For the next week I spend my time, day and night, walking the streets, existing on bread rolls from the supermarket and large cans of beer. I wander around the inner city and the back streets of Mount Victoria in bare feet and ragged clothes, thinking I’m going to receive some reward at the end of it, or meet somebody who is going to help me.
At night the voice tells me I am working for a gang that sells drugs and the police are after me. It gives me very detailed accounts of abuse I’ve received, leaving me with disturbing images going through my head.
Finally, on about the tenth day, it tells me I am going to meet the person who is going to help me fly away from this place in an apocalyptic world to a safe place where I will be looked after. In bare feet, with glass and stones on the ground around me, and at my wits’ end, I stand facing the Mount Victoria Tunnel and say to the voice, “I want to die.” Frustrated that I don’t have any instruments to use, I start screaming at the voice—pleading at my hands, where I feel sensations—saying, “Fuck off, I can’t take it any more, this is the end.”
There’s a bottle store nearby. I decide if I’m going to die, I’m going to die drunk. I walk in and have a look around. Suddenly I start crying. I see a storage cupboard with an open door. I walk into the cupboard, get on my knees, and start crying and weeping and squealing. Then, as if I have nothing left in me, I curl up in a ball.
Someone comes in and leads me out of the cupboard. I go to a table that has bottles on it and crawl under it and start crying again, my knees hunched into my face. I cry and cry until eventually I fall asleep with my head on my knees bent right up to my chest.
After a week of no sleep and constant chatter from the voice, I am no longer fully aware of what’s around me. I have no more fight left; I am completely lonely and living in my psychosis. I need a break.
I drift in and out of consciousness. A person crouches down beside me and says, “Are you all right?” I say, “Please go away.” I look up and see two police officers. They smile at me and I go with them. We get in the police car and they drive me to Central Police Station. As we drive I tell them all the problems with the government, the media and society in general. I don’t stop talking until we get to the station. When we arrive I ask for a cigarette and surprisingly they say yes. They don’t take me down to the usual cells. Instead, when we get in the lift we go up to an interview room that has carpet and tables and a chair—not the usual concrete cell that’s tiny with a mattress and a sink. I don’t say anything. I just stare at the ground. I can’t believe I have wound up back at the police station again after everything the voice said.
I sit in the room and entertain myself by looking at the pattern on the carpet. While I’m in the middle of this, a police officer comes and gets me, and takes me back down in the lift to a car. I figure we are going back to the ward but I don’t say anything. We pull into the hospital car park and the policeman leads me in through the front door, then the double doors, and then to the nurses’ station. The nurses smile at me. I don’t smile back. I give everything I have to Rachel. She shows me my room, just opposite the nurses’ station. I go outside and sit on a chair and stare at the rubbish. People talk to me but I don’t respond.
Epilogue
The events described in this book happened three years ago. A month after returning to the ward I was given leave to visit my parents. We got on well and my mother asked me if I wanted to come home. By then I was in a radically different state from when the police had picked me up. I had responded to medication and a period of abstinence from drugs. At home, over time, the idea of the voice being real came to seem stranger and stranger, until one day the voice had become so faint I could ignore it. And then, suddenly, it was gone.
Although I knew I was still not completely well, I didn’t acknowledge that I had a mental illness. I went back to using drugs and ended up in the ward several more times. Finally I was left with no choice but to accept an ultimatum and enter Capri, a rehab facility treating alcohol and drug addiction. While I didn’t believe I had schizoaffective disorder, I did accept I had a problem with drugs.
I left Capri after a few months, well and on medication. For a year I stayed clean of drugs. I rented my own flat, held down a job as a checkout operator, and attended regular meetings of Narcotics Anonymous. Capri had said in its report they felt my psychosis was drug-induced. This made me think that if I abstained from drugs I wouldn’t need to keep taking my meds. When I took myself off Haloperidol, the antipsychotic, I didn’t notice too much difference, but when I went off Lamotrigine, the mood stabiliser, I felt some of the old sensations coming back. One day, standing at the checkout counter at work, I noticed my body involuntarily moving forwards, and movements in my jaw. The old feeling was coming back.
For about four months I ignored these symptoms. I stopped sleeping and started meditating. I was about a week away from moving to Melbourne to live when my psychosis suddenly returned. I began to get paranoid about the police turning up at my place and taking me away. My anxiety increased to the point where I was barely eating.
I was in the final day of packing up my flat when a man from Vodafone knocked on my door, trying to sell me an internet connection. I said no and walked him out on to the street, leaving my house keys and car keys locked in my flat. I walked around Wellington trying to think what to do. Finally I checked into a hotel, rang my parents and left a message. The next day they phoned back, very worried. They thought I was on drugs and should go back to rehab.
I didn’t want to hear that: I wanted freedom. I calmed them down, and with the help of my father managed to get into my flat and collect my belongings. My flight to Melbourne was due to leave from Auckland the following day. I flew to Auckland, and as soon as I arrived I turned off my phone. I was to meet my sister and stay the night with her, but instead I went to the international terminal and booked a flight to Vancouver.
The flight was to leave in three hours. I had a final smoke and worked my way through the maze of an airport. I had packed all my writing and a camera in my hand luggage: I had decided that once I got to Vancouver I would drive down into the United States, taking photos along the way. I figured I wouldn’t eat anything in order to save money.
I boarded the plane for Vancouver. I couldn’t believe I had finally got out of New Zealand after all these years. I stayed awake for the whole fifteen-hour flight, dancing around and drinking wine. Towards the end the voice kicked back in and I started to communicate with it, talking through it to famous musicians and to friends back in Wellington.
When I made it off the plane in Canada, I thought I was safe and sound. I picked up my bags and went through Immigration, lying on my boarding card and giving a false address. I was ushered into a room where I was questioned and my bags thoroughly checked. It turned out I didn’t have a visa to enter the country. I explained that I had plenty of money and didn’t plan to work.
The process seemed to take hours. I was not allowed to smoke and my anxiety began to go through the roof. In the end I got so desperate I lit a cigarette and started pacing up and down. The immigration officers took me to a cell out the back. I sat and waited. I sang Marian Anderson’s “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and started to weep. I was transferred to the county jail, where I was put in a cell with a mattress, no blanket, and some ham sandwiches. I asked to speak to a lawyer but when I got on the phone I couldn’t hear the lawyer.
Next day I was taken to a building with cells where people were waiting to go to court. There were two other women in my cell, one from Russia and the other from China. When I went before the judge he said I was being deported back to New Zealand, and he talked about my mental health history. I thanked him and was led out in handcuffs.
After another night in the county jail I was transferred to a holding cell in the airport with another two women. There were three separate bedrooms, and a living room with a table and chairs. The voice explained to me that I was going back to New Zealand for a short while an
d I immediately fell asleep.
On the flight back to New Zealand I had the same crew as I had had on the flight over. They had made me roses out of white paper. They asked me not to drink and I obliged. I wrote all the way home, planning what I wanted to do with my life.
When I arrived in Auckland I was escorted off the plane by a female flight attendant. After clearing Immigration and Customs, I saw my father, who was overjoyed and overcome with emotion. He and I flew back to Wellington. The following day I saw my psychiatrist. She didn’t put me on medication right away and I didn’t get institutionalised because I was able to stay at my parents’ home.
My mood swings became extreme. I got angry easily and quickly. I suggested to the psychiatrist that I start taking lithium because of my extreme anxiety. The lithium took a while to work and meanwhile I was drinking bourbon day and night. Eventually I was prescribed Amisulpride, another antipsychotic drug. To fill my days I wrote songs, and sang and recorded them.
It took me about ten weeks to recover. In the caring home environment I got better much more quickly than I would have in a psych ward. One morning I woke up and saw very clearly that it wasn’t drugs that had led me astray this time: it was lack of sleep, lack of food, high stress and high anxiety. Therefore, my mental illness was not drug-induced but a condition I actually had. This realisation gave me hope that with the right support, medication and work I might never again have to get into manic, suicidal and gleefully high states. I would not have to live with a false perception of myself based on what the voice said. I would not have to do drugs or end up back in a horrible underfunded and understaffed public health facility.
Getting better is a gradual process. Slowly your ability to rationalise comes back, and then you gain the power to shut down the voice in your head. When the voice and the psychosis go you still need time to recover. I remained on heavy medication, which slowed me down, but in time my drugs were lowered to maintenance level. There were a few hiccups along the way: when the antipsychotic drugs were reduced some of the hallucinations came back, but it was easy to raise the dose again to get rid of them.
In the past, when I didn’t acknowledge my mental illness, I was not willing to talk about it. Now, though, I just want to be well. I don’t see myself as a drug addict but as someone who took drugs and became drug-dependent because I was self-medicating to alleviate symptoms of my illness. I no longer go to Narcotics Anonymous. I still get an occasional craving for drugs but this passes as I keep myself busy with writing and art. Today I have no sign of the voice and am not in a psychotic state. I focus on things that make me feel good and I keep in touch with my family and friends.
I try not to beat myself up about the past. There are downsides to having a mental illness, but there are upsides too. When you are getting well the simplest things—such as getting your concentration back and being able to read, have conversations, and watch movies with your friends—can give you a great sense of happiness. You can feel free just walking down the street not looking for signs and not analysing people trying to figure out what to do next.
I rejoice that I can now reflect on my state of mind, when it is up and when it is down. I can pause and stop breathing in the fire. Just to live well is a simple gift.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to John Saker, Mary Varnham, Awa Press, Nancy Yearly, Gerry Dowse, Lindsay and Helen. Nurses of Ward 27. Friends and family who have stayed constant in my life, in particular my mother and father for their unwavering support.
MaryJane Thomson lives in Wellington, New Zealand, where she is a writer, artist and photographer. This is her first book.
First ebook edition published in 2013 by Awa Press, Level Three, 11 Vivian Street, Wellington 6011, New Zealand.
ISBN print: 978-1-877551-80-2
ISBN epub: 978-1-877551-81-9
ISBN mobi: 978-1-877551-82-6
Copyright © MaryJane Thomson 2013
The right of MaryJane Thomson to be identified as the author of this work in terms of Section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.
Copyright in this book is held by the author. You have been granted the right to read this ebook on screen but no part may be copied, transmitted, reproduced, downloaded or stored or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system in any form and by any means now known or subsequently invented without the written consent of Awa Press Limited, acting as the author’s authorised agent.
All names in this book, with the exception of the author’s, have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals concerned.
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
Cover photograph by weareadventurers/Vetta/Getty Images
Author’s photograph by Jenn Hadley Photography
Cover design by Keely O’Shannessy
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Sarah Vaughan is Not My Mother: A Memoir of Madness Page 20