PDA fae

Tag: depression

  • Avoiding an ATU as a PDAer

    Ways NHS 111 have supported me:

    The moment I tell them ‘bear with me I’m autistic’ they do know how to alter their communication. If you’re lucky enough to have a diagnosis with a PDA modifier, they actually do have a degree of understanding of what that means.

    They will likely still be quite demanding to call – but if you are facing a dangerous crisis and don’t fancy heading to hospital, try and meet them. They take the “least restrictive option” and as in my case, can treat you in your own home.

    It’s best to lean on friends and family, but if it’s the middle of the night and things have *worsened*, call 111 every time something gets worse. Short of that, SHOUT is textcare, and there are multiple email support lines: saneline, samaritans being just a couple. There’s loads of suicidal crisis lines, papyrus, CALM, samaritans – but these need you to be actively suicidal. You can also contact the PDA Society helpline if you need PDA specific advice – but they are not a crisis line and will respond at a delay. The NAS also have webpages on where to turn in crisis – I would link but the website is currently down.

    Yes! All of this is demanding!

    BUT: all of this is better than any length of time in a psychiatric unit as a PDAer. They are restrictive, demanding beyond belief and very controlling. If you need to be in one, they’ll help – but if you can do any of this and stay at home, you’ll keep your control and autonomy.

  • Brainspotting…

    …works wonders!

    I’ve been working with an Autistic/ADHD/Dyspraxic/Dyslexic therapist recently, who has a PDA kid on trauma therapy. The modality she uses with PDAers is brainspotting, which is a variant on EMDR. Personally I think it could be called ESDR or EFDR, eye stillness/fixation de-sensitisation and reprocessing therapy. It works on bilateral stimulation, focusing on bodily sensation and rating it (which makes it a somatic therapy) – I tend to picture my bodily sensations as colours – and eye fixations. During this, you think about or visualise either a positive resource, or your trauma, either increasing or decreasing the feeling respectively.

    Tbis therapy (along with lamotrigine) has helped my life hugely. I have a lot more faith in the universe, and feel more comfortable with spirituality. I will post more about this shortly. I feel able to experience enjoyment, and trust in myself. I feel better able to self-advocate, have better self esteem, and better internal communication.

    I won’t say ‘I recommend this’, all I can say is how much this has helped me. It’s really starting to turn my life around. I finally feel like there was a point to surviving.

  • Everything sucks a little right now.

    I’ve been experiencing a lot of very low mood recently. A lot of anhedonia – loss of pleasure in activities, and a lot of feeling like a failure of a person. A failure for not graduating from university, for never having lasted in a job, for not being able to drive, for not being in a long term relationship with a family and my own home. For not being a settled 30 something.

    We’re trialling me on lamotrigine. It’s been known to cause me severe constipation the previous two times I’ve tried it, and it can cause a lethal skin rash, so this may not go well. I have to really hope it does though, because it’s basically the only safe mood lifting drug I can try, i.e. it won’t cause me to experience mania. Don’t worry, it’s possible to intervene if a rash does start to develop.

    It makes me really nervous. We all respond differently to medications and lamotrigine may just not work for me at all. If it doesn’t, I’m really out of options and just have to tolerate the life destroying effects of the near constant low mood I experience (I believe one psychiatrist felt I had dysthymia alongside bipolar). I don’t know how I’d cope with that, and it’s going to be a long slow journey to find out, because due to the rash, lamotrigine has to be increased very slowly.

  • Life is boring..

    .. life feels boring?

    Is life boring?

    It definitely feels it recently. Life has been feeling same-y, repetitive, lacking anything truly pleasurable, or worthwhile.

    I’ve also been sleeping a lot – regular 12+ sleeps, with very low demand capacity, struggling to cook, or want much food.

    Sounds like mild depression to me.

    So maybe life isn’t boring, but depression is making it seem that way. That’s what I’m hoping, because if that’s the case, there’s tangible things I can do about it.

    Though, part of me suspects that it’s also that human society is badly set up.. if you want to get out of the house and do something, what can you do?

    Shop? spend money you don’t have on things you don’t need

    Cafe? Park? Library? Cinema? It’s a limited range of options.

    OR

    There’s go down a pub… and we wonder why drinking is so common in society.

    It’s hard to think what there is to plan to go out and do with my time, that could be some spontaneous fun. I think that’s part of what I’m lacking, something different, out of the ordinary, spur of the moment… but it’s so hard to think what that could look like.

    All the options just feel like another part of the mundanity.

    I don’t know if depression is the reason that mundanity feels so oppressively unbearable, or not. If it’s not, I don’t know what to do about that feeling.

    But working on making sure I’m looking after my mood sounds like a place to start, and nothing has to be fixed all at once. It’s a journey… and yesteday (I write this at 3am), getting some sunshine, spending time with friends … and making plans with a local healthwatch* to do work around Autistic and learning disabled people stuck in prisons and ATUs was definitely a step along that journey. Definitely feels like a bigger step than the previous day which was made up of lonely sleeping and dozing (that horrible half asleep state where you want to just pop downstairs and see people you no longer live with). But I try to remember the value of rest, and perhaps that day of doziness was just as important and restorative – and prepared me for the day I had yesterday.

    *If you’re in the UK, you can find your local healthwatch here.

  • Low mood

    A big component of my neurodivergence is my bipolar disorder. Last year I had a big manic episode and became psychotic. I ended up in hospital, which is how it was identified that I needed supported accommodation.

    Now, my mood is a lot lower. It’s probably not a good thing that Taylor Swift’s Anti-hero is a trend on tiktok, because the words ‘It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me’ keep cycling through my head, because it sums up an long held self-belief. I’m trying to tell myself ‘I have problems, I’m not a problem’, but a lot of the time I just end up believing it.

    I’m finding life very mundane and dull. Things feel repetitive and that’s constraining, I feel like I’m living the same week over and over. Moving between the same few places: the school, my flat, the communal lounge, the swimming pool, my parents. It feels like there’s nothing that really adds meaning or fulfilment to my life. At the same time, I’m not sure what I could add that would make a difference to that.

    It doesn’t help that my flat has descended into a state of chaos. A support worker helped me tidy my bedroom and it feels like a little oasis. My living room is still a mess unfortunately. I find that working on it with someone else reduces the sense of demand and makes it possible to achieve. That’s not a long term solution as I won’t always have the supported accommodation, but it works for now. In the times between being able to get that support though, my flat is cluttered and untidy. It definitely isn’t good for my mental health.

    In general, depression is my usual. I get very little time in ‘normal mood’, instead I spend most of my time at some degree of low. It’s frustrating that we can’t really medicate for that, as antidepressants will make me manic. I just have to deal with it, and it really saps the enjoyment from my life.