And you were saying that when you were so young you didn’t really know about mental health or?

No.

.anything at all. And you said that it was other people around you who were noticing that there was something wrong.

Yes.

What was, sort of, happening at that time, what you know, looking back now, what was going on?

I suppose, you know, I was living with a family who, I thought they were very, very good to me. They weren’t my own family but my, I had a really good friend at the time and I’d be saying things to her that were really bizarre and was saying things like I thought that somebody was trying to poison me. Saying things like, that I’d been on holiday to maybe a America’ or where and I’d already seen her a day previous, you know, so there was no way, you know, it was just completely like, the things I was saying doing were out of character, but completely unbelievable at the same time. So but I do think that I built up a reality for myself, that I could cope with that at that time. But yes, it was just, it was quite bizarre, and I was get, I would get annoyed with people that they weren’t believing what I was saying and you know, becoming really quite frustrated and then realised that I was just very, very ill.

Yes, when I was 40, or just before I was 40, I left my wife and at the same time my dad had terminal cancer. And because of things that had happened in the marriage I became very paranoid. You, you know, it wasn’t paranoia out of, you know, it didn’t just sort of come out of nothing, it was paranoia based on things that had happened. Which I guess is kind of interesting because you think maybe when people talk about paranoia it’s completely sort of free-floating. Whereas it certainly wasn’t in my in my circumstances, or at least not to start with.

And then I went away on holiday to America. And when I came back I can remember thinking that, well, first of all that the taxi that picked me up had CIA, had a CIA driver in it, and I was convinced when I checked in that, that the people there were part of the CIA. Yes, it was quite, it was quite bizarre. And I suppose the bizarrest thing was that I was still coherent enough that, that in between the times when I was psychotic there were periods where I was completely coherent and could remember being psychotic. And I kind of went downhill from that point.

And I can remember getting messages from the television and, not just the news [laughs]. Yes, so it was, well, I wouldn’t say it was an interesting time, it was a terrible time. And kind of from there it, it got worse. I became, well, I became incapable of doing anything at all. And I guess when you get a very deep depression you kind of cease to feel anything at all. It’s this complete sort of, I mean I think emotion is part of the human state and I felt no emotion at all, complete nothingness. And in a sense you’re no longer human when you feel that. You, you know, it’s as if you’ve kind of like stopped being. So, you know, I felt like my life was completely on hold.

Ok, well I think I’d say that the relevant time with me becoming ill was around July 2009. I’d become increasingly anxious about kind of any decisions that I had to make, like we were going camping with some friends up in [name of town] and we had to go by car, although we don’t own a car and I was really anxious about driving and about what to take and things that I’d normally be fine about, I was really fretting about.

And I’d also become quite anxious about the children’s development and how I was with them and the way that I was bringing them up and things like that. So that was all, I was extremely anxious about that.

And then we went, the crucial time that sort of triggered the fact that I was ill happened just after I’d been sent home ill from work, so they’d noticed that something was up, when I was hiding under a desk and saying that I needed to go to sleep [small laugh]. So they said, You’re not right. You need to go home. So I was sort of signed off from that point.

Anyway we then went camping to a festival. I don’t know why we went. It was crazy to have gone, but we did [laughs]. I think I was just like, well I’m not ill, so we have to go with life as normal, because I was utterly convinced I wasn’t ill and there we were with some friends who, she was, just found out that she was pregnant and she had to tell us because she kept being sick, so, and they had two small boys. So I became convinced that my daughter was sexually abusing the boys. So I didn’t want to leave them alone with her and all that sort of thing. And then also was convinced that we were going to cause the Mum to have a miscarriage because we were like demanding so much of her, as she was doing all the cooking and things like that.

So when I said that to [name of husband], when I got home, I said, She will have a miscarriage and then you will know that I was right about everything.

That was when, I think that could have been when he called the doctor initially or called a second time and certainly spoke to a friend of mine and said, Look shes really lost it completely.

I guess my story is that I’d suffered from mental health issues most of my life since I was about a teenager, since I was about 12, and I coped quite well with them, most of my teenage and working life. Up until I got to about 38-39, and they started to get progressively worse. My depression would get longer and deeper. And that went on for a couple of years until I got to my early 40s where I got, I really had a bit of a breakdown, I would say, and the depression got very, very deep and very, very dark and very very suicidal. And at that point I’d been referred to a consultant psychiatrist and it was agreed that I would then move into hospital at that point.

I’d grown up, when I was young, my Mum’s an alcoholic and she was drinking alcoholically like, so I took on a lot of responsibility with myself and my sister trying to, trying to be Mum I suppose to my younger sister and there was a lot of abuse within the relationship that I had to try and cope with. Which I think probably, well very much definitely resulted in the first breakdown that I had.

As I say it was when I was 18. I didn’t have, I didn’t realise that I was ill. I’d never heard of mental health before, and you know, it was twenty years ago, so things were different then. And I remember being with a family that I was living with at that time, and going to my bed and I’d taken an overdose and I was serious, that was it, I just didn’t want to be waking up in the morning.

I had taken 20 tablets and I’d woken up in the morning and gone to work with what I can only describe as a Mother of hangovers. As soon as my supervisor had seen me she knew something was wrong and I got put into a like hospital.

A mental health team quickly became involved, and a psychiatrist came to see me and asked if I wanted to go to [Name of hospital] for a weekend’s assessment. So I agreed, not knowing what [Name of hospital] was. I thought they were sending me to a spa or somewhere for a rest [laughs]. How wrong I was [laughs].

When she first became ill, nobody, it’s the most, it’s the most difficult thing to understand… I don’t think people think about mental illness in everyday life. I think they think about heart attacks, cancer, all those, sort of, diabetes etc. But nobody ever thinks about mental illness. It’s not on peoples radar and when it happens to you it has the most devastating effect you could possibly imagine. I went to talk to the doctor. She came into my room one night and told me that her room was full of snakes. And, she was at college at the time. And she was never academically very brilliant but she was very fit, she was training to be an aerobics teacher and a beautician and hairdresser. And she loved life, she really loved life and she was strong and fit and slim, and very beautiful.

And she came into my room one night and said she had, the room was full of snakes. And she couldn’t sleep there. And I just automatically thought like everybody does, even though she was 19, shes had a nightmare. So I said, Oh well, come and jump in with me. And didn’t think any more about it.
Two or three days later I had a phone call from the college to say had I noticed anything strange about my daughter, because she had picked on a tutor there and was staring continually, never taking her eyes off this tutor, following him round the college and staring and arriving from behind walls and just staring? And they knew that things were not right.

Anyway I went round to see the doctor and he subsequently said, You know, were going to have to get her to see a psychiatrist. Etc.

So a consultant psychiatrist came to my house to interview her and they sectioned her, and she went down to [name of hospital], the local psychiatric unit and she stayed there for eight months on the first trip.

I grew up in quite a stable family and depression probably hit me, when was it? We, my ex-husband and I moved to [name of country]. He was in the services and whilst I was there I had a miscarriage and I lost the baby at about sixteen weeks and because of my nursing background, I don’t think that helped, I just was very clinical about it, and it didn’t affect me at all.

But to my surprise I had postnatal depression which I, stupidly, never realised could happen with a miscarriage and they were really nice. They didn’t know how to deal with me there, but they sent me back to the UK and I stayed with my Mum for a bit and then my ex-husband came back to the UK with me.

And then a year or so later I had my second daughter. And it was probably about a year after that I started to become really depressed. And I can remember having to go to the Department of Psychiatrist and the psychiatrist interviewed me, and he went off to get some paper work and I just ran. I had a little moped at the time and I drove that home and took a massive overdose and I went to the general hospital and I have vague memory of it.

Had you ever experienced anything that you would call depression or low mood or anything like that before hand?

I think in my teenage years, possibly. But Mum had severe mental health problems, depression, and you know, whether it was just a reaction to what was going on at home. My Mum lost my sister when she was a baby and that was before I was born and shes never really recovered from that. I don’t think you can recover. And so, whether it’s, no, not really [laughs]. No, but it was in the family.

I, wed got a young lad, a little toddler and I was working and so with the hours I did I didn’t notice too much at first and I’d gone up to, I’d gone, taken her and wed taken the lad and myself up to see my mother who was, well there was a party going on and my partner, she just seemed to sit there and not say much and others kept saying Is she alright, is she alright? and so I’d say Yeah shes alright, just tired.

But then as the next couple of weeks went on it became more and more noticeable that there was something not right and so I called the doctor. Doctor said oh yes I’ll have somebody come out next day to you and I thought well okay but shes not well, shes doing all these daft things. So next day came, Yes shes suffering from a psychotic illness, What do you mean? It’s a psychotic illness I can’t, I don’t, I can’t tell you the in’s and out’s, Okay. So there was another, he said I’ll call somebody else out, she come out and yep, We need you to go, take her to the parent and baby unit.

So I went up the parent and baby unit and they had a chat, Yes, we think theres definitely something wrong and we need, we think you need help. And so yep, Well take her over to the hospital, well take her over to the [hospital], Okay. And so taking her over, take us over to the [hospital] and want, she got worse travelling over there and we saw a consultant on the ward, Yep, shes going to have to be admitted and she said, and the consultant turned round to my partner and said Do you know where you are? [Pause] No, Do you know who this person is? Yes. She says Shoe Sales Assistant, and I thought well thank you very much, that’s what you think of me, so yes she was definitely not right.