Some Personal Stuff

 

I've need a transfer from my current housing situation, but I've got a problem getting the medical documentation I need

The problem I have with getting the medical documentation I need to get more appropriate housing and other things is the form of treatment I have chosen and the rationale behind it.

Under normal circumstances a person suffering the kind of mental illness I am suffering has to be heavily medicated.

I believe – and there is a growing body of research to back this up – that both the effectiveness of these drugs is questionable in the long run, and that they come with a number of dangers, some of which I am particularly vulnerable to, like drug dependency.

I also believe that many of the difficulties that bring out my mental illness, and interfere with the treatment I have chosen are circumstantial, and not at all to do with my mental health. In fact I believe that the frequency and severity of events that I have been living with now for a number of years speaks for itself. It would be enough to drive anyone mad.

So, since I’m stuck here the usual psychotherapeutic way of deal with circumstances you can’t change is to change the way you process the information. When I detail what my treatment actually is, I think you’ll find much of it is about changing my thought processes and behaviours to do just this.

So what is my treatment? Well, after doing a lot of reading about conventional therapies, and having tried everything from CBT to mindfulness, to rehab, to phychologists, I decided to start from scratch on a different premise.

The premise was to allow myself to recognise that these circumstances that I can’t change are quite unreasonable, and to allow myself be angry about that. To pursue my own good health in spite of that fact. And when I looked at the evidence around what actually does work for good mental health, I found that there were no easy paths. The things that work are the basics. Sleep, good food, exercise, keeping your mind active...basically having a healthy lifestyle.

I have also had to persue this new regimen while often under duress, so I have had to think about how the fact that I am constantly triggered while going through these routines will affect what I’m doing.

So, when you are triggered, the part of your mind that thinks creatively shuts down, and you fall back into automatic routines. At the beginning this was a real problem, because almost all my automatic reactions were unhealthy. But since I have started this new routine I have been slowly building up new habits. And it’s working. It’s a slow, painful process, but it’s working.

After years of work on myself, I no longer run away and get wasted at some party whenever there’s a problem. I am rid of all my addictions aside from pot and cigarettes, which are next on the list but require a peaceful place to be to get there. I have read 80 – 100 books, and studied them, highlighting and rewriting parts of them as I go to memorise them. I have done a number of commercial pieces including a DVD cover, a large sculpture that got David Walsh’s attention, and various bits of advertising done for friends. I have also done some quite laborious storyboarding for movies and music videos.

My theory is that if I have a couple of books going, my blog to write, and a few projects going on at any one time, if I get triggered at home I can fall into which ever one of these healthy activities jumps into my racing mind from moment to moment.

But all the while, things in these flats have been getting slowly worse for me since I was at Stainforth Court. That’s not to say the incidents overall in the flats have been worse. The problem is the amount of negative attention on my flat in the general community, and the amount of agro, and outright abuse directed at it, and occasionally threats. This went from almost non of the agro involving me personally at stainforth court, to one or two people here causing me trouble (leading to getting assaulted) to now, which has all of a sudden turned into every single drug user in these blocks convinced I am a narc, which I think anyone will tell you is a dangerous and unpredictable situation. There are at least six or more flats in miles street and about the same in the livingston street flats. I am inundated with curses, loud banging, hooning, people at my door with serious mental illness. I try to put my headphones on, but even then I hear them, and it is the first thing I hear as soon as I take them off. Most nights I go to bed hearing “fuck, fuck, fuck” and wake up to the same. It’s absurd.

At stainforth court I was at least quite high up and away from most of the chaos. I only ever really had to deal with it as I was coming and going while I was there. The flat that I am in now in comparison, is like a fish bowl. If there are a number of people in the neighbourhood who want to express their unhappiness about me, then there is scarcley ten minutes that go by on some days when I am not hearing some sort of aweful voice or curse or otherwise. Often it is not necessarily directed at me, but it IS directed at me just often enough that every noise I hear is spiking my adrenalin.

It’s worse here now than it was leading up to my attack, because where back then it was just the one flat that I was finding threatening, now I get abuse from so many flats that I never know which direction it’s going to come from next.

It’s sending me into coughing fits that last days, and as my doctor said to me once, even smokers don’t cough like that. It’s a panic attack.

So what I need is some sort of social psychiatrist who is aware of the works of people like Loren Mosher, who believe in and can see the social affects of mental health, and are on board with me trying to find a social solution...namely, getting me way from the abusive environment and into something more suitable.

So far, I don’t feel that any of the medical professionals I have seen so far seem to hear or understand exactly what I’ve been living with, and their descriptions of my circumstance to not at all reflect what I am going through. I think to a social psychiatrist or any reasonable person really, that the cause of my distress is plain, obvious and serious.

The problem with my chosen treatment as far as putting me into another block of flats or any kind of closely bunched up housing, is that another theory I have been working on to keep myself level, is that when I am angry or sad or want to sing, or cry or yell, that I allow myself to. The theory that I have been working on is that my body and mind know what they need. Also, when I do go into coughing fits and panic attacks, it sounds quite loud and distressing. But I need to go through these things. It was my doctor that recommended me to have a shower if I need to decongest. I need to breathe. And allowing myself to go through these things have been critical to the success of my treatment. What I need is a safe environment to go through this without copping abuse or feeling like I am inconveniencing others. This is critical if I am to re-train my adrenal system to realise there is no external danger.

Unfortunately the noises I make while I am going through this would upset any neighbour. If I am moved to another block of flats and they start getting upset about the noises I am making, the whole process starts all over again and nothing has been solved.

What I need is for housing to recognise that is repeated exposure to extreme life events that has made me this sensitive to external noises in the first place, and it is the same exposure that has made my recovery such an extreme and noisey process to go through.

I am getting to the limit to how much of my lifestyle I can change while I am being triggered all the time. I think I have done quite well so far under very extreme circumstances, and what I need is a quiet, safe space where I can sometimes completely loose my na-na while my head tries to come to terms with the nightmarish conditions I’ve lived under for far too long.

I need a doctor and some other form of medical professional that understands and are on-board with all of this. Anything less is of no use to me whatsoever.