I’m in a small caravan a West Bay. Also there are my mother, my grandfather plus my two grandmothers. I’m 12 years old and this is my home for a week in August. The weather is of course terrible. The caravan has no toilet, no washing facilities and no cooking facilities. And every night, I am suffering from night terrors.
Every night is the same. My paternal grandparents share a tiny double room, my mother and maternal grandmother share a tiny room with two even tinier single beds and I sleep on the settee, swaddled in a sheet and some old blankets. We go to bed early because there is nothing to do and nowhere to go and anyway it’s always raining. I try to drift off to sleep but I start getting anxious. I open my eyes and everything around me appears to be small and getting smaller. I close my eyes and my mind’s eye does the same trick. I fear my heart beginning to pound, my chest getting tight, it’s hard to breathe. I need to get outside into the open air as quickly as possible. I get up, fumble noisily with the door handle and finally get it open. I rush outside, on to the wet grass in the damp cool night air. Everyone gets up to see what’s going on. I’m standing in the rain, in bare feet, shaking uncontrollably, my heart leaping out of my chest.
My mum puts her arm around me, a rare show of familial physical affection which was strangely absent throughout my childhood and beyond. She asks what’s wrong. I have no idea but slowly, as I gaze across the small Dorset seaside town, with it’s harbour lights flickering in the semi-distance, a version of normality returns. But I am strangely exhausted and probably shocked at having been out of control. We all go back in, my three elderly grandparents returning to bed, my mum reassuring me that everything will be okay. But for every night exactly the same thing happens.
When we get home to the family home in Brislington, where my mum and me live, along with her mother who came across from Rotterdam for the summer, if anything my night terrors and panic attacks get worse. They don’t just happen when I am in bed: they happen when we are in the living room, watching our tiny black and white television crackle and pop in the far corner of the room. Without warning, the TV starts to get even smaller and it’s like being in a tiny room and I am panicking. I have to get outside of the house. I dash out of the living room, scramble to open the back door and stand outside by the steps. Everything is the right size again but I am a 12 year old mess.
I am in the second year of my time at Brislington school and these things are happening every night. I daren’t tell anyone because of what they might say. That included teachers, too. It affects everything I do at school because my mind is all over the place. And I am tired all the time. Even in Junior School, I had terrible problems taking stuff in. At senior school it’s even worse. My great strength is that I am able to bluff my way through. I somehow get by, albeit with terrible results in every subject.
A few weeks into the autumn term, my mother decides something must be done. She has no idea what, so she takes me to the doctor. I am to remain in the waiting room while mum sees the doctor. Soon, the doctor’s door opens and he calls me in. He tells me he is going to send me to see someone to make things better. I have no idea what this means but some weeks – or maybe months – later I am taken out of school every Tuesday lunchtime by my mother who takes me into town on the bus and she deposits me at a basement room on Brunswick Square where I meet a man. In the room is a boxing punch ball, various light footballs and a collection of crayons and paper. I am invited to punch the ball as hard as I like, to kick the ball around – indoors, mind you: that’s not allowed at home – and draw whatever I want. I have no idea who the man is and even less idea of why I am there. I’m pretty sure I don’t know if there is any connection between my night terrors and panic attacks and being here because no one tells me.
I have no idea how long I have been seeing this man for, but I reckon it lasts through the winter into spring and it turns out I will see him the following year when my mother reveals I have been seeing a child psychiatrist, which means literally nothing to me. I’m 13 for goodness sake. How do I know what a child psychiatrist is? To me, he’s just a man I go and see every week and I do nice things. I don’t remember even talking to him about anything but I must have done. When I got older, I realised that psychiatry involves rather a lot of talking because it would become an enduring part of my life.
Some time in the future
The night terrors and panic attacks have largely disappeared now. I still get the odd one but I can deal with it by opening my bedroom window, not always the best thing to do when the window is already frozen on the inside in this unheated home.
I am in the third year at Brislington and I am struggling badly with every single subject. Nothing makes any sense but my bluffing has been elevated to the top level and my school reports always say “could do better” when the truth is I couldn’t. One by one, I dump all the sciences because I don’t know chemistry from biology from physics. I get rid of the foreign language subjects and only carry on with things like Maths, which I don’t understand at all, because I have to. We are told to buy slide rules. I do not have a clue what it does and now I am older and unwiser I still do not have a clue.
Yet when I am in school, I don’t feel like I’m thick. Although my thought processes are often muddled, I look around people who are doing far better than me and I wonder why. But when I leave the classroom at the end of the day, I switch off completely. And no one in my family ever asks me about it, save my father who expresses his thoughts and gives advice, which I of course ignore, par avion from Canada, where he has lived for many years.
It never occurs to me that there might be something else going on. In my teens, as if to to replace the terrors, I suffer from big mood swings. As poor mental health has not yet been invented, I am told by all and sundry to stop feeling sorry for myself and to pull myself together. Things get so bad, my mum takes me to the doctor again. I am in the surgery this time and she tells him about my moods, how I can’t concentrate and how I fidget all the time. The fidgeting doesn’t bother my mum, but it drives me grandfather mad and when my dad comes to visit, he tells me constantly to sit still. And when I sit still, I feel like my head is going to explode, so I go outside into the open air, with far less drama than when I was having my terrors.
Still the same
I am 16 and I am in Southmead Hospital. Not as an inpatient, but I am seeing a Mister Something, which means he is Very Important. My doctor thinks I have something called depression and he wants me ‘checked over’. No one has told me what depression is, but Mister Something says that in his opinion I have depression. I see another man, who is probably a psychiatrist and I visit him every week, taking time off school, and my mum takes me to an organisation on Pipe Lane by the Colston Hall called Off The Record where I talk to another man about my unhappy life and my unhappy childhood.
Now
I no longer have the night terrors, but my dreams are often full of anxiety and panic. I’ve never stopped seeing therapists and now I’m on the highest allowable dose of anti-depressants, which do little more than take the edge off my depression. There’s nothing else available to me from the NHS because mental health is something ministers say is equally as important as physical health but in terms of doing anything about it, well, you need to be sectioned to get anything more. Hopefully, I’m not there yet.
I’m on a waiting list to be assessed for adult ADHD, which if diagnosed will not be something that turned up during the onset of old age. It will have been there all along, it’s just that no one, least of all medical professionals or my family when I was a child, thought to ask the question: why does he struggle at everything? Why does he fidget constantly? Why is he always interrupting people mid conversation? Why does he seem to have a motor running in his head which seems to make him get up and walk about whenever the mood takes him? And why are his moods often so low? Why is he fed up all the time? Why can’t he snap out of it?
The NHS waiting list for an adult ADHD test is years so, assuming I live long enough, I could be a dribbling old pensioner by the time I get a diagnosis. I could go private, which costs a fortune but my fear of shelling out a fortune and getting a negative diagnosis paralyses me with fear. If not ADHD – and my GP made the referral, not me – then what and how much will it cost?
I’m not in the small caravan in West Bay and everyone else who was in it is long dead and I’m still waiting for some kind of answer, some explanation and the thought remains that there isn’t going to be one. Oh, and the august weather is still terrible. Very little has changed, has it?
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