Coming of Age in the Eyes of Psychiatry

The Pathogenesis

I turned eighteen on the 26th December, 2014. It was only in the following February that my mental health services started to take notice. My community psychiatric nurses warned me that I wouldn’t receive the same intensity of care as an adult, something which cheered me greatly, as I had come to find child and adolescent mental health services invasive and overbearing. I looked forward to meeting my new psychiatrist, as I’d found my CAMHS headshrinker less than satisfactory, and I looked forward to having more of a say in my treatment, hopefully staying away from hospitals and supported accommodation.

The Hopes

I’m looking forward to meeting my new psychiatrist. I’m hoping that I’ll move him to adjust my medication — 250mg fortnightly depot injections of zuclopenthixol, a typical antipsychotic responsible for causing me socially damaging extrapyramidal symptoms, such as repeated rhythmic twitching of my head, are not ideal. I also suspect that the zuclopenthixol exaggerates my negative symptom of cognitive impairment. Another medication that I’m hoping to be rid of is lamotrigine, a mood stabilizer that also treats my epilepsy but which gives me “ataxia”, a medical term roughly translatable in this case as becoming a clumsy clod. As J. Spaceman puts it so well, “I’m waiting for the day when I can be without these things that make me feel this way all of the time”.

The Arndale Centre Experience

On a date which I can’t now remember — forgive my amnesia — I first visited the Arndale Centre in Drumchapel, Glasgow. This was to be my adult mental health services clinic. In the waiting room, I saw a man with severe extrapyramidal symptoms, a woman talking to thin air, and an apparently single mother trying to control three young children with floppy faces. The lighting was dull, hitting the off-white walls like a dirty dishcloth. Waiting rooms always have a sense of desperation. They are by definition spaces of inexorability.

After a while, my new community psychiatric nurse called me. We discussed my conditions briefly, something which I hate doing as I feel I’ve repeated the sordid details many, many times, and then progressed to the depot shot. I was relieved that they let me stand up to be administered it, as I always felt vulnerable and humiliated face down on the treatment couch in the child and adolescent clinic. After the shot, the nurse let me leave quite promptly. I exited the exclave of the psychiatric world and reentered the world of the healthy.