I have tried to avoid talking about mental health with regards to my loved ones for a while now. My blog started from my partners dissolving mental health over a year ago. It was a truly painful experience but not the first encounter I have had with someone close to me unravelling.
I have hardly written anything about my Mother or other members of my family. Probably due to the fact that my childhood and relationship with my Mother has been responsible for so many of my own scars, I have tried to have one place where I can forget, not focus and aim to concentrate on more flippant topics.
The thing is though, that I am affected every day by the stuff that has formed me and that continues to form. My concern for my partner, my Mother, my lack of closeness to my siblings who all have different Fathers to me and to add to this, my own well being at times and my thoughts on how well in reality I do cope with all of my past and present.
I had a text arrive on my phone last night from a friend of my Mother. He is a French guy my age who my Mother became close to whilst he was in London. The text sent me into a state of anxiety as I read his words. He wrote that my Mother had texted him to say that her Bi-Polar disorder had become more critical and the doctors had decided to put her back on Lithium. The way he wrote the text sounded like something specific had happened that day to her, though he didn’t explain what exactly. My anxiety heightened to a level I have experience in feeling on the subject of my Mother.
I live in fear that she may break again and be admitted to hospital or that the phone will ring one day and I will hear that she drank one Gin to many, popped one pill to many, had one to many a harsh word with my out of control half brother who himself started to hit the self destruct button many years ago.
It turned out that when I called her to see how she was, she answered the phone and was in the gym, burning off calories that she can’t afford to lose due to her fairly recent add on obsession to abstaining from eating. She lives on a diet of Gin and slim-line tonic and one small meal a day at the moment and her weight has gone down to scary supermodel size. This does not look good on an 18 year old let alone a woman in her 60’s. She told me she would call me back when she was finished her bone cracking work out and that she was fine.
She called me back a bit later and we had a very unusually long telephone conversation that evening. Frenchy is away again for 4 days on work and with the pair of us being hopelessly broke, this left me in Paris with no money, no friends and no enthusiasm, so it was nice to hear my Mothers familiar voice.
We talked of family. Which is never positive. We talked about her, which is always worrying. We talked of me and Frenchy, being impoverished and struggling with life. We talked of me and my unending feelings of looserism. Lack of friends, social life and general lack of belongings due to them being in London and me being in Paris and not having enough money to go fetch them.
And I feel decidedly blue.
My Mother was in good spirits despite the fact that my eldest half sister has just kicked her husband out again due to his addiction to alcohol and gambling. My half brother is cultivating his abusive streak and washing it down with a combination of alcohol and cocaine and a string of unsuccessful attempts to find a job. My Grandmother has become a recluse and depressed since my Grandfather died, despite the fact that he himself gave her no happiness whilst he was alive, suffered a nervous breakdown and was in-fact sexually deviant. I always knew that he was disfunctionally attracted to two out of five of my siblings. One of them being me. The last time he tried it on with me was when I was 18, he never pushed it thank God, but I was the only one in the family that he confided in about his own childhood abuse by his Mothers friends and a teacher. I always felt sorry for him rather than angry, he was a tortured man and spent his whole life hiding behind a cloak that was only transparent to me.
I am left wondering how sane I actually am. Wondering how much all the people in my life have affected me. I long to go get some therapy but I can’t afford it, so I have decided to spill the beans here and feel paranoid and scared writing about it all. I feel like a big gaping wound. The loose stitches that I have personally sewed in order to keep my wounds from showing unpick themselves with every word I type.
I cope by getting up every day and doing what everybody else does, but am I really coping?
I talked to my Mother about Frenchy. She asked how he was doing. He is doing well and after his breakdown last year, he is slowly putting the pieces back together. The thing that increasingly worries me though and I am starting to feel anger about, is my inability to understand the mental health system.
Frenchy was admitted to a psychiatric ward last year after complete meltdown. He was let out after a period of about 5 weeks and sent home with a bag of rainbow assorted pills. He spent the first couple of months walking around like the living dead, drugged up on a cocktail of unpronounceable medication. He visited his psychiatrist once a week to “check in” and keep an eye on him. This man is apparently one of the top psychiatrists in France.
Well I think he is a complete fuck up. I am angry at him. On many different levels.
I am angry at the mental health system. I hate doctors. I hate them because they can’t fix my loved ones.
My Mother walks around rattling, as does my boyfriend now. Medication is fine, I understand that there is a need for it, but it took doctors 58 years of my Mothers life to diagnose her with Bi-Polar disorder. She went through several break downs and other atrocities, a painful living existence and putting her family through ceaseless feelings of concern and fear. She now has her diagnosis and we all know the reason why she is the way she is.
But why the hell does the system shell out free medication, but charge extortionate rates for good therapy? I understand that some psychiatric illnesses need a life time of medication, but medication is the bandage for the wound, to keep it from bleeding and oozing pain, therapy is the open air the wound needs to attempt to let it dry out, show itself and be made aware of its very existence.
Since my Mothers last break down 4 years ago and her long awaited diagnosis, she has become even more crazy. She has an ever increasing collection of tattoos, 5 at the last count, with another in the pipeline. 11 holes in her ears and a diamond that has been injected above her lip. Her drinking has become very regular and has taken up asking for pot from my brother on occasion. She frequents the local bars in her area alone on a regular basis and chats up any man that happens to be near her. Her hair changes colour weekly, she has the most extraordinary outbursts of temper and has been know on occasion to get out of bed a 2 or 3 in the morning, get in the car and drive off to God knows where.
So tell me doctors, what have you fucking done for her lately?
Because although on the outside this woman looks like she is living her life in colour and has the ability to be the soul of the party, nobody sees what’s going on inside of her and nobody is forcing her to face her problems.
When she was recently put back on Lithium a few weeks ago, he doctor suggested she go back into The Priory for a “rest”. At 700 pounds sterling a day, this is obviously not an option for my Mother, and my Mother being who she is wouldn’t dream of going into a NHS hospital again for all the tea in China. So it was left there. No after care, no insistence that she get referred to an affordable good therapist. Just a pat on the back and another bottle of pills.
Fucked up.
Which leads me onto Frenchy. Who I love and care for. Who is my lover and my friend and who I feel needs and deserves more help than he is getting.
Now he pays good money every month for medical care, so why is he not getting it?
He has been on medication for a good 7 or 8 months now. His weekly visits to his psychiatrist have been lowered to once every 3 – 4 weeks. He was referred to an analyst months ago, but at € 180 a session there is no way he can afford it. Frenchy being who he is, is too proud to explain that he has not got that kind of money along with the fact that he is not keen on therapy. It doesn’t take a intellectual to work out that he has been avoiding the issue for months now. So why is his psychiatrist not chasing this up?
And why after 5 weeks of Frenchy being admitted to psychiatric hospital and being put on heavy medication, has no-one told him what the fucking hell is going on with him???
No diagnosis. No explanation. Just a shit load of pills.
How can you medicate someone if you don’t know what the cause is???
So Frenchy just keeps chewing his way through his daily doses and I watch him getting more and more concerned with the amount of weight he is putting on due to the side effects of the medication. Our financial problems and the fact that although he is getting work in, what he really needs is his next big project to happen are making him feel down and depressed.
Why the fuck is he depressed when he is being prescribed an inordinate number of pills??
Why the fuck am I the only one who notices this???
I am angry, pissed off and feel anarchic. I don’t like to see the people I love suffer.
When I first came back to Paris after Frenchy got out of hospital, I asked if Frenchy could ask his doctor if I could come to one of his visits with him. I wanted to hear what the doctor had to say about Frenchy, to see if he had any advice for me as Frenchy’s next of kin so to speak.
The answer I got back from this quack was that he was not there to survey me, it was Frenchy he was treating.
Well let me tell you something Doctor Duck, I don’t need your fucking surveillance, what I need is some fucking answers from you. I want to know what gives you the right to fill my loved one’s gills with meds and not take any fucking responsibility for the fact that maybe there is more you could do to help him.
You, with your nice home and your big fat pay check coming in monthly for anaesthetising your patients into walking around like zombies.
You, who refuses to give any explanation, diagnosis, or general information on what the fuck is going on.
You, who sits in you office and refuses to speak to me, even though I live with Frenchy’s pain too.
You little shit.
I have decided this week, that when Frenchy gets back from being away and makes his next appointment to go see Doctor Duck, that I am going with him. Doctor Duck will not know about this until I enter through the door of his office. I will have a list of questions I want answered.
So help me God, if he does not answer them, Hell hath no fury…
I have had enough.
