In contrast to recent trend this book is first and foremost a celebration of my adolescent and teenage years. It begins though at the age of forty three following a rapid decline in mental health with subsequent multiple diagnoses starting with Bipolar Disorder and finally settling on Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder.
The process has proffered insight and clarity to an early life of extremes, experienced not through circumstance as I acknowledge many children/teenagers are forced to, but through personal choices and the unrestricted freedoms afforded me through growing up in a country at war.
Those somewhat crazy yet blissful years are in stark contrast to my last twenty where I effectually lost the person I once was and slowly yet progressively became someone I have often been both ashamed of and disappointed in.
By describing the last five years, albeit briefly, I would *hope*/want to convey how seemingly ineffectual life circumstances can negatively effect mental health, and more importantly how to approach getting help, the over-riding messages being ‘help them to help you’ and 'do it sooner than later'.
An equally brief account of my ongoing treatment, recovery and hopefully the return/restoration of, if not all, then a significant part of my former self might also encourage those who have chosen not to seek help, for whatever reasons, to do so. The positive effects of first coming to terms with the fact you are ill, and then speaking to people who can both identify with and affirm your symptoms are immediate, or were for me anyway.
*Hope*
Hope is a strange thing. A currency for people who know they are losing. The more familiar you are with hope, the less beautiful it becomes.
From the Scottish movie ‘Sixteen Years of Alcohol’ written and directed by Richard Jobson,
ex frontman of the Scottish punk band, The Skids.
Mental Health Chapter Intro - Please excuse the language ! (Written 20ish years ago so now 100% sorted!)
1983, aged twenty, I left home, Zimbabwe, for the fifth time and headed for Scotland with a hundred and thirteen(ish) pounds in the pocket of my only pair of jeans and a bunch of tee-shirts quoting the proceeds of their purchase was going to pay for ammunition to shoot rhino poachers.
I also had an address for the sister of a friend of the brother of a girl friend who might, if asked nicely put me up for a while.
I was heading for Aberdeen to become a North Sea saturation diver. The plan was simple. Tell them I could dive, (I’d read the US Navy Dive Manuals from front to back and practised as much as I could at the bottom of our pool at home) jump in and wing it whilst trying not to disable or kill myself, make a shed-load of coveted Great British Pounds, go home, sell them on the black market and buy a farm, a pick-up, a couple of dirt bikes and a houseboat and live happily ever after. Don’t you just hate it when a plan goes to shit...
Somewhere in the homesickness (heart wrenching and nausea inducing, that took years to pass), and the numerous disappointments I somehow lost the person I was before I left home and have only seen him once briefly since.
2006, aged forty-three, I started to get ill again. Another breakdown? I’d had what I thought was my first one in 2002. I gave myself a mental slap “Get a fucking grip Gav” Once again, I failed to make the link between my symptoms and mental health, or lack thereof, despite a progressive increase in both their number and severity. Had all that petrol syphoning and alcohol abuse in my teens finally caught up with me?
My memory, already appalling was deteriorating, and at times non-existent. I was increasingly fuzzy, confused, disoriented, hugely indecisive, angry, aggressive, paranoid, anxious and depressed. My head when trying to work, relax or sleep was often filled with noise, either that of a TV on an untuned channel, someone hitting a large thin piece of metal with a pick-axe handle or heavy rain, the latter convincing enough to have me repeatedly check outside before leaving the house.
There were voices in my head too, though not the kind that whisper “kill Johnny Wilkinson”. They were both me, one calm, considered, understanding, logical, and seriously outgunned by the other who was the extreme opposite. They dominated a large proportion of the hours I was awake with endless minute observations, discussions, arguments and rants about anything and everything. Oh, and rumination. Lots of rumination, which along with the head noise made sleep nigh on impossible.
By chance I caught the BBC documentary ‘The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive’ presented by Stephen Fry and immediately thought, “that’s me”. I took the test for Manic Depression, or Bipolar Disorder, hosted on the BBC’s website which returned a score way above the threshold for potential positive diagnosis. It was time to get help.
During ten months of therapy and med’s my diagnosis changed three times, from Bipolar Disorder to ADHD with both Social and Performance Anxiety Disorders and finally to Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. (OCPD has nothing to do with ticks or rituals but is instead a combination of Social and Performance Anxiety Disorders and Perfectionism) Oh, I also suffered with Pauresis and Parcopresis but more of that later, maybe.
Despite the apparent credibility of all three diagnosis, my psychotherapist, whom I trust implicitly, doesn’t believe I fit into any one of them but instead exhibit certain traits from all of them. I’m still struggling with I how I feel about that. I’m almost pissed off at not having a definitive explanation, an excuse maybe for why my life went so badly wrong, and why I didn’t do something about it when I was still young enough to have options, or those that appealed to me anyway.
Malcolm has proffered theories for much of it, none of which currently sit well with me despite being perfectly logical. This is because to my mind they all amount to some kind of weakness, something I dedicated a great deal of my adolescent/teenage years to invalidating. The experience post diagnosis, (Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychotherapy and a decent sized forest worth of personal research) though still in it’s infancy, has been enlightening, both making sense of the past twenty years, and furnishing explanations for the many behaviours displayed and the resultant incidents encountered during my pre-adult years, the latter of which, I hasten to add made them the absolute joy that they were.
The experience has also had a profound effect on the way I think about and view life, not just my own but that of those other people so obviously having a hard time of it. The truth is, and at the risk of sounding melodramatic, only circumstance and a small number of very special people stood between me and a life on the streets, and I could see me walking past myself sitting in some doorway and thinking 'get a fucking job you lazy bastard'.
I now understand how easy it is to miss, or accept as normal, deteriorations in mental health, and as a result life in general if they sneak up on you slowly enough, and/or you’re too fucked-up to notice. Had my symptoms or their effects not progressed the way they did or had I not been a Stephen Fry fan I may have continued to live with them indefinitely, gradually declining until of little use to either myself or anyone else.
This begs the question, how many other people are living shit, or worse, lives because they misguidedly believe their symptoms are the result of something other than mental illness, and in turn, what effect are they having on the lives of those close to them?
With respect to my own life all my symptoms bar one probably, memory, have improved, most dramatically and as a result I no longer career from cup-overflowing to where-the-fuck-is-my-cup. I’ve managed to draw lines underneath my many regrets, a good number, if not all of which were my own doing irrespective of the excuses OCPD or any of my collective symptoms might afford me. I’m at ease, though still begrudgingly, with where I currently find myself in life and try to look forward to each and every day as it comes. I’m in group psychotherapy, this the final step in my recovery. It might take another year, it might take longer, it doesn’t matter and I look forward to every session, a lot. I look forward too to getting the real me back and can’t wait to introduce him to all the people that I love.
I’ll end this with a question I have asked myself often over the past few years. If it were possible, would I swap a more ordinary, less exciting first twenty years for a more enjoyable and successful second twenty? The answer without a doubt is “would I fuck!”
