John Y: Well you didn’t have any you didn’t participate in any of the discussion for ECT because you weren’t well enough.

Suzanne: No I didn’t.

John Y: You were like

Suzanne: I was like floridly psychotic, not psychotic but catatonic. I was

John Y: Yes, but what’s the description, the Mental Health Act?

Suzanne: I didn’t have capacity.

John Y: No. Legally

Suzanne: Yes.

John Y: They decided that you weren’t able to

Suzanne: Yes.

John Y: make a decision.

Suzanne: Yes, I didn’t have capacity to make the decision so

John Y: So what do they call that?

I mean there are various different sections of the Mental Health Act.

John Y: Yes, sectioned.

Suzanne: Yes.

John Y: So that so you’d been sectioned by that stage.

Suzanne: Yes, I was under the care of the doctors.

John Y: Yes, so you couldn’t make any legal

Suzanne: I was under is it Section III of the Mental Health Act?

John Y: Legally you couldn’t make any decision yourself.

Suzanne: Yes, well that doesn’t mean that you

John Y: So even if you had said

Suzanne: It doesn’t mean that

John Y: no I don’t want it. You wouldn’t, they

Suzanne: Yes, well but that doesn’t mean that the doctors won’t tell you what’s going to happen even if you’re sectioned. They would do. It’s just that I didn’t have the capacity to take in that information.

John Y: And it also means that you don’t have any power to change your course of treatment.

Suzanne: I think I was sectioned meant that I was under the care of the doctors but yeah, I was under their treatment and I had to stay in hospital, but I can remember being de-sectioned and I can remember that meeting very well with the doctors. Yes. And they said, Were now releasing you from the Mental Health Act or whatever. You are no longer sectioned. And it was like news to me, I’ve been sectioned.

John Y: Oh well you wouldn’t have known.

Suzanne: No I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know if I was wearing like, I was going to say if I was wearing clothes or not, but like I was kind of like a total zombie.

John Y: What actually happened was that I had no legal say in the matter as we were not married. Suzannes parents also had no legal rights on their daughter’s treatment as they were Irish and non-UK citizens. Hence the reason for my anxiety at the time. The doctors made the decision. Which I was thinking well, if I didn’t know anything about ECT when I looked at it on the, on the internet I was drawn to all the kind of horror stories and you know, memory loss and changing your personality, and that sort of thing.

Suzanne: Also loss of creativity and all kinds of things.

John Y: Hm. I was thinking you know, that this is a bit out of my hands really and I rang up our parents to say, you know, I’m not sure, you know, what’s going to happen here and they were all, Oh the doctors they know what’s best. They had 100% confidence in the doctors whereas I was much more questioning, thinking well hang on a minute, they don’t even know how ECT works. It’s still you know, it works for some people and theres a lot of people where it doesn’t work. The side effects are long lasting, if not lasting the rest of our life it seems to be a bit hit and miss. It doesn’t seem to be based on a sound scientific footing, you know, if they don’t know how it works then. To be honest I wasn’t in favour of it. So I felt in a position where, you know, I was, I basically didn’t have much of a choice in the matter I had to go with it, because there wasn’t any other options really.

Suzanne: Hm.

John Y: And in your case I think it did actually save your life and you know, it did have very positive results very quickly.

Suzanne: Hm.

John Y: So my doubts were dispelled in that case, but I can see why a lot of people you know, quite rightly are anti-ECT and it may not work for everyone.

I lost a lot of weight when I wasn’t eating and the ECT was kind of life saving really, because I don’t think I would have recovered otherwise. My parents think I would have, they think it would just would have taken a lot longer. And I have heard other psychiatrists talk about when ECT is used in those circumstances and so that people do recover, but I don’t see how it can happen when you’re not eating and not responding to anything.

Yes, I remember the last course of ECT treatment, but I’ve no recollections of the others, because I think I would have had about five or six treatments.

So different sets of treatments or ?

No like they give you a series of treatments and electric shocks and through for which you’re receiving anaesthetic for, as part of a package kind of it’s a sad story. I don’t know how to describe it. But it’s like a course of treatment.

Yeah yeah.

Yes. But for me I think it was lifesaving and I became well again very, very quickly and within a couple of weeks of being in hospital I had got myself a Sunday job and I was back functioning normally. You know, when I had a few days in hospital of feeling really well and then I was discharged and I continued to feel well after that.

Suzanne: That was around the time I developed a bladder infection and then my sleep pattern just went crazy because I was up at night going to the loo all the time. I went to the GP and he said, Oh, see how you go for another few days. And then a few days later I was a lot worse. I went to an A&E at the weekend. They were dealing with a lot of drunk people. They sent me home with a paper bag and said, Oh panic attacks are quite common in young girls, young women. And I just went downhill. And that weekend John was away and there was a friend came with me to the hospital and I just didn’t have my mental health assessed and the following week then, I just got really, really ill with panic attacks and delusions and depression I suppose. I had reflexology treatment on the Saturday & it brought out the panic attacks. It has never had that effect on me since.

You were saying earlier on in the interview that you don’t feel that either your bladder infection or your lack of sleep was properly addressed? Is that right?

Suzanne: Not early on enough. Yes. I think, I think I had left it a few days and let the bladder infection get worse.

John Y: I think they probably should have looked at Suzannes notes and realised that she had had a previous

Suzanne: Episode of psychosis.

John Y: .Episode and taken a second look at this and thought we need to keep a very close eye on this.

Suzanne: Yes.

John Y: Because she spiralled extremely quickly into you know, quite a serious state of depression.

Suzanne: Hm.

John Y: That’s not necessarily something you can predict but at least you should, if something like this has happened before, perhaps it is she would be a candidate

Suzanne: Yes.

John Y: where it’s something that they really should not have dismissed from A & E. They should have taken a closer look at it.

Suzanne: Hm. And they knew in this country that I had been on Olanzapine before. You know, so even though my notes hadn’t been sent over from [name of country], there was some record of the psychiatric history there. It’s just everywhere I turned from the GP to the A&E people, on the second occasion I just wasn’t getting the help that I needed and then a couple of days were going by and then I was getting seriously, seriously ill.

John Y: Yes. I think your GP let you down quite fundamentally really.

Suzanne: Yes. I didn’t get to see my GP when I had the sleep problem. And maybe not when I had the bladder infection, like around the same time. I saw another GP it wasn’t my own GP. And he didn’t know me and hadn’t looked into the history. So I don’t really blame him for his decision-making but I wish that he had looked a bit deeper. And I wished that I had spoken up and said, Look I have a history of psychosis and that’s why I’m so worried right now.

But by the time I was admitted into hospital or a short time afterwards I became catatonic and the medication that they were giving me wasn’t really having any effect and I was so kind of, I was totally despondent and I wasn’t able to interact with people or to speak or to eat and I was just kind of I think of it as a time when where I just merely existed for a period. Where I didn’t really have any input into anything, neither the decision about the ECT treatment nor anything.

And yes, it was horrible. I hated it. I absolutely hated it. And then towards the end of the stay in the hospital, I was there for about six weeks or so and towards the end of the stay I didn’t mind it at all, but I hated it in the beginning because I just wanted to be around people I loved and I just wanted the compassion from your family that you get. And, I wanted to be around people who knew me when I’m well as well, and I was being kind of interviewed by large groups of people and I wasn’t really being given any information about what was going on or what the medication was doing. Or I kept asking when I was going to go home, i.e. when was I going to be better and they said they didn’t know and that just scared even more, because I thought, Oh my God I’m going to be in here for years. So it was really traumatic and in that I felt worse by being in hospital. I didn’t feel like it was any form of therapy in the first few weeks but

Yes, Largactil. Yes, that’s what I was on at the beginning. Just for a couple of days or even a day or two. I’m not totally sure. But yes, I can remember that I didn’t have any dreams for a long time, that I was so medicated at night that by the time I had queued up for medication, walked back to my bed, got into bed, I’d be asleep. And I’d kind of wake up only moments later and it would feel like you hadn’t had any sleep at all in some ways, because you didn’t have time to process any of the day’s events. And it was kind of like bang and there you were there again, oh no waking up in hospital again and sort of feeling of yes, it was very frightening every morning waking up in the hospital thinking, Oh God I’m here again.

Well it was like I couldn’t leave the hosp even though I wasn’t, I was still a voluntary patient, I still couldn’t leave the hospital of my own accord and I couldn’t go home to my parents and all I wanted was to be around my family and be round people who knew me when I’m well, so that they would so that they would interact with me in a way that I was familiar with, I suppose and comfortable with, whereas being in the hospital I was scared to talk to other people and I didn’t know anybody there and I wasn’t really in a state where I could become friends with people because I was so ill. I think for the first three days in hospital I had a kind of blank expression on my face and wore the same clothes, and I just looked like I was in shock, like I had been the few days beforehand when I went in A&E and I was kind of like a bit of a zombie and then I just kind of came out of it like that. I don’t know whether the medication kicked in or whether my brain was just relaxing after being heavily medicated to sleep for a long time. Yes.

Yes. I was going for jogs around the grounds of the hospital and making scones sometimes in OT and doing woodwork and I had a little room to myself in the hospital at that stage and I was starting to work again on my postgraduate work whilst I was in the hospital under, making lots of friends and generally enjoying myself. So it was like, like I was having a holiday there for a while and then they decided they needed the room for somebody who was in need some therapy or help from the hospital and that I should go off home. Go home. So I happily did, yes.

And how have you manage your well-being over all?

Yes. Yes. Theres one major thing that I left out I’ve a friend who is trained as a healer and she does healing which is a bit like Reiki and shes done sessions with me for the past couple of years and I’ve found that to be tremendously helpful and it enables you to tune into your own kind of inner wisdom and if you have a worry that’s dominating your thoughts it kind of helps you resolve it and that’s been a really powerful tool for me. And that’s kind of kept me well on occasions when I was not, when I was teetering on the edge of becoming ill again.

I was a post graduate student at the time and I was travelling a lot, and I was away from home a lot, and what sparked off the whole incident was something happened in the place where I was staying that gave me a fright and it triggered off nightmares and the nightmares were so vivid that I was afraid to go asleep. So I stayed awake for about four days because every time I went to sleep I was having these really horrible nightmares and I looked like somebody who had been through a road accident, like I was in shock after a couple of days of this and by about four days I was becoming paranoid and about the third day, I think, I went to A & E in in the nearest town, and I travelled back to [name of town] and I was admitted to hospital there within a day or two, and then

So the more, the background information to that episode was I had been doing a bit too much work. I had broken up with a long-term boyfriend and I hadn’t been taking breaks when I needed to. And after a few months of that building up, and building up something small that happened just triggered and sent me completely off the edge and I guess that time when I was admitted to hospital it was a huge shock to me to be in hospital and I really didn’t want to be there and that was my first experience ever of the psychiatric system and medication and what the medication does and what different kinds there are [small laugh] and it was just a complete eye opener and also kind of a complete blow at the same time because I was in my probably early to mid-twenties at the time and mental health was something that I’d never really thought an awful lot about before then, and suddenly I felt that my existence was being decided upon by the mental health staff of when I had leave to go home and that kind of thing. And it was a huge, huge eye opener really and yes.

And did you have any discussion at all that you can remember about your diagnosis or did you care?

There was no discussion about it. I don’t know, patient appointment I asked what my diagnosis was, and I was told it in two words and I was so surprised that I couldn’t think of any questions to ask and I wasn’t prompted to ask any either. Its psychotic depression, and I thought does this mean I’m some kind of psychotic person who is going to be completely nuts for the rest of their life. That was my first thought upon hearing those words. And yes,

Did you get any explanation past those two words that you were given?

No, no, I didn’t. No and from the reading I’ve done now, I understand where the diagnosis has come from. From the symptoms that I had of being very low, and the kind of paranoia that I was having at the time and yes. Like it does make sense to me now, when I look back on it.

Yes, but it’s very much an episodic illness, with long periods of being well in between periods of illness, so I kind of count myself lucky in some ways. Yes.

So did you head back to your parents at that stage?

Yes. I did indeed. I was living with my parents and then, yes, I was I went back to live with my parents and that was about January of 2001 yes.

And how were things with your parents? You mentioned you know, quite a strange sort of Christmas dinner that you had to leave half way through and?

Yes. I think I left shortly after the dessert but when everyone was still gathered round the table, I had to go back to hospital. I was kind of a bit angry with [the hospital] for making me stay in hospital for when all I wanted was to be around people who loved me, rather than people who were, who didn’t know me from Adam. But I just got on with life, you know, and I just adjusted to that was, that was how it had to be, and that was it. Yes.