The Ten Points discussed
1. Choose Life. Sometimes an immediate issue. Recently I was talking by Internet to a man in New York who said he was sitting with five loaded guns under his chair. A difficult situation. Sometimes my life has been saved only because of the absence of loaded guns, pills, or by happening not being on a clifftop. Four or five people on the Internet took it in shifts to listen and talk, it went on for about nine days. Then he stopped talking. We never found out. A Samaritan told me that people have the right to chose. Fine, but if someone calls our group for help, we have the right to respond. Suicide is no longer an option for me, although the feelings come and go. If nothing else, the decision to act on those thoughts can be put off till the next day with a bit of persuasion. Choose Life and maybe give it one more chance. What can you tell a man with his finger on the trigger ? Maybe that a quarter of a century has passed since my own attempts failed, and, despite the difficulties and pain along the way, despite the doubts, I’m glad I’m still here. Along the way our group has saved a few lives. Simply because we were there and someone turned up as a last resort. For a few moments maybe, someone set their own problems aside and listened, and maybe said something that planted a tiny seed of hope. Choose life, and maybe, save another one.
2. Use the Group as a Source of Strength. The real strength in the group is the commitment. The decision to turn up. No individual can provide that same quality of support, and no individual can draw on the strength without giving some of his own, knowingly or not. We are not a fountain of wisdom, we don’t hand out fixes and remedies. It’s a lifeboat, and we all lend a hand in some way by adding to the unity and the bond of mutual survival. I don’t look for strength from individuals, I look for the feel people give each other when their lives and their qualities of life are at stake. Sometimes the strength comes from talking about illness, sometimes from recovery, the key lies in the honesty. No-one can rely on the strength of others in the group without giving it back, and passing it on. If anyone feels better, if their lives take on new dimensions, it might be a good idea to try to pass that on to someone else.
3. Try to get a True Understanding of the Illness. Find out where you are, get to know your cycles of moods, see how the effects vary from person to person. Lonely self-diagnosis is a one way trip downwards. If we think life is beating us up, we don’t have to lend a helping hand to it by constantly painting negative picture of ourselves. I know what my illness is called, and I can take my pick of old and current theories as to what causes it. Some say chemical imbalance, some say the position of the planets, some believe we have been bad people in a previous life. What really matters is to know what is illness, and what isn’t. Is a mood change part of some remote uncontrollable cycle or am I having a bad day? How did I respond last time I felt this way, and do have different choices now of how to respond? Are the limitations that my illness seems to place on me something I can negotiate with by changes of actions and thoughts, or do I simply give in to its unseen power and fall at every fence? Am I a person affected by an illness or am I an ILL person; there is a difference. Although my illness is unpredictable, can I plan for how I will deal with the next change of mood? Maybe the first step is to talk to someone who cares, or has been through the same thing and come out of the other side.
4. Try not to Get Depressed about being Depressed. Seems like a statement of the obvious, and yet it is a dangerous part of our cycle. Since in a low period, we are well aware we are not feeling the way we used to, or the way we would like to, it is too easy to pile one negative feeling on top of another, or build walls round the walls. On a day when the black cloud threatens, I may be limited in what I do, and it can lead to thought that this a No Day, no point in resisting. Whatever I would like to believe, I’m about as good as what I do with the situation in front of me. However small the progress I can make during the course of the day, I accept the reality of the situation that at all costs I must keep moving, even inch by inch.
5. Find Solid, Manageable Ways of Handling the Illness. I don’t know where the notion or attraction to doing nothing and letting depression swallow me whole comes from, but I know it has happened sometimes.
At present, I am managing my illness by changing my actions, modifying plans, and working to realistic targets. I can’t tell people how to do this, I can only say what I do. All said and done, I’m a bit of a mess by “normal standards.” My ability to cope with adverse situations was never brilliant, and at times I have found it hard to manage making a cup of tea, let alone manage a massive and crushing mood change. Improvements come in small, visible bricks for me, not in glittering dream palaces. My illness is like an unreliable car. Sometimes the window sticks, sometimes the wheels fall off.
I’ve left myself at the roadside a few times, or even at the scrapyard door.
This very day I have the ability to have some kind of plan or order, some hopes and even signs of a managed life. The illness isn’t quite so much in the driving seat. With help from some good people, I am.
6. Have a Clear Knowledge of the Past but avoid Living in It. We can’t get far today if we are dragging the chains of yesterday. Like any other person, our histories are seldom a model of perfection, or some happy Soap Opera. Mr Normal knows how to regroup after some personal disaster and move on. He isn’t likely to suddenly fall back into the quagmire or lapse into some sad daydream of regret. He won’t sit down and write a list of “The Ten Stupidest Things I’ve ever done.”
7. My past lives on the top shelf of a corner cupboard in the kitchen. It doesn’t stand staring me in the face like a trial judge. I know that if I allow it enough power, it will drain the potential goodness of any day, or any moment of that day. Virtually every self-help book I’ve ever read makes some reference to the point of living, thinking and feeling in the present. Within one day, which is all we have any power over. They are not kidding. This could be the best lifesaver of all.
8. Be aware of Others Worse Off and try to Support them. Like I have said elsewhere, we are not a special case. Our illness deserves no more attention from outside sources than any other. I have two illnesses, chronic alcoholism and manic-depression, but I also have an ongoing opportunity to recover, to manage the situation. Many people do not. Within our own illness, we aware there are people who seem to be beyond the kind of help a group like ours can offer. They can’t get there, they are locked up, under section perhaps, or medicated beyond reason. Or they are indoors, crushed between four walls, just like some of us were. Even with our group, there are people whose lives and present situation are appalling compared to mine. We do try to support them, and the group has recently made moves outside its own walls into local hospitals. If we can help break the loneliness, despair an isolation even for a moment, its worth it. Somehow, helping others seems to be the best therapy of all. It’s a pity the world isn’t aware of it.
9. Use the Telephone. It’s too easy to say “Well they wouldn’t’ want to hear from me.” I found the answer to this one by accident one day. I made a list of a dozen people I could phone, and phoned the last one first.
The reason they were last on the list was that I really believed they wouldn’t want to hear from me. All I can say is try it. To be phoned is a pretty clear indication someone is thinking about you. I sat in this very room ten years ago with no-one to phone. And I stopped answering the calls, too.
If you’re really on an up, phone someone you think doesn’t like you much.
If you are really on a down, give someone the chance to help you. They will probably love it, that’s a fact.
10. Plan to Go to the Next Meeting It’s the easiest thing in the world to miss meetings. Someone phoned me yesterday who thinks they are a group member. The truth is, they have been twice in two years. Maybe you don’t feel like going, and the last thing I want to do is to have to sell the group, or make a rod for someone’s back. Maybe you think you are too ill to go, or too well to go. That’s your choice, and I don’t walk in your shoes. The fact is, I’d like you to be there. Someone might turn up who needs you. Remember how you felt the first time you came. Someone was there for you. Enough said.
Wednesday, 28 March 2007
Saturday, 17 March 2007
unleash hell
David Kerr’s Story
Sometimes in the midst of all our apparent normality, life and circumstance take a turn for which no human being could expect to be prepared.
The world hurtles happily through space and time, its surface popping insanely with boundless human travesties. In any given moment, thousands of instant catastrophes are happening all over the world, even one of which would be too much to contemplate. In the time it took to write those few lines, lives have been shattered, snatched and broken, trashed and in those few seconds, everything is gone. The second hand on the wall clock moves one inch and everything you believe in, all your education and experience, all your history of love and life, means nothing. As the California license plate says,
Shit Happens.
Before it happened, I was David Kerr. Now I’m writing at the request of Mike Parker, founder of the Basildon self-help depression group. I cannot attend the group at present, I'm in an “Intensive Care Mental Ward” I do not feel, as it happens, intensely cared for in here. The unit is new, opened last week by the Chairwoman of Basildon Council. You can smell the polish and the OBEs. It is pristine, with Malibu style wooden floors, a state of the art Nurses Station, seemingly modelled on the gas-chamber observation room in San Quentin, a triple door entry system. It looks the part, like a film set. The truck arrived last week and spewed out the crew. A sorry bunch of half-life casualties. They are the staff. The patients seem more used to the displacement ritual. Two million pounds worth of instant decay, National Health Monopoly money scattered in a festival of ill-guided be-seen self-indulgence. I’m writing a four pager for Mike’s new book on depression self-help. Mike knows me, he knows I can write a thousand pages, but he keeps saying only four. I offer him 18 pages , he laughs and walks away. Out through the triple entry door system. Jesus wept, there’s no picture of the Queen, what hope is there for us? Mike says he doesn’t want a ream of change-the world rantings. He wants to know David Kerr. So do I.
I had, in some respects, a brilliant childhood. The streets of Cumbernauld, Glasgow, Scotland, tough mean and fun, with real adventures coloured with daydreams, my father’s scrapyard and dogs, anti-picturesque and musical, the central feel of family laughter, togetherness and warmth of optimistic poverty and the pop of air-rifles among the sad and derelict cars, pellets and shouts defining territory. We made our lives work, with the sheer energy of being, and rough and clannish but unshakeable bonds. It was alright to be us, it was more than alright. We never really knew if there ever was a big pike in the fishpond, the fabled lone symbolic predator feared by perch and little boys alike, but we waited endlessly for that unmistakeable ferocity of bite and the imagined glamour of being the one that landed the thrashing monster. Boys were born to kill giants, to take on the monster in the search for recognition and even adulation. The real monster waited.
A town dubbed as number two in the publication “The fiftiest crappy towns in the UK” where badgers were either too ashamed or too afraid to show up at night, according to the homespun humour which is the built-in self help therapy of lifestyles that otherwise might me labelled as inadequate. Millionaire pop-singers echoing in the ice-rinks and pubs “All you need is love” and our mothers scour Woolworths for a few pennies off, and live under the spiky umbrella of debt-collectors and the tally man. Teenagers with vacant faces in “The Worst Town Centre in Britain” while myself and comrades climb forty feet up a tree in search of a kestrel egg surging with forbidden anticipation, the seduction and rape of nature. The obscure prize nestling innocent and virgin, and only a hero can claim such a prize. And the legend that a swan’s wing can break a man’s arm proved true by one mate. It always seems that these things happen to a certain type of friend and never us, but it is the whole gang of us that become stranded on a cliff-top suddenly reminded that we are dependent still on some aspects of the adult world, not as safe as we thought. Maybe after all, adults know some stuff and can protect us. When shit happens. So, on a day when maybe thoughts were wandering to the mysteries of what girls have and boys don’t, there’s a sudden switch of realities when a raid on a starling’s nest triggers an attack by ferocious wasps who sting my ears into ugly swollen flaps and somebody, naturally, says “serves you right.” The dawning realisation that despite the endless attractive qualities of Mother Nature, she sometimes bites back, and hard. At about the same time, the blackest of comedic moments when a wasp invades farmboy’s yokelly overalls as he makes clumsy progress with an early female prospect who already is realising that a farm-working huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ adolescent lump somehow lacks the finesse and romance she craves.
I flee the scene, a hysterically bad slapstick figure. She must have laughed herself sick.
The move from Primary School to Secondary School turns a shy awkard achiever quickly into a Punk, I go quickly to the nearest and easiest peer group bandwagon, learning the best ways to flout the worst words in the language, the little swot overnight becomes a monosyllabic oaf-urchin, safer from the bullies now, the sensitivity less obvious, the doubts hidden in copied bravado, and under pressure, learning to live the lie. The dangerous conflict of high ego and low self-esteem begins to grow. Am little big man, or a big little man. I operate from defence, not aggression, years must pass before that simple safe philosophy is dashed forever.
It is Wilma who makes some attempt to make a man of me. We do the Thing. There is no lapel badge to flout to say “I did the Thing” We go further than the Thing and embrace Love, and clutch at it gladly, it means we are normal, and even a punk rebel has emotions of a sort. Her father offers me a job as a flat roofer, and I learn quickly to identify with the Sex Pistols happy benevolent outlook that “I was made a Moron, and have “No Future.” Their success endorses my gravitation to failure. The cult of Money must be financed by a cult of poverty and fed my acceptance of mediocrity. We suck on ciggies and feel comfortably wordly and American when we pull the tab on a can of cola.
It is Wilma too that opens the door to depression. It seems like a small door but there’s many rooms in that mansion, I am to discover. Wilma decides to share herself around. The head-spinning feel of first love and romance becomes a dirt-cheap parody as the tale-tellers feed me with skin-crawling details. The first raindrops of sad disillusion herald the arrival of the black cloud. The wasps move from my ears and sting deep inside me. They breed on the fluids of a sickening stomach. I am a blob of raped innocence, the colour of life turns to foggy mush, I buy wholesale into the pain and I have no defences as my Wilma, irreplaceable, satiates herself, gorging on garbage , feeding at the trough of cheap sensation. She takes more, she settles for less, and I have nothing.
The life-force and inspiration drain from my consciousness, and I taste the bitterness of deception, the hollowness if the Big Con, at a time when mindless promiscuity was in its infancy, at a time when some of us still clutched at the endless confetti of love songs and lived our emotions second-hand through the heroic hymn tunes of Phil Collins. High and brilliant feelings reduced to the appalling squalor of a Coronation Street bang behind the Rover’s Return. I taste the huge capacity of the Human to hurt others, I vomit the nauseating blood of betrayal, not realising, that just around the corner, the Beast waits. Shit is going to happen, and it is going to be bigtime.
Like a lamb to another slaughter, I begin the rounds of Doctors and Psychiatrists, again buying wholesale into yet another illusory world, actually still a believer. Here come the anti-depressants, they look promising and somehow I feel like a Graduate of the School of Life. I look at the pills, my new and trusted friends, they are pretty those little foetuses of process, and somehow compliment the neatness of the lady in Boots. Was she betrayed too? Does she know? Like an alcoholic tasting that first brimming beer, I am off and running, albeit backwards, albeit chaotic, albeit innocent, I am a consumer in the burgeoning billion-dollar industry of hope measured in milligrams and have not a whisper of an idea that one day I’ll begetting stronger doses of the Happy Elixir, through a needle, in the arse, held down by a gang of moronic mental health workers. No mention of this on the list of side effects. In some distant leather-clad office, the managing-director of some silky sweet pharmacological
Corporation can confidently order another Aston Martin. A new punter has entered the game, and sadly, it seems to be me. The quack says six months, they seem to have some weird affinity to that time frame, since they forget you in six minutes. All that pain and heartbreak, and instead of the kindness of angels I have only a little green prescription slip as a memento of the lost battle with love.
Six months. Too long to think about when the Suicide virus is already well installed in the system. I have a whole packet, a real-live gun.
Instead, the Geographic cure. London calling, and the prosperous South-East, depression neatly packed into a hold-all wrapped in some new hope. First stop is Ealing YMCA. Somewhere along the line I had shifted my suicide plans to somewhere in my forties, so now I considered my life half-done. I meet and fall in love with a head of staff at the Y, and we talk marriage. Her name is Jill Saward. The Beast is ready, the second hand on the clock sweeps slowly towards his Coming. He comes as suddenly as an axe wielded from behind, but with less mercy, he comes as totally as a horrendous nuclear blast, but with less reason. On March 6th, 1986, what happened is described by the Daily Telegraph as “One of the most notorious sex crimes in history” At the time of writing it is 21 years and seven days ago. It might as well be seven minutes.
In an Ealing Vicarage Jill Saward meets the Beast full-on. It comes in the form of three men, two high on drink and drugs who drag Jill, her father, and I into the study and after crushing the skulls of the men with cricket bats and pouring salts into the wounds rape my fiancée, my Jill, my love, over and over in the most vicious and appalling style. We are made to watch, and listen to the stream of abusive drunken filth. Heaven caves in and crashes through the earth taking all life with it. The senses, physical and mental, cannot take it in, it’s too bloody
big. A personal reverberating Armageddon knifed into the consciousness and twisted with hideous maniac glee, all the puss and filth of human garbage flooding every cell of the body, all the sins of sick and soulless men stamped behind our eyes for ever, and our mentality, the skin of life, so bloody thin, ripped from our skeletons and leaving only vacant staring terrified eyes and a mashed and jelloid brain which cries “No More!” There is a deafening silence of numbed consciousness, but no, it does not take refuge in legendary style in the subconscious, it is raw and naked and it rages. It sobs and shrieks and vomits, and if and its here forever. For some of us, the idea that time heals is an appalling sick joke. And brace yourself, victims, THEY are coming. The forgivers and forgetters, the Judge, the Jury. Unable to even imagine the horror of the victims, they take the next best course and sympathise with the perpetrators. See my book, currently under construction. See Jill’s book too, she somehow through some unseen grace, managed better than I.
The crime finished out relationship, the vicar forgave the three “men” a week later on TV. Jill forgave too, and later later married and had children. Somehow the second hand of the clock comes out of freezing and begins to trick me into depression, rage, paranoia, a healthy young man except for a dread of anything sexual and every conceivable form of mental illness writhing under the usual polysyllabic conglomerate Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
I will take nothing from Jill’s courage and strength by saying I was a victim too. Help offered to me……none. I become a celebrity of sorts at work, the cheap innuendos and sexual remarks come from every directions, people love to cash in on an easy target in order to boost up their vision of their own safe and ordered lives. Nobody wants a victim around, it makes them aware of their own vulnerability when the Beast is to close to home. Thank heaven it wasn’t me, say the rubberneckers. That bloke’s been through hell, let’s finish the job. He must have asked for it.
My first brush with Society, the System, the hypocrisy and neglect, the indifference and a ridiculous posturing legal system that gowns and wigs itself away from the real nature of crime. It tells us we are less than It. Queen’s council? Go council the Queen.
The punk graduates. Guns now, car and lorry theft, credit card fraud. The baby is rattling and good. #
Some compensation comes, but is swallowed up by the property crash. A flood of fractured relationships. Seeking emotional compensation with addictive voracious and empty encounters. Inside the child screams for love. A business venture with video rentals leads to meeting my partner Trish, who gives me two sons Jake and Jamie, now 10 and 11. Relationships for me the minefield of them all, the apparent normality infected by old messages in the mind, the slightest emotional difficulties turning quickly into hideous explosive unbalance. Alienation and resentment on hair- triggers. I leave the business and return to the work market.
At a local factory the prize comment, and maybe they drew straws for the honour, was “I’ve heard the rapists buggered you as well.” The milk of human vileness so freely available once again to an easy target. Two accidents, one a blow to the same side of the head fractured by the rapists, and now, inevitably, the whole network of emotion, rage, bitterness, blinding inner loneliness, unravelling me in every direction as every untreated mental wound festers afresh and PDST flashbacks, the hallmark of the Vietnam Veteran, create a ghastly nightmarish mental time-bomb leading be back to the face-flannel superficiality and irrational authority of the mental health system, where diagnosis and ham-fisted treatment are served up fast-food style. Next year’s street-corner drugs ladled out in bucketfuls and Have a Nice Day. An after care treatment with an astonishing resemblance to total abandonment finds me taking on the whole sick fairground of suicide attempts, from the mock-religious overdose to the more glamorous jumping in front of trucks and trains. The journey from hurt to madness is well known, and frighteningly easy. An exorcist-like fight for possession of my soul between mental illness and medication illness. More diagnosis, less care. In the end they go no further than the first page of the file. They don’t like to pry. Drug pushers professionally avoid involvement with their clients. After all, if it comes packed so prettily, it must be harmless in a dreadful sort of way. They have me now. I’m multilabelled, I’m on the computer, I’m Googleable. Just open open up a mental health unit anywhere, sooner or later David Kerr will show up. You only need a dozen David Kerrs and you are in business, the natural flow of money is assured, and through people like me you can claim your right to respect and a good pension. You can drive home happy and fulfilled. Hooray. Here comes the London train. Quick look to the left and right and its hey-ho, a horrendous screech from brakes and commuters alike and leap like a mad frog onto the littered rails. Failed again, hello forced injection.
What saved me? Mike Parker’s self-help depression group. They use a long forgotten medication there, its ancient as dinosaur droppings, and the health service fears and scorns it. Friendship. The real stuff, the 18 carat bond of actual care. There is wellness there. Two quid a meeting and you can stuff yourself on chocolate digestives. Suddenly the world shifts. Maybe, no matter what, despite the flashbacks, the smash-ups of the mental ward and factory premises, the latest admission to these very new and very thick walls, despite it all maybe its ok to be me. Mike thinks we can make it. Maybe even in the process we can shatter the plastic vacant smile of the corporate institution, maybe we can kick over a few money-changing tables in the temple. Maybe out there in the blind and cynical and increasingly self-driven world somebody will finally hear the Scream.
Sometimes in the midst of all our apparent normality, life and circumstance take a turn for which no human being could expect to be prepared.
The world hurtles happily through space and time, its surface popping insanely with boundless human travesties. In any given moment, thousands of instant catastrophes are happening all over the world, even one of which would be too much to contemplate. In the time it took to write those few lines, lives have been shattered, snatched and broken, trashed and in those few seconds, everything is gone. The second hand on the wall clock moves one inch and everything you believe in, all your education and experience, all your history of love and life, means nothing. As the California license plate says,
Shit Happens.
Before it happened, I was David Kerr. Now I’m writing at the request of Mike Parker, founder of the Basildon self-help depression group. I cannot attend the group at present, I'm in an “Intensive Care Mental Ward” I do not feel, as it happens, intensely cared for in here. The unit is new, opened last week by the Chairwoman of Basildon Council. You can smell the polish and the OBEs. It is pristine, with Malibu style wooden floors, a state of the art Nurses Station, seemingly modelled on the gas-chamber observation room in San Quentin, a triple door entry system. It looks the part, like a film set. The truck arrived last week and spewed out the crew. A sorry bunch of half-life casualties. They are the staff. The patients seem more used to the displacement ritual. Two million pounds worth of instant decay, National Health Monopoly money scattered in a festival of ill-guided be-seen self-indulgence. I’m writing a four pager for Mike’s new book on depression self-help. Mike knows me, he knows I can write a thousand pages, but he keeps saying only four. I offer him 18 pages , he laughs and walks away. Out through the triple entry door system. Jesus wept, there’s no picture of the Queen, what hope is there for us? Mike says he doesn’t want a ream of change-the world rantings. He wants to know David Kerr. So do I.
I had, in some respects, a brilliant childhood. The streets of Cumbernauld, Glasgow, Scotland, tough mean and fun, with real adventures coloured with daydreams, my father’s scrapyard and dogs, anti-picturesque and musical, the central feel of family laughter, togetherness and warmth of optimistic poverty and the pop of air-rifles among the sad and derelict cars, pellets and shouts defining territory. We made our lives work, with the sheer energy of being, and rough and clannish but unshakeable bonds. It was alright to be us, it was more than alright. We never really knew if there ever was a big pike in the fishpond, the fabled lone symbolic predator feared by perch and little boys alike, but we waited endlessly for that unmistakeable ferocity of bite and the imagined glamour of being the one that landed the thrashing monster. Boys were born to kill giants, to take on the monster in the search for recognition and even adulation. The real monster waited.
A town dubbed as number two in the publication “The fiftiest crappy towns in the UK” where badgers were either too ashamed or too afraid to show up at night, according to the homespun humour which is the built-in self help therapy of lifestyles that otherwise might me labelled as inadequate. Millionaire pop-singers echoing in the ice-rinks and pubs “All you need is love” and our mothers scour Woolworths for a few pennies off, and live under the spiky umbrella of debt-collectors and the tally man. Teenagers with vacant faces in “The Worst Town Centre in Britain” while myself and comrades climb forty feet up a tree in search of a kestrel egg surging with forbidden anticipation, the seduction and rape of nature. The obscure prize nestling innocent and virgin, and only a hero can claim such a prize. And the legend that a swan’s wing can break a man’s arm proved true by one mate. It always seems that these things happen to a certain type of friend and never us, but it is the whole gang of us that become stranded on a cliff-top suddenly reminded that we are dependent still on some aspects of the adult world, not as safe as we thought. Maybe after all, adults know some stuff and can protect us. When shit happens. So, on a day when maybe thoughts were wandering to the mysteries of what girls have and boys don’t, there’s a sudden switch of realities when a raid on a starling’s nest triggers an attack by ferocious wasps who sting my ears into ugly swollen flaps and somebody, naturally, says “serves you right.” The dawning realisation that despite the endless attractive qualities of Mother Nature, she sometimes bites back, and hard. At about the same time, the blackest of comedic moments when a wasp invades farmboy’s yokelly overalls as he makes clumsy progress with an early female prospect who already is realising that a farm-working huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ adolescent lump somehow lacks the finesse and romance she craves.
I flee the scene, a hysterically bad slapstick figure. She must have laughed herself sick.
The move from Primary School to Secondary School turns a shy awkard achiever quickly into a Punk, I go quickly to the nearest and easiest peer group bandwagon, learning the best ways to flout the worst words in the language, the little swot overnight becomes a monosyllabic oaf-urchin, safer from the bullies now, the sensitivity less obvious, the doubts hidden in copied bravado, and under pressure, learning to live the lie. The dangerous conflict of high ego and low self-esteem begins to grow. Am little big man, or a big little man. I operate from defence, not aggression, years must pass before that simple safe philosophy is dashed forever.
It is Wilma who makes some attempt to make a man of me. We do the Thing. There is no lapel badge to flout to say “I did the Thing” We go further than the Thing and embrace Love, and clutch at it gladly, it means we are normal, and even a punk rebel has emotions of a sort. Her father offers me a job as a flat roofer, and I learn quickly to identify with the Sex Pistols happy benevolent outlook that “I was made a Moron, and have “No Future.” Their success endorses my gravitation to failure. The cult of Money must be financed by a cult of poverty and fed my acceptance of mediocrity. We suck on ciggies and feel comfortably wordly and American when we pull the tab on a can of cola.
It is Wilma too that opens the door to depression. It seems like a small door but there’s many rooms in that mansion, I am to discover. Wilma decides to share herself around. The head-spinning feel of first love and romance becomes a dirt-cheap parody as the tale-tellers feed me with skin-crawling details. The first raindrops of sad disillusion herald the arrival of the black cloud. The wasps move from my ears and sting deep inside me. They breed on the fluids of a sickening stomach. I am a blob of raped innocence, the colour of life turns to foggy mush, I buy wholesale into the pain and I have no defences as my Wilma, irreplaceable, satiates herself, gorging on garbage , feeding at the trough of cheap sensation. She takes more, she settles for less, and I have nothing.
The life-force and inspiration drain from my consciousness, and I taste the bitterness of deception, the hollowness if the Big Con, at a time when mindless promiscuity was in its infancy, at a time when some of us still clutched at the endless confetti of love songs and lived our emotions second-hand through the heroic hymn tunes of Phil Collins. High and brilliant feelings reduced to the appalling squalor of a Coronation Street bang behind the Rover’s Return. I taste the huge capacity of the Human to hurt others, I vomit the nauseating blood of betrayal, not realising, that just around the corner, the Beast waits. Shit is going to happen, and it is going to be bigtime.
Like a lamb to another slaughter, I begin the rounds of Doctors and Psychiatrists, again buying wholesale into yet another illusory world, actually still a believer. Here come the anti-depressants, they look promising and somehow I feel like a Graduate of the School of Life. I look at the pills, my new and trusted friends, they are pretty those little foetuses of process, and somehow compliment the neatness of the lady in Boots. Was she betrayed too? Does she know? Like an alcoholic tasting that first brimming beer, I am off and running, albeit backwards, albeit chaotic, albeit innocent, I am a consumer in the burgeoning billion-dollar industry of hope measured in milligrams and have not a whisper of an idea that one day I’ll begetting stronger doses of the Happy Elixir, through a needle, in the arse, held down by a gang of moronic mental health workers. No mention of this on the list of side effects. In some distant leather-clad office, the managing-director of some silky sweet pharmacological
Corporation can confidently order another Aston Martin. A new punter has entered the game, and sadly, it seems to be me. The quack says six months, they seem to have some weird affinity to that time frame, since they forget you in six minutes. All that pain and heartbreak, and instead of the kindness of angels I have only a little green prescription slip as a memento of the lost battle with love.
Six months. Too long to think about when the Suicide virus is already well installed in the system. I have a whole packet, a real-live gun.
Instead, the Geographic cure. London calling, and the prosperous South-East, depression neatly packed into a hold-all wrapped in some new hope. First stop is Ealing YMCA. Somewhere along the line I had shifted my suicide plans to somewhere in my forties, so now I considered my life half-done. I meet and fall in love with a head of staff at the Y, and we talk marriage. Her name is Jill Saward. The Beast is ready, the second hand on the clock sweeps slowly towards his Coming. He comes as suddenly as an axe wielded from behind, but with less mercy, he comes as totally as a horrendous nuclear blast, but with less reason. On March 6th, 1986, what happened is described by the Daily Telegraph as “One of the most notorious sex crimes in history” At the time of writing it is 21 years and seven days ago. It might as well be seven minutes.
In an Ealing Vicarage Jill Saward meets the Beast full-on. It comes in the form of three men, two high on drink and drugs who drag Jill, her father, and I into the study and after crushing the skulls of the men with cricket bats and pouring salts into the wounds rape my fiancée, my Jill, my love, over and over in the most vicious and appalling style. We are made to watch, and listen to the stream of abusive drunken filth. Heaven caves in and crashes through the earth taking all life with it. The senses, physical and mental, cannot take it in, it’s too bloody
big. A personal reverberating Armageddon knifed into the consciousness and twisted with hideous maniac glee, all the puss and filth of human garbage flooding every cell of the body, all the sins of sick and soulless men stamped behind our eyes for ever, and our mentality, the skin of life, so bloody thin, ripped from our skeletons and leaving only vacant staring terrified eyes and a mashed and jelloid brain which cries “No More!” There is a deafening silence of numbed consciousness, but no, it does not take refuge in legendary style in the subconscious, it is raw and naked and it rages. It sobs and shrieks and vomits, and if and its here forever. For some of us, the idea that time heals is an appalling sick joke. And brace yourself, victims, THEY are coming. The forgivers and forgetters, the Judge, the Jury. Unable to even imagine the horror of the victims, they take the next best course and sympathise with the perpetrators. See my book, currently under construction. See Jill’s book too, she somehow through some unseen grace, managed better than I.
The crime finished out relationship, the vicar forgave the three “men” a week later on TV. Jill forgave too, and later later married and had children. Somehow the second hand of the clock comes out of freezing and begins to trick me into depression, rage, paranoia, a healthy young man except for a dread of anything sexual and every conceivable form of mental illness writhing under the usual polysyllabic conglomerate Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
I will take nothing from Jill’s courage and strength by saying I was a victim too. Help offered to me……none. I become a celebrity of sorts at work, the cheap innuendos and sexual remarks come from every directions, people love to cash in on an easy target in order to boost up their vision of their own safe and ordered lives. Nobody wants a victim around, it makes them aware of their own vulnerability when the Beast is to close to home. Thank heaven it wasn’t me, say the rubberneckers. That bloke’s been through hell, let’s finish the job. He must have asked for it.
My first brush with Society, the System, the hypocrisy and neglect, the indifference and a ridiculous posturing legal system that gowns and wigs itself away from the real nature of crime. It tells us we are less than It. Queen’s council? Go council the Queen.
The punk graduates. Guns now, car and lorry theft, credit card fraud. The baby is rattling and good. #
Some compensation comes, but is swallowed up by the property crash. A flood of fractured relationships. Seeking emotional compensation with addictive voracious and empty encounters. Inside the child screams for love. A business venture with video rentals leads to meeting my partner Trish, who gives me two sons Jake and Jamie, now 10 and 11. Relationships for me the minefield of them all, the apparent normality infected by old messages in the mind, the slightest emotional difficulties turning quickly into hideous explosive unbalance. Alienation and resentment on hair- triggers. I leave the business and return to the work market.
At a local factory the prize comment, and maybe they drew straws for the honour, was “I’ve heard the rapists buggered you as well.” The milk of human vileness so freely available once again to an easy target. Two accidents, one a blow to the same side of the head fractured by the rapists, and now, inevitably, the whole network of emotion, rage, bitterness, blinding inner loneliness, unravelling me in every direction as every untreated mental wound festers afresh and PDST flashbacks, the hallmark of the Vietnam Veteran, create a ghastly nightmarish mental time-bomb leading be back to the face-flannel superficiality and irrational authority of the mental health system, where diagnosis and ham-fisted treatment are served up fast-food style. Next year’s street-corner drugs ladled out in bucketfuls and Have a Nice Day. An after care treatment with an astonishing resemblance to total abandonment finds me taking on the whole sick fairground of suicide attempts, from the mock-religious overdose to the more glamorous jumping in front of trucks and trains. The journey from hurt to madness is well known, and frighteningly easy. An exorcist-like fight for possession of my soul between mental illness and medication illness. More diagnosis, less care. In the end they go no further than the first page of the file. They don’t like to pry. Drug pushers professionally avoid involvement with their clients. After all, if it comes packed so prettily, it must be harmless in a dreadful sort of way. They have me now. I’m multilabelled, I’m on the computer, I’m Googleable. Just open open up a mental health unit anywhere, sooner or later David Kerr will show up. You only need a dozen David Kerrs and you are in business, the natural flow of money is assured, and through people like me you can claim your right to respect and a good pension. You can drive home happy and fulfilled. Hooray. Here comes the London train. Quick look to the left and right and its hey-ho, a horrendous screech from brakes and commuters alike and leap like a mad frog onto the littered rails. Failed again, hello forced injection.
What saved me? Mike Parker’s self-help depression group. They use a long forgotten medication there, its ancient as dinosaur droppings, and the health service fears and scorns it. Friendship. The real stuff, the 18 carat bond of actual care. There is wellness there. Two quid a meeting and you can stuff yourself on chocolate digestives. Suddenly the world shifts. Maybe, no matter what, despite the flashbacks, the smash-ups of the mental ward and factory premises, the latest admission to these very new and very thick walls, despite it all maybe its ok to be me. Mike thinks we can make it. Maybe even in the process we can shatter the plastic vacant smile of the corporate institution, maybe we can kick over a few money-changing tables in the temple. Maybe out there in the blind and cynical and increasingly self-driven world somebody will finally hear the Scream.
Monday, 12 March 2007
it starts here.......
Intro. “keep it real” (Ali G)
Our self-help depression group is well into its fourth year. This book shows depression from the view point of people who want to do something about it.
It is has 3 aims. First to present depression management for those that have it, second to try to help friends and relatives of sufferers to understand the illness, and last to show by example how people with the same basic problem can find tremendous support and therapy through forming groups of their own.
Doctors and psychiatrists have taken a few guesses, some of them quite good, over the years, as to what we feel. The professionals aren’t enough. The principle of groups of our kind was laid down in the 1930’s by Bill Wilson, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous. The medical profession at the time had virtually written off chronic alcoholics as a lost cause. Within five years, Bill W had 100,000 alcoholics sober, by meeting in local groups. Scott Peck, the enlightened community- building American Psychiatrist who wrote “The Road Less Travelled” wrote that the founding of AA was the most significant event of the century.
Our group is the natural extension of two people trying to solve mutual problems over a cup of coffee. This is the obvious first step. When there are 3 or 4, maybe rent a room for a weekly meeting. Advertise and tell.
150 people have attended our group, and at any time there are between 8 and 15 at any meeting. Some of their stories are here, and hopefully illustrate the range of the illness. This is not a cry for help, nor an invitation for sympathy. This is a Lifeline.
Our self-help depression group is well into its fourth year. This book shows depression from the view point of people who want to do something about it.
It is has 3 aims. First to present depression management for those that have it, second to try to help friends and relatives of sufferers to understand the illness, and last to show by example how people with the same basic problem can find tremendous support and therapy through forming groups of their own.
Doctors and psychiatrists have taken a few guesses, some of them quite good, over the years, as to what we feel. The professionals aren’t enough. The principle of groups of our kind was laid down in the 1930’s by Bill Wilson, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous. The medical profession at the time had virtually written off chronic alcoholics as a lost cause. Within five years, Bill W had 100,000 alcoholics sober, by meeting in local groups. Scott Peck, the enlightened community- building American Psychiatrist who wrote “The Road Less Travelled” wrote that the founding of AA was the most significant event of the century.
Our group is the natural extension of two people trying to solve mutual problems over a cup of coffee. This is the obvious first step. When there are 3 or 4, maybe rent a room for a weekly meeting. Advertise and tell.
150 people have attended our group, and at any time there are between 8 and 15 at any meeting. Some of their stories are here, and hopefully illustrate the range of the illness. This is not a cry for help, nor an invitation for sympathy. This is a Lifeline.
our view
see it
We do not claim to be “a special case.” We are one among endless illnesses, some of which are so obviously more dreadful. Our world seems to be rife with illnesses of every description, cruelty, need, and all these enhanced by selfishness and indifference. Failure to share the world’s resources with each other has led to appalling differences in living conditions. In Britain, the loss of community has deadened the affinity of people to help each other. “I’m alright Jack” has never been stronger. Professionalism and big business in the health services has turned patients into what are now called “service users,” or consumers in a world that increasingly emulates big business. We, the group are one illness in the middle of all this, and we are a small and growing community which uses one resource. Each other.
.
The term depression means about as much as the term “a bad leg.”
Just as a bad leg can mean a stubbed toe, or severe gangrene, depression covers everything from a mild downturn of mood, to what we have come to call the Black Pit. In the general community, it probably means something of a grey cloud. Therefore, there can be no diagnosis of “depression.” It isn’t enough. Suicide figures give some guide to the scale of the illness.
Over a million people commit suicide each year. One every forty seconds. Given those statistics, its hard not to be cynical when people say “it’s a cry for help”
There are in addition of course, just as many suicide attempts. And then there’s the countless millions who carry the notion of suicide around, as it were, in their back pocket. Then there are the people who have no idea they are depressed. Their performance is low, their hopes limited, their lives greyed-out. They might work and have families, somehow hanging on, and may have the idea that something inside is wrong. It’s worldwide, it’s growing, and it’s often ignored, denied, glossed over, misunderstood, or worse, simply laughed at.
The definitions and categories of depression have little value here. If our lives are affected by negative mood changes, if we feel despair, powerlessness, lack of drive, low self-esteem, sense of failure, all these, and sometimes for no apparent reason, either intermittently, or seemingly endlessly, there is obviously a disorder to be faced. Our experiences show that we usually have limited resources in ourselves to deal with the situation, we have to look elsewhere. We have turned to the medical world for cures, and been disappointed. We have turned to our families for support and understanding and have met fear, judgement and misunderstanding in some cases, even from caring ones. Sometimes we have found refuge in trying to understand the symptoms of our illness, such as our addictions to substances and behaviour, and have sought the roots of our problems in our childhoods and meantime tragedies, or even our genes.
We have found however in our groups that the feelings are far more significant than the facts, and that the differences in our histories are far less than the feelings we have in common. Like every other creature on the planet, we can do little more than try to get the best out of each day as it comes along, and we are among the many millions of people who seek support from our own kind by talking in specific groups about specific problems. We have to find ways to disempower our illness, by understanding our limitations, seeing where in we are in relation to others, but also by seeing our potential. Often the first person to write us off has been ourselves. Doing nothing, and sharing nothing, has sometimes been our way of life.
We recognise that the propensity for depression is what we have in common, but more importantly we realise the limitless opportunity this gives us to help each other. Help may be talking, listening, or simply being present, instantly taking the isolation from the other person. Being there, and being aware, perhaps for the first time, that there is a bond of care available in the group which is special, and not available elsewhere. We have learned the combined power of listening and sharing in a safe, non-judgemental environment, and learned that we are more than people with a convenient label for those that would write us off. We are not defined by out illness, we are people with an illness, which sometimes comes and goes, with varying effects. And what is more, we have become vital to each other’s quality of life.
We do not claim to be “a special case.” We are one among endless illnesses, some of which are so obviously more dreadful. Our world seems to be rife with illnesses of every description, cruelty, need, and all these enhanced by selfishness and indifference. Failure to share the world’s resources with each other has led to appalling differences in living conditions. In Britain, the loss of community has deadened the affinity of people to help each other. “I’m alright Jack” has never been stronger. Professionalism and big business in the health services has turned patients into what are now called “service users,” or consumers in a world that increasingly emulates big business. We, the group are one illness in the middle of all this, and we are a small and growing community which uses one resource. Each other.
.
The term depression means about as much as the term “a bad leg.”
Just as a bad leg can mean a stubbed toe, or severe gangrene, depression covers everything from a mild downturn of mood, to what we have come to call the Black Pit. In the general community, it probably means something of a grey cloud. Therefore, there can be no diagnosis of “depression.” It isn’t enough. Suicide figures give some guide to the scale of the illness.
Over a million people commit suicide each year. One every forty seconds. Given those statistics, its hard not to be cynical when people say “it’s a cry for help”
There are in addition of course, just as many suicide attempts. And then there’s the countless millions who carry the notion of suicide around, as it were, in their back pocket. Then there are the people who have no idea they are depressed. Their performance is low, their hopes limited, their lives greyed-out. They might work and have families, somehow hanging on, and may have the idea that something inside is wrong. It’s worldwide, it’s growing, and it’s often ignored, denied, glossed over, misunderstood, or worse, simply laughed at.
The definitions and categories of depression have little value here. If our lives are affected by negative mood changes, if we feel despair, powerlessness, lack of drive, low self-esteem, sense of failure, all these, and sometimes for no apparent reason, either intermittently, or seemingly endlessly, there is obviously a disorder to be faced. Our experiences show that we usually have limited resources in ourselves to deal with the situation, we have to look elsewhere. We have turned to the medical world for cures, and been disappointed. We have turned to our families for support and understanding and have met fear, judgement and misunderstanding in some cases, even from caring ones. Sometimes we have found refuge in trying to understand the symptoms of our illness, such as our addictions to substances and behaviour, and have sought the roots of our problems in our childhoods and meantime tragedies, or even our genes.
We have found however in our groups that the feelings are far more significant than the facts, and that the differences in our histories are far less than the feelings we have in common. Like every other creature on the planet, we can do little more than try to get the best out of each day as it comes along, and we are among the many millions of people who seek support from our own kind by talking in specific groups about specific problems. We have to find ways to disempower our illness, by understanding our limitations, seeing where in we are in relation to others, but also by seeing our potential. Often the first person to write us off has been ourselves. Doing nothing, and sharing nothing, has sometimes been our way of life.
We recognise that the propensity for depression is what we have in common, but more importantly we realise the limitless opportunity this gives us to help each other. Help may be talking, listening, or simply being present, instantly taking the isolation from the other person. Being there, and being aware, perhaps for the first time, that there is a bond of care available in the group which is special, and not available elsewhere. We have learned the combined power of listening and sharing in a safe, non-judgemental environment, and learned that we are more than people with a convenient label for those that would write us off. We are not defined by out illness, we are people with an illness, which sometimes comes and goes, with varying effects. And what is more, we have become vital to each other’s quality of life.
first group sheet
Daily thoughts:
A bad wake-up can cause a bad day. Try, however difficult it may seem, to stand aside from the depression. Decide to not let it take over and damage your whole day. Depression is part of you; it may even be a large part, but it is not the whole you.
You owe it to yourself to give the day your best shot, no matter how you feel. Refuse to listen to hopeless, repetitive thoughts. Think of the support and strength that you know is available from the group; remind yourself that you yourself are a source of strength to others in the group. Think about the last meeting, and think about the next meeting. Think how far you have come by joining the group at all....a positive step towards a better life. You turned your back on isolation, and you never have to go back to that.
Today, try to claim part of your life back from the illness. It might help to make a short written plan for the day, and try to carry it through. You are probably doing things right now that in the past have been difficult or impossible.
When it’s hard, divide the day into three parts, morning, afternoon and evening and plan to get something for you out of each part, some small task, a phone call, a letter or some small job that needs getting out of the way.
Think of the goodness in the group, and remind yourself that you never have to struggle by yourself unless you choose to. Think back to when there seemed to be no hope at all and remember how much power you have to help those worse off, perhaps people who have illnesses that are never going to improve, and people who are totally cut off from sources of help.
Don’t be alone, be a friend.
Michael February 2004
A bad wake-up can cause a bad day. Try, however difficult it may seem, to stand aside from the depression. Decide to not let it take over and damage your whole day. Depression is part of you; it may even be a large part, but it is not the whole you.
You owe it to yourself to give the day your best shot, no matter how you feel. Refuse to listen to hopeless, repetitive thoughts. Think of the support and strength that you know is available from the group; remind yourself that you yourself are a source of strength to others in the group. Think about the last meeting, and think about the next meeting. Think how far you have come by joining the group at all....a positive step towards a better life. You turned your back on isolation, and you never have to go back to that.
Today, try to claim part of your life back from the illness. It might help to make a short written plan for the day, and try to carry it through. You are probably doing things right now that in the past have been difficult or impossible.
When it’s hard, divide the day into three parts, morning, afternoon and evening and plan to get something for you out of each part, some small task, a phone call, a letter or some small job that needs getting out of the way.
Think of the goodness in the group, and remind yourself that you never have to struggle by yourself unless you choose to. Think back to when there seemed to be no hope at all and remember how much power you have to help those worse off, perhaps people who have illnesses that are never going to improve, and people who are totally cut off from sources of help.
Don’t be alone, be a friend.
Michael February 2004
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
