Parenting and Bipolar

Yesterday I gave an interview to a trainee clinical psychologist for her thesis on parenting and bipolar disorder. I had been very nervous about it as I didn’t know what she would ask and what it might bring up for me, but it was a positive experience and it made me do a lot of thinking.

I thought I would write a little bit about what it’s like to have bipolar I diagnosis and be a parent. I have two children, one is thirteen and one is six, nearly seven. Both my children are doing very well at school, exceeding or matching grades in all subjects. They’re described as happy, kind, outgoing, capable and talented, at school. They are generally very well behaved and thoughtful, they have empathy and they’re creative in their own ways. Obviously, I am very proud, but I’m not trying to boast. When I said these things to the psychologist, I realized that despite this enormous issue: bipolar, we have all managed to get through it, and carry on.

The psychologist asked me about any difficulties parents with bipolar may face. There are endless difficulties. I said I thought being a parent with bipolar was almost like another form of bipolar in itself, as it has a whole other dimension. I’ve been a parent since I was seventeen, that’s thirteen years, and my eldest child has been through a great deal with me. When she was born I was very ill, depression mainly, and agitation. I also had racing thoughts and I self harmed regularly and habitually. I was suicidal. Basically I was going through a severe mixed episode. I fed her, cared for her in every way I could, but inside I felt so bad there aren’t words for it. This carried on for three years, then I was hospitalized and properly medicated, though I couldn’t say I had ever ‘recovered.’ At this time, I should have already been in services but had received a letter two years previous from my care co-ordinator to say she simply had too many people on her list and would have to pass me onto someone else, though she couldn’t say when this would happen. It never happened. This was gross negligence. The way I suffered during those years is not something I could wish on anyone.

When I was in hospital, my mum had to take care of my daughter. I was in for long periods of time, and when I would see her she would often go blank, and it was painful for both of us. She resented me for leaving her. I was ill constantly for all the years up to 2010, medications not working, and having my second child. After he was born in 2006 it was a downward spiral, and I felt it had no end. In 2010 I made a decision to commit suicide.  I had an elaborate plan, and it would have been devastating, but I was in so much pain I felt I was being tortured and I wasn’t rational, and I couldn’t think clearly about anything other than going through with it. My psychiatrist had been writing up a referral to a specialist bipolar unit and having tried all the medications they had to offer I felt completely defeated.  I wanted to give medication one last try, for my children, and thankfully, Depixol injections worked. They completely flattened my mania, my hallucinations, my agitation. Lithium has helped me to stop self harming, very effectively, and has stabilized my mood alongside lamotrigine which I believe has helped with depressive symptoms. I tell people I’m ‘stable’ but in reality it is a daily challenge and I have had to limit myself in so many ways to stay well enough to be a good parent. This past three years has been about building on all our strengths as a family, supporting each other and for me, keeping a routine and being focused on writing as my work and therapy. My psychiatrist asked me recently, do you think you’re a good mother, doing everything you can for your children? I could categorically say YES.

When I was manic my thoughts would race, colours and senses would be more intense, I would have a pressure to talk and talk, I would want to do lots of things and have lots of energy. My thoughts would be grandiose, and I would do anything for more stimulation, which for a lot of people would involve drink, drugs, sex or spending money, but in the case of a parent who has to stay and look after  children, I would ring people on the phone incessantly to talk, about anything, I would pace around the house feeling insane; I would need diazepam, and at one point, I was taking so much of it I was completely hooked .My body would be restless, I would need to move, I would shake, and not be able to lie down or sleep, and I would self harm because I couldn’t cope with the intensity of it. I would feel as though I was crazy; I remember a psychiatrist asking me what I wanted them to do and I told him I wanted them to take the top of my head off. When you’re with a toddler, or a teenager, it is the same: they are so over-stimulating, especially when you’re stuck in a house with them (and to be honest taking them anywhere in this state isn’t a good idea), it is overwhelming. My husband has had to take lots of time off work in the past to help me cope. A lot of people don’t want to be around you when you’re ill so you find a lot of your support is cut off. In hindsight, it can be understandable, because you’re irritable, you say things you wouldn’t normally say, you become enraged easily, you snap, you can’t hide your emotions.

When I was low the problems seemed endless: being so tired and sad, not having any motivation, crying, sleeping too much or too little, ruminating, self-persecutory thoughts and voices, hallucinations (when very high also), feeling a void inside nothing will ever fill. Pure despair. You have to cook, clean, get them to school/nursery, sort finances, sort shopping, go to parent’s evenings, after school events, wash them, clothe them, play with them, give them affection; and you think of nothing else all day but your own death and how you might accomplish it, how everyone would just be better off without you, how your husband will meet someone nicer who will make a nicer mother for your children (yes, this is how irrational you’ve become), but you’re too lost and exhausted to try. Either high or low, agitation and psychosis is something that would cripple me, and often, my husband would have to medicate me on chlorpromazine, which is a very old anti-psychotic but the only thing that ever worked, and lorazepam or diazepam, and put me in bed. When I’d wake it would begin again, the tension mounting, the anxiety, the agitation, the breaking down.

These episodes don’t last days, and even when I was ultra rapid cycling and very ill (mood-swings lasting hours and changing very erratically) it would go on for months. You’re probably wondering how the children coped. I tried hard to be there for them, talk to them, be open with them, and not let them down. But I have an acute sense of failure and every time I so much as had to go to bed to lie down, I woke up feeling like I had failed them and I couldn’t stand it and it fed into my bad feelings about myself. I believe very firmly that children are entitled to know what’s going on and should be allowed to be upset as it is a normal human reaction, to a parent going into hospital, or mummy getting upset, or being drowsy, or not being able to play, or being irritable. I found that others tried to pretend everything was alright, and gloss over things or sugar-coat them, to protect them. This, I have always thought, is damaging. Of course, you don’t want to devastate your children or upset them, but their natural emotions and reactions are an important part of their wellbeing, and shouldn’t be stifled. There are ways to comfort children, and be open and honest at the same time.

I believe that there needs to be centres for parents with severe enduring mental health problems, where they can take their children, receive treatment, and be around others in the same position. We need this provision, it is sadly lacking, adult mental health services have a huge chasm because they don’t make provisions for families. They make provisions for families whose children are suffering from mental health problems, as they did for me when I was a child, but not families in general, families who may feel very isolated and alone. I think that every family who goes through a parent suffering from mental illness should be offered family therapy as a matter of course. I also think that specialist personal assistants should be used in mental health services, especially for families. Practical support given for people who maybe haven’t got the support they need and need help doing practical things, while they are unwell. I think this could be even more beneficial that therapy in the long run, keeping families together and parents at home. It could save a lot of money on lengthy hospital stays, children having to go into care temporarily. Not once can I think of an instance when being a parent with bipolar was catered for or treated as an important thing, for me.  Even simple things like providing books and toys for waiting rooms in mental health clinics would make a difference, to people having to bring their children in with them. Otherwise, these places are blank, clinical and unfriendly. It’s almost as though professionals pretend your kids aren’t part of the picture, until they feel a need to involve child social services, which often isn’t necessary.

I recently took part in a computer-based bipolar support package, where I was filmed answering questions about parenting which would be made into a film which could be accessed online, to help other parents going through the same thing. I think this is marvellous, based at the Spectrum centre at Lancaster university. If anyone wants to know more they are on facebook. There are people out there trying to listen and make a difference, but as we all know, it all comes down to funding essentially, and I think we all know the situation there.

The psychologist asked me if there were any positives in being a parent with bipolar. Children are the best distraction the world has to offer. If I am agitated and I go walking with my son, who will talk to me about Spiderman and maths and Harry Potter, I feel ok, I get rid of some energy. We play scrabble, and although it is hard to stay focused, it keeps me focusing on something. We cook, we bake, we read books, we draw, we listen to music, we just get along. I have to stress that when it is severe none of these things are possible, but on a daily basis the children keep me in a good place with these distractions. My daughter and I have great conversations, about everything. I get so much joy from them, from seeing them happy, it is the biggest motivation I could ever have in my life. I write because I love them and want to do well at something in my life, and I stay reasonably stable, not just because of the medication, though it has helped enormously, but because I have them in my life and they are my purpose. The psychologist said she’s finding that a lot of people like me, as parents, are telling her similar things, that their children are flourishing, being labelled, ‘gifted and talented’ and are sensitive, kind and mature for their ages. I feel like I must have been doing something right, though obviously, these children have not been without their fair share of heartache over this. But I believe that children need experiences, and the emotional support and backing of their parent (s) or carers so that when they get older and things happen in their lives, they are prepared in part, and will learn quickly how to adapt and cope.

My daughter went to school one day and told the students and teacher in her Personal, Social and Health Education class that her mum has a mental illness. Later on, one girl sneered, oooh, your mum’s mentally ill! To which my daughter replied, ‘some people are. And?’

All My Dreams Alive While All The Rest Were Screaming

I’m listening to Radiohead in the car on the way to Liverpool…has the light gone out for you/ because the light’s gone out for me…I think of people I knew when I was ill and shaking and broken. I think they wouldn’t recognise me. I think of things I said or did five, ten, fifteen years ago and I cringe. I think of the work that I’m doing and how, if I edited it properly I would be left with 10 per cent of mediocre mumblings. I think of how often I have thought this. I think of how I wasn’t so anxious off anti-psychotics. I think of telling my husband who will tell me, again, that this started when our son was born, not because of pills and injections. I think of how he might be wrong. I think of how our son looked like he was turning blue even though he was really fine and just fast asleep. I think of all the women who made me feel inadequate because I couldn’t breastfeed anymore because they put me on the pills. I think of how my breasts are much smaller now, how they are redundant. I think of all the really real sad dreams I have about my brother-in-law and how even though I know he is very happy they trouble me all morning. I wonder who these dreams are really about. I think of my facebook friends and how I’d like to meet some of them in real life and how awkward it would be, for them. I think of how I’m too shy to post much on facebook because I have a neurotic fear of being exposed. I think this couldn’t be any more of a contradiction. I think of Shane because Radiohead is playing and the synchronicity of each of their album releases was insane. I think of the spectrum of emotions and experiences I had as a twenty-something and how different things feel now, how I’m insular and steeped in conscious and unconscious foreboding. I think of how I get on with people less and less, and how I smile more. I think about Carol at the clinic and how she saved my life and how I didn’t want her to, and how I’m grateful now. I think of songs I most associate with suicide. I think of Fresh Tendrils in my head and how that is my favourite song. I think of how Hell for me would be a closed room full to capacity of patterns and textures. I think of how this fear makes me visualize decay. I think of how the house might burn down because I’m not there to witness it. I think of things I’ll never be able to talk about. I think of how my husband knows these things exist. I think of our lad going around the house this morning with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass looking for stray bugs. I think of how Elizabeth worries I will get ill and have to go away again. I think of how I couldn’t promise her that will never happen. I think of how I know some truly beautiful people and how I am in awe of them. I think of how I never say the things I most want to in person. I think of the man who collapsed in Asda while I was singing The Perfect Needle to myself, how his teeth were all rotten and how we’re all going to die. I think of all the ways I might die. I think of executions. I wonder how my brain got so fucked. I think of Anne who is dying and the closest thing to a grandmother I have ever had and how I haven’t seen her in years for reasons that don’t really matter or make sense. I think of how she is sick and how I’ve missed her, and how I’m sorry. I think of how the dreams I have about my brother-in-law are really about me. I think of how this is the happiest and most stable I’ve ever been in my life. I think of how I’m glad the agitation is reasonable this morning. I think of how I’m nervous about the way I look today. I think of how I feel hideous most days and how this is pathetic in a world where disfigured people walk around regardless and get on with their lives. I think of how I feel disfigured inside, somehow. I think of how I don’t want to come across as self-indulgent. I think of how venomous a thought that is inside others. I think about how strange it is to go to Malaysia, blindfolded, and visually experience none of it, take lots of pictures and come home to see what you’ve missed, like the artist Pak Sheung Chuen did in 2008. I think of how a friend told me they’d rather lose an eye or a limb than have a mental illness. I think of how I’m sat in a French cafe with my husband. I think of how feelings of inadequacy permeate my day. I think of my too-small filter coffee and how good it tastes and how I’m drowsy and still wearing my coat and scarf. I think of Simryn Gill’s photographs of interiors and how I looked and looked for traces of anything warm or human, an empty cot for instance held my interest but how I as a viewer, felt abandoned, and how they seemed like a completely fathomless and cold apocalypse. I think of how I’ve lost the ability to play full albums in my head like I did on long journeys when I was fifteen. I think of how I’m sure all the pills have contributed to this decline in mental capability. I think of how ashamed I’ll feel if any of the parents from school read this, how there’s no reason I should, how I feel like a victim of societal repression, stigma, and my own self-consciousness. I think of how alienated I feel. I think of plunging my naked body into the sea, of freezing alive. I think of how remembering my dreams feels like clutching at vapour. I think of how unreal and unrealistic it is to accept advances in technology other people have created with themselves in mind, with money in mind, without knowing how they work or where their components came from. I think of all the people who don’t miss me. I think of all the people who are more valid than me. I think of all the people who are not more valid than me. I think about how my concept of validation is only reasonable in my head for a few minutes at a time and involves the occasional looks of people who don’t love me. I think of how my husband never wants to listen to what I want to listen to in the car. I think of the song Heaven by The Walkmen and how it makes him think of me, and how that makes me smile. I think about the plagiarist, Christian Ward and how I’d like to sit in a cold room with him for an hour and I don’t know why. I think of how I don’t feel sorry for him but how his audacity fascinates me. I think of how I’m amazed I’m thinking about it because I don’t really care. I think about my husband falling through the clouds. I think about him with perfectly formed, white wings. I think of myself as a harpy in the forests of the outskirts of my hometown. I think of how codeine helps. I think of how my brain feels like melting ice that freezes over without warning. I think of how that’s not very original. I think of how there’s not more to life than poems. I think of what a cold-hearted bitch I must be not to have cried for three years. I think about men on Death Row in Texas getting a glimpse of the sky on their way the their execution. I think of how maybe it is a primer for the afterlife, of Heaven and Redemption. I think of how insane this is. I think of how my husband and my daughter are committed in their atheism and how our six year old son believes in Heaven and how I don’t want him to be afraid. I think of how I used to dance in clubs and how I have a whole other body and sense of rhythm now. I think of how diazepam helps. I think of how I barely talk to anyone so it doesn’t matter what I think or what I need to say. I think of how The Pixies song I Bleed used to make me want to cut myself. I think of how before I took lithium lots of things made me think of self-mutilation. I think of how lithium dulls everything, reinforces apathy and inertia, dampens all the feelings that make you you. I think of how I wouldn’t dare not take it again. I think of how being overweight and having bad skin and no emotions is better than being dead or permanently in the agony of despair. I think of how many people have told me they don’t take medication because of the side effects, and I think of what it’s like to have a choice. I think about when I took that photograph that lit up the room and nobody wanted me to take it and I felt like an insult thrown back. I think about the swimming pool and the very hairy man who is always striding up and down and occasionally diving in and showing off all his hairy male-ness and how he must be giving someone a rash. I think about my boy tumbling in that time. I think about falling in sideways, a hundred times, hitting and hitting the pale blue surface of the water fully clothed, my mouth open. I hear the other mothers applauding. I think about how I’m empty inside and so nothing that anyone says to me can penetrate and I slump down in the deck chair and I feel my heart slow down. I feel my heart slow, slow. I think of how anyone reading this far must want more than I’ve got to give and will possibly see me in a worse light than ever. I think of how my father and I used to dream we were painting all the town’s houses primary colours in the night, how we both had the same dreams. I think of how my husband sometimes kisses me, like someone he hasn’t seen for a long while. I think of how he won’t understand why I’m writing this. I think I’m not sure either. I think of the girl stabbed and set alight in Blackpool. I think of all the screaming ones. I think of all the sad ones. I think of myself in wide, midnight dreams of nothing.

Guest Post: Sheila Hamilton – Response from The Cassel Hospital

I’d just like to share a few thoughts about this letter from Dr Skogstad, who is the consultant psychiatrist at the Cassel Hospital. (NB. He wasn’t the man in charge when I was there all those years ago; I have never met Dr Skogstad.)

 One of my feelings when I read and then re-read this letter was: this isn’t really a proper response to what I have written. Another feeling was: the tone is ostensibly polite but actually rather patronizing.

The most troubling aspect of it is: there is no acknowledgement that what I experienced at home was abuse. This is where I get the impression that the Cassel (and by extension, a lot of psychoanalytical psychotherapy) is actually lagging behind societal attitudes. I haven’t shown this letter to anyone except Melissa and the readers of this blog but my hunch would be, most people nowadays would recognize what I describe as abusive.

Linked up with this is the doctor’s failure to recognize that health professionals themselves can contribute to someone’s difficulties. By labelling very distressed teenagers in his care as having “personality disorder” while not giving that description to the parents who have abused them, he is basically saying that responses to abuse such as depression, anxiety, low self-esteem are pathological (i.e. abnormal) but that abuse itself is not pathological or abnormal. He is still operating a hospital where parents of teenagers are given a forum, as they were in my day, a forum that the more disturbed parents used in order to justify themselves and to manipulate the hospital staff. In short, the focus is still on Keeping the Family Together. (A family where the teenagers are this distressed, have attempted suicide often more than once, etc. is a family that has already fallen apart. If it was ever, in any real sense, “together”.)

His suggestion that the term “personality disorder” is not denigratory or pejorative in any way also marks this man  and his hospital as out of touch. He should speak to a few more GPs if he thinks it’s seen as just another diagnostic term, and while he’s at it he should check what social workers, probation officers, the police think when they hear the term. The way the term is generally used it is taken to mean “untreatable” and, in many cases, “not to be trusted” and also “violent.” I don’t care for the insinuation in this part of the letter that I have somehow got this wrong: I have known plenty of people who are burdened with this often very unhelpful label. (And why is it unhelpful? Crucially, because it locates someone’s difficulties within them, as if that person is somehow fatally flawed; it pays no heed to the external factors involved. And abuse is a very important external factor.)

Freud famously decided that all the accounts of abuse he was hearing couldn’t possibly be true, that they were fantasies.  It seems that some of his heirs are still swayed by him.

  I have decided not to respond to the doctor’s letter personally.

*****

23rd January 2013

 Dear Ms Hamilton,

Thank you for your letter to my secretary and my sincere apologies again for responding only so late and only after your prompting. It seems that the Cassel has made a lasting impression on you, as you are thinking about it and making contact with us after such a long time. I hope that your time here helped you and gave you capacities and strengths that you could use in your life since. I also hope the reason you are thinking so much of the Cassel again now is a good one rather than another particularly difficult period in your life.

Since the early 1980s, when you were here, there have been numerous changes to the Cassel to respond to our research and to adapt to changes in the NHS and its increasingly harsher financial realities. However, the hospital is still there to help people with severe emotional difficulties and has retained many of its old principles. We are now much smaller than when you were here, but we do still treat adolescents, as long as they are over 16, together with (mostly young) adults. Structures have also changed and so we don’t have the particular meeting anymore that you describe, but we do regular family work with adolescents or young adults as part of their treatment and sometimes offer forums for parents or carers.

Like you describe about yourself, all our patients had a troubled and often very traumatic upbringing, which has formed them and has often made it difficult for them to get on with themselves and their own lives. When we call what our patients suffer from “personality disorder”, we are not using this in any denigrating way, as it is sometimes perceived and you seem to hear it. For me and my colleagues, it is a way of describing as a short hand deep rooted emotional difficulties that need understanding and appropriate treatment, usually through psychotherapy and other support. In fact, the term has in recent years also helped to instigate developments in different parts of the country to establish services for such people.

Thank you for your good wishes to the Cassel.

 With best wishes,

                          Dr. W. Skogstad

Limited Edition Valentine’s Gift

I’ve recently collaborated with artist Alexandra Gallagher to produce Limited Edition signed prints of an original poem which are now available on Folksy. They are available both framed and unframed and would make an excellent gift for Valentine’s day!

 

 

 

 

Guest Post- Sheila Hamilton: It All Boils Down to Who You Believe

I have decided to share this because I suspect such experiences are far from rare. We probably don’t talk about these things enough.

…..

 Dear Sir/Madam,

I was an in-patient in your adolescent unit in the early 1980s. I have been thinking quite a lot recently about my stay in the Cassel, and about my adolescence generally.

I don’t know how many adolescents are at the Cassel now at any one time, how long they tend to stay, etc. Do they still have a meeting every Tuesday evening which parents are expected to attend? In my day, there was such a meeting: the adolescents themselves, the parents, and the two mental health nurses who specialized in adolescent mental health. The stated aim of these meetings was for adolescents and parents to raise any difficulties that had been encountered at the weekends (when we had to go home) and to discuss such difficulties within the group. In actuality, this meeting was really an opportunity for parents, many of whom were demonstrably disturbed themselves, to let rip about their children and to “play the victim.” My parents always came, driving all the way from Stevenage.

My father was the world’s best at putting on an act (in this case “Concerned Father”), and my mother was (and still is) extremely passive, would never challenge him even when he was lying outright about what went on at home. She’d look sheepish, that’s about it. What was going on at home (and what had been going on at home for quite some years) was that Dad was a shouter, verbally and emotionally abusing his wife and his three children (I have 2 brothers.) He was very manipulative, very infantile, a chaotic person, a “mummy’s boy” who had never cut the apron strings. This was a great source of conflict in my parents’ marriage from the off; my mother even then was confiding in me about this and looking to me for support. My father had been exempted from National Service on psychiatric grounds (but was always vague about the details); he had later had what appeared to be several “nervous breakdowns” prior to meeting my mother. On several occasions he had turned down treatment, and he and my mother never sought any professional help about their problems as a couple. My father clearly had great issues with women, and his hostility towards me increased exponentially when I hit puberty; I remember him sneering at me for having my period, he hated any mention of sex or reproductive biology, and was extraordinarily prudish. My brothers and I certainly did not have an environment in which we could ask questions or receive any reassurance about sex and sexuality! My dad was also very contemptuous of the fact I wore glasses, and would sneer in my face about this. (My mother just let it drop in the few days before his death that he considered people who wore glasses to be “defective.”) My mother saw and heard most of this behaviour on a frequent basis but did not intervene. If I mentioned any of it at the Cassel meetings, she would shift uncomfortably in her chair but would say nothing; I can’t remember her once challenging my dad’s hostility or his neurotic attitudes. (Perhaps she shared them?)

I broke down when I was 15. Is it surprising? I had been getting more and more depressed for some time, demoralized, cried a lot. (Years later, I found out that an educational psychologist suggested to Mum when I was 13 that I was severely depressed and offered to make a referral for help; this offer was turned down, I wasn’t even asked.) I was in an adolescent unit in Exeter for a short while about a year before I came to the Cassel. I don’t know the whole story but I do remember the consultant psychiatrist saying to my parents, in front of me, “I’m not really interested in depression. I’m much more interested in juvenile delinquency.” The day I was discharged from that place, one of the staff announced to the whole group of teenagers that I was going to be discharged (this hadn’t even been mentioned to me). I know that the Cassel prides itself (and did then too, in my time) as taking on people whose problems have “exhausted” other avenues. It wasn’t that my problems exhausted anybody; I had not been given proper help. The provision at Exe Vale was shabby. A month after I had been discharged my parents and younger brother and I had an appointment there. . .and the consultant seemed genuinely surprised that I was no longer an in-patient. .. how could that happen, I wonder, when he was meant to be the one in charge?  It was arranged for me to see one of the registrars on an out-patient basis. This woman’s oft-repeated phrase to me was, “I don’t know why you’re so angry.” Once she asked me (in a corridor) “Were you ever a Daddy’s girl?” and when I said “No,” she simply said “I don’t believe you.” I was on several occasions asked “Do you consider yourself to be an honest person?”

Yes, I came to the Cassel very angry. Who wouldn’t be angry? My big question to you is, if you had been living as a teenager with one parent who was constantly abusing you verbally and emotionally, eroding any sense of confidence you might have had, sneering at your gender while the other parent looked on, making excuses and actually expecting you to be “forgiving”, how would you have reacted? I got depressed and I got angry, perfectly predictable responses to the situation that I was in. I felt there was nowhere to go; I was sure that any approach to a teacher, say, or to our GP would have gone straight back to my parents. I find it very disturbing that you are still labelling this kind of situation with your patients as “Personality Disorder.” I broke down in circumstances that were intolerable (much as did the shell-shocked soldiers for whom the Cassel was originally set up, I may add): were they “personality-disordered” as well? This term, by the way, was never used to my face but it is in my medical records. (The fact that I was on the receiving end of abuse is not in my medical records. There is virtually no sense of context in those records at all, and there are a lot of presumptions.) And I note that the adolescent unit at the Cassel today is actually called “The Emerging Personality Disorders Clinic.” What hope does that offer to those patients? You might as well say “You are untreatable”. .. but there you are, trying to treat them. I don’t understand this. Do you recognize that they are, in many cases if not all, people who have been abused? That is a heavy legacy to carry, and someone with that legacy needs help to carry it, but to be handed a label like “Personality Disorder” is to be given a further burden. My father was really rather pleased, I suspect, that I’d been pathologised; it enabled him to carry on believing that there was nothing wrong with his own behaviour.

I’ve read quite a lot about personality disorders. I am not of the opinion that there is no such thing. There certainly are clusters of behaviours that could fall under various headings. I’ve come to understand that my father was very likely a Narcissist; the behaviour of other narcissists which I have read about tally almost uncannily with the behaviours that he showed throughout my childhood, adolescence and beyond. When all of his children were grown up and damaged, he finally sought out a psychotherapist. .. who was the very same person who had supported me for 18 months after I left the Cassel! He somehow prevailed upon this therapist to take him on; I was abroad working at the time and not in a good position to challenge this. She shouldn’t have taken him on, end of, but he was infinitely charming and manipulative. I suspect she had no real idea of the extent of his problems; he would have done a PR job on her of course, and there was no-one present to provide another narrative. So yes, personality disorder exists. He convinced so many people that he was Concerned Father, Good Neighbour, Supportive Colleague, but these were all masks to be shuffled and worn as and when it suited. The people at his funeral who spoke of him as having been a supportive colleague had never heard what he said about them to us behind their backs! Snide, unkind, condemning things, especially if they were female and/or more intelligent than he was. I’m afraid that such a person would have no problem at all in convincing some psychiatrists and psychotherapists that his daughter was unhinged, dishonest, etc. .. and I strongly suspect that’s exactly what he did. He managed to perpetuate more abuse, with the unintended co-operation of mental health professionals. With my mother’s compliance, of course; I don’t let her off the hook. My relationship with her has been difficult throughout my adult life for precisely this reason; nowadays, I have minimal contact with her because I have chosen to have minimal contact, for my own wellbeing.

Maybe my experiences are not “typical” of teenagers who come to the Cassel. I don’t know how “typical” they were back then. But I do think we still live in a society where children and young people are not being sufficiently listened to. If their narrative deviates significantly from that of their parents or older relations, too many doctors/social workers, etc. seem to prefer the narrative of the parents. This, too, is an abuse. Just as the many victims of Jimmy Saville, Cyril Smith, etc. have been finding out, lots of people want to turn a blind eye, or to trivialize what happened, or to say that reports of abuse are malicious, etc. But if professionals involved in mental health seem uncertain of where they stand over such matters, it’s hardly surprising that lay-people don’t know either.

I wish the Cassel well. It provides an environment which can benefit some troubled people. But I feel it could do so much better, just as mental health services in general and society in general could do so much better. We have a long way to go.

Yours sincerely,

(Ms) Sheila Hamilton

Sheila’s letter has been sent to the Cassel’s ‘Emerging Personality Disorders Clinic.’ She is awaiting a response. If there is a response I will publish it here.

Sheila’s poetry collection Corridors of Babel is published by Poetry Salzburg. She has also written two pamphlet collections, one by Flarestack entitled The Monster in The Rose Garden and one by Original Plus entitled One Match. 

The Next Big Thing

I’ve been asked to give this interview for an expanding blog project called The Next Big Thing, by the poet Sophie Mayer. You can read her brilliant interview here.

The idea is I post mine and tag other writers to do the same on the 26th December.

…..

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The poems accumulated over a three year period of intense writing, yet intense in a very different way to writing my first collection. I wrote with more constraint, more routine. I wrote nearly every day, about whatever struck me in the moment, and I think it simply got to a point where it felt coherent and I said to myself, I might have a collection here. Once I had my title it was a case of carefully piecing it together, which has taken the best part of a year.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Vicky McClure might play the part of the object of some of the love poems. I don’t know who would play the part of my husband, frankly, no-one’s up to scratch. I think the people I write about are so unusual and interesting in their own way that actors could never do them justice. A movie rendition of a poetry collection is certainly a very interesting concept.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

When I was a little girl I read a book, a very unusual and rare illustrated book in which the a creature with a big heart dies at the end and goes to heaven and because I could never shake this beautiful story and because I once worked in an abattoir and once wanted to die I wrote this book in fits of semi-eloquent heartache from a room in a house in a town where all the skeletons come out to greet me and I bow to them and everything else I can make out in the dark, waiting for me with open arms.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Three years. I had one year where I wrote very little, or very little of what I wrote was any good, and I felt as though I’d never write again, but this coincided with beginning treatment for what I regard as an illness, whether forward-thinkers like it to be called ‘illness’ or not. The past year has been especially fruitful and I’ve managed to knock a manuscript into shape, with plenty of work to choose from. This was an experience I’d describe as beyond satisfying.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I was inspired by the place where I live now, which is the place I grew up, where I unleashed all kinds of Hell a decade and a half ago. I was inspired by the memory of someone I loved (love) who passed away. I think she deserves someone to write sad poems about her to the end of their days. Part of the book is devoted to my estranged father, his death and my unearthing of the past as a way of moving forward. Or you could muse that it is about lives almost lived, and the discovery that at every turn someone who you loved and who loved you in their way, who was absent for one reason or another, were themselves living a life clouded by absence. It is also about whether these kinds of thoughts are mere romanticism and a desperate search for resolution where there’s no closure.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

This book is not for the faint-hearted. You need to be ready for sex and death, suicide, mental illness…but in there is big, big love, in swathes.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It is my hope that this book is published by an agency. I have sent it out to a publisher and am waiting to hear news.

My poets to tag are:

Leo Cookman

Jeremy Gluck

Kirsten Irving

Michael Egan

Make sure you check them out on the 26th!

Interview with Sheila Hamilton

The following is an interview with the poet Sheila Hamilton whose first collection, Corridors of Babel came to my attention a few months ago. The collection has a brilliant introduction by the poet and editor David Caddy, who celebrates the thoughtful and erudite poems written by this extraordinary ‘anthropological’ poet. Mythology, fairytale and surrealism are invigorated with a purposeful questioning of the world, both real and metaphysical, re-inventing its parameters. Seeking truths in the everyday and domestic as well as in often fragile familial relationships we are also asked to consider animals, dolls, puppets, unicorns and galloping horses alongside these turbulent pre-occupations.

Sheila has also written two pamphlet collections, one by Flarestack entitled The Monster in The Rose Garden and one by Original Plus entitled One Match, a sequence of poems after Jan Palach, a Czech student of history who committed suicide by self-immolation as a political protest in Wenceslas Square, 1969.

Why is poetry important to you?

I have always loved the rhythms of speech, and am drawn to music without having ever been a natural on any instrument. That’s one reason. And poetry has given me so much. When I was a teenager I found it very liberating to read the poems of Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath and also various Eastern European poets in translation, Polish poets, Czech poets, Hungarian poets. .. it was liberating to see people tackling big subjects: death, war, madness, totalitarianism. Poetry can be praise or lament, it can break your heart or make you laugh aloud. Because it is also about sound and cadence, it is closer to the heart than prose. (Though I do like prose.)

What was the first poem you wrote?

I can’t remember exactly but it was probably a haiku. We learnt to write simple haiku at primary school: meditations on the natural world, with some emotion of our own in the mix. It’s not a bad place to start though I realize now that haiku are actually very complicated! The first poems that I remember writing out of a creative need, let’s say, were written when I was 16 and in a psychiatric hospital. I don’t have them now, and I can’t remember their titles, but they were an attempt to process difficult material.

People tell me that I tackle big subjects in many of my poems. It’s true, but I would also say it is pretty much lethal to a poem’s success for the poet to sit down and say “Today I am going to tackle a big subject.” For me, a poem starts with a powerful visual image, or an intriguing phrase I’ve overheard somewhere. Many poems are born out of a sense of being bothered (and not in a Catherine Tate kind of way!).

What is the most difficult subject you’ve ever tackled in a poem?

Writing about Jan Palach’s self-immolation in Czechoslovakia was never going to be one poem. It appeared in the pamphlet One Match as 20 poems, though with a bit of re-arranging it could be considered one big uber-poem, I suppose. Writing about Jan Palach came out of going to Prague a few times and standing at the place in Wenceslas Square where he actually set himself on fire. (This place has been marked since 2000 by a bronze cross.) But once I began writing, this poem (these poems) began to address all sorts of things: the nature of political protest, how people behave in a totalitarian society, the tricky issue of martyrdom, how the living remember the dead.

I see most of my work as being a body of work, and running through that body is a preoccupation with trauma. Trauma can happen on Wenceslas Square, it can happen in the trenches of the Western Front, and it can also happen in your house.

In One Match you delve into someone else’s psychology, and not just Jan Palach’s but his mother’s and girlfriend’s. How did you go about achieving this?

. . .I have always been fascinated by how people tick, largely because no-one conforms to a template; even the most self-aware person can surprise themselves. When someone does something as extreme as immolating in a public place, it is only natural that others will try to find clues in the personality and circumstances of that person. Yes, Jan Palach’s protest was political in nature, there’s no doubt about that, but not everybody deeply disillusioned and angered by political conditions would do what he did.

So writing and researching about JP inevitably entailed finding out various things about people he knew. And this led in turn to a certain level of emotional identification with those people. This was not always a comfortable experience!

JP appears to have been emotionally involved with two young women. As far as I can infer (and this is an inference), he was close to Young Woman A but only viewed her platonically and he was romantically/sexually involved with Young Woman B. Young Woman B’s name was Eva, and there is an Eva in my poem “Jan Palach: Boyfriend” but the Eva in my poem is really a composite of both these women. In the poem, I imagine what she might have done if he had confided in her about his plan. I needed to explore that idea before I came to understand that, probably, he did not confide his plans at all, not to anybody. Doing so would have put the listener in an impossible position.

During his 3 days in the intensive care unit, Jan Palach was visited once by his mother (accompanied by his older brother) and once (separately) by Eva. His mother leant over him and said, “Janicku (note: a term of endearment), what have you done? What have you done?” Eva paced up and down talking nineteen-to-the-dozen before breaking down in tears and crying, “Please tell me that what you have done was a mistake.” Those are both cries from the heart in what is a visceral human drama. Running through my mind as I explored all this was the unanswerable question, “What would I myself have done if this had been me?”

And I’ll mention Jung, if I may. In the Jungian world of archetypes, Jan Palach is a Divine Child. A Divine Child is basically a young person who comes over as wise beyond their years and who stands out for the intensity of their ideals. (Jesus is the prime example within Western culture.) Such a person exists in difficult conditions and is, in a sense, made by them. A Divine Child has a huge impact on others, not because s/he is attempting consciously to “make friends and influence people” but because s/he has a lot of integrity.

Why did JP’s story compel me so much? Over the years, I have written quite a few poems inspired by folk and fairy tales and JP’s story contains several archetypal aspects (see above.) I have also over the years been able to exercise my democratic right to protest; what it would be like to live in a context where there is no such right, where attempts to march, lobby, distribute leaflets, etc. result in the person being carted off to prison or being put in a mental hospital? . .But these are what Palach as a philosophy student would no doubt describe as post-hoc rationalizations. When I was actually writing, I just knew I had to write. Some things just hit you in the face. ..

There is a line in your poem ‘ There is an asteroid named after Jan Palach’ which reads ‘Better, surely to be un-burnt, un-famous.’ But you don’t believe this. Often  I see in your work a celebration of what it is to be human and to suffer. Do you think, this not shrinking from the truth sets you apart as a writer and can you think of any particular influences or like-minds?

The whole sequence of poems on Jan Palach was born out of an ambivalence: did he do the right thing? On one level, the individual human level, it would certainly have been better if he had scrapped the whole idea. But we do not exist purely as individuals; we are a part of society. He felt compelled to make a powerful stand against repression and he knew quite well that setting himself alight in the main throroughfare could not be ignored or hushed up.

The human fascinates me, we are such a complex species! People can be courageous, creative, generous beyond all call of duty. .. and people can also be despicable. I think in my poems I try to honour the human. But I wouldn’t say that I celebrate suffering, no. Suffering is horrible. Getting badly burnt is horrible. Feeling that that is the only way you can be heard is hideous, it should never come to that. I feel suffering needs to be acknowledged as part of the human experience but I do get angry with people who make out that suffering per se is a form of nobility.

I feel poetry, and other art forms too, must concern themselves with honesty. Otherwise, why bother?

Particular influences? I think of Shostakovitch the Russian composer who attempted in his music to honour the experience and sufferings of his fellow-Russians, people living under Stalin during the purges, people in Leningrad during the siege. I wouldn’t presume to put myself in the same category as him because he lived in circumstances I can scarcely imagine.

In a slightly different vein, I love the stories collected by the brothers Grimm, stories which definitely don’t turn away from difficulty. They have hunger in them, and abandonment, jealousy, infanticide, incest. The German versions written down (and sometimes altered) by the Grimms themselves are more visceral than the English versions, which the Victorians sanitized. In the German versions, the stepmother in “Snow White” is set upon at Snow White’s wedding and forced to dance herself to death in red-hot metal slippers. And Rumpelstiltskin doesn’t just stomp off into the wood “never to be seen again” but actually splits in two. And it is clear in the German version of “Rapunzel” that Rapunzel is having a sexual relationship with the young man who climbs up her long hair into the tower. These are vivid stories that don’t sugar-coat the messiness of the human experience.

What are the main themes in your collection Corridors of Babel, and how long did it take you to write it?

Corridors of Babel grew, like many first collections, over a long period of time. The earliest poems in it date from the mid-Nineties; the most recent was written very early in 2007, the year in which the book appeared. (That 2007 poem is “The Children Who Transformed Themselves” and came out of a wonderful one-day workshop tutored by Pascale Petit. I love the way Pascale works with myth to explore difficult experience.) In the earlier stages, I had little concept of putting together a book; I was simply working on poems and getting acceptances in magazines. So there’s less cohesion in it than there is in my later work.

Having said that, some themes do emerge. There is a preoccupation with people who are on the edges, the margins. Linked up to this, and I see this more clearly now with the benefit of distance, is a preoccupation with violence. There is the violence found in the Grimm tales, and in the Greek myth of the Minotaur, but also the violence within history: the execution of a Scottish Covenanter in the seventeenth century, the disappearance of Genette Tate, torture in Chile during the Pinochet regime. In the Remedios Varo poems towards the end of the collection, I explore various sorts of quest: physical, artistic, spiritual. And there’s quite a lot of dream running through the book.

 Which poems in Corridors of Babel are you most proud of?

That’s a difficult question. I think I am attached to all of them for some reason or another. . The Genette Tate poem, “Disappeared”, I am proud of because I had been trying to write of this for a long, long time. .. this is what finally emerged after lots of false starts. When Genette went missing in Devon in 1978, I was only a little bit younger than her and lived only a few miles away. The fact that she disappeared was disturbing enough; the fact that her body was never found, even more so. . .And a poem in some ways connected to this, “Freyja”, I am especially pleased with because it came to be a love poem. I’ve definitely decided not to sit down and try consciously to write love-poems; they happen by serendipity!

“Gretel” I vividly remember writing at a large table in the Arvon Centre at Lumb Bank in West Yorkshire in the middle of the night. The course was focussing on childhood and dream and though I wrote other things there, this was the poem where both those things came together and collided with those already-existing preoccupations with violence and with people who are marginalized. John Burnside was the guest poet (the tutors were the excellent Moniza Alvi and Susan Wicks) and he had suggested to the group the night before that we might want to go off and each get stuck in to our favourite fairy tale or myth. Well, I could think of several but I settled on “Hansel and Gretel” and the voice of Gretel presented itself. It was one of those special occasions when a poem appears to write itself.

If someone were to write a poem about you…

Ah, this would depend so much on who was writing the poem! My younger son is autistic with severe learning disability: what kind of poem would he write? Perhaps it would be about me teaching him how to make a cup of tea. Someone else might focus on my wanderlust. Or on how a confused child of Catholic convert parents has been, in turn, a free-ranging protestant (small “p”), an apprentice Buddhist and, latterly, an agnostic with a deep distrust of most organized religion. I think I’ll just say: I hope that I never inspire a revenge poem. All else, gratefully acknowledged!

What are you currently working on?

I very much hope that my second full collection will see the light of day in 2013. At present, I am deep into working on my third collection. At the heart of it is the whole business of transience: travel, migration (both animal and human), how fruit ripens, how it rots, how the living relate to the dead. There is a fair bit of archaeology in it. Inside me is an archaeologist trying to get out. . .Or an archivist. I love the work of archaeologists and archivists. . .it is so important, they really are unsung heroes.

My preoccupation with trauma continues. I think I’ll soon be writing more about shell shock/war neurosis/combat stress. Who was it who said, “In war, there are no unwounded soldiers”? . . And I have recently been writing a longish poem about Liverpool, focussing on how Victorian Liverpool nudges the Liverpool of today and finds echoes there. Also two longish poems about specific places in Prague. I’m very interested in cities as palimpsests, places of layers and of incongruity, the magnificent alongside the horrific, elegance in close proximity to squalor. (Note to self: read “Cities” by Elaine Feinstein.) I have really enjoyed writing these longer poems. . .and intend to write more.

What advice would you give to an aspiring poet?

Everyone says this but I’ll echo it: read a lot. Read all sorts of poetry, especially lots of contemporary stuff. (Keats, Shelley, etc. are wonderful but you can’t learn from them how 21-st century people write, any more than you can learn from them how to talk.  When Keats and Shelley were writing, they were modern.) Also read lots of things that are not poetry.

Go to workshops if you can but don’t presume that workshops can teach you everything.

Be prepared to write a lot of rubbish. If you tell yourself that each poem you write has to be great, you are setting yourself up for failure. . .and paralysis. All the most well-known poets past and present have written rubbish. . .over time, you tend to get a feeling for when something is good and when it is not, and when something can be reasonably improved.

Don’t write about something/anything that only vaguely interests you. Why would a reader want to read about something that even the poet can’t get enthusiastic about? Rather: what do you find yourself thinking about a lot? dreaming about? What keeps you awake at night? What do you find yourself discussing in great detail with friends? A lot of bad poems are vague because the poets are not sufficiently engaged with the subject-matter.

Draft. Re-draft. Re-draft again. If you find other poets who are 1) friendly and also 2) capable of offering constructive criticism, share your work with them. And pay theirs the same compliment.

Encourage other people who are writing; encouragement is not on ration. The suffering artist (or is that artiste?) languishing in his/her garret is a myth.