What more can you do....

[7548]

Okay so you don't know me but heres some information, I'm 23 and was diagnosed with depression when I was 10 by the time I was 12 I had clinical depression. I know where my depression came from but it wasn't to long ago that I was able to open up about it you see I was raped when I was 8. I was away with a local church group and at that point I hadn't had any sex education so had no clue what had really happened I just knew it hurt but when I tried to tell the leader I was called stupid and imaginative. After that I did what anyone else would have I kept my mouth shut I didn't want to feel the way that leader had made me feel again. However once the sex education started when I was 10 it was like my world just started to crumple. I felt ashamed, dirty and betrayed I had trusted my leader and she just ignored me and made me feel idiotic.

As the days turned into months I locked up more and more. Then my health started going downhill slowly at first but over the years its got a lot worse. I withdrew from everyone not trusting my parents, sister and being honest I didn't have friends. The only person well animal that I didn't pull away from was my cat. When I was 16 we lost my cousin to cancer and I think it was then that the big cracks started to appear. I started self harming and by the time my 17th birthday arrived I had took 3 overdoses. Of course I tried therapy but I just couldn't bring myself to open up. At this age I had a very very unhealthy approach to sex also it just seemed to be nothing special there was no emotional connection to it and I ended up pregnant.

When I found out I did fight because I now felt I had something to fight for but as usual nothing stayed right for long and 14 weeks into my pregnancy I miscarried. I sank even deeper into depression than before and this is when the nightmares began. I had never been much of a social butterfly but I could still go out but now I was stuck as everytime I went out the panic attacks started happening. I don't know how I exactly broke I just remembered I did and I told my mum about being raped, about the nightmares and about the panic attacks. The baby I kept to myself that was my own seperate curse.

My mum was more understanding then I could have ever expected she just held me and let me cry it out. Its only been through her that I was able to go back to my GP and tell them my tablets weren't working of course they changed them and perscribed some more therapy. To this day however I still haven't had a long enough time frame with a therapist to build up enough of a working relationship to talk fully about what exactly happened but I have recieved treatment to start working on tackling the panic attacks. While I still can't go out to the pub or go shopping by myself I can get through a day of work or go to my hospital appointments. Even the doctors can see I'm trying as even if I can't get up the courage to ask them a verbal question they are willing to answer the ones I had written down for them.

However since I was 18 I have been diagnised with a progesterone allergy, diagnosed with endometriosis, recieved muscle damage to my jaw, tendon damage to my wrist, had my femur and tibia twist, suffer from daily dislocations of my kneecap and to top it all off another miscarriage. In the last 3 years I have undergone a total of 17 operations under general anasetic and 1 under a local anasetic. I was woke up incorrectly from one of the operations as they removed the part of it that kept you asleep but forgot to reverse the muscle relaxant leaving my awake and totally paralysed which now gives me even more recurrent nightmares. I have to see a psychatrist on a weekly basis who I have just started trusting but has now informed me that we only have a few sessions left as shes leaving to have a baby but wants me to open up and talk about losing mine which is very hard. I am on the maximum strength my GP can give me of my antidepressant which at the moment still leaves me feeling exactly the same. Plus a lot more.

Even now I wonder what more could I do but all I do know is I'm not ready to give up!

[newleafprogramme]

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All the best Martin

[Hidden]

Hi,

What a sad story beginning for such a young child of only 8 years old! I really feel for you. You've done really well to have got as far as you have and also to have written so clearly on the website here.

Your story does have similarities with my own, although also is very different. I experienced sexual abuse at the age of 11 and am fairly sure I was sexually interfered with at an earlier age because of the way I feel when I think about the particular person. Abuse does so much damage to children, especially when there is no understanding and support from adults at the time.

I'm glad your mum was eventually able to help you to cry about your experiences as a child. I am also really glad to hear that when you don't feel able to speak to health professionals you do take your problem or question in writing. I've also done that, I once took 25 pages of writing to a therapist as I felt unable to know how to even begin to explain why I was there - fater reading it all he could hardly speak because he was so choked and that was incredibly helpful to me, to know someone else really felt for me, about what had happened to me.

I know what you mean about not having a long enough time frame within therapy. Despite some NHS therapy, training as a psychotherapist myself and the extensive therapy that involved, and now further private therapy which I'm still in - even then I feel it's never enough for someone to really understand all that has happened to me and its ongoing effects. I guess that is the nature of experience, that it is ultimately so private and impossible to fully share especially when it goes back to early childhood. I don't know whether you share this feeling, but I feel as though events in my distant past destroyed who I might have become and instead have left me battling with depression and other difficult feelings throughout my life. Early experiences affect so much of the personality - trust, self-confidence with others, self-esteem, ability to learn... the list goes on. All we can do is to share our feelings with other people as much as possible, grieve for what was and what might have been, and struggle on from day to day. It's not much consolation, I know, but it's all I find myself able to do.

Panic attacks are awful. I have had panic attacks at various times during my life and know how scary they are, how irrational the fear can be. The only time I managed to shift mine was when I stopped fighting them because I was too exhausted to fight any more. I gave up seeking help realising that no one could help me to overcome them and so collapsed into depression and just thought about the worse thing that could happen to me, which was that I would die. So I let myself die - well anyway I did the things that caused the panic attacks because I no longer cared about living, and of course I didn't die...

I'm sorry you have had so much ill health recently. It must be hard to find things happening in adulthood to make your life difficult as well as carrying all the feelings from childhood and early life. I know that difficulty too... Sometimes antidepressants numb the very feelings that might help you to share them but leaving you without antidepressants leaves you at risk of even worse depression, so that makes things complicated. It is a shame your psychiatrist is leaving, particularly when the reason links so closely to your miscarriages and feelings about them. I assume you have only been seeing her perhaps monthly and really in order to work through so much grief you need more intensive contact than that. I am wondering whether there may be an organisation with group therapy or counselling sessions locally, perhaps a group specialising in the kinds of problems you have experienced, whether that is the abuse (rape is always abuse) or the loss of babies or as a mental health service user. I am thinking more outside the NHS as there is likely to be more control for you about the length of time you can find available. The NHS is so restricted by funding cuts at the moment that it is no wonder you can only get repeated short term contact with any therapist or psychiatrist. You might be able to find organisations offering such group help through a google search, it all depends whether you live near a big city where services tend to be better although they are then more in demand. The only other thought is whether you have enough money to pay for private psychotherapy. There are therapists and counsellors who specialise in grief work, as well as ones specialising in trauma such as rape and its consequences.

I know none of this is likely to be of much help, sorry, I feel similarly stuck myself sometimes although I do have other sources of support and also no longer feel suicidal and do not self-harm.

I will be thinking of you and if you do feel able to share more of your story I will be here as are many other people who come to the website because it is always available 24 hours a day.

Suexx