mg risperidone instead of the prescribed 4mg. 8mg is the maximum ordinary dose for bipolar; 10mg the maximum ordinary dose for schizophrenia. Some patients (exceptionally) take up to 16mg but not being used to 8mg it knocked the crap outta me. And it WAS accidental. Not every day I didn't take it was accidental but no way would I deliberately take too much. I put the pill on the side ready for me to take and thought I'd lost it. In actual fact I'd almost certainly taken it. I feel such an idiot. So that drivel you got earlier is just how I feel on too many pills I'm afraid. Sorry I can't come up with something more positive when I'm in a negative state of mind. I took heroin again today and again it was rubbish. This on borrowed money as the DSS have messed up my claim. They're paying 2 weekly and thoughtfully inormed me of this when I was in a manic psychosis so of course none sank in. I vaguely knew the spacing was changing from weekly to fortnightly; what I didn't grasp was that I'd have to do a week on NOTHING. Thanks so much DSS. You wanna know my change in my medical condition GET FUCKED. I'm not telling them nothing.

If I inform them I'm diagnosed schiz-affective they'll only use it to play mindgames against me. No I do not trust them.

Thank y'all for finding so many links. Michael David Crawford's Living With Schizoaffective Disorder geometricvisions link was particularly good. Like me he tells people he's bipolar. It is easier to understand than schizoaffective wheich means bipolar with sparkly knobs on. Like MDC I hallucinate too much to be bipolar eg when I'm ill (not all the time) one time I bought a cyder and my change jingled "fuck off!" at me. My psychiatrist said that is schizoaffective not bipolar. I didn't bang on about the weirder stuff, more the more ordinary stuff to do with mood swings. Yet still he recognized schizoaffective when he saw it. My coping mechanisms are low for bipolar, which is again schizoaffective. So I accept what is wrong with me.

Seaneen at the secret life of a manic depressive says to me congratulations you're the top rung of the psychiatric ladder. Which means I'm less likely to be deliberately mucked around like a person with anxiety disorder would be, so I'm glad to be taken seriously even if it is in a way I wouldn't like. Seaneen is only joking. She's a brave girl who has had severe bipolar disorder since her teens. If you didn't laugh, as they say, you'd cry. And in most circumstances laughter outdoes tears. She got a big knock back when the Kings College, London nursing course she'd set her heart on turned her down, but like I told her, she's only so upset because she WILL make a difference, WILL put her heart into whatever she does. Just by reading her I can tell she would be a credit to whatever institution, company, team she joined.

Somehow she manages to handle her illness without being childish. I know I am being childish when I mention suicidal ideation and everything being pointless and worthless. That's how I feel, but how can I express it in a grown up way? I have absolutely no idea. Most people don't blog their actual breakdowns the way I did, so maybe it's par for the course. I don't know.

Well I'm here on my own with Michael Jackson singing. I looked EVERYWHERE for some music I could tolerate on repeat play and Michael Jackson was all I could find. Bear in mind I'm talking DVDs not CDs so it must have good videos. A lot of music I like has no videos at all. So Michael Jackson it was, along with Abba (Mama Mia) and Varied Contemporary (Moulin Rouge). HMV seem to have a thing against Madonna. Not one single disc of any description. Madonna's collected videos I would have gone for but they weren't there.

Thanks again for all the links; I'm going to look through them more carefully. No link any of you came up with was one I'd already read and I have googled away. I still don't get what illness I'm meant to have. Is it bipolar plus schizophrenia (the implication is NO). Is it a cross between the two (the implication is yes). In ordinary people's terms I'd say schizoaffectives I've met were the most messed up of all psychiatric patients. They get ultra-floridly psychotic: manic with even more psychosis. In psychiatric terms disorganized or hebephrenic schizophrenia (that strikes in the mid to late teens and strikes HARD) is probably the worst psychosis you can get. Most people's idea of psychotic apperas to be paranoid schizophrenia. You have to bear in mind there's also depressive psychosis, manic psychosis and schizophrenic psychosis as well as paranoid psychosis. Each of these has a very distinctive flavour, which is why I say being in a madhouse is FAR more interesting than being in a drug detox. Heroin/crack addiction bends unique people the same way. While nutters go mad after their own fashion. I mean I went into a space where I was the centre of a tornado universe my head so frazzled I had no English thoughts just Noise. Now I didn't even know it was possible to go mad like that. But I did. That is severe mania. See I learned something from my experience. I hope one day I would be able to help another person. As it is I need help to help myself and I do need it. I'm tired and I don't know what to do. It's confusing being ill and dull being less ill (a psychiatrist would say I was still unwell, I know the way they think now) so I'm stuck between a frying pan and a fire all the time. How the hell I find my way to sanity I've absolutely no idea.

And thanks again DSS for making me have to go begging on the street, something I only did for tube fares, food and drugs when I needed heroin money. Now I need to do it just to survive. So thanks DSS for accepting how fucked up I am on paper then treating me like I'm able to negotiate beaurocracy only someone in a paid job should be expected to deal with. I'm putting this to Deshane on Thursday. This week there is a special nutter club because it's ENDING and I don't want to go. I went last week as a gesture of support more than anything and nearly had a panic attack over it so I just don't know what to do. I'm fed up of forcing myself into things in the name of "being grown up" and just suffering, gaining nothing from it.

I learned from the schizoaffective write up that of the 3 personality types: weird (eccentric); avoidant (anxious) and antisocial (don't-care) I'm the first yeah a weirdo so no wonder I have schizophrenia!

Right I have to go I'm dying for a cigarette. I hope y'all are well and thanks again for the links they were very handy.


PS Didn't someone recommend the film Bucket List to me? I looked and looked but cannot find the comment, but thanks whoever gave it. I've got that already on DVD, I bought it during my manic DVD shopping-spree!

Illustrated: see how tiny my robo-hammies actually were. These are fully grown specimens! They're very flighty and like nothing more than pinging onto the floor and vanishing for days at a time. Itchy (the only one of my 3 who was remotely hand-tame)spent more than a week of her life AWOL on 3 separate occasions, the swine!

Flight of the Blue Tits

DOES ANY OF MY WRITING ACTUALLY MAKE SENSE? Or is it just me reading it back wonky? It seems to be all biddybangingbong: all over the place. I don't judge other people's writing as good or bad; I just read it. Also, my attention span is all over the place. I'm having a bash at reading a fictionalized biog later on; it's in short sections with rotating perspective (ie one person speaks, then another does, so it's easier to stick with). I need to get my attention span back.

And what was I on about earlier? Akh, I was a bit hyper. I was playing the music you see in youtube screens below today's earlier post which brought back memories of love doves and mitsubishi ecstasy. My mood was up so the music took me higher into full-blown "euphoric recall". It was more than the tingly neck you get from dance music once you get into it, it was a reliving of the E-state. I think that's why I'm now called "bipolar".

Akh, how did me and words like bipolar and schizophrenia ever get together? I always knew there was something wrong and that it wasn't plain depression. Those nauseatingly repeated dsm diagnostic criteria that pop up whenever you google "depression" somehow never described me even when I felt hopeless and suicidal. Partly this was depression deluding me, partly it was having got so used to being in a negative mind-state I couldn't see the positive one required to make sense of diagnostic criteria.

I fit the manic ones far more easily than the depressed ones. Ukh. Me? Manic?? A maniac is a crazy person and crazy people are Somebody Else.

I have been trying to read up on my medical condition because apart from knowing what it is I didn't know anything about it. Now I know a little bit about it. The European and American versions of schizoaffective differ. I have the European version that is, in the language of psychiatrists, mood episodes with mood-incongruent psychotic features. I also do have symptoms of schizophrenia but didn't even know it. I never delved into schizophrenia before: you can't know if you've got it. Stuff like obsessive-compulsive or bipolar you could know about because the patterns are really clear. Schizophrenia just feels like extreme dissociation with everything taking huge effort, even simple things. That's schizophrenia. That's why schizophrenics seem lazy, they're actually stressed. It's a big thing to do a little thing. That's why things don't get done. That's why I'm in chaos. Now I get all these people helping me.

Ukh. People helping me. I just want to crawl away and hide.

I want a bird feeder for all these blue tits. I haven't actually seen a blue tit around here. They're so tiny, they're like blue sparrows only slightly smaller (more wren-like) and highly agile. They hang out more at bird-tables and are frequently seen feeding upside down. They form mixed flocks with great tits, according to Wikipedia.

I can't wait for tomorrow because tomorrow I can get some paints. Whether I actually will get them is anyone's guess. Usually I don't do anything I actually plan to. I know I should do it but get lost in the detail. There is too much gory detail in life. There is too much gore. That is why I hate life. That is why I have to win the euromillions lottery. It's £50 million next week. I need enough to get a house with high prison walls to keep the world OUT.

Well I don't feel depressed any more. I felt depressed last night so I took a load of methadone and slept deeply. Then I woke up feeling fine. There are FAR worse things you can get diagnosed with than "elevated mood" (and my mood is elevated far more than it is low) so I'm not complaining. As Serious Illnesses go I think I got just about the best one. I keep hearing about, thinking about, seeing all sorts of physical injury and disease that scares the living shit out of me. Then I'm really glad I don't have to deal with that. I might be thinking that because I'm ill, but at least I am just thinking it not being it. (And I could get lost from here on in, as I get lost in what I think... ukkkk is that why my Dr thinks I'm crazy?)

O I have to go I don't know where I'm going now. Blue tits! There ya go. Left it on a positive note didn't I!!


Illustrated: tiny tits in various positions in British gardens