Letters from the front.

I'm just reading Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman. And thinking about what happened to my son that inevitably led to something psychiatrists if the past would call hysteria. 

And how it was that his hysteria became psychosis.

And how it is that what was once called hysteria became shell shock, when it showed up in men. Finally now, understood as a post traumatic....

Disorder?

Or

Response?

A response that leads to disordered behaviour.

Apparently if a normal, well adjusted person is subjected to severe stress and threats, it takes just 200 to 260 days before their response becomes disordered.

What on earth did they do to get this information!?

But, for my son to get to psychosis I am almost 100% certain that it required SSRIs..and the ceremony of degradation that is the inadvertent outcome of mental health services.

I have been watching a mental health nurse's posts on Instagram. They have no idea about the impact of their language and way of understanding. But it feels as if there's a glass wall placed securely between the normal and the 'ill'. I remember the smell of that attitude, how disempowering it felt, and I wasn't even on the receiving end.

Yesterday I went looking and I found my red book, the one I used during the screaming. I'm insulated from the full impact of the awfulness of that time because my notes written at the time are not very good! 

And there is this blog thank goodness.

Because I'm fitting together the story so far.

It starts when my son went to London to study at university. The first we heard back from him was when he told us that he was hanging out with a 'rock star ' famous for his heroin use. 

That was year 1. 

Then the girlfriend, who I call Princess K ( k for ketamine) who came with a ghost of a schizophrenic mother and a habit of watching online videos of people being tortured and dying.

That was year 2.

His response? 

To make a graphic novel about a totalitarian state, no future except drug induced passivity and succumbing to a routine of mindless work.

This was not for his degree...

Unfortunately the time it took him to write and draw, and go to work until 3am, whilst living in a slum. Relationship with Princess K in tatters - he failed his final year...

As if he'd fallen into his story.

And 'went off his legs', thought that he had a brain tumour and the rest is history. Because what else could explain how terrified and mad he felt.

Epistemic injustice plays it's part here.

Something about all this couldn't, in his mind, be a cause of such catastrophic symptoms. Patently obvious to me. But then I'd lived in fear as a child and knew what it did to my mind. 

We brought him home, and the family were so worried ( I felt so conflicted - but I wasn't worried)  I gave in to what seems to be common sense and took him to hospital...

SSRI induced akasthesia. 

And all the rest....