2006-10-13
I was back down south for my niece’s christening at the weekend. So – five weeks apart – one niece has got married and another is just starting out on life. Which is a function of my sister being fourteen years older than my brother and he having children early and him having them late.I arrived at Gatwick on Saturday afternoon and my phone immediately started buzzing text messages at me. I’d intended to catch a train across to my brother’s house but the messages were telling me my sister’s husband Richard would come and get me, bringing Michael with him. When I saw them I realised what was going on: Michael, who just a week before seemed to be on a steep up-curve from his mental problems, was in a bad way and Richard was doing what he could to occupy him and try to bring him out of his torments.
He had gone back to work on the Monday and it had been an ‘unmitigated disaster’. Perhaps wanting to be kind and ease him into work again a decision seemed to have been taken to remove his existing work to another office and nothing had been arranged for him to do. With the result that he sat in a room on his own and got more and more panicky and started down some paranoid thoughts about people plotting to get rid of him and what could he possibly do if he couldn’t hold down this job und so weiter.
As we talked though it came out that his psychiatrists had told him to stop taking the low dosage of the anti-depressant he had started three weeks before. At the level he was taking it, they said, it wouldn’t be having any effect and if he was getting side effects from it he would be better off not bothering. And so after two weeks of feeling mentally better he stopped taking them and then started back at work the next day. It seems pretty obvious to me that if you’re getting ‘side effects’ then there is some kind of effect happening and three weeks isn’t really long enough to work out whether the drug is not being beneficial or not. They seem to have decided that his brief turn-around was just a natural occurrence – and to me that looks like a wrong decision. And a decision they’d reversed the day before I saw him.
He was in a sorry state of anxiety and it was bad to see him so distressed. He was back to fixatng about not being able to sleep and I learned later from Christie that during the night he had been so convinced that the only way this would end would be in him killing himself that he got up and looked out his will to be sure everything was in order. [Not that he was on the point of suicide – just couldn’t see that it wasn’t inevitable at some time soon].
And he was scared of not being able to get through the christening without a panic attack. I’m not sure that Christie’s suggestion that if he woke up feeling bad then they could just cancel the event was helpful (intended to be reassuring, I’m sure). I suspect the idea of putting so many people off at short notice was adding extra pressure to him.
As it happened he got a good night’s sleep and woke feeling able to cope, if still apprehensive. And I’m sure the vast majority of people at the church will have detected no change in him from his usual self.
I left him Sunday night worrying about whether he’d be able to go into work the next day. Or rather asking the question repeatedly: ‘what if I can’t go in tomorrow?’ To which the answer had to be ‘decide in the morning, and don’t assume if you feel you can’t go in that it’ll be the same the next day’