Thordora’s Interview Meme – Question 1

Thordora’s Interview Meme Rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying “Interview Me.”

2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.

3. You will update your blog with a post containing your the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

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The Five Questions From Salted Lithium To tempest carousel:

1. What events and/or behaviours led you to your latest attempt to find psychiatric help?

I was in the supermarket with my girlfriend and our housemate, and I began to feel strange. Very strange indeed. As I described it to my psychiatrist the other day, it was like I was wearing a helmet, a heavy, iron helmet, and I was straining to peer through a very narrow eye-slit. I’d had a moderately stressful day at work, but then most days there are challenging in one way or another. I’d been aware of an increasingly pervasive headache as the afternoon drew on, but by the time I’d reached the supermarket it was all-encompassing and my anxiety levels had risen dramatically. I remember bumping into one of my staff in there, and having this vague, distant, other-worldly conversation with her, where she recounted her recent holiday. I can recall thinking I really hadn’t a clue what on earth she was talking about.

By the time we’d reached the tills I was in full-blown panic mode. I’m no stranger to panic attacks in the supermarket, but I felt totally threatened – physically and psychically. I became so desperate to get home that I shouted at my girlfriend when she stopped to have a cigarette on the way to get a taxi from the nearby rank.

When we got home, I started wailing. The last time I can remember wailing like that was when I was delivering my son. There was a hideous bellowing wail in the distance, and as I lay there in the maternity suite I was thinking, Someone must stop that woman screaming, someone must help her. Then I realised that woman was me. And it was the same when I got home after the supermarket. It was like the wail came from somewhere else: that’s the only way I can adequately describe it. It’s pertinent to mention here that in the weeks leading up to this my girlfriend had been swept up in fairly traumatic circumstances; she was recovering as well as could be expected, but in retrospect I can see I’d prioritised her wellbeing over processing my own feelings. And I have no doubt that was the best way to cope with the situation, but inevitably it left me emotionally fragile.

I woke the next morning, after a restless night of paranoid dreams, with my mind racing and the uncontrollable urge to do something, anything, quickly and with urgency. My body was fizzing with so much electricity I could almost see the sparks zapping out of my fingers. I had enough presence of mind to know that All Was Not Well and while my girlfriend slept beside me I picked up my mobile phone and called the surgery to request an emergency appointment with my GP.

This was – what? – five or six weeks ago, maybe. Without a calendar I’m not exactly sure. My GP suspected that I was on the threshold of hypermania and immediately stopped my antidepressant, Duloxetine, which I’d been taking for the past nine months. Ironically, those nine months had probably been the consistently mentally well months I’d had since I was about sixteen. I’d been living with depression for twenty years or so and thought I’d finally found a medication that was effective and tolerable. In retrospect I can identify episodes of hypermania/mania in my past; last summer I was definitely elated for several months, and I was self-medicating with alcohol whilst I wreaked havoc on several valued friendships, my health and the Creative Writing Masters course I had nearly finished. My thesis remains unwritten. The episode was incredibly mixed, though, and I was on such a nihilistic trajectory that my GP and I concentrated on treating the depressive symptoms. I remember asking her, “Am I bipolar?” and she reassured me that it was unlikely, but offered me a psychiatric referral. Inevitably, because I thought I could cope, and because I worked for the same mental health services as the psychiatrist, and possibly because I wasn’t ready to start really facing facts, I turned her offer down.

And here we are, twelve months on, and oh! how things have changed…