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…

I woke up this morning and felt like my body didn’t belong to me. I was having to deliberate about each footstep and mentally tell myself what to do next. Even for really simple things like washing my hair. I just tried to call my friend, and she’s one of those people whose number I’ve been calling for years; it’s one of those numbers that my fingers know off by heart and I got it wrong. I had to stop, take a breath and then say the number in my head and concentrate hard on where to put each finger. Hanging out the washing and bringing in the dry laundry has been a severe challenge to my co-ordination.

It goes without saying, really, that this is testing my patience somewhat. In fact, even sitting here typing this is testing my patience severely. I’m – what?- a hundred words or so in and already I’ve had to use the spellchecker umpteen times. Usually my fingers fly over the keyboard and I can beat out paragraphs nearly as fast as I’m thinking them. Today, the effort involved is incredible.

It’s making me think, though, about how ineffectual print is to convey the act of writing. It’s hard to express the effort and thought and agony, sometimes, behind each word. My brain is mushed. Seriously. I just typed ‘between’ then, when I was trying to write ‘behind’. When I started writing the previous sentence, I couldn’t spell ‘brain’, either. Part of me wants to leave all the mistakes in, to demonstrate just how rubbish my physical ability to transcribe my mind’s wanderings is, but I am too vain and too much of a perfectionist to do this. I may feel like a retard today but i have no intention of giving anyone else the opportunity to think that.

I can only imagine that these are side-effects from the Lamotrigine. When my GP first said she wanted me on a mood stabiliser, she gave me a week to think about it and told me to go and do some research. Off I went, and looked at all kinds of things – the manufacturer’s statements, which of course are just glorified sales pitches written in reassuring medicalese; I looked at countless users’ and ’survivors’ websites, I looked at the NHS NICE Guidelines for Bipolar Disorder In fact, I looked at so much, and read so many books that my head went a bit potty with the weight of it all. But yes, the overwhelming concensus appeared to be that Lamotrigine was going to be nicer (I use that word with a hefty dollop of irony) than a lot of the other medication available.

You know, I still haven’t received a formal diagnosis. I am also not one to advocate the risky process of Self-Diagnosis With Internet Help. But really, I’m a mental health professional. I’ve worked with people in every state of illness imaginable for over ten years. Technically, my GP can’t make a diagnosis: I have to see a specialist to get one. Have I seen the specialist? Have I chuff. My GP mentioned cyclothymia, but as I understand it – and indeed as all the clinical guidelines instruct the doctors – depression in cyclothymics is ’subclinical’ rather than severe. I know, and my GP knows, that my depression is not ’subclinical’ in any way. Last year I was seriously bloody ill and posed a major risk to myself. God forbid anyone would read this and think that what I’m saying is [adopts Cartman voice here] ‘Nehhh. My depression is bigger than your depression,’ because I’m not. But what I am saying is that my depression is bigger than cyclothymic depression and therefore I need to see the specialist.

Gah. I am sitting here getting het-up and frustrated, and not just because it took me three tries to spell ’sitting’ just then. I am going to ring the GP’s surgery now and ask what’s happening about me seeing the psychiatrist, because the NICE guidelines say that I should. And I’m being prescribed medication which I have only ever professionally observed to be used to treat epilepsy or bipolar disorder. In fact, in the US, it’s specifically licensed as a treatment for both these conditions. The UK licensing issue is sketchier, because neither the BNF nor the patient information leaflet make any mention of any mood disorders whatsoever. Glaxo SmithKline’s clinical trials register is interesting, though. There is a part of me (mostly the vain woman part) that is extremely concerned that they felt the need to be researching the emergence of PCOS -type symptoms in female Lamotrigine users.

But I digress.

I am Not Well. Today I am also Not Well due to the medication I am taking because I am Not Well.

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I just had a phonecall from a guy who’s an occupational therapist with the local Primary Care Mental Health Team. This is a new team that works with GP services. My GP had referred me to them to explore options for counselling and support. The guy – we’ll call him Dave – said that he was loathe to work with me directly because I’m a member of staff and because there might inevitably be occasions where our paths would cross in the future. He then directed me to my employer’s Staff Psychological Wellbeing Service, who have an appointment for me tomorrow to see a counsellor there.

It’s a two and a half hour bus journey away. Plus a taxi to the place. Then two and a half hours home on the bus. All because I’m a member of staff and local services are ‘loathe’ to see me. the knock-on effect of this is that I have to cancel my GP appointment in the morning, and oh! joy of joys! the next available appointment is on Friday 14th, by which time I will have run out of all my medication. I have the option of calling every morning at 08.30h to see if there’s an ‘emergency’ appointment, but they can’t guarantee which doctor I’ll get to see. To say I am well and truly cheesed off with all this is an understatement.

The secretary at the Wellbeing Service asked me the reason for my referral. She said, ‘Is it stress?’

I almost laughed.

If I wasn’t stressed before, I certainly am now.