From A Locked Ward Door To My Own Office

Only Eight Years Later

Having worked with my psychiatrist for 7 years every week, I always dreaded her telling me she was changing jobs. I was very attached to her because she was the first person to believe my level of distress. She brought me on to the ward one day for a regular meeting and gave me the news. She was moving to another part of the country. The reason she told me this face to face on a mental health ward, was that she knew how badly I would take that news. I honestly didn’t think I could carry on without her in my life. She said she’d give me an hour to digest the news, then come back to speak to me again. What she didn’t know was that before coming to the hospital, I had just collected a month’s worth of medication, and I was taking anti-depressants, two anti-psychotics and others. In desperation, I swallowed a lot of them.

I was taken in an ambulance to Accident and Emergency and I still remember bits of it from 24 years ago. I remember asking a doctor “if I was going to die”? She said “not on my shift” but then said if my breathing slowed down any further I might need to be admitted to Intensive Care. I also remember how surreal it felt when a medical student approached me saying that he was told I’d be happy to explain to him what Borderline Personally Disorder was. I can still see him scribbling in his notebook as I recounted the nine characteristics of BPD (according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association 5th Edition) through my foggy brain.