I'm confusing myself...

 ...about what to write here and what to write in my other blog.

[Content warning: suicide]

I wanted this to be to share my experiences of being failed, but I also didn't/don't want to fill my other blog with my ramblings about being suicidal. As far as I'm concerned, being suicidal is entirely connected to the failures in my care: lack of appropriate help/support; being made worse by failures to adapt properly, atrocious communication, professionals with little to no training or understanding of autism (it's not a mental health problem so why am I told to see mental health services??), completely inappropriate hospital admissions in torturous psych wards. Because I shouldn't have deteriorated to this with the right help/support at the right time. So anything about being suicidal probably belongs here. Unless it's old/unconnected to failures in my care, because I have been suicidal before. Why do I think this is different and not just me being suicidal? Because of the reactions that services trigger. They actively make things worse, and I really don't understand why they do that when they're meant to help and could help at times but just... haven't. They cause more stress rather than helping to reduce stress. And they expect things from me that I just can't do/deal with. 

It's nearly three years that I've been entitled to s117 aftercare after a section 3, and for almost half of that I didn't even know there was an assessment I was meant to have had but I apparently told someone I "wasn't ready to engage" (I knew nothing about it), and the other half has been trying to get them to adapt the questions so I can do the assessment. Three years. They've had over five years since I asked for help this time. All that time they could have been doing stuff to help (for some of it they did try), but they've mostly wasted it on making me worse.

I'm exhausted and I don't want to keep struggling all the time just to do the basics. I can't do everything, but I can't not do things either, so I keep hurting myself to do things (because of my physical disabilities), or beating myself up mentally when I haven't done things. There's so much to do. I can't see how I can ever do it. I don't know what I want anymore, I'm completely overwhelmed and drowning and I just need it to stop. I can't see any answers that don't bring more (or different) problems. I can't just walk away and leave my cat, I wouldn't be able to live with myself anyway, and I wouldn't know where to go either. It's not where I am that's the problem (though it has problems, but so would anywhere else). It's me not being able to function and needing help but not getting the right help and not knowing how to cope with help either. I'm disintegrating. And the people who are meant to help are nowhere. Their idea of help is sending the police round to do a welfare check that just checks whether I'm alive, who tell me there's help when I wouldn't be like this if there was help, and blame me for refusing help when I tell them what they're suggesting isn't help. Autism isn't a mental health problem. Autistic burnout isn't a mental health problem. I need people who actually understand, not more gaslighting.

I'm dependent on taking tablets to help me sleep every night now. I can't face going over stuff in my head and not being able to sleep and getting more stressed and distressed. (Yes I know writing this at night maybe isn't helpful, but I don't seem to get round to it during the day.) I couldn't get up to my cat last night the third time she meowed during the night because I was too tired, possibly due to the tablets. They're not sleeping tablets, it's diazepam and cocodamol. Together they seem to make me drowsy enough to get to sleep easily. I was taking them occasionally to help but now it's every night, and that bothers me. I'd like to just be able to sleep and not worry about what shit's going to be going through my head tonight to keep me awake and rigid with tension.

I'm getting tired now because of the tablets.

 

[Moved from another blog. The date/time are from the original post.] 

Not sure this is going to work

[CW: suicide, overdose]

Not writing blogs from emails anyway. There are so many of them, and there's so much of my distress in them (I don't know how services can read them and do nothing to help; simple answer is they probably don't read them), I don't want to read it all. There are things that I've forgotten that I can be reminded about from emails. There are emails I wrote after I'd tried to kill myself. I don't want to go over it all, yet a lot of it goes on in my head anyway. I was trying to avoid having to write stuff from scratch, knowing I've probably written it before, and with limited time and difficulty getting started, and my memory isn't great anymore so I don't have clarity for everything that's happened. I don't want to get things wrong/misremember and be accused of lying, even after I'm dead.

There's also a lot that I haven't written. Like I don't think I've ever written the story of most of my sections, what actually led to them (lack of sleep was a factor in most of them). All the stuff I've written in emails will be there for some people to see. Anything I haven't written about will die with me. But then I'm back to not knowing what to write/where to start, and I can't be sure what I haven't written about. I've had years to write stuff and I'm down to my last fortnight-ish. I can't prioritise, I don't know what are the most important parts to write about. I just don't want my experiences and my reality to be drowned out and attempted to be rewritten by professionals who want me to be seen in a certain way to justify their (in)actions, and who often weren't even there. I was there for all of it. I'm biased too, I know that, but I don't have a reputation or career to protect. My reputation went when I was in the news after I tried to get myself sent to prison, thinking I might be able to cope there and have some kind of life. My dignity went at some point in the overdoses and sections, I couldn't say exactly when. My decisions were based on trying to do things that I thought might help, at times when I needed help/support that I wasn't (and I'm still not) getting. And justice sensitivity. I don't know how to live with everything that's happened. And I'm tired of struggling.

It's sad that I'm looking forward to being dead. I'm not looking forward to the dying part though; that's the part I struggle with, that's why I'm still alive. I was meant to die too many times to remember over the last two and a half years. And every time I didn't die, I had experiences that made me have to struggle more. Noisy hospitals; indifferent, ignorant or deliberately nasty professionals; lack of understanding of autism. (I'm getting too tired to think.) It hasn't all been bad but the negatives have far outweighed the rest. 

I wish I could swap places with someone who's dying who wants to live, because it feels so unfair that other people die and they'd probably do anything to live, and I'm not grateful for life, I don't see the point in carrying on. I didn't feel like this before. I've felt suicidal before but it's always been when I'm struggling to cope. And there's no help. No appropriate and stable/predictable help anyway. Just people saying they'll help and then not, or making things worse.

I'm just rambling now. That's not what this blog was meant for. I've got another blog for that.

 

 [Moved from another blog. The date/time are from the original post.] 

PACT emails after assessment

(PACT is the personality and complex trauma service, who were suggested to me in January 2021 but I avoided because of autistic people often being misdiagnosed with personality disorder and the trauma that causes. CMHT were about to dump me, not that they were doing anything but discriminate anyway, so I didn't see any other option to try to survive.)

---------

16th August 2023

Dear Sarah-Jane,  

Thank you for your email. I am sorry for the length of time it has taken for us to have collaborative discussions with our CMHT colleagues and think carefully with all professionals in our teams about how we may be able to help.  

We have concluded together, that as you have continued to advocate for yourself, that an out of area treatment by a specialist autism service is most likely to be helpful for you. We have made a referral to the out of area treatment panel and will all be strongly advocating for a suitable provider to be identified. If you have any idea of a provider you would like to work with we would be glad to know and can help to make a case for this being funded for you.  

We are extremely grateful that you engaged with [the psychiatrist] and while I acknowledge that you feel this was not a good use of time, it has been helpful in helping us evidence that no local services are best equipped to meet your needs at the moment.  

I cannot make any promises for the outcome of the panel but can assure you that we will do all we can to help them understand why LPFT are not best placed right now, although we continue to hope that you could trust us, in LPFT to support you, in a mental health crisis or with any other mental health difficulties, but know that currently you need support with your autism.  

(Emphasis in bold is mine.)

------------ 

21st September 2023

Dear Sarah Jane,

We have met with the Out of Area Treatment panel and whilst they are still very happy to fund a specialist advocate for you, and we hope you can identify someone who you think is helpful and can get along with, they do continue to feel that your needs would be best met in LPFT.

(I'm not including the whole email. It's clear enough that the people who've actually met me and assessed me think I need autism support, which doesn't exist here, but Lincs ICB still disagree and say LPFT can meet my needs while LPFT say they can't meet my needs. I waited over two months from the PACT assessment for them to say I need autism help, and the ICB to refuse out of area autism help for the second time (they refused it in 2019, which is when this all started; it all could've been avoided if they'd got the right help from the right people at the right time).

 

[Moved from another blog. The date/time are from the original post.] 

They just keep making things worse, part 2

 [CW: suicide]

I'm really shit at writing blogs. I didn't realise I hadn't written since before I was shipped back to a local hospital (with two hour's notice (they said an hour), while on hunger strike and still in bed), where I stayed for the weekend before being taken off the section and discharging myself against medical advice, so absolving everyone of any responsibility if I went on to kill myself. They asked me to stay voluntarily while my care was sorted out. I couldn't stay where it was torture -- they've literally built a torture chamber for autistic people with noise sensitivity. Seven weeks later, not only do I still have no care, but nobody has even spoken to me about my care, nobody replies to my emails about my care, yet they've turned down help from a company that finds respite care, and how do I know that? From the company that helps find respite care, not from anyone in my so called care team. I also found out from that company that my social worker has been off sick for some time. Nobody bothered to tell me. But she's not meant to be my social worker anymore anyway. I requested a new one I don't know how long ago; someone who can actually communicate and adapt. Well that appears to be nobody at LPFT, or Lincs ICB.

Things have built up, especially today, and I've had it. They're never going to help. They never were. I was always going to die. I've felt like I'm not really here anyway. I was so upset earlier and now I'm just numb. Trying to think of what I need to do before I die. I need to get through Christmas first, I can't ruin it for everyone. I wish I could've just gone tonight though. I'm so tired, I'm so sick of being seen as not really serious because I'm not dead yet. If they honestly think I'm just saying it then they really don't understand autistic people at all. Honesty is important to me. Not that those bunch of liars would understand that.

I'm too tired tonight and I've already taken tablets to help me sleep. I will write more soon. I'll write as much as I can so it doesn't all die with me. It's not going to be pretty, it won't be polished, but it'll be me, and them. And probably Lincs police too, since they've played a part in the state of me now.

In the words of Zoe Zaremba: I wish I'd never asked for help.

 

[Moved from another blog. The date/time are from the original post.]