And some days would be, I would be really overwhelmingly depressed. And about then I was referred to the psychiatric hospital for assessment. Although I think it probably took about two months I believe between the initial sort of GP’s referring letter and getting an appointment. Which again in retrospect was, was way, way too long, way too long. I was really, really ill and barely coping. So just before Easter I had my [laugh] first it’s quite funny, my first meeting with the psychiatrist.

And to that meeting I’d gone prepared to talk about how I tried to kill myself and it was you know, really very likely I was going to, you know, try again and next time I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t mess up. I went prepared to the meeting with the psychiatrist and I’d actually ‘ the day after my suicide attempt I’d written it up and posted it to a news group and I printed that out because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to talk about it, but it was something that, you know, I wanted to convey.

So I presented him with my, with my write up, and talked about how I felt and I cried and I sobbed and I filled out the mood forms and I scored in the extremely seriously mega-depressed range. And I remember he went to talk with a professor and was actually quite concerned about leaving me on my own which was [laugh] very nice but I remember thinking, ‘Well actually this is quite amusing, seeing as I have managed to struggle through these last two months and then you know, by the time I come to see you, yeah, sure realistically I am on my last legs. And he said, ‘Are you going to be OK? Do you want somebody to sit with you?’ [laugh] was actually kind of ironic.

But I had a GP that was quite interested in how I was, which was good. And then I had Bells Palsy, which really, really threw me – the facial paralysis. And I had a high dose of steroids, and I think that was just like the icing on the cake, that was just the end of it. I was very low physically and clearly very low mentally, and the GP. and I’ll be forever thankful for him, actually said, ‘ I don’t think I am helping with the right kind of medication for the right reasons, and if you agree I’d like to refer you on to somebody. And it was like an immense relief, it really was an immense relief. Half of me was thinking this was a disaster for me because I was going to see a psychiatrist, and the other half was thinking, hooray, somebody’s actually going to treat me as somebody who has a problem here.

So I went along, to the assessment, and as soon as I said out, lots of things about my life and about the way I felt in my life, there was no sense of you’re in the wrong place, it was, ‘ Fine, we think we can help you with it. And it really was a huge relief, and they immediately put me on a proper dose of antidepressants, and saw me regularly, and I actually felt that somebody was for the first time, somebody was actually listening to me.

It was only about the third appointment that I felt brave enough to say, ‘What do you think is wrong with me?’ and the psychiatrist at that time said, ‘I think you have what’s known as a double depression. So you have dysthymia, which is chronic depression, which you’ve probably had since your teens and I thought well, that makes sense – And he said, ‘And at the moment you have a depressive episode. And I thought yeah, I can understand that.

But in the last year or so, as well as the sort of the depression and anxiety yes, and I’ve been going to the [name of hospital], for about five years now, since 1998 in fact, after the doctors locally, and the local psychiatrists as I say [slight laugh] weren’t sort of up to much really I, somehow felt…. I did think I had Schizophrenia, but I saw a professor [name], at the [hospital] and he said that I haven’t got that condition, schizophrenia. And I thought, “Have I got manic depression or any other things?” I think he said well, I haven’t really.

There was one day I was talking to one of the nurses and I must have said I wasn’t feeling so happy and whatever, and so she got like a psychiatrist to come as like theres a psychiatric hospital about 2 miles from the, you know, the big general hospital.

And he came and he asked me really strange questions [laughing], he was a foreign gentleman and he said…. And I said I’d heard like the nurses talking about me, which I had because like the nurses’ station was quite near. And they’d been sort of saying like I was withdrawn and a couple of other things, I think.

And so when I said I’d heard some people talking about me he interpreted it as a sort of schizophrenia type thing, and he was asking me had I ever thought of cutting off my penis, which was really a rather odd thing to be asked at that time.

I’ll just give you one example. I met one chap and he didn’t even say, ‘Hello’ to me. He sat in a chair cross-legged with no shoes on, which bothered me for some reason that he didn’t have any shoes on. And he didn’t say a word. And this was our first session. So I ended up saying, ‘Where do you want me to start?’ And he said something like, ‘Where do you feel comfortable, where do you want to start?’ And it’ that’s the way it went you know. I think he did ask a couple of questions. ‘What was your earliest childhood experience?’

And it was just like oh, very textbook stuff to me and it put a barrier up. I instantly thought, ‘Fuck you, you know, you’re not getting any where near me. There is nothing wrong with me and actually I even said it a few times,’ Nothing traumatic has ever happened to me. I have, I had a very nice childhood thank you. I said it loads of times and that was so untrue. I said it and. and it was untrue.

But it was dealing with these kind of professional people that are asking me these professional questions about, ‘What was your earliest childhood memory? What was your earliest this. You know, I just couldn’t deal with them. I instantly thought, you know, ‘Fuck off I can’t deal with you. I want to deal with a human.

But the psychiatrist I had did harp on. He eventually left and somebody else came in the last two years but he was a great therapy psychiatrist. He believed in therapy and he would go on and on about how much, you know, I really needed therapy if I was ever going to recover. If this vicious pattern I was in was ever going to stop, then therapy was the answer. And I didn’t just. I just wasn’t listening. And I didn’t believe him.

And I feel that I’m getting a wee bit more confidence in myself. But it only takes somebody to say a wee thing sometimes and my paranoia takes over. And it’s quite frightening.. It’s about trying to control my thoughts right, convince myself, you know, that these things are in my head, that I am not in them.

But when I’m like that, it’s reality to me and it’s quite scary, it’s quite scary. And my friend who… she has stood, shes been with me the last months, because I realised everybody that I helped in life when I’m looking for help, there is nobody there for me, except my doctor and my psychiatrist and my CPN. [laugh] They are there for me but not…. never anybody else I tell Dr [name] and Dr [name] everything. I don’t keep anything. [laugh] And I know that I don’t lie about anything.

Then the next thing was that actually a social worker who. they tend not to do this very much, but she actually came round to the house where I was living with my father after I’d dropped out of University, after I’d made a suicide attempt. And she was helpful in a few ways in that she actually got my father to understand a bit more about my depression and that it wasn’t just a case of laziness. It was a case of not being able to function, really. being completely lost.

And she also did have hour long sessions with me at home and I think I got, you know, I was into talking about things and possibly I was talking about the way things could go. And that was probably beneficial, actually. I think I was completely isolated at that stage, and she would make positive suggestions. She wasn’t like the psychoanalyst in that sense, she would say, ‘Well, maybe you could move away from home?’ And she also investigated possibilities for doing that. And I talked quite a bit about my Mum, again. And the kind of frustrations I had.

I hadn’t been out of the hospital grounds for 4 months and then suddenly I thought, “Well maybe I should just go to the corner shop”. I went into the corner shop, and that’s when my panic starting coming. I went in that corner shop and I put things in my, I had a list, and I was shaking there and I put these in my basket, and I went to the checkout desk and every… there was a queue of just 2 or 3 people there.

And I was OK if I was the one at the end of the queue, but once somebody came up behind me, I couldn’t cope with it. And then I had visions of me walking out of the shop with this stuff in my bag and not paying for it, so I suddenly went into a fearful panic attack of, “Oh, I’m going to be a shoplifter,” and I can understand why people do it when they’re not thinking straight.

And I dropped the basket and I just ran down the road to the hospital and I was, I couldn’t go out for ages. I went into a massive panic attack and they put me on medication to cope with it, which was at the time, you know I was in such a state I took it. But it wasn’t until… the next time I had gone into panic attacks, anxiety, all these things had come to me, you know, I couldn’t go out.

Then what happened was that they had to get a CPN, a community psychiatric nurse to bring me home for one hour, gradually to see how I could cope with being in my flat on my own. And then shed come in here, she would spend an hour in here with me, we would do some cleaning or something and she would take me back again. Then the next time she would bring me in and we would stay 2 hours, and then the next time she would come, she would come in for 2 hours and then shed go away for an hour and leave me here on my own and then come back.

I was at work. At the time, for [company name], I was under immense pressure and suddenly I, one of the managers there came in and started having a go at me about something that wasn’t actually my problem really. And I flipped and I’d never done this before in my life. I just lost it. I started shouting and crying and chucking, well not chucking things, but I walked out. Basically. I walked out there and then.

And that was me. I was gone for six months and never went back. I came home [pause]. That act somehow spurred me deeper, and I eventually thought I can’t go to work. I can’t get to work. I can’t do it any more so that pushed me to go my GP to get a sick note, there to get signed off so I could get paid, so I could, the mortgage would be paid.

So some part of my brain was functioning [laugh]. So I went to my GP. She arranged for me to see the CPN (Community Psychiatric Nurse) again, get in contact with the CPN again. We arranged an appointment. I think the CPN rang me and came and we talked but I didn’t feel at the time she was taking me seriously. I didn’t think she felt [pause] I don’t know. I just didn’t think she was taking me seriously and, or perhaps I wasn’t explaining myself very well, but I felt a lot worse than she thought I was, I think.