David - Interview 28

Age at interview: 31

Age at diagnosis: 17

Brief Outline: David feels like he has been involved with mental health services his whole life, and started self-harming aged 14. After being discharged from the army for self-harm, he 'lost his way' and eventually went to prison. Now he is training to be a support worker, has done a degree in applied psychology, and found CBT useful.

Background: David does volunteer work, and is single with no children. Ethnic background' White British.

More about me...

David says he doesn’t know what it is like not to be involved with mental health services as he has been ‘his whole life’. He always wanted to be in the military and never did particularly well at school. He started self-harming when he was at school, and always found it difficult to ‘make sense of the world around [him]’. He said being at school was ‘horrible’; he lost interest and now thinks he had learning difficulties.

 

When David went into the army at the age of 17, it was noticed that he cut his arms and he was discharged with a ‘stress disorder’ and asthma. He saw a psychiatric nurse when he was 17. He says he got ‘half-way through [the army] breaking [him] down and[…] never got built back up’. He ‘lost [his] way’, got into alcohol and drugs, and eventually went to prison. He found some of the routines similar to military procedures. He lost both his grandparents when he was in prison, and thinks that is where his ‘anxious sort of thing came from’. He used self-harm to try and ‘regulate’ himself as there was a lot of ‘turmoil’ going on. He ‘never had an issue with it’ but other people’s reactions to self-harm were more pronounced. He had started writing words when he was cutting; his parents ‘didn’t know what to do with that’. Eventually he was prosecuted for criminal damage as he had smashed a window, but didn’t ‘register he did it’. He felt that he had ‘made a war zone’ around himself and isolated himself, and that his lifestyle was confrontational and destructive. He didn’t feel ‘connected with society’ and ‘hated everything about himself’. He got involved with the Prince’s Trust but kept ‘slipping back’.

                                             

David remembers ‘induc[ing] psychosis’ as he used to get picked on quite a bit. He was trying to ‘get himself angry enough to fight back’. He tried MDMA and weed to help him relax, and then get caught, so just used alcohol instead. He said that he never got into drugs ‘in a big way’ because he always had the self-harm. He says that when the ‘psychosis kicked in’ he ‘wasn’t conscious of what’s going on around [him]’. Sometimes he ‘sought it out’ to find that ‘comfort’. He thought he was ‘communicating with things and people’ and ‘playing conversations through [his] head’. He always had the illusion that the ‘doctors [..] were brilliant’ but now he thinks they know ‘as much as we do most of the time’. Only a couple of doctors have ‘directed [him] in sort of the right direction’.

 

Eventually he built his relationship up with his Dad and went back to college and University. He studied psychology and found it useful, as there was a lot of information he ‘picked up’. He would have found CBT a bit ‘patronising’ had he not done his degree, and thought that it denied personal responsibility a little bit. He felt he would never have learned CBT approaches unless he had to. He struggled a lot during his exams and he would ‘switch off totally’ and then ‘fell back’. He would hear voices and get a ‘surreal feeling’ of being ‘distant’. He felt a lot of anger during this period too. At times when he was walking down the street people would react to him, but he now understands it as a reaction to his anxious behaviour. Sometimes he couldn’t tell whether people were saying things or if he was hearing voices. When he starts to hear voices and feeling stressed, he needs to ‘close everything off’ and ‘shut everything down’ because he doesn’t want to initiate mental health procedures. He has never really talked about the psychosis as he was afraid of what could happen. He finds that there is support when you ‘hit rock bottom’ but not when you’re in a ‘transitional period’. He now gets support from a local centre, but when he experiences certain things he ‘[doesn’t] want to contact anyone’. Via social networking sites he’s realised that he can ‘believe what [he] believe[s]’ and still be a part of society. He found that instead of beliefs being ‘detrimental to what [he] was doing’ it has been the ‘other way round’ and they help him ‘get through and to challenge things’. He always ‘been all right in [himself]’ but it was ‘how [he fits] into the world’ where the ‘obstacles’ have been. Financially now he is ‘very, very stretched’ but has managed to minimise some costs which affect his mental health. He doesn’t want to get a ‘full diagnosis’ to get disability living allowance. He now wants to work in a support role working in mental health as it is ‘the world [he’s] been living in all [his] life’. He has some ‘coping strategies in place’ and it is something he has to ‘keep plugging away at’. He thinks that spirituality is part of his recovery, as well as paganism and ancient religions. His recovery has included research into magic and ritual, as well as education, including psychology, neurolinguistic programming, doing peer support work and mentoring training. Anti-depressants ‘never really did anything’ but he has benefited from ‘talking therapies’ and having the ‘environment and support around’. 

David was given a range of different diagnoses over the years and people have disagreed about which one he should have.

When I was about 17, 18 this military psychologist said I had a stress disorder. Later on with doctors one of them mentioned that I had a personality disorder. And over time there were some that said, well we shouldn’t be giving you personality disorders, that basically means everyone’s given up on you. And some of them just went oh I’m going to say it’s borderline. And then since then, I’ve had people say you haven’t got one at all and then laughed. It’s... depression and anxiety too have both come out a few times and sort of stuck. Never really talked a great deal about the psychosis and that because I’m always afraid of consequences of what could happen. I mean some of my mates and that I’ve seen they actually have been racked onto really strong medication and sectioned and everything and, and been shouted out by, or their music tastes have been blamed for their current state.  

David liked the emotional distance produced by smoking weed.

Some days I’d be all right, some days I wouldn’t. I never recognised anything as psychosis. In some ways I liked it and I sought it out at times. That’s why at times I used to smoke weed. I used to find it. I used to find that comfort of I could talk. So I know now that it activates part of speech and hearing and that sort of thing to action part of the brain. And I think I used to find comfort in that. Because I didn’t feel like I was on my own any more. I had something or some part of me with me. And…

 

I also know, a lot of people try and access psychosis element, because they’re given the edge because it’s given them a confidence boost. So they don’t feel threatened, so you’ve got that little street edge sort of to life, and I know I sought after that for quite a while as well.

 

And when you say it activates the speech and voice part of it, was it then you started to hear voices?

 

Yes. Yes. I used to think I was communicating with things and people and I’d play conversations through my head. I also found it easier to think. I don’t know if that was actually an illusion or not, but it felt like it at the time, and it was nice to have that feeling of not caring as well. Just that emotional distance. It sort of combined with self-harm and everything I was sort of into. It all sort of went together.  

Education helped David to understand why he felt as he did, and how the world around him worked.

Going into education has really helped. It’s getting the support within my college and university may not be the best way forward and stuff because sometimes it’s pointless and it’s good. It’s definitely learning and be able to see things from different perspectives. Training courses as well. And at the moment doing NLP and I love it. It’s brilliant. It’s given me a whole new perspective and things. It’s like doing the Peer Support Worker training, mentor training, that’s helped me a lot as well. It’s given me a different perspective on things. And doing my degree in Applied Psychology gave me a huge perspective on both myself and people around me and the people in the world and I enjoyed things like sociology in that as well. It’s like human sciences. So they’re about people and when you can start looking at how people work and how things are constructed like society and how views and beliefs are constructive you can take a slightly different approach on where you are in yourself and may be come to understand why people don’t understand or may be they’re afraid and the reasons why they sort of distance themselves, and also some reasons why you might end up feeling the way you do feel. 

David found that going into education really helped.

Going into education has really helped. It’s getting the support within my college and university may not be the best way forward and stuff because sometimes it’s pointless and it’s good. It’s definitely learning and be able to see things from different perspectives. Training courses as well. And at the moment doing NLP and I love it. It’s brilliant. It’s given me a whole new perspective and things. It’s like doing the Peer Support Worker training, mentor training, that’s helped me a lot as well. It’s given me a different perspective on things. And doing my degree in Applied Psychology gave me a huge perspective on both myself and people around me and the people in the world and I enjoyed things like sociology in that as well. It’s like human sciences. So they’re about people and when you can start looking at how people work and how things are constructed like society and how views and beliefs are constructive you can take a slightly different approach on where you are in yourself and may be come to understand why people don’t understand or may be they’re afraid and the reasons why they sort of distance themselves, and also some reasons why you might end up feeling the way you do feel. 

David is learning more about spirituality from many different faiths, beliefs and cultures such as Buddhism and Paganism, and has learnt to look at these in a 'critical way'.

There’s more and more, there’s more and more spirituality in that coming through at the moment and things which is a bit weird [laughs].

 

Well tell me something about your spiritual side?

 

Well there’s a lot, there’s like a lot of the Buddhism and stuff and that coming through and meditation and things. And that’s on the NLP and everything as well. I’ve always been more sort of into paganism and what they call the left hand path and the right hand path but I’m more into the left hand path, then slightly Ancient Egyptians, Samarians, Paganism, Nordic, African American. Native American. And then there’s Aboriginal. Everything from that sort of world. I’m more in touch with like nature and that, but I also recognise like the advances in even that as well. Like the 1900s and stuff. I think a lot of that’s just ignored these days.

 

But I’ve been exploring it… but it’s kept my brain active.

 

Yes.

 

… and it’s enabled me to just think and especially doing the psychology and that, I can like look at things in the critical way and like dismiss certain things in that as well. So like I can do that. 

David used CBT and other therapy to challenge 'black and white thinking'.

But the fact is a lot of it’s, it changed, a lot of that changed after I actually did the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. I actually walked out and went hang on a minute, I’m not sure, I’m not sure who I am again because I started looking back at all my past experiences and started thinking right this is how I remember that experience, but was I thinking along these lines of black and white thinking or everything was my fault or everything was someone else’s fault or …it made me have to really rethink where I’d been, what I’d done. And some of my experiences my actual life experiences. I had to re-evaluate every little bit and think hang on a minute I can’t really sit in and do, I know this from this experience of my life. That sort of in a way dismiss a lot of it, crushing it. Which isn’t a bad thing. But it’s like getting into that feeling of lost again. So you feel like you’ve lost your personal identity and your self-identity.

 

So you said you rebuilt a lot of that?

 

I’d say a lot of times I think. It keeps happening and then it gets to a point everything just goes out the window and then it’s a case of like rebuild. But I think over years I’ve managed to build together quite a solid foundation. So when I’ve fallen out, I can only fall so far and I’ve got all the steps there to build myself back up quickly without going too far. So as I said I’ve built up relationships with my family and that now and …

 

What was it like doing that?

 

It was hard work, because I think going back to how I used to be when I was younger some of my behaviours and where I was in my own head, it’s very destructive, and then I couldn’t really comprehend where I was, so god forbid how anyone could actually, how anyone else could comprehend where I was or what I was doing, or why I was doing it. But yes, it’s taken time and effort.