PDA fae

Tag: hospital

  • Delusions.

    As part of my bipolar manias, I experience psychosis. This is primarily experienced through delusions for me, though possibly I get hallucinations (if I do, I am not aware of the perceptual experience as being hallucinatory at the time). I don’t hear voices, which I am grateful for.

    The main delusions types I experience are: grandiose, paranoid and “pronoia” (which refers to delusions of being aided or helped). They centre around military intelligence and my history of trauma. During each manic episode, events going on at the present time will inform the delusions, shaping them into a narrative specific to that mania. I also find that my delusions pull in the people around me, giving them roles in a narrative they are unaware of – often thankfully so, especially when the delusion is a paranoid one!

    I often find these delusions embarrassing once I return to “consensus reality”, and have found this time that it has helped to laugh at them. After all “vampire marriage night”, without consent from the poor groom, and with the presence of vampires that looked oddly just like staff and patients is quite a creative one, I feel. They behaved well, biting no one, just getting grumpy that being on a locked ward prevented them reaching the portal back home – to hell – in the courtyard. One staff member even got the starring role of being the devil himself! I don’t usually have such a religious content to my delusions, so that’s a new aspect for this mania.

    Perhaps it feels inappropriate to laugh at such a serious psychological phenomenon, but for me, having survived it, doing so feels the best way to respond. Most of it is patently ridiculous, and it takes the edge off that which is scary, intense (usually to others) and relieves embarrassment very well. It’s been good spending time with fellow patients who experience strange beliefs, and realising that I’m not alone with these.

  • Still stuck in an ATU

    It’s tough being in an ATU. There are so many restrictions, even for inpatients just waiting for housing who could be otherwise discharged.

    Bedtimes. Medtimes. Meal times. Must wear shoes times. Must be signed out- can’t use a bloody door! Being checked on at night when trying to sleep.

    It’s enough to drive a PDAer bloody mad! Luckily the staff at the ATU I’m on have been very open to learning about PDA which is super helpful. Perhaps fortunately, my supported housing has had it’s funding withdrawn by the council, so it is closing and I am once again technically homeless.

    We now have a protracted process of working out my needs and what will best meet them. Luckily this time I actually have the autism diagnosis and won’t just be limited to mental health supported housing. I also have a good CPN, who I hope I will be allowed to keep whilst in the community – though some of the local autism supported housing would be outside of his local area. It’s a frustrating system.

  • Continued success

    In further ‘tidy only one thing’ success, my dining table has a lot more free space on it now.

    This rule isn’t freeing up enough demand capacity to get this entire tiny flat sorted, but just enough to do one small piece on my own. I’m still recovering my demand capacity after my hospitalisation from August 2021 to April 2021- having to only meet the demands of ‘sleep at night, take meds when asked, eat enough to not worry us’ actually really depleted my demand capacity. There’s a video on youtube of a young boy talking about his PDA who says that allowing himself to avoid a demand makes it harder to return to meeting it later. I would say this year was a big example of that.. I left hospital thoroughly painfully understimulated, but with so little demand capacity that it took about a month of just watching tv on my laptop to repair the understimulation and start repairing my demand capacity.

    It’s been 6 months now. In many ways I’ve come on leaps and bounds – I’ve started a teaching assistant apprenticeship at a local SEN school. So obviously I can now meet an awful lot more demands than 6 months ago! It doesn’t feel like a truly accurate reflection of my capacity though, because that work fits exactly my PDA flow. I’m working with autistic learners, I’m very interested in education and the autistic experience of it after my year spent learning about autism as I realised I was PDA.

    So is that work ‘demanding’? Arguably not.

    Outside of work, I’m still struggling.

    But for tonight, one small success.