“Thank you for calling the Generic Mental Health Crisis Line. Unfortunately, no one is here to take your call.”
I held the phone slightly away from my face, wincing
somewhat at the artificially cheerful female voice on the other end.
“…As there is no one here to talk to you, we recommend you
call the Samaritans.”
“I did.” I said to the automated voice. “They were lovely
but suggested I call you.”
“…or call back to speak to a member of the crisis team
during office hours. We are available from 8.30 am-”
I hung up. It had taken me an hour of staring into space to
actually summon the courage to enter the NHS number into my phone and press
dial. I had simply sat on my sofa, feeling a grand total of precisely nothing,
until finally, almost for want of anything better to do, I had decided to take
up the advice that the Samaritans had given me two hours before and call the
crisis team. I’d felt bad calling the Samaritans. I wasn’t planning on offing
myself that very evening; I wasn’t sitting with my legs dangling into oblivion
or eyeing up a homemade mixture of ground up sominex and whisky. I was simply
at the point where I needed to do something. I could have phoned a friend, but
someone professional would have been preferable. My friends tended to have
their own lives, and didn’t need mine to fragment around theirs.
The recorded message, now silenced, and dropped, along with
my phone, to the living room floor, provoked two responses. The first was a
perplexed, macabre amusement at the idea of a mental health crisis team that
only worked weekdays. Presumably, it was unheard of to need to support of a
mental health service at 8.38pm on a Friday evening. I tried to imagine a world
where people left themselves Google Calendar reminders for “fucking terrifying
mental health breakdown” (scheduled, perhaps, for 11.55 am so that if it ran
over into lunch, it wouldn’t cause a fuss). Of course, on a logical level, the
real reason the mental health team weren’t ready to swing by for a cup of tea
and a slice of Battenburg and a chat about my total loss of control of life
wasn’t because they were all sat in a booth in Ta Bouche, one arm round a
bottle of Cava and the other around a floozy of their preferred gender, but
more likely because mental health funding has be cut to ribbons in the last few
years.
You'll find all the mental health professionals here
Every single person at this bar is a mental health
professional
The second response was: am I actually having a crisis? The
phrase mental health crisis implies that something terrible is about to occur,
that everything is on the brink of collapsing in on itself, or that a point of
no return has been reached and something must be done to avoid an emotional
trainwreck.
Fear. That was what I felt. The white hot nauseating fear
that turned your bones to glass, so when you stood you crushed the ground like
a pathetic Ozymandias; fear that turned your guts to acid, fear that was so
bright that it both seared you and showed you, in every detail, just how bad it
was. It was not the sudden, animalistic fear of a panic attack, which appeared
out of nowhere, mugged you of your good sense and left you sobbing in the
gutter, but more a long drawn out realisation that I had no control. I have
prided myself on the fact that no matter how bad my mental health became (with
one notably horrible exception during my first year of University), I still, on
some level, could step out of myself and think logically and calmly and clearly
about what I needed to do. Most of the time, those actions were never
undertaken, but the fact that I had this perspective, this critical, analytical
distance gave me some comfort.
What frightened me was the comparative silence of that side
of myself. The rational, analytical, practical Chris, who popped his head out
the door when he heard the sound of impending disaster, and meandered about my
mind, tutting and tapping his watch and saying things like “surely you can’t be
serious” – he had missed his usual entrance. Rational Chris was gone and there
was nothing anyone could do about it.
My mind
Where is my mind?
The thing is, though, that this phone call, this explosion
of fear and horror, this crisis, was three days ago. Nothing happened. I didn’t
die. I didn’t end up in a psychiatric ward, as I had suspected might be the
case when I’d dialled that number. I continued.
I suppose when we talk about mental health crisis we tend to
imagine it almost akin to a physical accident – we trip, we fall, something
breaks and we need paramedics. Perhaps a mental health crisis is a more drawn
out process of loss of control with no definite end point. Perhaps that is why
it is so hard to understand what I am feeling, and for those around me to
understand what is happening, and thus instinctively, and understandably, shy
away.
What this incident taught me, once again, is that asking for help is immeasurably hard. It is a movement of almost gargantuan strength to extend a hand and ask for aid; the whole thing seems rather worthless when that hand is effectively slapped away – when the GP doesn’t think you really need that “emergency appointment,” when the therapist has you on a two to three month waiting list, and politely requests you “don’t do anything stupid”, when the people you work with demand to know if you’re “better yet” while you try to desperately hide the fact that you’ve been crying in the gents. When even the people closest to you say “no, can’t deal with you now,” and run out the door into the middle of the night without so much as a goodbye. It’s hard, and the stinging of that slap makes you want to take your hand away and never reach out again.
What this incident taught me, once again, is that asking for help is immeasurably hard. It is a movement of almost gargantuan strength to extend a hand and ask for aid; the whole thing seems rather worthless when that hand is effectively slapped away – when the GP doesn’t think you really need that “emergency appointment,” when the therapist has you on a two to three month waiting list, and politely requests you “don’t do anything stupid”, when the people you work with demand to know if you’re “better yet” while you try to desperately hide the fact that you’ve been crying in the gents. When even the people closest to you say “no, can’t deal with you now,” and run out the door into the middle of the night without so much as a goodbye. It’s hard, and the stinging of that slap makes you want to take your hand away and never reach out again.
I urge you not to. Keep it out, and keep it steady. Someone
will take it eventually.
By: Chis Page. Chris runs the blog
http://the-misanthropope.blogspot.co.uk/, which is part of our blog network.
Asking for Help: Mental Health and Crisis
Reviewed by Admin
on
11:42
Rating:
Loved this, amazing way of explaining mental health, thank you for sharing !
ReplyDelete