Hibernating

I'm decided to remove this blog from the public domain for the time being, until I've sorted my priorities out and addressed a few practical issues. There are basically three reasons why I'm taking it down:

1. I'm yet to adjust to the void in my life that unemployment has created. Even though I've increased my subject load at university, it still leaves long stretches of time in which the temptation to get lost in the past is overwhelming. And I'm continuing to question of wisdom of bringing this particular aspect of my life back into such focus, and finding that, at least at the moment, there are things I really don't want to think about right now. So I'm not sure if I want to post further, as an ersatz pearl diver, until I feel stronger.

2. Unemployment carries additional repercussions, surprise, surprise - such as the desire (that will eventually thicken into a need) to find another job. Although I wasn't fired from my most recent position, I left under a bit of a cloud, owing to a rather long and drawn-out breakdown in the relationship between me and my supervisor, a relationship that was always complicated, to say the least. He is aware of this blog and of my online identity - I had confessed all during our happier days. Now that I'm out of there, looking for another job, and relying upon him to provide a good reference, this blog represents the most concrete of our differences - I'm concerned he may pass on the URL and blow my cover; he's less than thrilled with the references to him and the nature of our relationship that pepper it. So, at least at the moment, the mere existence of this blog is something of provocation - and what it does provoke in me, thanks to what it may provoke in others, is an insidious anxiety. Which brings me to:

3. All of the above, but particularly the loss of my job and the relationship breakdown, have made me fairly miserable of late, as can be deduced from my 'K' post. While I think I'm over the worst of it, my demoralisation and resulting self-absorption have affected the quality of this blog, with my most recent posts being little more than exercises in the most cross-eyed of navel-gazing. 'Sharing experiences' is certainly an integral part of what this blog is about, but it is not meant to be a journal, or ironically enough, a place for people in crisis (as I rather stuffily requested in my first post). I have a sense of the Ideal Off-Label, but right now I'm stuck in the cave, watching (my own) shadows on the wall and posting about them as if it they were real and newsworthy. That may not bother everybody, but it sure as hell bothers me. And until I get over my 309.28 Adjustment Disorder or whatever you want to call it, I can't see the situation changing.

None of the above, however, means that I won't be reading and/or commenting on your blogs any longer - no way. In case this is not just the result of a spiking spasm of despondency that will straighten itself out within a few days, I'd just like to say thanks to you all (and particularly to Gianna) for the all the interesting, informative and supportive feedback I've received, and that I look forward to further dialogue, either on your own turf, or even on mine, if this blog should rise from the ashes of my meltdown.

Why I Quit Therapy (Part I)

I ended two years of re-engagement with psychiatry recently. During this period I saw two psychiatrists, both female, fifty-something, and of a psychoanalytic orientation, but by no means ideologues. The first, who had specialist qualifications in child psychiatry but appeared to see mostly adults, would mostly stare at me for an hour a week while I vacillated between a terrified muteness and a more laconic, well, what I am supposed to say? After two months she put me on Xanax temporarily, and after six, Zoloft and Xanax combined. The initial Xanax prescription was occasioned by my terrified muteness mutating into tears one morning, and her threatening to ‘fire’ me unless I started talking. I told her what was bothering me – the office ‘romance’ I was engaged in at the time had ended abruptly again – and out came the PBS pad together with an invitation to call her at any time over the next few days if I felt the need. While I appreciated the offer, I had a dim impression, not quite a recollection, of what happens to patients who call their psychiatrists in the middle of the week. And the Xanax, for which I had no tolerance as a teenager, worked a treat. That day, I was due to head off to one of those corporate-style love-ins, or retreats as they are not-quite-so euphemistically called, and a pharmaceutical Band-Aid was what was really needed, given that I had been responsible for organising the damn thing, and had endless meetings and a three-hour car trip both ways in the company of my ambivalent paramour to look forward to. I sailed through it all, and successfully ignored phone calls from people who had no business calling me the following weekend.

This retreat (from reality) was held, ironically enough, in what was once a large state mental hospital, one of those 19th century monoliths way out in the middle of nowhere wrapped in a ‘Ha-Ha’ Wall, in a part of the country spotted with small towns that all like to call themselves ‘historical’. Our group gathered in what was once a large dayroom or dormitory, complete with seclusion rooms at the back where extra tables and chairs were now kept, and we slept in the nurses’ quarters, me in what must have been the head nurse’s room, complete with fireplace and antechamber that had been transformed into a bathroom that was almost as big as the room itself. Because my room was so big, the younger staff hung out there a lot, playing cards and drinking games. Xanax and beer don’t make for crystal clear recollections, but I do recall one rather astute but cruel boy daring me to say ‘X (the ambivalent paramour, my relationship with whom was supposed to be a secret) gave me genital herpes,’ and me collapsing in a fit of giggles on the floor, thus forfeiting my turn. At some point later that evening, I found myself in bed in another room with another young man (as well as another newly acquainted couple) and succumbing to his urging to ‘rest your head on my shoulder, just there, yeah.’ Not long after that, relative maturity together with the knowledge of another long day ahead kicked in, and I excused myself and returned to my quarters, sweeping them clean of any human or glass debris and toppling into a deep, opaque sleep.

Presumably the Xanax in my system prevented the meaning of my surroundings from resonating more fully, but I was sufficiently intrigued by them to borrow a camera and take a lot of pictures – and I’m someone who travelled right around Italy with taking a single snap, on the grounds that it was just too tourist-y. While it would be an exaggeration to say that at this point in time my memories of my earlier hospitalisations had been repressed, they were certainly not memories routinely accessed, or experienced as having any implications for my safety or identity. As far as I was concerned, I was just curious. Anyway, one of the photos I took eventually inspired my online moniker - click on the photo to see the graffiti:


For those not in the know, rooting is Australian slang for fucking. I certainly felt pretty rooted at the time, both figuratively and literally.

K xx

I wrote the following about two or three weeks ago. I have since quit both my job and Mr K.

I CAN HOLD IT TOGETHER during the day, most of the time. So what if a few tears inadvertently slip from under my sunglasses on the tram on the way to work; so what if people stare - it will start to kick in soon, downed with the dregs of last night's beer. I catch each teardrop with a fingertip, and stare back at those who would treat the world as a gossip rag, its pages to be turned at will. As they leaf past the laughingstocks to the pointlessly lucky, the ticket inspectors get on, and there's a dash for the machine, leaving me stock still in my iBubble, upon my liar's chair. Is there any way, a man yells into his mobile phone, over background sounds of steel on steel, coins dropping and falling orange peel, of getting through to someone like that?

The next eight hours will be punctuated by the unscrewing of the bottle and the counting of the pills (I can never remember how many are left) and the slow lurch down the narrow corridor from my office, gently bouncing from wall to wall like a pinball, in search of something to offset the soporific effects of the stuff. I never used to care that much for Klonopin, never really noticed it before, it was just a fallback boy during football season; a backrub for my lack of concentration; collecting me at the end of the day and settling me into bed, but alone, always discreetly going home and never pressing for any further involvement. But now that to fall in love with me is a mental illness, and now that I've been pushed out of sight by the out-of-mind, I've fallen in love with K. About 8 mg a day just to sit still and face the screen, more to stop crying. What, you want more? I tip the tablets out of the bottle again, take one, and make a pattern with what remains - if forty-five, then a triangle, if thirty-seven, a hexagon, but now there's only thirty-six, a square. The patterns may proliferate, but the prescription is not a repeat one. K and I are in a relationship with a definite use-by date.

And at night, I disappoint myself. At home, alone, I have IDD OCD, which means I roll over repeatedly to ensure that my mobile is switched to silent and that the landline is off the hook. Not that this protects me in any way - voicemail is still there, cupping its ear on my behalf and to ensuring that the words can never be taken back, even if my sleep remains unbroken. Still, it's the memory of being jaggedly hauled out of a dream - and what a dream it turned out to be - by a phone ringing at 3 am that drives my compulsion. Incredible betrayal that it heralded aside, I ask myself if such things will always be distilled and fused into an iconic sound, sight, smell or scene designed to forever haunt me, and demand such accommodating rituals? Why don't my wounds thicken and scar, instead of excoriating me, the auto de flay for the next wrongdoing? I'm a gun, and the whole world is a trigger.

Is there any way of getting through to someone like that?

" ...she said, well, he didn't say exactly those words, but they were having some... some humorous discussion..."

I ran to the bathroom, and sat hunched over on the toilet, not sure whether I needed to throw up or let it out the other end. Eventually I went for the latter. It felt like the bloody bowels of hell had taken up residence inside me, and when I eventually stood up and did the three-year-old's Freudian pirouette, the bowl was full of blood. I vomited and lay down on the cold floor, as the band next door launched into the Ride of the Valkyries, only to fumble and stall after the first few lines. I felt nothing, just sick and tired. Which was good, and I wondered how I could keep it that way.

Enter Mr K.

The heroic sorrower begins by saying, 'You do not love me as I love you', proceeds to saying, 'You did not love me as I loved you' and ends by saying, 'You could never love me as I loved you'. Male supermacy dictates an answer in the affirmative: 'You are quite right. It would be mad to love you as you love me. Keep taking the pills.'

- Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

Illustration by Edward Monkton.

CBT Song

I fear I may have missed the deadline for the Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health Userwatch competition for the most truthful poem, since the winner's already been announced. Oh well, I thought they might accept a late entry, which is, as usual, my bastardisation of someone else's carefully arranged outrage:

CBT Song (with apologies to Eric Idle)

Fuck you very much for CBT
Fuck you very much for reminding me
That the way I feel has no relation to what's real
And that no one really cares what happened to me
So fuck you very much for CBT
For trivialising and reducing me
To an emotional bureaucrat in my crisis management hat
I shouldn't say shouldn't, and even ought at that
I should make my bed and comb my hair in my railroad flat
So fuck you all so very much

Below is the original 'FCC Song' as performed by Eric Idle, and the complete lyrics can be found here. I'd welcome some additional verses and if someone who can sing and play the guitar (in other words, not me) feels like recording it and uploading it onto YouTube, that would be way cool. (But remember, it's just a feeling.)

School daze #1

One thing I rarely think about these days is high school. I know I've made barely any reference to it on this blog, apart from noting that my reluctance to attend was one of the factors that precipitated my induction into the mental health system. But my high school experience was critical in a number of ways - not only was I deviating from my prescribed role as an adolescent in Western society by skiving off, playing hooky or wagging, but I was also incurring the wrath of individuals in positions of authority, and last but not least, I was very distressed by what was happening when I was there. A triad which was a perfect inducement to psychiatric intervention if there ever was one.

In contrast, the shortcomings of the education system within which we were trapped continue to preoccupy some of my contemporaries. I suppose I'd be looking back in anger too if all that other stuff that was going on at the time wasn't getting in the way. But while my boyfriend expresses his irritation at not being allowed to take extra subjects to increase his university entrance score, and my high school friend Rose blames Catholicism for the mind-numbing conformism and anti-intellectualism that we had to contend with, all I can really think of is how scared I was of not being let out of hospital in time to sit my exams, and thus of being kept back for another year.

I did most of my time in the Catholic education system, but completed my final year at a state school. What happened to me at primary school is something best left for a session of EMDR followed by the intravenous administration of massive amounts of Valium. What happened at high school is well documented, as I was a compulsive diarist and letter writer at the time. I suppose one day I might sit down and read what I've kept and dredge up everything I've suppressed, but even without doing that I can say that back then I was very angry with the situation in which I found myself. A bit like some of my friends are now, but they generally weren't back then, something which rendered me very isolated in my opinions and thinking, and thus vulnerable to pathologisation.

What I mostly remember now about high school is the cold, or at least that's what I talk about when such reminiscing is called for. The heating system would often grind to a halt at the most inconvenient of times, usually the coldest days of the year. I brought a rug to school and Rose and I would wrap ourselves in it as we sat at paired wooden desks still covered in graffiti from the 1960s. The temperature in this classroom is not conducive to learning, she once wrote on the blackboard in her scythe-like handwriting just before an English class was due to start. The more extraverted types sat in rainbow-striped sleeping bags and gossiped through the mouth-holes of balaclavas, while the rest of us learned to write neatly wearing mittens. School rules forbade the wearing of socks, no matter how discreetly, under the regulation brown stockings, so during my first few months there my feet raged with chilblains. Of course I was always going to break that rule. The principal's secretary ordered me to remove the socks. I refused. It was the first of my many battles with teachers and other authorities, and is notable for being the only occasion on which my mother took my side.

I also remember how in Year 9 they made us do a six-kilometre run in gale force conditions, ostensibly to choose a team for the inter-school cross-country competition, when in fact the team had already been chosen. I remember trees being bent into hyperbolae by the wind, my clothes being soaked through, and that it was dark by the time we got back to school. I stumbled inside and saw panic in the face of the principal. The foyer looked like the corridors of the Louisiana Superdome, packed with drenched and stunned teenage girls. Somebody's mother drove me home, I think, and I spent the next few days in bed, in a kind of half-light, not knowing whether it was morning or evening. I took a pissy little overdose of aspirin and paracetamol, most of which I vomited up and then slept the rest off. I remember how a girl in the year below me stood up in class one day and started screaming Well, you're perfect, and you're perfect and you're perfect, pointing her finger at various other girls, and got carted off.

Rose and I have had many discussions about our school and what was wrong with it. She's still processing it, and needs to talk about it still, which is sometimes hard for me to swallow since back when it was actually happening and I wanted to talk about it - look, Rose, can't you see what's going on - she'd just tell me I was paranoid. She's right about the mind-numbing conformism and anti-intellectualism, that's for sure - we spent double the amount of time on the domestic sciences we did on the physical sciences and were told that the school's main goal was to produce good Catholic wives and mothers. There was no such thing as dux or valedictorian, and the only prize was the one given each year to a graduating student deemed by the teachers as being the most "Mary-like". (As I never managed to fall pregnant while still a virgin, I was unfortunately never a contender.) But while I'm no apologist for Catholicism, I don't consider it to be the root cause of the phenomena Rose describes. For relatively poor Catholic schools such as the one we attended were very dependent on the Federal Government for funding, and as responsibility for policy, curricula and so forth was delegated to the states, the thinking of the sitting State Government was highly influential as well. Our school could dress their policies up as "Gospel Values" all they liked, but it was politics - that of the governments, teacher training institutions, and teachers' unions - not religion, that fundamentally dictated them. And the politics at the time, er, weren't good.

I've always preferred to conceive the political spectrum as circular, with totalitarianism and democracy occupying opposite poles, as opposed to a linear left-right continuum. So we can create a totalitarian state either by moving sharply to the right or to the left. Now, it would be a gross and irresponsible exaggeration to say that Victoria, Australia, under the Labor government of 1982-1992 was a totalitarian state. But policy-making for education at the time was heavily influenced by Joan Kirner, a former school teacher and member of the party's socialist left faction, who became Minister for Education in 1988 and Premier in 1990. While Minister for Education, Kirner initiated a series of reforms aimed at reducing what she saw as the class-based inequity of the education system. As noble as this may sound, what Kirner tried to establish was a system that valorised "equality of outcomes" over "equality of opportunities". The concept of failure, along with any healthy competition, rapidly became verboten, and the notion of striving for excellence attained a decidedly elitist air. But one of the most pernicious and absurd implications of the "equality of outcomes" doctrine was that intellectual potential was, or at least should be consistent across the school population - that any variation in it was due entirely to class-based inequity, which of course had been scheduled for extirpation. This combined with the good old-fashioned Aussie tall poppy syndrome (that applies to just about everything but movies, pop music and sport) meant that many of us were encouraged, or even forced, to tone it down academically. To be something we weren't. To participate in the denial of the obvious that we are not all the same, and that our differences cannot wholly be attributed to class-based inequity.

It's not hard to explain this to Rose or anyone else. What is difficult to explain is how the denial of reality that is characteristic of totalitarianism, whether subtly or not so subtly enforced, manifests itself in epistemological terms, and how it replicates itself insides the minds of those required to participate in it. Essentially, some ideology - or theory in its ossified form - that was once presumably developed via a process of induction, is used to determine reality itself through the process of deduction. So the hardened theory ends up taking precedence over reality, when it was once a mere extrapolation of same. Educationalists observed that socioeconomic standing influences performance in school (induction), therefore any differences in performance were due to differences in socioeconomic standing, and nothing else (deduction). According to the dominant ideology, kids like me and Rose were just a bunch of spoilt rich brats, who needed to be cut down to size. Little matter that some of us came from families that were really battling, and not in the sense that 'battling' is used in the contemporary Australian political vernacular, that is, to describe people for whom it is somewhat a struggle to afford plasma screen TVs, five bedroom houses and SUVs.

Another example of this process, which will be familiar to many readers of this blog, is the habit of psychiatrists fixating on a particular diagnosis, and viewing your symptoms entirely within its framework. The diagnosis itself - a constellation of symptoms - might meet certain conditions of validity and reliability for it to be considered reflective of a tendency for such symptoms to co-occur, but rarely is a particular symptom indicative of a single diagnosis, and psychiatrists prone to leaping to conclusions will consciously or otherwise ignore any evidence that either contradicts or fails to confirm them. A patient who cuts can be diagnosed as borderline; another who hears voices can be diagnosed as schizophrenic - it usually isn't too difficult to extract from the miasma of psychological distress that accompanies these phenomena evidence that the patient meets the remaining criteria.

When this is going on outside, what happens on the inside? The message, loud and clear, was that I was a constellation of attributes and circumstances that couldn't, indeed didn't exist. In the face of this, my self contracted like a pupil, refusing to let the light in. Terrible memories I thought I'd gotten a handle on suddenly overwhelmed me, knocking me sideways into dissociative trances, which eventually became my stock response to any strong feeling whatsoever. I'd wander off between classes and 'come to' an hour or so later in the Botanical Gardens, in a nearby park or even at home, not recalling how I'd gotten there.

Then, owing to a complicated series of events, meetings and circumstances, I woke up one morning at the centre of the universe. I felt as if I was trapped in a glass cage, moving through a world populated by puppets and androids, dancing to my discordant, uncooperative tune. I was the tablecloth upon which the crockery and cutlery and the finest Waterford crystal was laid out - pull on me at your peril; it all hung, or sat, on me. Of course, at the same time I was told we're trying to change things, you and I, so don't fuck this up with your disappearing acts, Ruth. Are you listening to me? I'd go to the bathroom for a smoke and to inspect the nascent bruising on my upper arms (where my co-conspirator had grabbed me) or my shins (where he'd kicked me) or all over when he'd enveloped me in a rib-crushing hug. You can't go to the school up the road. There are boys there; they'll hate you, they'll call you a lesbian because you're good at maths.

I visited Rose, uninvited, not long after the first time I was hospitalised as a teenager. She was wearing her "Yay Team" school t-shirt and wasn't particularly pleased to see me. She gave me her usual lecture about how paranoid and negativistic I was, and when I told her I'd been in a psychiatric ward, she began talking about Sylvia Plath and Janet Frame and asked me if they'd given me any shock treatments. She seemed disappointed when I said no. We didn't speak to each other for a couple of years after that. The next time I saw her she was coming out of the building where the university's counselling service was based, doing the depressive shuffle.

In her early twenties, Rose spent a year or two doing nothing but watching daytime television, swallowing a now-banned anti-depressant, and ricocheting between the couch at home and the one in "shrinky's" office, where she pondered her need to infantilise him and everything, while being eaten up from the inside by a vulturous guilt. (I know that guilt well. It kicked in when I was 19 and I rode it out for a few months before resorting to Prozac, after which I completely nosedived.) Another girl, who'd been the quintessential quiet, polite type at school, suddenly lurched to the opposite end of the spectrum when she started uni, ranting and raving about nothing and everything, alienating all of her old friends, and putting off potential new ones. Another actually tried to set fire to the place. (Out of all of us, she's the one who's gone to enjoy the most social, academic and occupational success.)

In 1992, the Kirner Government was voted out in a landslide victory to the opposing Coalition parties. To a certain extent they were carrying the can for various major cases of financial mismanagement that had occurred both within their ambit and without, but they left a $2.2 billion budget deficit and $33 billion public sector debt nevertheless. The new Liberal Premier, Jeff Kennett (note that 'Liberal' has very different connotations in Australian politics to what it has in America and elsewhere; when we want to use the word the way Americans do, we say "small-l liberal") immediately took to the State's budget with an economically bone-dry scimitar, sacking public servants, closing down schools and privatising everything from utilities to prisons. While these had obvious economic benefits, there was an inevitable backlash, with thousands of people left jobless and many questioning the social costs of his initiatives and decrying his arrogance. He was re-elected in 1996, and remained popular for a while, but his cavalier attitude to criticism, his attacks on formal mechanisms in place to ensure accountability and his apparent failure to recognise that there was more to Victoria than its capital city, all led, gradually and then suddenly, to his then utterly unanticipated downfall at the 1999 election.

I've spent a bit of time on Kennett here because of his adjunct role in the mental health system in Australia today. He is chairman of an organisation called beyondblue, a "national depression initiative", and was one of the driving forces behind its establishment. A lot of people find this puzzling or hypocritical, given the devastating consequences his economic policies must have had for the mental health of the thousands who suddenly found themselves redundant. But while it's not exactly NAMI or TAC, it does promote the mainstream, medical-model approach to depression (to the extent that some local consumer groups have complained of censorship by moderators of its online forums), so to me his position there doesn't seem particularly incongruent with his earlier activities. After all, the mainstream, medical-model approach to depression localises the pathology within the individual, not in his or her social circumstances, such as being laid off by give-a-fuck economic rationalists.

Things are very different now, needless to say. The current Labor state government carefully puts one foot in front of the other in the middle of the road, as if auditioning for a certificate of economic and ideological sobriety. Meanwhile, enrolments at state schools are in decline, with those still operating perceived in very black and white, 'good' and 'bad' terms. Lying about your address to get your kid into one of the 'good' state schools is commonplace, as is the private schools' practice of 'poaching' talented athletes or the academically gifted from the state system, offering generous scholarships as enticements.

In a curious irony, the day I began drafting this post I got home to find that I'd been mailed a promotional magazine of sorts by my old school - God only knows how they got my address. Sixteen glossy pages of oh-aren't-we-fabulous, produced by a Fundraising and Public Relations Committee that certainly didn't exist sixteen years ago. The brown tights and serge dresses have gone, the nuns have been replaced by a lay principal with peroxided hair and a crocodile smile, and at least a couple of last year's graduating class have gone on to study medicine or law. The gangly Adams-appled history teacher I had in Year 8 now looks like Liam Neeson; about the only thing that hasn't changed is its domination of local inter-school sport. Then again, this being Australia, we were never expected to doubt the reality and desirability of excellence in that particular endeavour.