TRIGGER WARNING – If you hadn’t guessed from the title, this post contains a number of references to child sexual abuse in varying degrees of detail.  Please, please be careful if you think this material may trigger you.  Take care, Pan x
I received a text message from my cousin SMcF early this afternoon to report [...]

In response to this.  See also this update.  I have corrected a few minors errors in the author’s writing and have, as you will see, provided (italicised) annotated notes of the most rational and considered variety.  *cough*
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Dear Pandora
Advocacy in Accessing Mental Health Services
Thank you for your letter dated 17 December 2009 about accessing our mental [...]

Last year, the Beeb produced an appalling episode of its long-running Panorama show on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, strongly inferring that the only people who would genuinely be afflicted with the disorder were soldiers traumatised by battle.  As the title of the documentary – The Trauma Industry – suggested, the central tenet of the program was [...]

Things were so much improved on Thursday from what they had been the week before.  I think C’s mood and / or attitude was better than it had been, and I was feeling considerably more sane than I have of late, so between the two of us, the whole session felt a lot more productive.  [...]

So.  After the misery of January and the earlier part of this month, I had thought that things were beginning to find more of an even keel.  That perhaps the Quetiapine / Venlafaxine ( / psychotherapy?) combination might be starting to yield some results.  My motivation is still shockingly low, but my mood is higher [...]

Apparently I wrote this epic gem of a post on Thursday, post-C. It reminds me of a diatribe that A wrote to his friend W whilst in the early, very bleak years of his long university career:
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck it all,
My fucking life.
Suck, suck, suck, suck, suck it all,
My fucking dick.
Here is [...]

This hardly even warrants an entry, but in my obsession for complete records of my psychotherapy with C, I am going to write at least a rudimentary account of it anyway.
The reason it doesn’t merit a post is not so much because it was a useless session – though in some ways it was – [...]

My descent into complete madness continues, ironically – I am convinced – as a result of anti-psychotic medication.  I am fairly certain that I am experiencing, and have been experiencing, the phenomenon of akathisia.
It is so difficult – impossible, I believe – to describe this thing of complete awfulness in any coherent or accessible way, [...]

Thanks, anti-psychotics.  You’re doing a fabulous job.  I’m still actively suicidal, fighting every second not to give in to my overwhelming desire to top myself, and now, as well as hearing ‘They’, I’m seeing fucking gnomes walking down the street, and strange shapes floating past my direct vision.
The gnome ignored me, like.  It just walked [...]

In the last few days the title of this blog has become something of a misnomer.  Ha – no, I’m hugely playing it down in saying that – it is a complete misnomer.  I am not anything even remotely approaching an insomniac.  I am afflicted with a severe case of hypersomnia, sleeping as I have [...]