WHEN I LIE TO YOU.

Inspired by Dr Zed Zha’s wonderful book -Consented.

I thought this might be a new perspective, the fact that many of us lie to the professionals we approach for help, but I hear it is normal for many professionals to expect this.

So many of us lie for so many reasons but I want to concentrate on one I am familiar with. I know people who say that they hate on-line assessments because the doctor they are speaking to cannot pick up on what they are not saying.

They may be desperate, close to death but to come straight out with it. To deliver the unadorned version of truth is not possible. They need their doctor to know them well enough and to be perceptive enough with their body language and their silences to be able to tease out what they want to say but cannot say, even on pain of dying; if they end up sent away without the chance to reveal where they are in their lives.

I get it. I cannot quite say why they may do this, but I think I can remember some of the reasons I do not say what I would like to say.

It is rarely for fear of being hospitalised, or given treatment I don’t want. Well, that happens already but I am used to it. More often it is for the banal reason that there is no easy way to launch into an account of how I am thinking. It is just not how you start a conversation.

I need the niceties. I need to be able to say I am fine and have no symptoms and no problems and maybe work is a bit busy. Unfortunately, nowadays that is pretty much all I do say. Mainly because the moments I am with my helpers, I am only in their space for five minutes while they inject me and though they ask how I am and rattle off their standard questions it is abundantly clear they do not want an answer that requires action or further conversation. After all there is someone waiting their turn and life is easier if it is smooth, so I remain silent. I remain silent even though I yearn sometimes to say how I am really feeling.

To say the things, I do not say to those I love and who do not need to hear my darker thoughts.

I sometimes wonder what these people put in my notes, when they witness my bland smiley face; that may say the jag didn’t hurt or that everything is good. I assume they know I never speak the truth. I assume they would prefer not to know the truth but sometimes I would like the chance to see a professional who knows me and can tease out what I want to say and yet don’t want to say.

Some of it is, like I say, banal. I do not give the inside of my heart readily to relative strangers. But I also do not want to talk of things that they do not know how to talk of and how to listen to.

My doctors have recently been very good at getting at my interior life. Sometimes it is only moments before I am on the verge of telling them I know they are part of the armies of good and evil and have their own reasons for keeping me alive that have nothing to do with illness and wellness. Sometimes my voice catches in my throat when I almost tell them how utterly disgusting, I find myself and when they get it, really seem to understand it; it is a huge relief.

For a time, I almost dare to believe they will, if not act on what I say, give me more chances to do the speaking I so much want to do. And sometimes they do say they will see me more often or they will arrange for me to see someone else to talk of trauma or whatever but they never do; the months wind past and I might encounter them being busy in a corridor but they do not have time to say hello or to ask how I am.

So, I leave it be and feel each time just that little bit less inclined to speak to them as openly as I would like to.

There are so many reasons we lie. It is just plain old embarrassing to confess to our inner worlds. It is annoying to be made to speak as though we speak of illness when this life does not feel like it is one of illness even though their job is about the very illness they think we have and which we are there to see them about.

There is always the fear of rejection and ridicule and contempt and though many of them deny it, most of us have experienced it to some extent to know it exists. We are not being responsible enough or we are not ill enough, or we are exaggerating how we feel or we are being too demanding or we are manipulative. They do not come out directly with this very often, but we sometimes know they feel it, despite most of us doubting our own perceptions.

Often, they get what we say wrong. I have given up correcting the mistakes professionals have made about my past and my experience, at the tribunals that determine my freedom.

Often it is clear they do not have the time or the inclination or sometimes the ability to do anything, even in the unlikely event that we know what we want them to do.

Often to speak; to be honest and open, only upsets a routine that doesn’t want inconvenienced. We are there for our routine check up and it is so much easier if they can take their notes and feel that no action is needed at present. We are much the same, maybe ill, maybe with residual symptoms, maybe with a variety of needs but none that need action immediately and therefore it is easier for them to do the interview and close it down because if they were to act on the unexpressed needs of all their long term patients there would be no way of coping with the demand.

We know this, we are in some ways complicit and in some ways, it is easier to lie than to have the audacity to hope for something better; something more than the fortnightly jag that lasts for year on year on year.

We do not want to be a burden, and we do not want to be a nuisance, and we do not want to see irritation on peoples faces when we cause inconvenience. It is far easier to be quiet than to speak up and demand a world or an impossible solution that even we know is unlikely to work.

It is much easier to say we will call in crisis when we know we won’t because we know that despite the assurances, unless we are about to be carted off to hospital when we call, we will be greeted with platitudes that do not comfort and, of course we will be.

The people on the end of the line do not know us; they do not know how we spend our days or who our partners are or what we like to do and so, as long as they can calm us down and feel assured that we will not walk in front of a train, they can say the meaningless phrases that stop us saying how we really feel but do allow us to put the phone down with false mutterings of thanks.

It is not their fault. We live in a new system where being known and understood is a rarity. I remember nurses who knew my life in more detail almost than I knew it. I did not need to pause to see how I would be received or to wonder if I dared to speak to them.

They knew how I was because they had seen me for an hour two weeks ago and before that and before that. They knew what I worried about and what I found difficult and I had learnt to trust them. I couldn’t lie because they were a part of my life and it was not possible or desirable to hide from them.

People like that made such a difference. I miss them.

Maybe to say we lie is an exaggeration but the idea that we go to our helpers with a clear agenda seems deeply misguided. It is over forty years ago that I sat in a doctor’s office and, having no words, pulled up my sleeves to expose my red ragged wrists. Maybe that was the clearest and most honest I have ever been. I was in unbearable torment and didn’t like it and that is pretty much all I could say.

Since then, it seems to have been decades of appointments where nothing much seems to happen. I often have no idea how I am feeling. I long ago stopped believing my life would change or my beliefs or my sadness and I am not sure that I ever had faith that a person in a suit or posh clothes would be my solution .

When I walk into that office, I rarely know what is wrong or what I expect or what I would like. I am often ignorant of how I have been feeling over the last wee while and I am often ignorant of why I am feeling the way I am feeling and more often than not, I am not sure why I am in that room.

I have no choice but to attend these meetings but I do not know if the person I see just now will be the person I see next time as, for many years, my area has relied on locums and I really do not expect them to put anything in place which will for once and for all sooth the naked scream of my bare wrists of all those decades ago.

I gave up on that years ago. Once, some years ago, a nurse who I ended up thinking was my very best nurse said baldly that she would not try to get me to speak because she knew long term people like me did not like to speak to people like her and I was enraged. Though quietly, with a bland smile and a scowl hidden deep inside but the more I think of it the more I am now inclined to agree with her.

I will continue to routinely say am fine when I am not fine and I will continue to say I will reach out if I am in crisis when we know I won’t and I will sometimes, once every few months, admit a little more to my doctor when my name appears yet again in her diary.

I am more honest here on substack. Here you can find out about my craving for colour and energy and some of my deeper darker fears.

I did, after a ten year wait, have six months, seeing a psychologist last year. It was very, very, good and very, very, painful but it hasn’t changed anything; not really and now I have had that opportunity I very much doubt I will have another one like that in the near future if ever, so why would I be open? Why would I hope for better? or expose my vulnerability to these helpers?

I still don’t know what I want and I still don’t know what would work and I am not entirely sure if I ever knew what was wrong in the first place and I am pretty sure they are quite happy with that.

They are busy enough as it is, an appointment logged for six months in the future to do the same all over again is much easier than trying to change the way it has been for as long as I can remember.

Though as an addendum, I wonder a little. Maybe this is just how life is and to expect anything different is almost as ridiculous as expecting my legs to grow back if they had been amputated and I continued to be monitored for year on year. Maybe, despite our anger at the assumption, schizophrenia, for some of us, lasts for ever and to assume different and better is misguided.

But if that is the case maybe we could talk about it, maybe the coming to terms of this life might once have offered some balm to waking every day unsure why life worked out this way.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.