140 replies to this topic

[BlubberBigMouth]

Well I have finally written Part 1 of my story through the Psych system, including 2 stays at Larundal.
I will post it here, as this is where most people know me. Or my member name.
Sorry if this is a bit of a boring one. But as the hospital's got older and bigger , things got more and more interesting.
Enjoy.

My Psychiatric Journey

PART 1



I have been in a total of 9 psych hospital and wards. These are from first to last; Pathways Adolescent Unit, Western General Hospital Psych Ward, Parkville Psychiatric Unit, Royal Park, Mont Park, Brierly, Larundel, A Ward at Frankston, Lakeside back to Larundel to the Professional Unit with severe Post Natal depression, so my new born son was with me, and then finally Lakeside again for 3 short weeks.

I think with the many stories I have that I put them under the hospital’s name and go from there.
There will be a mixture of funny things. Tragedies and abuse from the very people who are supposed to be looking after you.



Pathways Adolescent unit



This Unit was within a very small psychiatric hospital in Mercer Rd Armadale. Melbourne. I can’t even think of the name of the hospital, but I think it was called something like Alencon.

I was in this psych unit at 17 when I completely lost the plot after being sexually assaulted and the guy tried to kill me and leave my body in a swamp.

This was the mid 80’s and I received NO support or Counselling afterwards apart from being told to “Dust yourself off and get on with my life.” Well at 14 that was too hard to do.

The guy who assaulted me was a serial rapist and I was his 4th and last victim.

I was in Girl Guides at the time and around 2 months after the assault I went on camp with the Venturer’s, all boys, when the Rapist turned up at the camp.

He was thrown away in jail for 3 years.



Anyway I have only told you this so you can be assured that I am not some stark, raving lunatic. And to basically explain why I was in too many hospitals. For too long.

In the mid 80’s all the way into the late 90’s they never knew what was wrong with me. I had a diagnosis of Borderline Personality, Manic-Depressive to Schizophrenia, when all I had was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder they DIDN’T require me to have my brain constantly fried to being doped up to the eyeballs.

One of the worst hospitals/Unit was Pathways.

The staff at this Unit from the nurse’s to Psychologist were abusive b*******.

Because they knew I was in for cracking up a few years after back, so their ‘treatment’ targeted my fear of men.

Each week, each patient was given a sheet that had goals on it for each day, the week and the month. The staff would have to write down something that would challenge us. We would then rate how hard this goal would be to achieve.

One of my Goal Sheets that I still have was to talk to 3 unknown males for 15 minutes each about sex and why I am so scared of it! Yep you read that correct. Could anyone, especially at barely 17 after an assault and attempted murder aside, speak to strange men about sex??



Anyway, a few nasty things happened in the Unit.



I had rice and curry shoved up my nose for punishment.

I was made to make a bib with “I love my mummy and daddy. Baby Wendy” written on it.
I was made to wear this not only in the Unit but also down the park where we were forced to play cricket every Tuesday, but also on trams and trains that we had to catch up to the City Centre. Whilst in the City Centre, whilst earing this bib the whole time we had to sing Christmas carols, whilst wearing swimming goggles, whilst pretending to swim down the tram lines in Bourke Street. I was so embarrassed. Everyone was staring at us. And it was winter to boot.
I actually have photos of these days. I might make them up and put them on Facebook.
I was also given carpet burn all up my back and front as one of the male nurse’s Ron, who hated my guts, did this to me because it was funny. Funny to hurt someone?? Yep according to Ron.
If you have ever had a small carpet burn on your knee or elbow, you would know how much that hurts. Imagine now having burns all up your back, stomach and over your boobs.

I was also constantly told that I should have gotten over the assault and that I was now being a tortoise. (Each patient had animals named after their behaviour/issues) Such as me being a tortoise and a hare. Meaning instead of facing my issues (Issues that the staff made up most of the time) I would pull my head into the shell and hide away from the truth. The hare, which contradicts this, is that I run away from my problems.
I escaped one day. Although there was a nurse’s station right in front of the stairs that led down and out through the adult part of this old hospital.
I took my very first OD that day I escaped on Panadol for hecks sake.
I get back and Ron was so mad at me that he put me in the room that is right beside the nurse’s station and had a window on it.
I was given a 5,000 word essay to write on ‘Why every blade of grass is a different colour green.’ Whilst I spent 72 hours straight in this room without leaving it once. And it was so small.
Because I had been a smart **** to Ron when I got back and slammed the empty packet of Panadol on the bench and said “So what are you going to do about that now.” Not knowing at the time they can pump your stomach. Give you Ipecac and other things.
So Ron over dosed me on Ipecac. He told me this was because I overdosed on Panadol, and then he would overdose me on Ipecac. Which is extremely dangerous as Ipecac is a poison when too much is taken. This is why it is no longer available for purchase by ANYONE now. Too many deaths occurred.
I was so sick that as I had a shower I made sure I sat down because I lost consciousness in the shower and awoke 90 minutes later to freezing water.

I was discharged 4 weeks later and only after less than a week at home, I was re-admitted for another 2 long and torturous weeks.
Everyone who got discharged had a book made for you of ‘thoughtful’ things that the staff wanted you to remember, including a picture and a positive thing that we would remember as we were going away ‘cured’ (NOT!) to take to heart and remember forever and never repeat.
I received a photo a me with my arm crossed, miserable standing in cold Bourke St Mall with Jan the Psychologist smiling away giving me a cuddle. Yuck! Gary, who was a psych nurse wrote, as I can actually still remember it, NOT because it was pivotal to the rest of my life but because it made me so darn mad that he even wrote this. “Wendy. Remember the important things in life and trash all that other rubbish that you think is your life.” OK it may be a positive motto but what he meant by it as I was shocked by what he had written thinking it was positive as so many other’s before me had, had such harsh mottos but mine, to me, seemed tame. So I thanked Gary like an idiot for writing something so nice. But he quickly dashed me down in flames when he told me that what he meant by the words was that I was attacked 3
years ago. It was time to let that go and stop using that as an excuse not to face and deal with my REAL issues, tortoise/hare again.
He continued about all this crap about the assault was just bull****. I had real issues, not the assault being one. I had to face these issues and get on with my life because if I continued down this ‘playing games’ path, people would get sick of it and it certainly gets old as the staff here had certainly had enough of it after just 6 weeks.
All I could do was cry. There was no explaining to Gary or anyone else anything more. He had the other staff had made up their professional minds.
I did have one parting gift to Ron and his playmate at work, Varri, who worked together almost all shifts, especially when we were finally allowed to turn on the TV at 7:30pm until 10:00pm spent a lot of time playing Nurse’s and Nurse’s in the closet. I mean desk. I won’t say what my parting words were not to be written. Let me just say, they were not what those two were expecting. Neither were my parent’s I should say. I was in so much trouble for quite a while because I had been abusive and rude to the ‘professionals’ who deal with crap like I gave them all the time, that they didn’t need to hear gutter trash talk as a thank you for looking after me.
My parents knew about the abuse but always thought I was exaggerating or lying about what was going on, like the burns. They only thought that it had been done in a different context than I was talking about and that the staff knew exactly what they were doing and talking about as they would not have a job if they didn’t.

The two positive thing I got out of Pathways was a love for doing Tai Chi and finding out that Pathways was closed down, and the hospital demolished after claims of abuse were found to be true.

[Retarded_Genius]

Hi .
Sorry you had to go through all that happened to you. I had tears welling in my eyes reading that. I cant even imagine what it would of been like, but thank you for sharing.

Where was Pathways located?

I look forward to reading more of your expieriences if you choose to post.

Brian

[Xanaxatticus]

La rundel and janefield back onto the plenty river before premier kennet ran out of money I remember playing by the river as a child and hearing the inmates bang their heads against the walls screaming on Sunday afternoons. Now they are closed people hangout the stigma of the institutions and develop urban myths  it was just the nut house mile to me

[Brian Topp]

BlubberBigMouth, on 18 May 2012 - 02:03 PM, said:

Well I have finally written Part 1 of my story through the Psych system, including 2 stays at Larundal.
I will post it here, as this is where most people know me. Or my member name.
Sorry if this is a bit of a boring one. But as the hospital's got older and bigger , things got more and more interesting.
Enjoy.

You said Story, Normally that is refered to fictional story. Is this a real events or "based on a true story" or completely fictional? I am not trying to be rude but we get quite a lot of want to be writers posting their stories.

[BlubberBigMouth]

Retarded_Genius, on 28 May 2012 - 10:37 AM, said:

Hi .
Sorry you had to go through all that happened to you. I had tears welling in my eyes reading that. I cant even imagine what it would of been like, but thank you for sharing.

Where was Pathways located?

I look forward to reading more of your expieriences if you choose to post.

Brian

I never thought I would bring someone to tears.
I cried enough of my own in that place.

It was located on Mercer Rd Armadale. Either 24 or 42.
The phamplet, Gary's quote, etc I still have. So I can try and find it if you would like. But I have Google Earthed it before and it looks like it has been pulled down.

[BlubberBigMouth]

Brian Topp, on 29 May 2012 - 04:43 PM, said:

You said Story, Normally that is refered to fictional story. Is this a real events or "based on a true story" or completely fictional? I am not trying to be rude but we get quite a lot of want to be writers posting their stories.

Sorry I thought I had made it clear. Maybe I didn't. These stories I am adding here are about me, myself, being a pateint in the Institutions. So they are "Real stories" based on real events that happened to me and other patient's.

Psych Section at Western General Footsgray is next. A bit boring, but with a few weird things that they made us do, makes perfect sense to me now being a nurse instead of the patient. And some 'interesting characters'.

And no you didn't come across rude.

PS I am not sure why I am not receiving any emails about comments???

[felixIII]

homicide, on 20 March 2011 - 02:59 PM, said:

A great majority of the Mont Park buildings are still there, it's just that 3/4 of them are renovated. The main reason I quoted Ruddy was that he talked about the music boxes - I had virtually the same thing happen to me last week.  My friend and I heard it distinctly, on two occasions and  what we heard was a "circusey" like melody filtering (if you will) through the hospital grounds.  It was definately the sound of an old music box.  On the first occasion it was heard outside.  Roughly an hour later we heard the same instrument playing again except that we were inside on the second story (we'd broken into the ground floor and walked up a staircase).

Has anyone else heard this at Mont Park?? Mindboggling

  funny that im reading this.... but iused to go to the macleod tech school when it was there in the 90s and a few times we would wag school and go into the old hospitals and dorms surrounding it, parts of mont park that were closed down. we had to jump some fences and walk through bushland to get there and man were these buildings spooky. and i do recall a time while a small group of us were exploring the hospital wards we all thought we heard that same sounding circusy type music. i remember us all thinking it was actually a gelati truck nearby or coming to where we were it was really tinny sounding and we all thought nothing more of it..i see now what it may have been..creepy. there was always the feeling that we were being watched  also or followed something like that. another time it was just me and one friend and we were in the 2nd story of one of the huge dorms in a room just looking around and we both heard  a distinct sound of someone walking upstairs we **** bricks thinking that security guards had come for us as we knew they sometimes did {another friend was caught and warned away some weeks earlier by one} we froze and stayed silent for what seemed forever, but there was no-one. i remember that clear as day. in another part of the dorms later we heard a door slam very hard, that may have been the wind im not sure though.  we also found a straight jacket covered in blood in another part of the hospital wards that was freaky too. we never saw anything though or took pics as these were the days before everyone carried phones with cameras, but im sure we would have caught something if we had them. all them buildings got demolished years ago now and its all housing estates. there were some other incidents in gresswell forest which surrounded mont park too. some of us were camping in there as teenagers and we got pretty spooked by the noises at night we even thought we heard laughter really close but no-one was around and thumping like heavy boots or something like that. very spooky. later we heard of suicides in that forest.  ive since moved from watsonia though and reading this thread sort of reminded me of those days when the buildings were still there.

[Terezin]

I have found this thread whilst researching the history of Larundel and Mont Park.  For a period from 1957-1987, my mother
was in-and-out of Royal Park, Larundel and Mont Park and had been an out-patient of the Ernest Jones Clinic in Preston
from the early 70s.

I am very familiar, as a regular visitor, to these 'psychopolises'.  A term that Anne Burke coined in her very interesting
paper, "The Lure of the Land - Mont Park Hospital for the Insane" which can be found at this link at Academia.edu
http://unimelb.acade..._for_the_Insane

I grew up in Reservoir, after my father was advised to move from the 'sticks of Hurstbridge' to be closer to the hospitals, as
well as civilisation.  The isolation of Hurstbridge, the lack of public transport, my mother never learned to drive a car, was
home alone with a young child with no support from extended family, no doubt contributed to her despair and suicide attempts.

I have a clear memory of visiting my mother at Larundel months after she seemily vanished from my young life. Nobody had
said anything, I was told not to ask, and in the absence of an explanation: I thought she had died.

Imagine my surprised delight to be taken to this large park-like setting with a lovely big red-brick building - like a palace - to find
my mother sitting on a garden bench in the middle of a rose-garden.  I thought dad had taken me to Heaven to visit my mother.
That is my first memory of Larundel circa 1965.

In the 70s and 80s, my mother would be admitted to Mont Park, that was a more austere building and I have lost count of the
many times I would come home from work, grab something to eat, and putter off down Plenty Road to go and visit mum. Take
her supplies of cigarettes, lollies and magazines.  Occasionally she would give me some little thing she made in the craft room:
a picture she had painted, a drawstring pouch made from leather with gumnuts threaded through the cords.

In the 70s, when I was in my early-to-mid teens, my father would take me on the weekends to visit mum and then we'd go over
the road to walk through the massive space of Bundoora Park with a few scar trees and so on.  You have to understand that
back in the 70s, we were taught buggar-all about pre-white civilisation in Australia.

As well as the psychiatric hospitals, over on the Fairfield side of Yarra Bend Park, we had Fairlea Women's Prison and the
Fairfield Hosptial for Infectious Diseases, where quite a few polio-victims were living encased in iron-lungs.  Not forgetting
the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital that was located inbetween Northlands and the Austin Hospital - Waiora Rd maybe?

The Repat Hospital felt far more confusing to me than any psychiatric hospitals or wards.  I was somewhat surprised to
read that shell-shocked soldiers from WWI were treated at Mont Park.

Makes me wonder just who and from where I picked up the spirit of the WWI soldier that a platform medium at the VSU,
back in 1982, said was standing next to me.

My own ghostly 'batman'.

You young'uns spook too easily. I just had to join this site and thank yew all for the laugh!!

Having said that, your experiences, blubberbigmouth, are no laughing matter. Have you sought advice from Mental Health legal
representatives? Have you called back your spirit from those traumatic experiences? Do you even know how to do that.....

[BlubberBigMouth]

Terezin.

No I don't know how to call back my spirit. Please explain. I would like to know.

[BlubberBigMouth]

I know it's been a while in coming. But I have finally finished my next installment.
I am actually finding this extremely helpful in ridding some of the Demon's of my past. So thank you for reading.

Western General Hospital Footscray Psychiatric Ward

For a while I tried keeping myself together, but by now I had started a steady and long decline down an eating disorder path.

I had also left high school and started doing my VCE at TAFE. But as me eating disorder took over my life and my parent’s found my stash of laxatives, then my diary, my World came crashing down around me and it was never to be the same. My cycle of being ‘institutionalized’ had begun.

The day after my parent’s flipped out after finding my stash and diary I walked all the way to TAFE. Saw the Social Worker who referred me to a nurse.
I ended up at a major general hospital and a Doctor who was getting so angry as she had wasted her day with me according to her, who wanted me to go to Larundel. The thought of this terrified me so I agreed only to go to my first adult psychiatric hospital at a smaller place.
Off I went after an extremely long day in an ambulance to Footscray.
When admitted I was weighed, had my ob’s taken and made to get into a hospital nightie made of thick flanette. Luckily you get to wear your knickers, BUT you are in this nightie and the one pair of knickers for 4 days.
You are put in these ‘clothes’ to discourage you from escaping.
You were also put in the ‘security’ room for those first 4 days. This room has NO door on the bathroom. NO toilet role holder. NO shower curtains. NO towel rail. Cupboards with doors DRILLED SHUT. NO curtains and basic beds.
After your 4 days were up, you were given back all your clothes and any bag you may have brought. Mine was a school bag, with pencil case. This is important as I will come back to this although I know it will anger a few of you.

This was the first hospital amongst many that would start me on medications.
I had sleeping tablets for the first time even that bombed me out. Luckily at this hospital you could sleep in all day if you wanted, so I slept through breakfast many times. Not that the meals were anything great. The only thing I would eat in Footscray was biscuits, an odd piece of toast and when I could get them some M&M Peanuts from the Milk Bar outside of the hospital.
Patient’s either had to be bribed to get you things from the Milk Bar or if you were very lucky, you may get some time to disappear to the Milk Bar yourself.

My trips to the Milk Bar for usually for peanut M&M’s and Ford Pills. 60 a day. It’s probably why my inside are now paralysed? Maybe…..



Oh the staff took us to places like Geelong and the Museum as they knew how board we were I think.



Our days were so boring. We did craft and such. Played pool and cards. Smoked, a LOT and sat around watching TV.
But I did get to meet some very interesting staff and patients.



Carmela was my first roommate. An Italian depressed/paranoid woman. Both her and her sister were amazing.
I remember all this as one thing I did buy down the shop was a small book which became my diary that I still hide away today.



I gained a roommate, who I found inside a closet one day. I opened the door when I heard crying and talking inside.
Here sat this girl, all of 18, saying to me “Please mummy. I promise I won’t do it again. I promise. Don’t hurt me.”
This girl was to put it nicely, very weird. She didn’t have mood swings. She had very different personalities. I later fouhnd out this girl had been diagnosed with Multiple Personality disorder after her mother had severely abused her as a child. One of the things her mother used to do to her was lock her in the closet.

Whilst on this admission I did something that I am not proud of.
I started something that I would turn to constantly in the years to come whenever I felt overwhelmed and such. I cut my arms with my pencil sharpener after I broke it apart when I was allowed to have my school bag back.
I know that many people hate and misunderstand people who cut and harm themselves, but when you are experiencing so much mental pain. You’re crying every day. All day. Every day seems like a huge black cloud over your head. You can’t escape into yourself anymore and to cut, and for me soon, burning, releases that mental pain by causing physical pain.
I don’t expect you all to understand. But please do not have a go at me for what I did almost 20 years ago now.

In this hospital, the staff all sat around in the Nurse’s Station, only ever coming out to do a head check every 15 minutes, or to grab someone trying to get down the elevator to escape. Jumping on them. 5 nurse’s always. Even more when the person was really jacked up on adrenaline. One nurse held your head, sideways on the floor. The other four had an arm each and a leg. A fifth nurse would run away, this was the whole entire nurse’s shift for one patient which came in extremely handy for myself later down the track, to render this patient unmovable.
When the injection came, they just dacked you wherever you were and jabbed you in the bum. The more you moved and fought, the harder the forces they would apply onto your body actually hurting you in the process making you move even more. Making them come down on you even harder. You couldn’t win.
The jab in the bum was harsh. They didn’t want to and couldn’t dilly-dally around on being nice.
Once you were jabbed you were thrown, sometimes literally, into seclusion. Unlike the movies, seclusion had no padded walls, door or floor. It was just a bare, single room with a protected, double stitched, hard plastic mattress, mattress in it. You could be thrown in there with half your clothes missing. Made to strip and giving a nightie or PJ’s to wear or the worst part was being thrown in there after they forcibly stripped your totally naked.
Try sitting in a room one day naked trying to cover up and protect your bits. It’s not easy at all. And once you found a way to cover, hopefully, your bits and pieces, that’s how you would sit for the 4 to 8 hours you were in this room on the hard, cold floor.
Not nice. Or comfortable.
But it was used to allow you to calm down and so you could lash out without hurting yourself. Thankfully the jab in the bum usually knocked you out for a while.
The real problem with seclusion was that the room was way off down the end of a deserted corridor usually where other patient’s couldn’t disturb and upset you. But if you needed the loo or something like that, you had no way of getting the nurse’s attention.

I spent no time in seclusion at Footscray. But I would spend half my time in these rooms not too long afterwards.



The diagnosis I was given at Footscray was ‘stress’. Just plain old everyday stress.
I was told I couldn’t be given a diagnosis or medication because I wasn’t 18 yet so I was still a child so couldn’t be given a diagnosis of something that only an adult could suffer from.
Of course times and treatments have changed and now children are being diagnosed with ‘adult illnesses’ that they now realise kids can get.

I spent almost 4 months at Footscray.
Whilst there I visited Parkville adolescent Unit that they wanted me to be admitted to. It was in Parkville of course, just down the road from the Zoo and Tirana Prison.
I hated the place when I first went there and refused to leave Footscray when they told me I had to go to Parkville. I even did some stupid things, like cutting myself and telling them I wanted to die, just to stay in longer. But eventually I would have to leave and so my time at Footscray came to an end.

[kreative1]

felixIII, on 15 June 2012 - 12:17 PM, said:

funny that im reading this.... but iused to go to the macleod tech school when it was there in the 90s and a few times we would wag school and go into the old hospitals and dorms surrounding it, parts of mont park that were closed down. we had to jump some fences and walk through bushland to get there and man were these buildings spooky. and i do recall a time while a small group of us were exploring the hospital wards we all thought we heard that same sounding circusy type music. i remember us all thinking it was actually a gelati truck nearby or coming to where we were it was really tinny sounding and we all thought nothing more of it..i see now what it may have been..creepy. there was always the feeling that we were being watched  also or followed something like that. another time it was just me and one friend and we were in the 2nd story of one of the huge dorms in a room just looking around and we both heard  a distinct sound of someone walking upstairs we **** bricks thinking that security guards had come for us as we knew they sometimes did {another friend was caught and warned away some weeks earlier by one} we froze and stayed silent for what seemed forever, but there was no-one. i remember that clear as day. in another part of the dorms later we heard a door slam very hard, that may have been the wind im not sure though.  we also found a straight jacket covered in blood in another part of the hospital wards that was freaky too. we never saw anything though or took pics as these were the days before everyone carried phones with cameras, but im sure we would have caught something if we had them. all them buildings got demolished years ago now and its all housing estates. there were some other incidents in gresswell forest which surrounded mont park too. some of us were camping in there as teenagers and we got pretty spooked by the noises at night we even thought we heard laughter really close but no-one was around and thumping like heavy boots or something like that. very spooky. later we heard of suicides in that forest.  ive since moved from watsonia though and reading this thread sort of reminded me of those days when the buildings were still there.

Yeah, I went to Macleod High mid 90's, like in your post, we use to hit the same area during a wag, even when we had to do school projects around the area, always ended up in some old building hyping each other with stories and showing the girls us lads not scared. Interesting how many people feel negative towards the surrounding bush, even around Latrobe Uni . Like I posted earlier, only one small building we felt cold, uneasy, otherwise nothing weird to report. Actually, my mate just pointed out, when we left the last time we were there, there was a owl right above the park car, when we came back to my joint, parking the car a owl landed near us??

Edited by kreative1, 12 July 2012 - 12:23 PM.

[Terezin]

BlubberBigMouth, on 10 July 2012 - 03:18 PM, said:

Terezin.

No I don't know how to call back my spirit. Please explain. I would like to know.

"Calling back one's spirit" is a shamanic practice.  The concept behind it is that parts of our self splinter off, become fragmented when there has been an experience that has
had on impact, left it's mark on the life.  A popular tune from the 60s was "I Left my Heart in San Francisco" which is a lighter take on this concept, yet most of us can
pinpoint times and events in which we felt that something was lost.  Innocence, trust, illusion - a bubble being burst about something. An eye-opening experience.

I could say that hauntings, ghosts and poltergeists are simply lost and displaced soul-fragments of people who once lived, loved and fought in those places. An energetic recording-loop: someone who has left their hair in the Akashic soup.  Very much in the same way that the living know that we shed hair, dead skin cells and toe- and fingernail clippings everywhere.  Think about how much energy detritus your average nail salon in Chaddie is collecting?

I am purposefully using these modern and wry examples to remove the woo-woo mystique about this concept of soul-fragmentation and shamanic practices.

In telling your stories, BBM, you have created a container in which to place these memories - a containment field if you like while you are picking over the traces of your past, identifying the impurities, the contaminants, and sorting out for yourself what to keep, what to turf. It is a strange quirk of human life that when an individual is going through a profound passage of psychic and psychological turmoil, that the individual will be surrounded mostly by people even more disturbed and distorted.  In one sense you become a Sewage Pit for other people's stuff and nonsense.

Of course you cut yourself.  You were subconsciously tapping into an ancestral medical practice of bloodletting, which was believed to release the 'evil humours', the evil spirits that had infested the person and were contributing to their psychological and physical disturbance. Blood-letting was a practice of early medical shamanism. The symbolism is that you felt - sensed - there was something under your skin which you took drastic measures to remove.

In telling your stories, the metaphor is of coaxing a deeply embedded splinter which has festered, which is a foci of inflammation, to be worked closer to the surface and then plucked out with tweezers.

Story-telling is a form of psychic surgery, a shamanic practice that is called 'word doctoring': and you are naturally performing this removal of demons. This demonstrates the innate wisdom of the body, of our souls (or whatever term you wish to use) in knowing what is best for us in regards to what heals and soothes us.  Except we live in a society where we are taught that others have more authority and expertise.  Mother knows best.  Expert medical opinion - and variations on the general theme.

You express yourself : I had started a steady and long decline down an eating disorder path.


The Path of Eating Disorders.  I am reminded of the Holy Anorexics and connections that have been made between Italian saints and this modern-age plague of young people electing to withold nourishment from their bodies.  You may like to consider the viewpoints offered within this linked essay which is rather meaty in content.
  http://primal-page.com/farber1.htm

.
Perhaps what I am trying to get across to you, BBM, is that within another context and in another time, your experiences would not been pathologized. It is important at this time, that you cease to use the vocabularly of psychopathology when you tell your stories.  That is one way in which you call your spirit back: use words that do not continue the pattern of stigmatizing.

.......and what is stress but a medical word coined in the seventies for 'Living with Arseholes'.

[BlubberBigMouth]

Terizen,

.
Perhaps what I am trying to get across to you, BBM, is that within another context and in another time, your experiences would not been pathologized. It is important at this time, that you cease to use the vocabularly of psychopathology when you tell your stories. That is one way in which you call your spirit back: use words that do not continue the pattern of stigmatizing.

What you said, regardless of who I was at the time of my admissions, I am actually a very intelligent person and can clearly understand where you are coming from.
I am actually finding the telling of my tale to be very therapeutic. And finding putting it into words then posting it is causing me not only to confront my past but to re-live it and finally move on.

I won't reveal on here just yet why I can't not use psychopathological wording when telling my tale.

I will send you a private message instead.

[BlubberBigMouth]

Terezin,

You sent me 4 messages, that got sent to my Hotmail account BUT when I tried opning, ALL were etitled "Something to think about." but I can not opeen the message/s because it states that I am banned from this conversation!!!

Do YOU know what that means as I am still only knew to this site?
Have I said something to upset you? Which I try my very best to keep an even keel and be a friend, so if I have upset you? Please tell me what I have done so we can fix it.

[Retarded_Genius]

Thanks for sharing your words W.

I look forward to the next instalment.

I hope you got time to read things I sent in a pm..

I don't know if you reply to my pm's, But it's all good.

Happy to chat any time.

Thanks for letting me know.

Cheers