There has been a great emphasis on mental health during the pandemic but, in my opinion, not before that; I should know.
When I have spoken to GPs about my mental health, I get the same answer “there is a long waiting list”. So I have had to pay for counselling privately.
I hope that something good has come out of the pandemic; a realisation that people suffer so badly with their mental health but I fear that as the pandemic wanes, we will go back to what it was.
I probably got more assistance with my mental health in prison, as I was on suicide watch during my whole time on remand. I completely shut down from the moment that I entered the prison. I neither ate for 10 days or even went to the toilet (other than number 1s).
That being said, I could have easily committed suicide. The “watchers” got bored and the time between them checking on me varied enormously; they just saw me as a pain.
Quite frankly, given my numerous attempts at suicide (some that led to my arrest and mistreatment by the police), I should have never been in prison in the first place. That was the judge’s fault in wanting to “get” me. After all, it was not long before that when I was in a psychiatric hospital, for wanting to commit suicide.
Everything had got on top of me; the abuse by the police, the feeling that they could burst through the door at any moment, drag me out of the house and the complete disregard for my agoraphobia; not even my GPs surgery came to see me at the allotted time, they could not be bothered. But I did talk to my GP and he said what I expected “there is a long waiting list” so I had to book myself into a psychiatric hospital on the mainland and it cost me £21,000 when I left. That made a massive dent in my savings and the trust were not interested in helping me, although they gave an interest free loan of £1.45M to my brother and bought my daughter a free house.
But I felt better being at the hospital; I felt safe and no one knew where I had gone, except my GP.
The thing is that I cannot deal with any stress and that harks back to when I was 16, when I had my brain cancer operation. I had been suffering from epilepsy since I was 13 and they discovered a brain tumour when I was 16. If I had not had the op, I would have been dead within 6 months; a “no brainer” really.
The cancer was removed and they said I was fine but what they did not tell me was that scar tissue would start to form. That scarring caused epilepsy, which was finally controlled totally by drugs but not until 2012, yes 2012.
But on top of the epilepsy, it caused my tolerance to stress to be reduced to zero. What that caused was me to drink and smoke quite heavily; no one understood that, not Liesel, my second wife or my daughter.
My father told my cousin that “I was imperfect” and he did not just mean the sexual abuse that I suffered but I was not the son that he wanted me to be, despite achieving the same professional qualification that he did and working my way up to Finance Director.
Then after a period of massive stress, my career collapsed after a nervous breakdown and everything that I had worked for went down the drain.
He blames me for getting ill, he even blames me for him sexually abusing me and he blames me for having no tolerance to stress so that I could not work.
So, he decided to destroy me and it continues to this day
David's Diatribe 