The Sequence Of Hatred and The Impact on Mental Health Sufferers

I'm going to use this week's theme of sequences to explore what no body really tells you about OCD.

Before I begin, let's nip the illusion that everyone who is clean and tidy is suffering from an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and point out the fact that by throwing the term around, you're actually harming the real sufferers of OCD.

Not every sufferer of OCD has to turn a light switch on and off a certain amount of times, or wear the same jacket each time they go to Tesco. OCD can manifest itself in ways that we could never imagine. I once knew a girl who everyone thought was crazy, she was openly mocked within her social circle for thinking if she hadn't heard from someone in a while that they were dead, but this is all part of her OCD, all of these emotions were real for her. Imagine, not hearing from a friend or relative for a while, and then getting an overwhelming feeling of dread and frantically trying to reach out to them, and not being able to rest until you know with absolute certainty that they are alive.

It may be hard to accept that reality doesn't always have to go hand in hand with rationality because everyone experiences the world differently. No two realities are the same and the sooner we realise that the sooner that stigma over people with mental health issues will end. All too often OCD is overlooked and not even considered as a mental health issue.

I've seen an amazing level of acceptance spread for sufferers with anxiety and depression, yet mental health is more complex than a label we use to categorise human beings with.

The truth is that OCD can be debilitating. The mind can obsess over anything macabre, your very own narrative of horror replaying in your mind in infinite repetition. Some people even fear that they're psychotic, and they will end up killing the ones that they love. It's no wonder people with mental health issues often become alienated. This is just one of the reasons why mental health stigma is a killer. OCD sufferers are often regarded as freaks, just because people fail to see life through the eyes of someone that's suffering. This is the sequence of mental health stigma that allows people to become ostracised and ultimately too afraid to speak out.

People who suffer with OCD and any other mental health disorder need social support to recover, because the worst thing that could happen is for the person suffering to stigmatize themselves, thus completing the self-fulfilling cycle of hatred.

Thank you for reading, Amelia Vandergast

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Meat is murder? Look at it another way.

My Mum celebrated her 68th Mother's Day this Sunday.  She is 95 years old.  Her eyesight is failing, her hearing has almost gone but her 'little grey cells' are better now than when she was 60.  I can say that without fear of contradiction by anyone.  Her GP, her friends, her family would all tell you that her physical condition, her mental health and her memory are both considerably better now than then.

In the late 1970's Mum weighed 6 stone, her hair was dropping out, she walked with two sticks and was extremely ill both physically and psychologically.  Some years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a medical condition for which her GP had prescribed steroids: So many steroids that she couldn't sleep.  She was then prescribed barbiturates.  The combination of the two made her volatile, unpredictable and more than slightly strange. One day she fell backwards, hurt her back and was rushed to hospital. They ran some tests, discovered that she was calcium deficient but they also found that she had been misdiagnosed. Mum was dying from Pernicious Anaemia. There is no cure. She was 59.

Now when I say that there is no cure, that is a fact. It is a terminal condition. However, in recent decades a method was discovered to sustain life for those with the condition. Pernicious Anaemia is a condition whereby the body cannot absorb Vitamin B12.  Sounds stupid, doesn't it?  A human being can die just because they can't hold onto one of the thousands of vitamins and minerals that we have in our everyday diet.  The symptoms of lack of B12 are devastating. The condition has detrimental impacts on; short term memory; concentration; energy levels; muscle control and skin condition.

Every three months, my Mum has an injection of pigs blood.  It contains high enough levels of Vitamin B12 to sustain her life. And what a life she has had in the 30 plus years since she was diagnosed. She has seen all four of her own children get married. We have given her six grandsons and two granddaughters and they in turn, have introduced her to her six great grandchildren. She lived to see my father celebrate his 80th Birthday and to share with him their Golden Wedding Anniversary.

Mum came to my graduation (an incredible feat because I was 52 at the time) and she was around to see my eldest brother receive his MBE and went with him to Trooping of the Colour.  She has seen my sister's daughter compete at the Commonwealth Games and my younger brother's son win the Lytham Trophy.  I hope that she remains mentally and physically well enough to enjoy her telegram from the Queen.  Had Mum had been a vegetarian or vegan and refused the treatment, she would have died and missed out on almost half of her wonderful life.

Is meat murder? That is for the individual to decide.  All I would say is, if you make a conscious choice not to eat meat, have your B vitamin levels clinically checked on a regular basis. Also, and I appreciate that this is a big ask, but please try to live and let live on this one. You may consider that meat is murder but to some it is the giver of life.

On a different note, a song that we sang in a House music competition at school was called Donna and was a mournful story about a small calf on its way to market. As an eleven year old, it moved me to tears, just thinking about the fate of this helpless creature. I should add that there was no inference in the song that Donna would be slaughtered and eaten: Any such detail emerges only in the imagination of the audience. I wrote this week's poem during our community creative writing project Walking on Wyre inspired by the remembered song and bullocks paddling in the river at Scorton as Sand Martins put on an acrobatic aerial display.

Birdsong  

Black Angus heifers paddling in the Wyre,

St Peter’s spire and Nicky Nook

Brush-stroke a pastoral scene.

A landscape from the past,

lacking only country folk,

horse-drawn wain.

Ripples circle outwards from hooves in the

shallow ford between two luscious,

green-mile fields.

They lap contented at the tea-stained water

as it slugs along Sand Martin-pitted slopes. 

Nesting birds dash in and out,

bank left, then right,

fly-catching on the wing,

they sweep the fragrant air,

sky ballerinas in sweet Summer rain. 

 

Today they will not sing their freedom in the sky;

will not mock the beef-boys,

happy with their lot.

They see the pock-marked soil,

over-flowing with rose-tinted rain

and offer only birdsong in their wake.

Thank you for reading. Adele

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In White Coats

For quite a while now I've been trying to work on a collection of poems which pick and unpick at the mental health system. Below is a fragment from said collection:

I

Through squares of reinforced glass

I notice her cumbersome frame, and awkward arms.

The short cut white hair and lined face

out of time with the age of her eyes.

Don't worry, a nurse tells me, That's just Lily.

Over the next few days, she takes a liking to me,

sweeping her large, heavy hand over my hair

as if I were a doll, and rearranging my bedside table

until everything is straight and facing forwards.

At night, I lie awake listening to the lullabies

she sings to herself

                                *             *             *

I remember her licking at a red lollipop

and holding hands with a nurse.

I'm going out for the day, she said.

When she returned a couple of hours later,

she was tied to a wheelchair - her eyes empty,

her mouth stuck open as a line of strawberry saliva

travelled down her chin.

That night, the words of long ago lullabies,

were never sung. 

Sometimes, when writing poetry, the difficulty isn't in finding the idea, but rather in finding the best way to represent it. The fragment of poem above needs work when it comes to the representation of the idea - it's too prosey, the tenses aren't quite right and I'm not sure about the way in which speech has been presented. But this is one of the great challenges and pleasures of poetry, the rewriting and editing, as if the idea were a muddy gemstone plucked from the ground simply waiting to be cleaned and polished by the writing process.

Thank you for reading,

Lara

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Beware: Idle Hands

When origami used to be mentioned, like many others, I would think of paper cranes, butterflies and fish. However, these ‘first-to-mind’ associations changed a few years ago after reading Don Paterson’s Rain.  Now, when origami is mentioned, I think of a single poem from that collection: a blank poem consisting of just a title (‘Unfold’) and a name (Akira Yoshizawa). The poem is in memoriam and once the reader discovers that Yoshizawa was considered to be the grandmaster of origami, this poem, which initially seems to say nothing, takes on a very different meaning…

Yoshizawa once said “When you fold, the ritual and the act of creation is more important than the final result. When your hands are busy your heart is serene.”

Such sentiments have woven their way into therapeutic practices; Occupational Therapy (OT) exists within most psychiatric hospitals – or did before Cameron began his destructive reign – not because clay ashtrays will cure mental health issues, but rather the process of making may offer an hour of distraction.

Ideally, inpatient services would offer more than clay-shaping and paper-folding – talking therapies that give the chance of real change – but, in rundown wards where daytime ‘routines’ centre around the blurred chatter of the television, money becomes the reason for why more isn’t offered. So, for the moment at least, all we can hope is that OT remains in our hospitals, giving brief relief, until the government realises that those with mental health issues deserve more – that their lives are worth more than the subsequent costs.

*          *          *

To bring this post back to poetry I’d like to share a poem with you from The Naked Physician: Poems about the Lives of Patients and Doctors (Quarry Press) and reproduced on The British Journal of Psychiatry’s website.

Origami – Poems by doctors

(Arthur Clark)

At first, a long time ago,

there were only the folds of your armpits

and your buttocks and groin and eyes,

then the folds of the palms

whereby Madame Ricardo purported to know your future.

Much later came two folds on the forehead.

The folds at the eyes extended,

the ones between the nose and lip grew deep.

More folding. Vertical folds crossed the horizontal,

summers folded onto autumns, and the year

was folded by year and put on year away.

Vast sorrows were folded onto minor triumphs,

tucked under the slip of memory and lost.

Then I began to see the process,

in long shadows, by altered evening light,

as a process, and how each folding

brings you closer to perfection of the finished piece.

Thank you for reading,
Lara

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