No Child Of Mine by Judith Haire

 

Don’t talk.    Don’t feel.   Don’t be.  Learn to hide your feelings and thoughts.  Yes that’s better.  Blame the illness on your genes.   You’re mad.   You’re bad.  There’s no hope for you and we told you so.  You can’t blame us  –  you made your choices. We tried to help you when you were a teenager and very depressed.  Don’t you remember?   We took you to see a Child Guidance Specialist.  He gave you Diazepam and Mogadon didn’t he.   Yes it was a shock to us all when you became psychotic.    A cocktail of psychotropic drugs, electro convulsive therapy and shame.  There, that’s the best we can do.  We did come to see you in hospital.   We came every day.  Some days the nurse told us not to bother because you were in your own little world.  The psychiatrist told us he thought you were hallucinating and having delusions.  We were very worried about you when you said you didn’t want to take your medication any more.   Shouldn’t you have been on a maintenance dose?  Yes we knew you had side effects but surely there was other medication you could have taken for those?  Oh and you have cataracts?  Don’t worry we can operate on your eyes – did you take Chlorpromazine by any chance?  We’ll get your sight back.  And your eyes will be like brand new.  

 

You can’t have your job back you’re dead wood and you’ve taken too much sick leave.

Try to do something useful with your life dear.  Oh you wanted children?  Well it’s probably best you didn’t.  Not with your history.  

 

It’s not our fault.   We had no idea you were struggling.  We didn’t realise just how far we had pushed you.  Now you say you were in an abusive relationship well we told you to leave.  Yes you did leave and you broke down.  That’s what comes of bottling it all up dear.

No one can hear your headaches you’ve got to find your voice.  

I can hear screaming.  After a moment I realise it’s me.  I’m sobbing.  I shout out “He’s going to get me”  I sit up suddenly. I shake.  

 

I’m cold.  I wrap myself more tightly in my blankets and try to sleep.  Memories of another day are receding.  Full of self-loathing I promise myself I will seek help tomorrow.   I pick up the phone.  I talk to a well being practitioner.  I  explain  I’m having night terrors.  She tells me that children have night terrors,  I know.  They’ve never gone away.   I can hear her typing.    She doesn’t understand.   I go to one session of counselling.  I go to another but leave half way through.  Still, no one hears my voice;

 

© Judith Haire 2017

Our Encounters with Stalking 9781910919248 (Due 31st October 2017) AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER

Source: Our Encounters with Stalking 9781910919248 (Due 31st October 2017) AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER

What is Social Anxiety?

Source: What is Social Anxiety?

What Chester Bennington’s death tells us about mental health awareness

Dr Goat's Blog

Millions of us were shocked and hurt by the sudden death of Chester Bennington, who committed suicide two days ago. He was 41. If you don’t know who he is and have never heard anything by Linkin Park, l suggest you familiarise yourself with Hybrid Theory immediately.

As well as sadness and disbelief, public reactions to suicide invariably include the judgemental. It’s the coward’s way out. It’s selfish to those left behind. They should have just pulled themselves together. I’ve seen plenty of those over the last day or so, but they have been far fewer than those expressing sorrow and sympathy, and many people have directly challenged the more hateful comments.

Encouraging as it is, what bothers me is how those defences are being constructed. They all seem to vary on a theme: that depression is a disease caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, which people…

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EMDR and Preverbal Infant Trauma: My Experience So Far

Source: EMDR and Preverbal Infant Trauma: My Experience So Far

Disabled claimants told: 2 yrs to get job or be sanctioned for a year

SKWAWKBOX

The government is pressing ahead with the roll-out of its Universal Credit (UC) replacement to the benefits system in spite of huge delays and problems – and continuing problems so ingrained that foodbank use has increased sharply in every area where is has been implemented.

UC contains a draconian set of provisions, including a ‘Claimant Commitment’ (CC) – a set of imposed requirements to which the claimant has no right of appeal whatever. As the government’s guidance on CCs states:

There is no right of appeal if a claimant refuses to accept their Claimant Commitment and the requirements that have been set out in it.

A JCP adviser – who might be incompetent, inexperienced, bitter, have a personality clash with the claimant or just simply be having a bad day – is the final arbiter of whether a CC is reasonable and achievable, and even a patently bad decision…

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Addiction doc says: It’s not the drugs. It’s the ACEs – adverse childhood experiences.

ACEs Too High LLC

He says: Addiction shouldn’t be called “addiction”. It should be called “ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking”.

He says: Ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking (what traditionalists call addiction) is a normal response to the adversity experienced in childhood, just like bleeding is a normal response to being stabbed.

He says: The solution to changing the illegal or unhealthy ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking behavior of opioid addiction is to address a person’s adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) individually and in group therapy; treat people with respect; provide medication assistance in the form of buprenorphine, an opioid used to treat opioid addiction; and help them find a ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking behavior that won’t kill them or put them in jail.

This “he” isn’t some hippy-dippy new age dreamer. He is Dr. Daniel Sumrok, director of the Center for Addiction Sciences at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s College of Medicine. The center is the first to receive the…

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FIDDAMAN BLOG: DEMAND CHEMICAL IMBALANCE REDACTION

I am highlighting celebrities, journalists, organisations who continue to spout the chemical imbalance nonsense.

Source: FIDDAMAN BLOG: DEMAND CHEMICAL IMBALANCE REDACTION

talking about “psychosis”…

recovery network: Toronto

Psychosis is not a “thing” except as a kind of  aperture or a lens through which we view someone struggling. It’s an interpretation, a way of seeing, of categorizing, naming, and talking about a person’s struggle.

That that lens, that interpretation, that way of seeing and talking about tells us as much and more about the person doing the looking as it does about the person whom they gaze upon and who is struggling.

… and that’s all our choice, the one we make.

Here’s one way of choosing…

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What Matters Matters – How my psychiatrist got it right (after so many got it wrong)

Future Patient - musings on patient-led healthcare

Asking ‘What matters to you?’ rather than ‘what’s the matter?’ has become a clever bit of reframing within the health service, intended as a phrase to re-imagine the relationship between healthcare provider and those who use services. And to get us to focus on the real needs and wishes of those with health conditions.

But be careful. Context is all. And the devil is in the detail of how it is asked, who asks it, with what intent and whether there is the capacity to do something about it.

—

June 1986: Geneva, prior to the World Health Assembly. I was 24, excited and working with a network of professional and patient organisations lobbying for better pharmaceutical use internationally. With my good friend, the late great, Andy Chetley, we had written ‘Problem Drugs’ an activist’s guide to better use of medicines in developing countries. My life was on the up…

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