Why don't I write?

I haven't written for a while. In truth, I've been running near empty for a while, but that hasn't meant I've been out of words. Far from it. But I haven't written because I fear - I fear hurting the people closest to me, the people who know me and have found this, my release valve.

I've been ill for a while. Depressed. It doesn't show, and it does. Mostly I look normal - I doubt most people would see anything. But since depression includes withdrawl, I haven't really given anyone a chance at a good enough look. But that loss of worth, that sense of disociation, that encompassing sense of loss, they've all been creeping up, to reach the point where nothing in the world makes sense anymore, including and especially my own place within it.

I should have fixed this a while ago. My health insurance covered treatment, and I started this, started to get some of myself back with careful counselling (I may have covered some of the horrors that happened at work last year, or I may not - suffice to say that 3 otherwise strong people have all come close to the edge from these and come back both weaker and stronger from it), but then it reached the point where the insurance stopped and the NHS began. Now I've had and seen some excellent NHS treatment in the past, but this is at least worrying and shading into deeply troubling... I was referred and then forgotten about. I called - they'd lost my records; I got an appointment but went into the wrong building (the signage wasn't clear) and was rather ungently told to go away (not the NHS's fault, but not something you'd want to do with a less pacific referral case); I got to the right place at the right time, made sure they had the right contact details, and was assured that it was an admin glitch and I'd have a decision within a week - on whether I'd be allowed into a group session rather than receive individual help. And then nothing. They forgot me again. I got on with my life. And all the earlier treatment slowly faded away.

I can think of several reasons for what happened. Maybe the unit was deeply disorganised - somewhat troubling in a measure-everything culture. Maybe it was overloaded - worrying, but not necessarily unsurprising. Or maybe, myself only being a danger to myself, I just wasn't an important enough case to be treated. And that just makes me plain angry. If I had a physical life-threatening condition (and I use the word 'physical' loosely because depression is also a physical response), I'd be seen. Maybe not immediately, but there would be outcry if the NHS chose to completely ignore a relatively cheap method of keeping someone alive longer. But because it's a mental condition, perhaps even because the link between life and death includes my own will rather than a god-like decision by a doctor, the treatment isn't there. And my company insurance is prepared to pay more money to an osteopath to fix my back when its muscles go out of line than it is prepared to pay to help give me the tools to handle a potentially fatal condition (my depression) forever. I am tired of this thing nearly killing me. And I am pissed off for all the other people who are in the same place, for all those people who do not have the voice to rage at this institutional insanity, who do not have the energy to keep on asking for help, or for whom any help would now be too late.

I feel a bit better for a small rant. Tomorrow I may try again to get treatment. But it really shouldn't have to be this difficult to obtain.

the Grief Cycle

I always have so much to learn about life. I've been watching someone precious go through parts of the Kubler-Ross grief cycle. Which I thought I understood: y'know, denial, anger, negotiation, depression, acceptance, ta-da and some forward rolls to end. But it's more complex than that.

The notes in changing minds describe an 8-stage process, not the 5-stage one I thought I knew. And it has a lovely (clickable) graph of this, which I've unceremoniously copied onto here. So, the 8 stages are (I've pegged these to an event, but it could be a state of being, e.g. illness instead):
* Stability: the status quo before the event
* Shock: immediate, apparent disbelief that the event has happened; emotional paralysis often with no outward reaction, twinned with classic physical shock symptoms
* Denial: longer-term evasion, pretending the event hasn't happened, regardless of evidence.
* Anger: the big explosion (or more usually the series of explosions) about the event or even vaguely-related events or circumstances, often with blame (of self, others etc), sometimes with classic grief
* Bargaining: trying (through actions etc) to make the event or its consequences go away... false hope, if you will.
* Depression: accepting the event has happened, but not having the resources (yet) to deal with it. Often desperate loneliness twinned with refusal to be helped.
* Testing: first tentative steps towards resolving responses to the event; trying small parts of possible solutions and accepting that they might help.
* Acceptance: knowing and accepting that the event has happened, and moving on from it.

Changing minds is good in that its pages contain notes not only on the cycle, but also on how to support people going through the cycle. The cycle itself is a construct to help understand the processes of grief. Everyone goes through it differently, but the stages are broadly right; some people go through some of them very quickly, others slowly; some people get stuck in cycles (e.g. anger-denial-anger); others get stuck at single stages (e.g. anger), but mostly, 99% of the time, the stages above are how it happens.

Other useful posts on the grief cycle include businessballs. The post on gettingpastyourpast is a real cracker on relationship breakdown, in language we can probably all associate with.