Visibility Moderate Or Good - Occasionally Very Poor

If I was a Victorian woman, I would be one of those women who is confined to bouts of light needlework and Yellow Wallpaper style rest due to suffering with my ‘nerves’. If I was Greek, I would have a classic case of ‘hysterical womb’. Probable cure - being left on an exposed hillside to die or survive as a wild woman of the woods living off unripe olives until I shit myself to death, whichever comes first.

As a woman of the modern age I suspect that were I to be diagnosed now, I would have a string of letters after my name that would put B.A. Hons to shame. We will never know, things being as they are in the world of adult mental health provision. The current iteration of which is closely modelled on the being left on an exposed hillside idea.

I grew up in the Seventies and Eighties though, so I went through the stunningly imprecise journey from ‘highly strung', to ‘complete mental breakdown’ aged 17 with no discernible labels other than ‘thinks too much for her own good’ and ‘control freak.’ Treatment options included; swimming, chamomile tea, a pint of Guinness and uncontrollable weeping - none of which I recommend as a pick me up for chronic, existential despair.

Since that time I have made various forays back into the mental health arena for better or worse. Largely worse if I am honest, which is something I am trying to be here whilst still being funny.

N.B. It turns out that laughter is most definitely not the best medicine, because I am currently borderline batshit and still find the world extremely funny, but it is doing three fifths of fuck all to cure my woes. No doubt, laughter will soon be offered in six week blocks of treatment by the NHS as long as you’re prepared to do it over Zoom with a third party and swear on a stack of side effect leaflets that you’re not planning on killing yourself any time soon.

Someone recently described my life as ‘carnage,’ which was a fairly brutal assessment but one which on reflection is pretty accurate. It’s a lot, my life. Eastenders worthy except that if it was all written down, people would undoubtedly say that it doesn’t ring true.

I’m not saying that there aren’t good bits. If there weren’t good bits I would be in no position to be crafting witty newsletters to chuck willy nilly into the ether. For the sake of balance, which is something singularly lacking almost everywhere else, there are great bits but there are also terrible bits, and there have been terrible bits for a long time. That’s a lot to deal with.

Which is why I found myself calling the GP a month ago, asking for some help. I am back on the dried frog pills, which mean that I cry less at work. That’s good because nobody needs you to weep over their newly minted Colleen Hoover until it looks like it’s fallen in the bath. I also agreed to talking to a therapist, because man cannot live by dried frog pills alone.

I did not hold out hopes for the therapy because I am an old hand at this and I find myself struggling to share my innermost thoughts with someone who did an eight week course of CBT at their local college and now consider themselves to be the Oliver Sacks of the East Midlands.

I did try though, because mental brains are not always the most logical, and I felt I had to show willing and ‘turn up’ for stuff, and hope that things might be different this time.

It all started to go wrong yesterday after I filled out two, questionnaires to help the therapist decide on the right course of treatment for me. These consisted of a series of 1-10 questions that went very much like:

1. How likely are you to go postal and stab your entire family to death with a meat skewer? 1 - Not likely at all - 10 - Pass Me the Skewer.

2. How likely are you to fling yourself from a motorway bridge, causing unacceptable tailbacks on a busy, bank holiday weekend? 1- I heart the M25 - 10 - I usually work bank holidays anyway, so fuck the lot of them.

The call was this morning. It was an hour long assessment to see if they could glean any clues to my current mental health that twenty rounds of how likely are you to kill yourself and have your family sue us? didn’t cover.

I had to answer a lot of questions where I was only given a yes/no option. Can you wash/dress/feed yourself type questions. You were not permitted to answer, ‘yes but what is the point?’

I had to answer a lot of questions about what it feels like to be mental both physically and emotionally, but only, it seems, in specific circumstances. It is not enough to say that you feel like a ghost, dragging around a meat carcass because if you can still go to work and not stab people in the face with a gimbal gun, they don’t care.

None of the questions asked about the context to these feelings. When I attempted to explain why my skyrocketing levels of anxiety are not going to be solved by breathing in for four and focussing on the colour blue if I am still required to spend large parts of my life dealing with an out of control bin fire, you could hear her stop typing and put her best listening face on: ‘hmmm. Let’s move on.’

If only I could.

She was mandated to steer me towards one of three options:

CBT - which I refused to do, because if sniffing an orange and practicing a wide range of displacement activities was going to work for me, by now I’d be the fucking Dalai Lama. She however, seemed to think its powers are so mighty that it will not only turn me into a tranquil lily of the field in my waking life, it will also stop me grinding my teeth into bloody stumps while I sleep. Verily a miracle.

Counselling for depression - only six sessions after a several month wait and apparently, because I am not about to enact a personal armageddon and can wash my own armpits, I am not depressed enough to qualify. My anxiety is too high, she explained, and pushed my anxiety to hitherto uncharted peaks where the air was so thin I felt like Sherpa Tenzing. Luckily there were no crampons to hand, given that I had already sworn I was not in a position to commit violence upon anyone. After this, I inched closer to qualifying for something. A strait jacket, probably.

Goodbye and don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out - I was, it seems uniquely qualified for this - and so we are back to exposure on a hillside as if several thousand years of human evolution had never happened.

At the end of the session she asked me to complete various sentences. The last one?

I will know when I am better when…?

I said:

I will know when I am better when I feel like myself again.

She said:

That’s not an acceptable answer.

And there you have it.

In the world we live in today, attempting to be yourself is not an acceptable answer.

It’s enough to drive you mad.