Group Therapy

This is the latest in a series of posts about a breakdown I had in 2010.
The first post is here.

Mount Snowdon: a turning point

I have agreed to attend Group Therapy courses because if I turn them down, there is nothing else. No other help available. The GP thinks it will be good for me to have to get up and be somewhere three times a week. The lady from Psychiatric Services thinks Group Therapy will keep me going until she can get me into the "Working Through Depression" group. I would rather just stay in bed and wait to die. But I said I'd do it.

And so, the following Monday, I get myself up and wander into town. I stop in a cafe and buy myself the largest possible latte, with added syrup, and sip it on my way to group therapy. I try to look as inconspicuous as possible as I wander along a main road of almost stationary traffic, and turn into the grounds of the mental institution. In reality, they probably don't care one way or another. I'd like to think I don't look particularly crazy; it's entirely possible that even if I am noticed, people would just think I was a member of staff, or visiting someone. Or not even care.

I sign in at the reception desk, which is behind a glass screen as if the staff need to be kept away from us, lest they catch our madness. I am told to wait in the waiting area. There are some chairs and some magazines. I am early. I take a seat. More people turn up; the waiting area is tiny and packed with people who don't make eye contact with each other. Eventually a lady comes out from behind a locked door, and takes us through to another room. We all sit down, and don't make eye contact. I assume this is the first week the group has run, but actually most of these people have been coming for several weeks. I am the only new person; they just don't speak to each other. Except for one lady, who turns up late and talks enough for all of us put together. It basically becomes her own personal therapy session.

Group therapy consists of this: a group of socially awkward, horribly depressed and anxious people sitting in a small conservatory crammed with too many vinyl hospital chairs and some dusty plastic plants. The lady running the course goes off to get her folder, then comes back. We all get a handout about today's session, and then she sits and reads it to us. I sit there, incredulous. Do I have to sit through two hours of this? How is this going to help me with anything other than my insomnia? Ironically, this is the assertiveness group, and I am not assertive enough to stand up and tell them what a crock of shit this is. So I sit and sip my coffee while we read through the worksheet, pausing every couple of sentences for the loud lady to tell us all how this point is relevant to her life, her week, her dog. Sometimes the lady running the group tries to be assertive herself, and ask whether anyone else in the group has anything to add. Mostly, though, she lets the loud lady do the talking.

There is no Goal Setting group that week, so I am granted a few days' peace before the relaxation group on Friday. The loud lady is in the relaxation group too; as is my brother in law, who I barely know. We don't really get on. He usually tries to tell me what to do, and I usually bite my tongue so as not to start a family feud. Between the two of them, I don't feel very relaxed. The same lady comes in to lead the group again. She hands round sheets, and reads them to us. I am sensing a theme for group therapy. After an hour of discussing how the loud lady finds it hard to relax, we go into the gym and lay on camping mats with pillows under our knees. The lady puts on some relaxing music, and reads a text to us while we close our eyes and "relax." Afterwards, the lady tells each of us how well we did at relaxing, or whether we still seemed tense. And then I leave, as quickly as I possibly can.

The groups are the same the following week. I am not impressed. 

This week is my first time at Goal Setting group. The loud lady is there again. My heart sinks. The same lady is running the group, and seems powerless to stop the loud lady from taking over. We spend the first hour having a sheet read to us, like story time at school. Then we all get a "goal setting" sheet. Apparently in the second hour of this group, we review the goals we set last week, and set a goal for next week. This weekend, I am being taken by a friend to climb Mount Snowdon (more about that here). It's something I agreed to ages ago, and he is holding me to it as a way of ensuring I am ok and making me Get Out And Do Things. On my goal sheet, I put "to climb Mount Snowdon and get to the top." When we go around the room and read out our goals, I have my first ever inkling that actually, I'm not so bad; actually, I may be on the mend and not as hopeless as I thought. Everyone else's goal involves doing the washing up or writing a letter. Jaws drop when I read out my goal.

I attend Group Therapy for a few more weeks. Irritatingly, my GP is right - it's not the therapy, so much as having to get up and out of the house three times a week that helps. After therapy, I go back to the cafe, order another large latte, and curl up in an arm chair upstairs, alternately reading a book and watching the world go by outside. It's my own form of therapy. Sometimes I have two or three coffees, curled up in my armchair, reading endless memoirs of depression and madness.

After a few weeks, I start missing groups. I'm going away for the weekend, or the weather is nice and I want to go to the beach for the day. 

One day the loud lady is in a pub I am having a drink in with friends. She asks me, in front of everyone, whether I think Group Therapy is helping me. I do not return to Group Therapy after this. They call to check I am ok, and I say I don't appreciate being "outed" in front of people who may not have known I was attending Psychiatric Services.  She doesn't have an answer for that.

The next part of the story is here

Thank you for reading. If you have enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends using the buttons below.

Squeaky Clean Like a Rubber Ducky

This week, I have been medication-free for a year.

I had something of a colossal breakdown in the summer of 2010, which resulted in my being signed off work for a month, and eventually taking voluntary redundancy. I scared a lot of people, lost a lot of weight, and developed a fairly ridiculous drinking habit (Pisang Ambon, anyone?) I tried a few different medications before finding one that seemed to take the edge off it, and after a couple of months things settled down.

When I fell pregnant and it dawned on me I would have to come off the medication, I was seized by panic. I knew there was no choice but to come off it, but I was petrified I’d end up going back to the comatose, suicidal heap I’d been before. I came off the medication, and between the withdrawal, the usual first trimester hormones, and problems with S’s father, my first 12 weeks of pregnancy were something akin to hell. My GP was keen for me to go back onto the medication as soon as I reached 12 weeks – apparently after that first 12 weeks it’s not such a big deal any more. I had an appointment with her, where she told me: “you can go back onto them, and only a small amount will get to the baby. It’ll only have a bit of withdrawal when it’s born, which will probably just mean it cries a bit more and you probably won’t notice that. Or if you’re breastfeeding, the drug will still be passed to it through your milk, so it won’t have any withdrawal.” I was horrified at this concept – I’d read articles previously about antidepressants and the argument over their being given to children and adolescents; the argument against that use was that a child’s brain is not fully developed, and antidepressants affect the way the brain works. The thought of feeding my baby a brain-altering chemical as it developed inside of me made me sick, and I refused point blank to go back onto the medication. Also, once I’d gone through the pain of coming off them once, I didn’t want to then go back onto them, knowing I’d have to go come back off them and go through it all again at some point. And so, instead of medication, I agreed to regular appointments with my GP (so she could check I wasn’t going mad, and do that ridiculous depression questionnaire they do), and to go back to the Community Mental Health Team for counselling. Both were rather useless when it came to day-to-day functionality.

Looking back, I would say the last 12 months have been some of the hardest in my life. This is not only because I was unable to fall back on self-destructive habits that had seen me through in the past (over-exercise, self-harm, weird eating habits, drinking, sleeping pills), but also because I was wracked with guilt over my responsibility for the life growing inside of me. Because of my situation I felt I had let the baby down before it was even born. Every decision I made now had to take into account how it would affect my unborn child. A lot of those decisions were, in hindsight, not the best ones – especially those involving S’s father.

At 30 weeks I lost weight two weeks in a row because of the stresses I was facing. I moved house at 33 weeks, and S was born at 35 weeks, when I had a chest infection. We were kept in hospital for 11 days, and when we came home the roof had leaked and we couldn’t spend our first night at home. Once we were home, I faced pressure in my relationship with S’s father, and looking after his 6 children at his house. I remember the health visitor sitting on my couch one day and saying to me, “you have to look after yourself better because you’re at quite a high risk for post natal depression.” I burst out crying and told her I thought I was already there.

I stuck to my guns though, and refused time and time again, often through floods of tears, to go back onto the medication. S is now nearly 6 months old, and I have to say I’m really quite proud of myself. I know that the medical profession advises it’s perfectly safe to use the antidepressants I was on after the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and I know that nobody would have thought any less of me if I’d gone back onto them at any point between then and now – especially those who had faced the task of trying to deal with me when I was at my lowest. But I know what I am like, and I know that if I had begun taking them again, I would have blamed myself if anything was wrong with S, at birth or at 25 years of age or any point in between, I would have thought back to those pills I took while I was pregnant and breastfeeding.

I didn't just do it on my own though; I've had a lot of help and support, both from professionals, and from my friends. My health visitor and GP have been amazing, going above and beyond what I could reasonably have expected from two over-worked NHS employees, and my friends have reduced me to tears of gratitude and joy more times than I care to mention. People I wasn't particularly close to before S was born have gone out of their way time and again to help me both practically and emotionally. For that I am eternally grateful.

When I came off the medication, it made me horribly sleepy and out of it, and I had to tell my boss why I’d come off it because he wasn’t too impressed at the desk-snoozing I kept doing. He told me he thought having a baby might just be the thing to sort me out mentally. At the time I thought he was talking utter bollocks, but now I think about it, he appears to have been right. Don’t get me wrong, I do still have bad days when I feel awful and want to crawl under my duvet and hide… but you can’t do that when there’s a baby there wanting to be fed and changed and played with. I’m lucky; I know for a lot of people having a baby can make no difference to their depression, perhaps even make it worse. But for me, so far, I seem to be doing pretty well. 

Edit: since this post was published, the safety of using antidepressants during pregnancy has been questioned. It is now not considered as safe as the medical profession thought at the time. 

More on How to Spot Domestic Abuse

Following on from this post, I decided to write more about the signs of domestic abuse. First though, a note about semantics. To make things easier to follow, I’ve used the concept of a heterosexual couple where the male is the abuser, but it is important to remember that abusers can often be female, and same-sex couples are not immune to this either. It’s just easier to write and to follow if I stick to the male/female scenario. 

Quite often a woman can be in an abusive relationship and not necessarily realise it. She may think her partner is a bit moody sometimes, but “that’s just men,” or he may have completely convinced her that every problem in their relationship is her fault, and she’s the one with the problems. 

A list like this can prove useful in helping a woman to understand that what she has been experiencing is abuse, even if there has been no physical violence. Obviously, at some point in a relationship you will hear your partner say these things, but it's when they're being said on a daily basis, or with a menacing tone, that there's a problem.

Phrases you might hear in an abusive relationship:

“You’re asking for trouble”

“You’re obviously shagging someone else”

“I work my arse off to put food on the table and all you do is sit on your fat arse all day and eat my food with those slag friends of yours.”

“You’re really winding me up today”

“You know I hate that”

“You know I’m suffering from stress at the moment, you’re doing this deliberately.”

“You know I need sex regularly, I have a big libido.”

“What sort of a wife/girlfriend are you!”

“How dare you make me feel like this! Who do you think you are?”

Unbelievable as it may seem, many women will believe violence against them may have been their own fault – or perhaps the blame was 50/50 and therefore she has no right to claim abuse. An abuser who is experienced can make his victim believe he has done nothing wrong. Similarly, he can be very skilled at convincing friends, family, even the police, that no abuse has occurred.

Excuses an abuser will use for violence:

“I had to restrain her; she was hysterical. I thought she was going to hurt herself/me/the children.”

“She fell and hurt herself.”

“She just bruises easily.”

“I was defending myself; I am the victim here.”

“Where did those bruises come from? Who did that to her? I wasn't even here!”

“I was drunk; I don’t remember a thing. I always have a bad reaction when I drink spirits.”

“I suffer from this medical condition which makes me lash out in my sleep. I don’t know I’m doing it.”

“She made me so angry! She nagged at me until I just lost it.”

“She is mentally ill and it is so difficult to live with her. I just lashed out from sheer frustration.”

“She is such a bad mother; the children are suffering because of her; I just lost my temper because of it.”

“She is the violent one; I am the victim. I need some help. She attacked me and smashed the house up.”

“She’s a slag. She made me do it because she was having an affair.”

“I only did it because I love her. “

“She deserved it; she had it coming.”

“This situation is so difficult for me, I’m suffering with anxiety.”

“I had a terrible childhood/I suffer from Gulf War Syndrome/I am insecure/I have low self esteem/my mother abandoned me/my ex-wife was such a bitch and slag that I find it impossible to trust other women.”

“I am autistic/I suffer from ADHD/I have Tourette’s/I have a personality disorder/I have learning difficulties.”

“I have been working too hard/I’m unemployed”

Abusers will often project their own behaviours/thoughts onto their partners. For example, he may start an argument with you, and later on refer to the massive row that you deliberately started. Or he will tell you you’re unreasonable, unsociable, you’re passive aggressive, you need to get help for your anger issues, and so on – and you’ll be thinking, hang on, I was about to say that about you! 

It is also quite common that an abuser will fire insults, questions and accusations at you non-stop for as long as it takes you to snap and lash out in frustration, and then use this as more evidence that you are unstable and abusive. They are often very skilled at this, and can make you believe you are indeed the one in the wrong; you have been a complete nightmare to live with, and he is so patient and kind to still be with you. What a saint, to put up with you and your difficult ways. 

Every now and then you may think, wait, I’m sure it’s not unreasonable to ask you to do this, or perhaps you’re the one that wanted to go out and he said it would be better for you both to stay in. Or perhaps when you look up the definition of passive aggression it’s like reading a description of the abuser in your life. But by that point he has put that seed of doubt into your head, and you’re not sure if you’re right or not; not sure if you’re going mad. The lines will blur to the point you are not sure what is going on. I have heard stories of abusers tampering with their victim’s medication, so that they are either taking too much or not enough, and as a result do not know what is going on. Then they say, See? Look at the state of her; she’s driving me round the bend…

To finish, here is a link to the National Domestic Violence Helpline. There are instructions on the website as to how to hide the fact you've visited it. Their 24 hour helpline number is 0808 2000 247.

As a post script, I urge you to please read this post on domestic abuse, which explains domestic abuse so much more eloquently than I could ever hope to.

Domestic Abuse - No Longer Just Physical.

The government has announced it intends to widen the legal definition of domestic abuse so that it covers mental/emotional abuse, and under-18s for the first time.

This is really good news. Previously there was not a lot that could be done if you didn’t have a physical injury; and even then there wasn’t much to be done, hence the fact Britain’s refuges are bursting at the seams. This is only the start though, and without going out and educating women and making facilities more readily available, I sincerely doubt it will do much to curb domestic abuse. 

Until you teach a woman that she doesn’t deserve it, she didn’t cause this behaviour, it’s not normal, everyone else doesn’t have to deal with this, and it’s not just the way men are, she will not stand up and say, Enough.*

According to Home Office figures (in 2007), 112 women in Britain are killed by a male partner or former partner each year. That's more than one every 3 days. A lady called Pat Craven set up the Freedom Programme to help female victims of domestic abuse, both physical and emotional. It is an invaluable course that helps to show women that the behaviours they have been tolerating and thinking of as normal behaviour they just have to deal with, are wrong and unacceptable.  It also helps women to identify potentially abusive behaviour in any future mates – as we tend to repeat the same patterns in relationships, many women can end up in a string of abusive relationships, reliving the same nightmare. Women often arrive to their first session of this sort of counselling thinking, I’m in the wrong place, he never hit me, I was just over-sensitive. They tend to change their opinions fairly quickly. 

One in five young men, and one in ten young women think that abuse or violence is acceptable. That is a truly horrifying figure, and something we need to change. In the interest of “doing my bit,” here is a list of behaviours used by abusers to try and control women:

• Glaring, sulking, grinding or gritting teeth, a menacing smile

• Invades your personal space in order to intimidate

• Fires questions at you without giving you time to respond

• Moves to hit you but stops just before making contact

• Emotionally abusive, calling you names or saying things to make you feel fat or ugly

• Messes with your head, making you think you've lost things when he's moved them, contradicting you on things you know you've said or done differently (this is one of the worst, and so difficult to prove because you genuinely believe you must be going mad)

• Unfaithful (often blaming it on your behaviour that has driven him to it)

• Puts you down in front of others, often in the form of a joke ("it was only a joke, what's your problem!")

• May isolate you and sulk when you have visitors to the house

• Charms your family and friends so they can't see why you have a problem with him

• Makes the abuse seem less by playing it down or outright lying about it

• Either denies abuse or blames you for it ("you drove me to it!")

• A million and one excuses as to why he has behaved this way - drink, drugs, work, unemployment, stress, low self-esteem, insecurity, my dog ate it.

• If there are children an abuser will often use them against you, getting them to join him in arguing against you or telling them lies about you#

• Tells you you're a bad mother, often telling others too. In many cases abusers will take this to the extreme, with children eventually being removed from the house because of what has been alleged

• Denies he is the father of your child

• Controls all the money

• Makes all the major decisions in the household

• Either refuses sex or demands it as and when he wants it (regardless of how you feel)

• Rape ("current partners" are responsible for 45% of all reported rapes. Approximately one-fifth of all rapes is actually reported)

• Attempts to keep you pregnant for long periods of time (one child quickly after another)

• Uses coercion or threats to keep you in your place

• May threaten suicide or cry to get you to come back if you leave

• May threaten to hurt pets or children to get you to do as he wants.

Of course, most people will exhibit some of these behaviours at one time or another; but if you are in a situation where your partner is doing several of these things on a regular basis, you may want to consider whether you are  in fact in an abusive situation. On average a woman will be abused 35 times before she will actually seek help.

Many abusers don't believe their behaviour is abuse if they don't actually hit you; they see it as normal behaviour, and may well tell you that you're just being over-sensitive or picky. (People outside the relationship may well say the same.) Even if they do hit you, they can usually excuse themselves because you provoked them, or it was just a tap, you moved in the wrong direction and they didn't intend to actually hit you.

When a woman falls pregnant and books in with a midwife, she is given a pack with various leaflets about things relating to pregnancy and childbirth. These days they also include a tiny, wallet-sized card depicting "Mr Right" on one side, and "Mr Wrong" on the other. Mr Right lists characteristics such as "Cheerful, consistent, shares financial responsibility, encourages you to be independent." Mr Wrong's characteristics include "shouts, sulks, calls you names, never admits he is wrong, uses the children to control you, expects sex on demand." The cards are deliberately made small so that a woman can quickly hide them away from someone who may be enraged by seeing them. This can often be the first thing that makes a woman think perhaps her situation is less than ideal, and it's a good job - women are three times more likely to be injured while pregnant, and pregnancy is often when physical violence begins in a relationship. When a woman is pregnant she is more vulnerable and more dependent, so an abuser feels he is more likely to get away with it - and often they do.

This is all done through charity, government grants or lottery funding though. People who run the Freedom Programme and similar programmes have to fill in endless paperwork justifying their existence, and practically beg for funding each time they begin a new course. Meanwhile, women are trapped in abusive relationships, truly horrific circumstances, believing there is no way out, and this is just their lot in life. How many women will hear the law has changed and suddenly think, "oh yes, now I can leave?" I'm guessing not many. More needs to be done.  There is also a valid argument that if they took this sort of work into schools, and taught young women what they don't have to put up with before they are in the middle of it, they could prevent a lot of abuse from taking place.

If a child is growing up in a home where Daddy hits Mummy, they can be heard arguing all night, Mummy is called all sorts of names and so on, they will not expect life to be any different when they grow up - either becoming an abuser themselves, or ending up in a relationship where they are abused. Nearly three quarters of children live in households where domestic violence occurs. Next time you see a gang of unruly teenagers in the park, look at them and remember that figure. Three quarters of all children. Three out of every four. What are we doing to our children? We need to do more to stop the vicious cycle because it can only get worse, new legislation or not.

It is also worth noting here that while the government is expanding the definition of domestic abuse, they are also still planning to bring in Ian Duncan Smith's brainchild, Universal Credit. Under this scheme, the majority of benefit payments will be rolled into one monthly payment per household. This will mean that where previously an abused woman may have had benefits coming into her own bank account and a certain amount of freedom, the man of the house will now be back in control, holding the purse strings tightly and putting the women's lib movement back by about 50 years. How much easier is it to control a woman, when you know she doesn't even have the money for bus fare to get away from you?

This post is a little long and rambling; sorry about that. It's highly likely I will make another post about domestic abuse in the near future, as it's something I feel very strongly about these days.

*: yes, I know that abuse is also perpetrated against men. But the fact is that the majority of violence and abuse, whether against men or women, is perpetrated by men. 

The Reality of Mental Health Issues in Pregnancy.

I had a nervous breakdown in 2010. While I was recovering, I met a man and fell pregnant. I wrote this in November 2011, when I was around 3 months pregnant with S...

I was on antidepressants for just over a year. I got a new job, I met a new man, I thought I was ok. I would forget to take my pills for days at a time, and still be fine. I toyed with the idea of coming off them for good, and even lowered my dose. And then I fell pregnant, and suddenly coming off them was more than just an abstract idea. I stopped taking them. I was fine. Yes, I was tired – but isn’t everyone in the first few months of pregnancy? Everyone said how well I was doing. I believed them. We were all wrong. The truth is that I wasn’t doing well; the truth is that when you’ve been on medication for over a year, it takes a while to come out of your system. And that while is like sliding down the sides of a very deep pit. A pit with a deep, sticky pool of quick sand at the bottom and no ladder to aid escape. And most of the time you’re not entirely aware you’re sliding, but every now and then you look and realise the sky and the sun are just that little bit farther out of reach; that smiling happiness you used to know is that little bit harder to remember. And then you hit the bottom. And you start to sink. And then you realise that everything that came before was just a sick joke, and that you’re back down where you were before.

Except before, when you couldn’t sleep or concentrate or speak to anyone or ask anyone for help, you could buy a bottle of vodka and get good and drunk. Or take a couple of pairs of sleeping pills and lose a weekend. And now you’re pregnant and you can’t get drunk or take anything stronger than bloody paracetamol. So 3am just becomes this horrible mocking thing that you just resign yourself to. And the tears and the despair and the horror and the panic attacks and the horrible realisation that you can’t even fucking kill yourself to end the misery, because now you’re responsible for another human being. And killing yourself would be tantamount to murder. So, basically, you’re fucked. I’m fucked. This is all fucking fucked. And I have no idea what to do.

This is how it happens. It’s not a sudden jump into a massive pool of crazy; it’s gradual. The madness creeps up, insidious. To start with you might have a few days of feeling ok; good, even. You can do this, it’s not so hard. Followed by maybe a half day of feeling like you’re Chicken Licken and the sky is falling in. And then, gradually, over time, you find that you have half a day, tops, where you feel like you could probably cope, if you really concentrate. Followed by a week and a half of unrelenting hell. I have fallen into the bog of eternal stench and there are no ladders to help me get out.

Madness is sneaky; it creeps in the back door while you’re busy doing other things. And once it’s there, it’s like the worst kind of unwelcome house guest, the kind that turns up with a bag of dirty laundry and stinky shoes, and you just groan and know it’s going to be a long while before it leaves.

I split up with the man I so idolised a few months ago. Then we get back together. And then we split again. And back and forth it goes, until I can’t remember why we were ever together, or why we were ever apart. He wants to “be there” for me, but he doesn’t understand what’s going on in my head. How can he, when I don’t even know, and have no hope of explaining it? For the briefest of times, I’m sleeping at his house once or twice a week, and he sleeps on the couch. We spend time together and it’s nice, and we make plans and agree on trying to Work Things Out and tell each other that This Time it’ll work, we’ve got it right. And then one of us panics over something and it stops, and then we miss each other and it starts again. And my brain is so fucked, I can’t tell if it’s him, or me, or both of us that’s being ridiculous and difficult and needs to just man up. I know that for both our sakes, I should just walk away and never look back – but I can’t because this is his child too, and he has a right to see it. So I have to suffer with the back and forth and the to and fro. One minute he wants us to be together, then he loves me but he just wants to be friends. Then he’s bringing me stupid little gifts at work. He’s worried about me, he cares for me, he wants to be my friend. I want to run for the hills. He doesn’t understand that while he’s changing his mind like a teenage girl, what I really need is to be stable in my environment. That the only way I have even a sliver of hope of getting through this is with boring, monotonous routine and reliability and stability. I realise later - too late - that the instability is his game plan. He deliberately never lets any situation remain the same for too long. Nothing in his life is predictable or easy to follow. It's how he controls me and others around him.

I have no patience these days. And when I say no patience, I mean absolutely none. People getting in my way in the supermarket, people on the phone at work who won’t just shut up, family members who ask too many questions, children who make too much noise. I spend my entire life biting my tongue, my jaw set, my blood pressure soaring and my heart pumping in my ears. I hate everyone. I hate everything. There is nobody I will not kill in my mind if they stand between me and wherever I’m trying to get to. One day, queuing in Marks and Spencer while a young child runs around and around the queue, I am reminded of something a friend said to me last summer, when I was mid-breakdown: that my rage over the tiniest things was a sure sign I should probably be medicated.

I’m over 12 weeks now. Apparently after 12 weeks the risks from the particular pills I was on are very low, almost negligible. My GP is of the opinion that, in my case, “the benefits outweigh the risks.” Apparently the worst that can happen is that the baby has a bit of “withdrawal” when it’s born. And if you’re breastfeeding, it doesn’t even get that because you’re still passing the drug to it in your milk. When they tell you these things, what they’re not saying is that if you give in and take the psychotropic drugs, what you’re essentially doing is feeding a mind-altering drug to a brain that is not even developed yet. And to continue feeding it to a newborn just continues to fuck with its brain more. They tell you there are little to no risks, that the baby will be fine, but really, what do they know. This is a drug not recommended for children under 18 because it changes the basic structure of the brain, but it’s perfectly fine for a baby? Fifty years ago they were feeding women Thalidomide for morning sickness with gay abandon, and look how that turned out. I know that if I relent and start taking these pills again, I will be pumping these chemicals directly into my baby’s brain, which seems ridiculous when I’m abstaining from alcohol and Ibuprofen and Vitamin A and a million other things for 9 months. If I can’t take Ibuprofen, which is 50p from Tesco, why is it fine to take Zoloft, which you can’t even fucking get hold of without crying to your GP and getting a prescription?

So I’ve decided, against the advice of my GP and my midwife, and probably the local mental health team, if I’d kept them informed, not to go back onto the pills. For one thing, last time they took a good few months to start working, and in the end it was a mixture of the pills, 3 months off work in a blur of alcohol and daytime sleeping, and help from the local mental health trust that got me back on my feet. There seems little point in starting up on the pills again, when I know they’re not a miracle cure, and they’ll take ages to work, and I can’t afford 3 months off work. Better to just try and soldier on as I am. 

And so, I plod. I go to work with a big mask on and pretend everything is fine. I laugh when they make jokes about me being a single mother and make oh-so-witty personal comments about my on-off relationship with the father and about his reputation for being a bit rough. I take it on the chin when they laugh at me for falling asleep at my desk. I pretend not to notice the impatience and loathing that bubbles beneath the surface whenever I’m off sick. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. I go home and stare blankly at whatever is on TV until I can stand it no longer, and then I go to bed and stare at the ceiling. These days I’m more likely to cry for seven hours than to sleep for that amount of time. Experience tells me there’s little point in picking up a book to try and read in the middle of the night, so I just toss and turn and think about how shit everything is. Then I get up early for work, because I can’t sleep and I may as well just get it over with. Just like before, I turn into a robot going back and forth, around and around. My days merge into one, punctuated only by arguments with the ex and panic attacks. Some days, I’ll wake up feeling ok and think perhaps that fabled day where I get my pregnancy glow and am awash with oestrogen has finally arrived. But by lunch time, it’s gone again. 

I’m stuck.

I should just man up but I can’t.

I can’t enjoy being pregnant like normal people; I can’t just snap out of it like people think I should; I can’t just be like everyone else. 

And I also cannot just end it by jumping off the tallest building I can find.

Before, that was at least an option; something to comfort me in the middle of the night when the horror took hold: “if it’s still this bad at the end of the week, you can end it,” I would promise myself. Now I don’t even have that, and it will never again be a viable option. I have nothing. I try to think of the baby in my belly as comfort, but all I can think is that I’ve let the poor thing down already. I have nowhere to live, no money, no plan for how to sort everything, no idea how I am going to do this. Neither of us stands a chance. Plath’s Bell Jar has descended once again and this time there is no lifting it.

And the worst part is that I can’t ask for help, I can’t admit failure. Nobody wants to hear that a pregnant woman might be preoccupied with thoughts of throwing herself under a bus. After last year I can’t make my friends worry again like they did before, it’s not fair. I can’t tell people I’d really just rather not be here at all. They’re all so excited at the prospect of another cutesy baby to coo over, they could never understand how I could be so totally consumed with blackness and despair. I'm supposed to be excited. I'm supposed to be glowing. Why am I not glowing? 

Last time I felt like this, I couldn’t eat, and all I did was drink – so I lost a fair bit of weight, and that was like my consolation prize. This time, my waist has disappeared and my belly is ever-expanding. My clothes don’t fit me because my belly is too big for them. This is not cause for celebration and excitement. I can’t afford to buy pregnancy clothes and there is nobody to buy me new underwear when the bras I am wearing are cutting into my skin, leaving marks that are still visible after 8 hours in bed. I’m fat and frumpy, and I can’t go to the gym and punish my body for 2 hours to try and feel better. 

All the things I would normally turn to as a way of somehow relieving this are gone now.

There is nothing; there is no relief, no comfort, no solace.

All that’s left is this unending guilt I have for a child not yet born.

How can I offer this child a chance of a happy life? How can I take care of it and raise it properly, give it a good start in life? I can barely bring myself to heat a bowl of soup for my tea. I feel like I’m dying and yet still alive. I am convinced that, were it possible to expire through mental illness alone, I would be long gone by now. Instead I drag myself around, a wraith. The ghost of Vicky past.

The people at work start to notice something is wrong. I’m simply too exhausted to keep up the façade. My boss tells me I look tired and I tell him I’m not sleeping He pulls a face that says “ok I can’t cope with women and feelings, please don’t cry, let’s talk about movies.” I don’t blame him. 

Other people ask me what’s wrong and I don’t know what to say. Frozen with fear, I know I could never tell them the truth. I try not to cry when they ask if I’m ok. I stop laughing at the jokes they make about my life. Eventually they stop making them. I hear only snippets of conversation, and don’t bother trying to find out what they’re on about. I stop trying to explain to the young lad-about-town who sits opposite me why being housed by the council somewhere on the other side of the county would be suicide. That no matter how much I shy away from human contact, I still need to be close enough to friends and family that I could visit if I wanted. He doesn’t understand mental illness, and no amount of tears will make him. He represents the majority of people in this world, and I hate him for it. I’m sure he’s of the opinion I should just pull my socks up and get on with it. I know he’s not the only one who thinks this. I’m past the point of caring. It’s all I can do to wash my hair before I leave for work. 

These people don’t care about me; they’re not my friends, they just don’t want me to go off sick and leave them in the shit. My life is like Eastenders to them: cheap titillation between phone calls. They all have their opinions about what I should do; I feel like an interactive reality show. And when I don’t heed their advice and things are still shitty, they sit there with their arms crossed, thinking to themselves, “well she doesn’t take good advice, what does she expect.” Everyone, but everyone, thinks they know of something I’ve not tried or heard about. Either practically, to do with finding somewhere to live and a way to furnish such a place, how to resolve the situation with the ex, how to raise a child alone with no money, or metaphysically – if only I’d just get up and join a gym/go to a yoga class/pay for therapy/paint on a grin and pretend, everything would be peachy. Well everything is so very not peachy, and it never will be. They don’t realise that when you feel like this, you can’t see the silver lining, all you see is clouds. You can’t just pretend, because you’ve been pretending for so long that you’re just exhausted to the point of complete flatness, and now all you can think of is sleep and blackness and death and nothingness.

I am at that point now, where I wonder which is the real me – the one before the pills, where I was almost dead more times than I care to mention, where there was no hope, no sleep, no happiness, no enjoyment, no contentment? Or the me for the last year, reliant on a reasonably high dosage of a psychotropic drug, changing the very mechanism of my personality and making me able to get out of bed, to smile, to laugh, to enjoy things? Because when I look around me, other people are like that without pills. They just wake up in the morning and they know what to do, they know who they are and what to say and how to function. If I need a prescription medication to be like them, does that mean that’s not the real me? 

What if the real me is this insufferably miserable mess?

My refusal to find any enjoyment in anything, my constant negativity and Eeyore outlook on life is just another of the many things that wind me up and make me want to scream. I dread to think what other people must think – “just lighten up!” Is this me? Is this my true personality? Am I really this insufferably gloomy? Oh, good grief. I can’t even stand myself – no wonder I can’t keep hold of a man for more than 5 minutes! No wonder I’m pregnant and single and alone, with nobody knocking on the door! 

Then again, I feel so terrible I would only hide behind the furniture if someone did knock the door. 

They can’t win – and they don’t even try any more.

I’ve reverted to the mentality of a toddler. Come and show me some attention! Why don’t you want to know what’s wrong? Why don’t you care? Nobody cares, I’m all alone! Why are you here? Stop crowding me, I didn’t invite you, I don’t want to make polite conversation with you! I have nothing to say, leave me be! Go away! Wait, where are you going? Why aren’t you sticking around to try and fix me? Why won’t you fix me? Come back and fix me!

This story seems miserable, but it does ultimately have a happy ending. When I was pregnant, my boss told me he thought having a baby might be the thing that would sort me out. At the time, I thought he was bonkers. Now, I find that actually, he was right. I am one of the lucky few for whom becoming a mother saved me. Yes, I still have horrible days and low moods - but I also have a beautiful, bouncing child who never fails to make me smile. Even in my bleakest moments, S makes everything seem ok. And I know I have to make everything ok, so that she can have a chance of growing up happy.

Support

When you are a first-time mother, you have no idea what is “normal” for a baby – and when they are very small, the slightest thing sends you into a panic that you have broken them (or is that just me?) For mothers with a partner, even if that partner is also a first-time parent, there is somebody to give a second opinion: “did she have that mark there yesterday?” “Do you think that crying sounds different to her normal crying?” “Does this poo-filled nappy smell normal to you?” “Does she look a bit peaky to you?” “Do you think I should call the doctor?”

When you are on your own, there is nobody readily available to consult on such things. There’s also nobody to grab you a snack while you’re stuck on the couch feeding in the middle of a growth spurt and crying because you’re so unbelievably hungry and can see no light at the end of the tunnel – what if this baby is always going to be this hungry, and I never get to change out of this puke-stained t shirt?

To be fair, even before S’s father buggered off he wasn’t much support in this area. Still, when he finally went, I was completely bewildered, with nobody to consult as to what was normal, and what necessitated a trip to the doctor. I made numerous fraught Facebook updates, and had literally no clue as to how I would move forward in this.

My family has never really been very good at the whole touchy-feely thing. While I was mourning the end of a relationship I had thought was forever, missing S’s half brothers and sisters who I’d spent a year caring for, and trying to get used to being solely responsible for a tiny baby with no instruction manual, they didn’t really jump up to offer assistance as perhaps other families would. To be fair I didn’t really expect them to; it’s not like we’re a particularly close lot and the idea of suddenly spending lots of time with them makes me balk slightly. That said, I do send my sister in law at least one text a week asking a ridiculous new mum question and she rarely laughs at me for it! And I see my younger sisters regularly; but because they are that much younger than me I never feel that I could fall at their feet in a puddle of snot and expect them to help – I am the older sister, they shouldn’t have to look after me. I felt very alone in my battle to establish some kind of normality in my life, completely lost at sea. I didn’t want to burden people with my problems, but in some instances I felt that I’d been abandoned by those who perhaps should have been rallying round.

Luckily, the day after S’s father left us, a friend I’d not seen since we were in hospital texted to see how we were. I told her what had happened and her response was perfect: “this is the plan, no arguments. I’m coming round this evening, I will help you bath the baby and put her to bed so you can have some time to yourself. See you at 5.” She came round, helped bath S, got her to sleep, did my washing up, tidied my living room, and told me (repeatedly) I could do it on my own. She spent a lot of time with me over the next few weeks, helping me to put up net curtains, talking about what was going on with S’s father, giving advice and telling me the sort of things “they” never tell you about having a baby.

Several other friends came and made similar mercy missions: one friend came from her house 25 miles away to bring me home-cooked bolognaise sauce, brownies and a big hug and “you’re doing an amazing job.” Several friends texted, emailed, left encouraging comments on my Facebook. Friends I’ve not really seen much for a good few years have met me for coffee, given me lifts to pick things up or just gone on mad random road trips with me, listening to my whining and telling me everything would be fine, right when I needed to hear it. I will be forever indebted to a friend who stood in the middle of Homebase and said to me quite plainly, “you are making excuses for your ex and you have to stop.” One friend, a girl I’d actually not seen since I was around 12, sent me a message to say I was doing a great job and not to worry, and that she’d invited me to join this Facebook group she thought might be useful. Since that day, I have made hundreds of posts in that group, asking stupid questions, letting off steam about things that were bothering me, and squealing with delight when something good happened. The group is closed, so I knew that I could have a good old rant about whatever was bothering me, without the fear of anyone else seeing it. And the ladies in that group were so supportive; they made me feel that I was making the right decisions, that my gut instinct wasn’t completely off.

Some sources of support have appeared seemingly from nowhere. The day S’s father left the postman knocked the door to deliver a package, and it was the man who ran a church youth group I attended fifteen years ago. He arranged for a man from his church to come and paint over the damp patch on my bedroom wall, and also gave me a lift to the hospital one Saturday night when I was mid-panic about S. Strange though it may seem, having not been to that church for so long, I do feel very much that if I had a problem and someone there could help, they would – which, to me, is what Christianity is all about.

My health visitor, who had supported me since before the breakup, was (and still is) invaluable. She, her student, and her nursery nurse still all go out of their way to tell me I’m doing really well and bolster my confidence. One or other of them referred me to my local Children’s Centre where there were several groups they thought I might like to attend. A lady from the centre actually came out to the flat to talk to me about what services they offer, because they knew I wasn’t very confident going out just yet. They also suggested I join a counselling group for women in a similar situation to me with regards to my relationship. That group probably saved me and S from a great deal of heartache. Later, when I called the health visitor in tears after a street-based slanging match with S’s father, they referred me to Home Start, a charity based locally who are in the process of pairing me up with a volunteer who will come to visit us weekly, sit with S while I make important phone calls or come with us to appointments for the same reason. Being a single mother, you suddenly realise how easy you had it before when you had to call the gas board about a problem, or go to the council offices to go through some form or other. Babies don’t like to be ignored, especially when they are in their pushchairs, in a strange place.

I do feel that I’ve found my feet a bit more lately, but I still have episodes when I have no clue what I am doing. I have more support now, though. I know that I can post a stupid question on Facebook and, while some people will leave a jokey or rude (or sometimes judgemental or plainly unhelpful) response, I have a solid group of friends who will always help out by giving their own take on the situation, offering their own experience of it. This works well, because I know people who have raised, or are raising children in very different ways under different circumstances – so I get a lot of different advice to choose from. I still call my health visitor, but usually when I have issues with S’s father, rather than issues with S herself. More importantly, I am more inclined to reach out and call or text the people I would previously not have wanted to burden. I might not call up and say “help me I’m having a shitty day,” but sometimes just having a conversation with another adult is all you need to get you through.

The whole situation has made me much more compassionate towards other people’s suffering, especially where a new baby is concerned. I’ve found myself sending messages to people I don’t know terribly well, offering my support should they need it. My first few months as a mother were a lot less fun than I would have hoped, and if I can do anything to avoid someone else’s experience being like that, I am inclined to do it. My friends have set me a good example in that respect. And for the times when I don’t want to burden my friends with yet another whiney moan, I know there are other places I can approach for help. Things are looking up!