(Approx 20 mins read)
Dear friends and fans of my art,
I’ve had to put my creative endeavors on hold while dealing with some personal health issues and untangle myself from a complex set of circumstances which are threatening my liberties and impinging on my ability to create content for my website.
As some of you may already know, my sister Cathleen took her life at the start of 2018. My sister’s death was hugely traumatic for me for a number of reasons.
The main one being that for a long time, I had been trying to arrange a time to discuss a serious assault she endured 10 years prior. We never made it – this meeting between sisters never took place, it kept being adjourned to a later date which never came. I just didn’t get in there in time for my sister to offload the suffering that she endured on her weakened shoulders. I felt riddled with guilt in the aftermath and wanted to make it up to her. To do everything in my powers to fully understand her difficulties so that I could sooth myself into knowing that I had done all that I could for her. To make up for the neglect and hostilities she had to experienced in the weeks leading up to her untimely death, when she found herself at a lose end with no support from family or indeed her back up safety net, the services entrusted with her care.
When doing some research after she was already buried, I discovered some significant failings coming from the police and mental health services which were monitoring her welfare neglectfully and badly with virtually no transparency or guidance offered to her in case of a relapse. Given the seriousness of the attack, I was astounded to discover that my sister had not been given a witness protection plan.
I myself had no idea if her attackers were about to be released from prison. My sister was a lifelong struggling addict and in these murky druggy networks, it seemed not implausible that her attackers could have made contact with her upon their release or that they would return to their hometown, Cambridge, where I was residing at the time after being derooted from London.
My sister’s story was not told to me by her in a comforting environment. I had to learn about it along with the general public, by trawling through the online trans debate which was extremely toxic for me, a hostile environment steeped in opaque arguments I could not immediately draw sense out of.
This lead to me onto a journey of intrepid and at times reckless internet ‘self harming’ research which saw me visiting sites and exploring theories I would not normally have ventured into. Along this journey, I incurred significant distress at being called transphobic for insisting that my sister’s assault was perpetrated by men and found it very frustrating not being able to contact journalists or spokespersons who specialised on this highly antagonistic topic. Articles depicting her assault were actively suppressed in the media, her story deleted from the Cambridge Evening News on account that it shone women-identifying men into a bad light.
In the years following my sister’s death, I felt the double blow of my brother’s suicide attempt, at first unsuccessful and then the following year, successful. My brother had a mental breakdown while in his teens and his passing had some serious repercussions within my extended and what was left of my immediate family who refused to discuss anything and wished the whole sorry business of my siblings’ problems to be shoved under the carpet with no refection over what had happened to them or indeed lacked the curiosity to find out how it had impacted me.
During this time, I had no therapeutic support – although I was offered a course of anti depressants by a doctor themself on anti depressants and I was offered an appointment with a grievance male nurse from Africa which didn’t satisfy my requirements for in-depth discussion in the dysfunctions in my family created by the heavy dependencies and handicaps of both my siblings. I had requested a female nurse with whom I’d be able to relate more which was ignored.
The heavy handedness of the mental health team assigned to me – some of the nurses had been working on my brother in the lead up to his death – made me extremely frightened. I did not feel that such an overlap of nursing staff was in any way beneficial for my recovery from a stress related episode which was exacerbated by my then neurotic mother who herself was feeling the brutal effects of my brother’s sudden loss. It’s around this time, I completely lost faith in the services to keep me safe and to act out in my best interests.
At my most vulnerable moment, my mother was being instructed to render me homeless, effectively removing all the comforts and securities which made me feel safe. It was a hugely distressing and disorientating time for me. The worst period of my life.
After being made homeless, I made an attempt to return to my mother 2 months later but instead was carted off to a hotel in the middle of the night by the police. My life had lost all its structure, all my boundaries were lost and I found myself living beyond any worst case scenario I could have imagined – having to stay in a hotel like as though a tourist in my hometown, rejected from my mother who was close by. This nightmare continued over many months while I was residing at an isolated property in Suffolk looking after chickens who dependent on my care and service.
I had used this opportunity as a base to plan out my next move to a place where I could relay my roots and start my life over. I planned to lodge a formal complaint about my treatment by the mental health services so that I could be reinstated into a suitable queue for housing, or find a mediator to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement between my mother and I, more suitable to my needs. The only housing I had been offered at this point was a christian commune which took on ex male prisoners, less than 5 minutes distance from the burried bodies of my siblings. This was an offer I had to refuse.
The internet research became quite derailed at times and my fears heightened considerably as I could not confirmed many unknowns. Very few but the most loyal friends came to visit, over which time I expressed my concerns about a neighbor who was living in the property attached to the house I lived in.
We both shared a loyal and helpful eccentric landlord who suffered from partial memory loss. This situation was exploited by my neighbor – a chronically out of work mendacious electrician/car mechanic – who set about sabotaging some of the utilities in my part of the house, while given unfettered access into the building, day or night, by our landlord who failed to grasp the needs and boundaries I had to establish to ensure for my safety and security.
Calling the police was for me the absolute last resort. Living next door to my neighbor who was actively breaking things in order to present himself as a savior to my landlord played a big part in heightening my feelings of extreme paranoia while living at the property.
Devoid of family and friends within in close distance, I felt completely isolated and increasingly frightened by my neighbor’s nocturnal activities and criminal undertakings.
He had mentioned to me several times that he used to frequent car thieves (he had been working on 4 cars while living on the property in various states of disrepair) and burglars and that were our mutual landlords not giving him a roof over his head, he’d have been living as a tramp with no fix abode.
It is my hope that while being treated in a safe therapeutic environment, the services will take extra care and attention to understand the factors which made me sort of lose the plot with unfettered internet research and that they will see that this was a direct result of post traumatic stress following the deaths of both my siblings which were overseen by a man working in the senior management of mental health services who had urged my mother to render my sister and myself homeless at our hour of need.
When my mother made me homeless, she was uttering the same protestations that she had made at the time of my sister’s death, namely ‘I wasn’t making you homeless, I just couldn’t cope’.
Since the death of both of my siblings, I felt as though I had no one to turn to. The mental health team dealing with my brother and then zoning in all their attention onto me, were extremely hostile and cold. They treated me like a criminal and interrogated me in a style which felt threatening and wholly unprofessional. I had my encrypted what’s app broken into unjustly and they were putting words into my mother’s mouth suggesting that I was an imminent threat to her safety, which couldn’t have been further from my position and the vulnerability that I experienced at the time.
If you’d like to support me through this mission of getting me better. Please come down and visit me. Pay close attention to how my case is being dealt with so far. I’m troubled and concerned that the post-traumatic stress I incurred, along with my dyslexia and kookie artist self-assured personality, is being bundled and repacked as a servere psychiatric condition with no insight and capacity to understand my condition.
I have been informed in reports that the mental health services whose care I am under currently believe that I lack capacity and insight into my condition which couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m perfectly able and willing to discuss the lapses of judgement I made while living in intolerable circumstances at times where I had no support and had too much to manage all on my shoulders, getting sucked into a rabbit hole of reckless internet searches.
It is clear that with proper housing support and security, my intrepid research is unlikely to return. I’ve learned my lessons the hard away. A lot of the trauma that incurred following the death of my siblings, and the rejection from my mother, have all more or less already been processed by me. I am keen to get back on my feet, free from unnecessary medication, and to have erroneous psychotic labels lifted from my medical files. I am confident that the services, when analyzing the trauma I’ve been through, as against the extreme conditions I had to endure singlehandedly while living in rural Suffolk, they will understand how they came to jump to conclusions and made the wrong diagnosis.
Painting wise, I do not have access to the painting material that I need, so I will continue with art therapy in the form of graphite drawings. Thank you to those who’ve taken the trouble to get up to speed with my extremely tricky situation and thank you in advance for those who’ve made enquiries about my safety and wellbeing in these testing times.