These wards contain so many people’s individual horrors, and there needs to be enough beds and enough people to carry all this and care for them. Otherwise we lose our humanity.
Tag: bipolar disorder
Being a psychiatrist – any regrets?
Becoming a psychiatrist was very important to me as a young doctor. As a patient, who had been in and out of a psychiatric hospital, it felt like a lost dream, something I could never hope to achieve. It is true that I had wanted to train as a psychiatrist before I became ill, but…
Boredom and depression
There are many unbearable aspects to depression, and sometimes it seems that the words available just won’t do – awful, terrible, crushing. There are many more. This can be particularly hard with recurrent depression, as each time it is freshly grim, something you had previously forgotten, and it never helps when people say – You,…
Preparing for mental illness
How do you prepare for mental illness? I think it is exceedingly hard, and can often require the kind of confidence that is, by definition, missing in such circumstances. I have never managed to prepare well, by which I mean that I have no written plan as to what care I would prefer. The saddest…
Return to work
How can things be better? This is a very general question, which doesn’t have much of an answer, so I realise I need to make it more specific. How can I reduce stress at work to enable me to carry on working in a useful way while avoiding becoming ill again? It’s a bit of…
Self-care or self-spare
I realised last week that I might need to take a bit of time off work. I’m not very ill – I wouldn’t be writing this if I were – but neither am I completely well, if well is as good as it gets, or ought to get. I have had a diagnosis of a…
Depression – a lack of energy
What is energy, as we experience it? It is a word with a positive force behind it, that glows and lives, and is the opposite of all that one usually experiences when depressed. Personally I find it quite difficult to recognise the feeling of low mood when I’m depressed, but reduced energy is actually more…
The trouble with psychiatric drugs
I’ve already written about psychiatric drugs, but this is a new post, and perhaps more personal than the last. For me, and I suspect others, taking psychiatric medication is a problem every day of my life. It’s like I have two people in me, one saying – ‘Yes, you know you need to take them,…
Saying the wrong thing
Mental illness is very personal, and also very immediate. When it happens to you, it is all that there is, surrounding you, bending your thinking, affecting what you say to others. But those people that are listening to you are not always in the same place as you, even those who have experienced similar illnesses…
Remembering life and illness
So many moments make up a life. Some are forgotten almost instantly, some fade with time, and some are written hard on memory. Some of these are happy, some painful and humiliating. Do we really remember them, or do they curl into something else, worn by memory itself? Do we talk about them, look at…
Of my daughter
My second child was due to be born when my daughter was four years old. Psychotic depression, before and after her birth had meant that we thought we would not have another, and it was a joy to think that we might have a different experience. I had been on lithium when the baby was conceived,…
Privilege
Privilege is a word that is uppermost in many minds at present. It drips off the tongue, coated in caviar, champagne and cocaine, and no-one can really decide whether they want it or not. Does it help? Does it condemn? I consider myself privileged and feel guilty for being so. I’m not privileged enough to…
The worried doctor
I think I have always experienced anxiety. Not all the time, in that I’m not always anxious, but it has always lurked in the background, waiting to spoil things. I don’t know how much anxiety is normal though, and perhaps mine is a sensible and healthy amount. No anxiety at all would be quite a…
Personality
We all have a personality, but, when you move into the realms of psychiatry and mental health, this term can take on a rather different meaning. It is often also very difficult to discuss, something which is hardly surprising, given the fact that personality disorder can be seen as a punitive diagnosis, one of exclusion…
Memory & more
I used to think that being present in any particular situation ensured accuracy. By this I mean accuracy of observation and also of recall; that standing witness to events was always reliable. As a child, I thought of the years as a climbing staircase, with different events, schools and holidays marking out the way. In…