I lost a close friend a few years ago. In my friend's case, he was suffering from multiple sclerosis that progressed enough he retired from the job we shared. He was the guy who helped me cut my teeth and deal with jitters, the pressures, and the horrors and my desire to set heartless bureaucrats on fire...
Even though he retired he was the sort of guy that wanted to help others, establishing a group in the local area he was based in for people affected by similar isolating difficulties. He was always a giver.
Regardless of his pains, he had a wonderful sort of humour, the sort that makes me smirk as I sit here pondering his crude jokes or sharp observations distilled into a witty punchline. He should have been a stand-up comedian he would have been up there with George Carlin. We would watch films together sometimes and drink mead and idly play poker. He was the sort of guy that would point out every flaw or inaccuracy. Commenting on how cars in films must be partly made from nitroglycerin.
My memories of him make me feel sad mostly. Sad at what happened. Sad that they closed down the independent living fund, sad they took away his specially adapted Motability car using spurious reasons. I saw how that was like taking scissors to a canary's wings leaving behind bleeding stumps that soon turned rotten. Sadder still they cut his support workers hours. A guy he had grown increasingly dependent on. I remember him telling me how hard it was all starting to become, that it was hard enough fighting his own body let alone everything else. I saw his mood drop, his nights were harder to deal with as he did not always have Andy there, and sometimes he suffered intense muscle spasm that left him rigid and in need of assistance. Throughout our careers we had always been angry at injustice, it is what drove us in the first place. This injustice against him though I think caused him to wither. He would ring me up in the middle of the night sometimes sobbing.
The Problem with these sorts of conversations is after the person is gone, you revisit everything said in intricate detail. Being chewed on by what you should have said, or should have done. Even after years I sometimes find myself thinking about those conversations. The if only's and should of haves resurfacing.
As far as I am concerned my government threw him under the bus. Robbed him of dignity and left him trapped in a way no one should be trapped. Just as they are throwing me under the bus. All for the crime of getting sick.
It may sound like hyperbole to say my government is indirectly killing the disabled in this country. But I will leave Callum's list here and you can stare long into the abyss and come to your own conclusions as you follow the threads of indifference and atrocity.
http://calumslist.org/
He did not ring me the night he chose to die. But he had sent me a text at 3:33 Am. That number now has a significance to me. Whenever I see any clock at 3:33 I find myself thinking of him. Like that combination of numbers now has greater meaning. If I am exposed to a film we had watched in the past I think of him, pointing out how that woman was dumb for going into the basement, did she expect to find a convenient hatch to China? Or how that sword is entirely impractical and would be more likely to cause injury to the protagonist than fight off monsters. For a time I also fixated on how I had missed the text, sleeping right through it and cursing myself for not being there. I still have that mobile in my desk drawer. I have stupid anxiety sometimes, that the text will degrade and be gone. It is dumb but it is what it is.
Looking back though I feel that was intentional. That he had made his mind up. He was just done. Things beyond that became a blur for a time. It was all very sad. There was a large turnout at his funeral. He was well-liked and fondly thought of. Former clients of his also attended upon learning of his passing. Each time the date of his death or birthday rolls around I think of him, toast some mead to his memory. I am reminded just how much I miss him. I want to believe he is at peace now, but the realist in me accepts he is not at anything now. The only mercy is a corpse can't suffer further. The maggots get to feast, pupate and be fed on. Death feeding life. Just another indifferent cycle among many.
Some of my clients have also suffered similar fates, failures in what are meant to be supportive systems. I have bitched about it elsewhere. I was left chronically frustrated at just how poor mental health provision is for those who want it. Chronically angered at the stupidity of it all that people asking for help, willing to engage with that help, are the very ones being denied it! Dismissed by it, or worse having it turned on them like they are to blame when nine sessions of lazily delivered CBT they have been waiting for eight months for does not magically cure them of chronic years of abuse... It is utterly sickening to behave in this way.
I feel those deaths much like my friends but it is different, muted by professional distance or I wouldn't have been effective for the next person. Now I don't have to be professional it just adds to my hatred and misanthropy, especially as I am acutely aware mental health provision is worsening, it is the worst I have ever seen it in my entire career.
Wasn't uncommon for my clients' pain to be essentially trivialised in some way. Or for them to not be heard by the treating professional when they would say, 'I don't feel alive I feel like a zombie.' One such client was told how much they were costing the NHS. Then proceeded to engage in extreme self-harm straight after, that landed them in the hospital and with permanent nerve damage... One of my clients who did kill himself came out of a particularly fiery meeting remarking something like, "If me being suicidal is me making progress then being dead must be the fucking cure."
Sad to say he went on to 'cure' himself. I could write a book about the odious shit I have seen. After getting hurt by what is meant to help what avenue does a person have left?
It is depressing to me that this flawed system is what you have to gamble on in the first place. It does work for some but that does not excuse its structural failings. It really is luck of the draw on what is on offer and what personalities and god complexes you run into along the way. Or how eviscerated staff are by various top-down pressures and targets or dangerous workloads that take away from meaningful care. Because reams of paper on outdated systems must be attended to and the liability of things satisfied otherwise ivory tower management forces may descend and want to lop off heads.
It operates like triage and makes little attempt at preventative measures, as most outpatient services have been cut to ribbons. Or if you are unlucky they do exist, but because you have self-harmed recently you do not qualify at this time... even if severe anxiety and isolation are what is making you self harm in the first place! It is all about saving costs or accruing profit while front line services are having to deal with the mantra of do more with less and obviously failing. In the same way you would fail to feed more people with less food. It does not compute, but this is the bat shit logic that is underscoring rampant failure across the board. Leaving minors in abusive situations. Elderly stewing in their own shit. Schools needing to beg for books. Charities to go under as they lose funding and often along with it goes your access to justice and awareness of what may well exist in your area.
People, as a result, are just left to face a wasteland in a lot of cases. Unsurprisingly people don't make it. In the same way, people crossing a desert that do not encounter an oasis soon enough don't make it.
The trigger point I feel is unaddressed pain in whatever form to the point a person just cannot cope any more. Something snaps that can overwhelm survival instinct. In the past, I have crossed that line myself.
One pain that is rarely considered with any real weight is chronic dissatisfaction and disappointment. As if those are trivial. But they are an erosive kind of pain that whittles away everything till passion itself dies. At that point your life is autopilot of job, tv, sleep repeat. To make matters worse keeping the lights on demands you do this dance regardless if you have a passion or not. The savagery of that dance is getting worse, not better. I have never seen work environments provoke so much fear as I have now.
Or if you happen to be disabled in some way it can become surviving just to survive while wondering why. Where no amount of positive mental spin is going to change the fact you are slowly drowning to death in your own lung fluid. Your own government just recently cut your support hours and has no qualms rendering you homeless, but your therapist is telling you, you are just catastrophising.
The whole system meant to address pain is rotten to the core. Needs more than a serious overhaul but a structural change. But that is not going to happen because to overhaul this. Society itself would have to look at the toxic environments it has normalised and continues to protect for a greedy minority. As well as changing it would also cost money and damage shareholder value across sectors. Can't have that now can we.
So no son, pull yourself up by your bootstraps stop being a lazy entitled whiner and desist in engaging in chaotic lifestyles. If you don't like it you can always move to North Korea. (Just in case my Britishness is lost on you, that paragraph was bitter sarcasm. You will have to forgive my grammar crimes as well as I can't summon up enough effort to care. Now it is back to stabbing orcs in the face, ironically the middle earth universe makes more damn sense than this one. Rant over.. Peace..)
