Rings around the moon.

We were going to go on an expedition. The one promised from a lifetime ago, when ex-Service User said that he wanted to go to the beer garden...and I said 'we will come back when you are not taking the SSRI and you can drink beer...' But this morning began in a way I can't recall... And for reasons I can't remember. Perhaps in the light of yesterday... I just couldn't take the possibility of him becoming florid , as I was driving down the motorway. After all been there and done that - the nightmare scenes filling my mind - so I gave him two hours to reassure me by his behavior within those hours. But most of those hours were filled with him being screaming mad. So, here we are. The reasons for the screaming mad? Well for my own sanity and to model 'correct' behavior husband and I have been ignoring his obsessional monologues. They are met with - if any reaction at all - these words: 'I believe this is an obsessional thought. I refuse...

Ex-Service User hasn't ritualized his anxiety, but he is obsessional and the obsessional thinking is certainly compulsive. Now I'm asking myself, just what is it about a 'diagnosis' that makes me feel better? How do the words help? First of all, the words. At the top of this page I say my son was suffering from 'psychosis' in so much as the word translates directly to illness of the soul...I leave the word psychosis unchallenged. I think psychosis is one of those things that doesn't really need a text book description for you to recognize it in operation. You will know it when you see it. A psychotic person is in a different reality, animated (understatement!) struggling, dissociated - too far away from any shared versions of reality to reach, waving and drowning.... Apparently there are two main pathways to psychosis: depression and schizophrenia. The difference is, a psychosis growing out of depression doesn't take over the whole person, the...

We took ex-Service User to the hospital for his check-up X rays. Being positive here, I can honestly say that his capacity to sit in the waiting rooms is so much better than it was. Just a couple of forays into the subject uppermost in his mind -about being a psychopath, having committed lots of crimes and how he will be tortured forever - headed off at the pass by feeding him nuts...., He left with a discharge - sometimes that is a good word - so he is healed sufficiently, his fractured bones are mending. We headed into town for a celebratory meal...only it didn't feel that way, because within minutes of the orders being taken, ex-Service User is beginning the panic monologue again. I had been revising Solutions Focused technique, a central tenant of which is: who cares about reality (don't get caught up in he content) just look for stuff that works! So I was fairly centered and able not to get caught up in the mad spinning, but on the other hand, having to spe...

Realising that OCD fits the symptoms demonstrated by ex-Service User explains why the SSRI and anti-psychotic drugs had zero effect on his repetitive, endless, self-recriminations. The stuff about Satan and Christ and being in Hell were fueled by morphine, Tramadol and the rest of the drugs, while his obsessional, compulsive thinking magnifies any emotive thing that crosses his mind. And it will remain so until he realises that he is the cause of his own despair. This is what his aunt suffers from, his Granddad too, to a lesser extent. It is ugly and pointless and the article (from which that section in blue comes) describes it as hopeless... So Simon George (or is it George Simon?) is all we are left with as a guide. How many people are in our position? How many families around the country are trying not to get sucked into the whirlpool of mental torment and twaddle OCD creates? The thing we need to work on - that is husband and I - is how to avoid enabling... The thir...

Marduk made the world by wrestling with the dragon... Only by fighting to the bitter end... The piece of paper - the letter - that husband and I signed, saying: We give you 30 days notice.... I burnt it on the lawn, last night. This week has been truly awful So, what made me burn the letter? An article in the Guardian, actually. Written by a person suffering from Pure O... I'd never heard of it. The OCD society don't see why such a term is necessary... But I for one, am very grateful to the person who wrote that account, because it has radically changed our relationship with ex-Service User. Literally, it was as if someone broke down the roof cave-in, that had held us trapped in a dank and dark prison cell ever since we first brought ex-Service User home. I would never have got to  see that Service User is suffering from a form of OCD without the term Pure O. It explains why he wont go to see a psychotherapist, because the shame of seeing a therapist would ...

So we walk back to that line again. The invisible one 'drawn in the sand' Between enabling a grown-up child to remain dysfunctional, and shoving them out of the nest - I know that isn't a very nice way to say it, but I suspect that push will come to shove. At the moment I genuinely can't tell if I feel so ill because I'm stressed, or if I'm actually ill. Underneath the headaches and nausea I am in total and utter despair; my eyes fill with tears at the slightest thing. There is the despair at what we have all been through - at some point I will stop to process that, but the time isn't right.  But I feel that all that is placed in a jar on a high shelf for latter, I'm in despair everyday because he makes no attempt what so ever to seek help. It doesn't matter what we say, no matter how many times we challenged his reductive assumptions about how he can't do anything about the past, and how the police are going to take him away and he w...

As I walk past the bathroom, I think I hear the sound of my husband weeping, his tears falling as he showers. I'm upstairs to fetch my coat, the fake leopard fur. I'm cold in a way only despair can make me feel. I think you may rightly judge from that word dispair , we have really had enough. The 'Summerland' visit was too much, it proved to me that there isn't a way to distract ex-Service User better. My feeling yesterday that his whole life is a distraction, just grew and became a conviction. I don't think his comment about drugs last night, helped either - class A - not medication. The drug connection is something I have no idea about, but increasingly the subject makes me angry. I can't remember if I wrote about 'Princess Ketamine' before? She was ex-Service User's ex-girlfriend and she came to stay here after ex-Service User got out of the psychiatric hospital. At one point ex-Service User asked me if I had a problem with her....and ...

Well yesterday was a ' Summerland ' day; a day to help Ex-Service User create good memories. Only...who knows! We went out and he paced. We were out, now sitting in Costa, and he was talking about how the police could be about to get him. We went into a shop...and all the time I could feel the timer ticking, asking myself, how stressed is he now, how many people have noticed that - guess what - he is pacing. Summerland is possibly a good theory, I mean I think it sounds like a reasonable theory. But he isn't someone who needs any more distraction! This morning I awoke to feel as if I'd been hit over the head during the night. My stress quota is back to dysfunctional-normal for me now, after falling down to zero over the weekend. My husband seems to have some kind of food poisoning today as well.. So anyway, I got in touch with a therapist to see if she can offer ex-Service User any treatment, and I put on headphones and listened to Turkish psychedelia while I ...

There are now pages at the top of this blog. And the first one is about The Order of The Third Star'... link And here is a poem:

Having returned from the roundhouse...and this photo is through the door into the meadow - the meadow where the wild deer would graze each morning as the sun began to rise... Having returned we feel a lot stronger and more able to avoid getting caught up in the whirlpools of Service User's 'I should haves'. The hardest part of returning is this, there is no one who can tell us what to expect or what to do. The only theory we have, underpinning what happened to Service User is that prolonged 'anxiety' damages the hippocampus. And, in theory, the hippocampus can recover if anxiety diminishes. Studies are described to show that chronic stress or prolonged exposure to glucocorticoids can compromise the hippocampus by producing dendritic retraction, a reversible form of plasticity that includes dendritic restructuring without irreversible cell death. Conditions that produce dendritic retraction are hypothesized to make the hippocampus vulnerable to neurotoxic o...

We have a holiday booked. I booked it in January - so it is for two people, to stay in a small house somewhere well off the beaten track. This tiny holiday (tiny house, for three nights) has hung like a precious jewel, threatened by all sorts of mad twists in the events that followed.  A beautiful tiny house, in a meadow, by a stream. Hanging like a promise, hanging before me as a taunt - because how can we leave Service User...I mean he just went out and ran under a bus...what if he does it again! Well a friend has stepped in and will be on hand to listen to, and be with Service User while we are away. Also, this kind of thinking, the 'what if...and I'm responsible' attitude is my 'Royal road' to my own edition of anxiety and depression. Three whole nights, I see myself lying flat on the ground in the pouring rain, just connecting to me and my experiences. Nothing mediated through endless 'what ifs'. And far away from the gibbering. Gibberi...

Service User talks a lot about being dead and being in Hell. Well to be honest, I think it is getting less. Partially because there isn't much point telling us, since we just say 'well it seems pretty good, you get food and a bed and no disembowling'. Then he says, "it's going to start any moment" And we say, 'oh well so be it'. Thinking about visiting Aunty Ex-ServiceUser and the rage she and her dad feel towards the world, towards themselves, towards everything I guess... It struck me that perhaps Service User has a point. His rage will eat him up and leave him an empty shell A body without a beating heart, without love, without feelings. A zombie... Why is a zombie devoid of any feeling except rage? Years ago a dream told me about a spirit that ate people leaving them drained...their bodies clawed away...and this spirit said that it was 'the true Maria'. Weirdly there was that 'Satanic' aura of fear about the dre...

On Wednesday we went to see Service User's aunt and her 'carer' my Father-In-Law. The reek of urine was distinctive...as we walked in to the house. The stench of urine in her room was overwhelming. More about that later. Father-in-Law runs on resentment and repressed anger, he was pleased to see Service User though, but it didn't take very long for the same old themes to reoccur - about how he is too busy 'with this lot' (meaning his daughter) to get a GP to see her. On digging a little deeper he says that he doesn't want to upset her because she will start swearing, but he would think about allowing the doctor to see her if my husband (his son) was there too. At that point Service User and I went upstairs to see Aunty ex-ServiceUser. I think my mind has shut quite a lot of it out now... But she was fairly happy - is the best I can say. Lank, greasy, unwashed hair, clothes.... Her legs are now contracted in that way the legs of coma patient...