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sga_flashficAuthor: halotolerant
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: McKay/Teyla implied
Notes:
'My name is Matt Emmagen, my Mom’s name is Teyla and she has been at Shady Willows Psychiatric Home just over two years now. I’m entering my third year as President of our network and I hope to meet all of you personally over the coming months at our regular socials (please see attached flyer for details).'
Dear Friends, both old and new,
Welcome to ‘Release’, the dedicated support network for relatives, partners of individuals currently at the Shady Willows Psychiatric Home. My name is Matt Emmagen, my Mom’s name is Teyla and she has been at Shady Willows just over two years now. I’m entering my third year as President of our network and I hope to meet all of you personally over the coming months at our regular socials (please see attached flyer for details).
Watching a loved one go through mental health issues is one of the hardest and most challenging times anyone can face. We have to accept harsh realities that often they themselves are oblivious to, and deal with the fact that they may blame us either for their condition or for the fact that they receive treatment they don’t believe they need. In such times the support we can offer one another is invaluable. Joining our organisation and subscribing to this newsletter is your first step in getting help, so well done!
Here at Release we believe in honesty. We aim first and foremost for the truth; for ourselves, for our suffering loved ones and for the world at large as they encounter psychiatrically challenged people in the community. We encourage all of you to share your stories and in that spirit I like to set an example at this, the beginning of the year, and tell mine:
- - -
Teyla, My Mom:
When I was a very little kid I thought pretty much everything my Mom said was true. Santa Claus, the virtues of carrots, plug-sockets kill and that we – she and I - came from a city called Atlantis.
She encircled my world, my Mom. She made every day I can remember from then something precious and warm. I can still smell KFC buckets on the treat days, when she’d drive us out to the beach on a summer evening and let me sit up on the car top, legs dangling through the sunroof, licking breadcrumbs from my fingers. She loved the sea. She’d sit back and close her eyes and smile, listening to the waves, maybe sing a little in her own, made-up language.
We never had much money, but back then I wasn’t to know that. Mom could make do with odds and ends like you wouldn’t believe, and I know now that she got by on very little herself to get me things I wanted, stupid things like plastic toys that ran on batteries and Sesame Street slippers.
There was one smile she only ever got when she sang, but the days that she did never seemed to be days she was really happy. What I loved, what I really loved, were her stories.
Atlantis. She told me that we used to live in a water-bound city on another planet, called Atlantis. She told me that my father (who has never in my memory been present in my life), had been there too, and she would tell tales of their exploits there.
To illustrate what these stories meant to me, let me explain that when I was in first grade my teacher – Mrs Henderson – made a point of telling Mom how proud she ought to be of my contribution to the Craft-and-Create Table (a model of uncertain symmetry made mostly from egg-boxes and plastic straws, painted blue and carefully labelled ‘ATLAMTISS’).
But she also said, quietly, that she’d asked the class to make a model of their homes, and maybe your little boy has a bit of an over-active imagination, wouldn’t you say Ms Emmagen?
I asked Mom, later on, why Mrs Henderson didn’t know that we came from Atlantis.
Mom laughed, I think. But that was when it started. She sat me down and said, quite sternly, not to go around telling the other kids, or the teacher, the Atlantis story. Being a kid I naturally asked why, and she replied I’d understand when I was older.
She avoided Mrs Henderson after that, too.
Like all kids growing up, my school and my friends grew in importance in my life. I started to rebel in little, stupid ways and sometimes we fought like any other parent and kid. Once, aged about eleven, in the heat of it, I remember yelling: ‘Why don’t you just go back to Atlantis then? Huh? Go back to it and leave me the hell alone!’
We probably hadn’t spoken of Atlantis in years, then. I remember she jumped when I said it, and then folded her arms and said I *was* picking up the plates I’d left on the Living Room floor and that meant *now*.
But she was shaking.
I was very afraid, and ashamed, of provoking that reaction, and almost from that day I tried to do better. It wasn’t hard – academic achievements came easily to me and Mom supported me all the way. Despite a demanding job as a physical fitness instructor she turned up to every Math contest and every quiz and she sat up late into the night each year, helping me sort out whatever experiment I had constructed for my Physics project. The year I turned fifteen it was a beauty in circuit boards and needing soldering for most of twenty-four hours. I remember her coming to my desk at about four am that night with a mug of coffee and some cookies.
(She herself has never drunk coffee. But she makes it almost every day. Usually she stands, looking out of the window, as it cools. She says she does it for the smell.)
She hugged me, tight and close.
“My clever boy” she said, “you always find the answer.”
I squirmed, naturally, and said “Mom! I need to finish this!” and she laughed, squeezed tighter and said “Just like your father.”
Well, see, we just *never* talked about him. I was floored, absolutely freaked out. She stroked my hair and smiled, and suddenly I realised she’d planned to do this. She took a deep breath and, still kneeling before my chair, she launched into the story.
Personally, I don’t like to repeat Mom’s delusions word for word. Some people find it helps, I find it mostly hurtful. Let me leave it that she told me, in astounding detail, about how we had come from the ‘City of Atlantis’ in another galaxy through a special kind of speed-travelling gate; how she herself had been born in that galaxy and had met my father – an Earthman – when a exploratory team went there from Antarctica.
You remember the ‘SuperSoldier’ scandal some years back? Well I’ve since read in the light sections of the paper that all along some conspiracy theorists had claimed those men killed 93 civilians of Denver under the influence of an alien enzyme harvested from another planet, but until that night I had no idea my Mom had tied that story into her own, previously benign, psychosis.
“We could not stay, of us who still cared” she said, very seriously to me. “The government – this country’s government - were coming to take over and the last of us daring to take a stand in opposition were in real danger. We had the spaceship, but after the earlier fighting that was going to mean a twenty-five year journey. Your father,” she stopped here and swallowed, “your father managed to find a way to get two people through the gate undetected. We all took a vote and it was you and me, Matt, you and me. No one wanted a little toddler to grow up in twenty-five cubic metres of air.”
I was shuffled back in the chair by this point. She took my hand. “I do not know what happened” she said, and there were tears in her eyes, “I do not know whether they even escaped. He told me to build a new life, a separate one, and I have tried but I…” she stopped, took a breath: “We have to wait, Matt. We have to wait and pray that one day he will come back to us.”
“Stop, Mom, please” I cried, and finally she did. I couldn’t bear it, hearing like that.
During my teen years the situation fluctuated. I still had no idea that Mom’s behaviour – the stories, the delusions, the paranoia about giving out our address, the strange language she sometimes talked to herself in – were symptoms of an illness. I tried to cover for her with other people and I would do anything to avoid confrontation and so avoid hearing the stories again.
Once when I went to the attic to get some old clothes for a yard sale that I found nests of wiring attached to a deeply dangerous looking LED display and a bunch of satellite dishes welded together. I called her up and she tried to laugh it off, but wouldn’t hear of me moving it. Eventually I dragged it out of her that it was ‘protecting’ us. I was fairly nervous of it setting fire to the whole house but I put it back to please her. She also disappeared at odd times, sometimes for up to a week, and once came back bruised and bloodied. In answer to my questions she would only say “You do not need to know,” by which we both knew she meant it was ‘Atlantis’ stuff.
Don’t get me wrong. She was still my Mom, my wonderful Mom. I still loved her and knew she loved me. I just thought I could cope, and manage her safely by myself, when in reality I was now spending nights waiting up for her and having to scrape together damages payments after she trashed a black van she claimed had been monitoring the house.
I started doing less well in school, which was the last thing I wanted because it could mean home visits and parent-teacher events. I began to dream along with her delusions – I dreamt I was in a city surrounded by water, with tall, brown rooms and a magic circle. I dreamt about the warrior who was the runner, carrying me – a child – on his back and running through a field. I dreamt about a man who – in my dream – I knew to be my father, lifting me up to an orange rock and reading trigonometry over my bed.
Two years ago, when I was 23, the crisis came. One day I came back from the store in the pouring rain to find my Mom had somehow ripped up all the cable TV cord from the front of our house and had connected it to a sort of PDA I fear she probably stole from somewhere. She was standing in the garden, soaking wet, yelling into this thing, and when I ran to her she twisted round and for a second squared up to me like she was going to punch me.
I didn’t know what to do.
Then a wonderful event happened. A guy came into my college to chat to us about the stresses of student life and at the end, I don’t know, maybe he’d seen in my eyes that I had issues, but he came up to me and offered to talk. He asked me if I was carer, and when I broke down and told him one or two things he gave me a book and told me to call him anytime. He was very interested in Mom’s delusions and vocalising them for the first time to an outsider really put into perspective their abnormality for me.
‘The most dangerous thing that can happen to a carer is that they become involved in the patient’s psychosis.’ I read that phrase in the book and it set me onto the right path. I also read another, key, idea: ‘For many, a delusion may mask an uncomfortable truth.’
I had never before thought *why* my Mom believed these things. Once that door opened so much fell into place. My absent father, her lack of family, her mistrust of almost everything in the USA system - I feel she truly does believe if she just waits long enough my father will come back to her, but has cloaked this waiting in a mantle of mystery and self-aggrandisement that takes away the sting and the shame.
I chatted to the guy – Al Krychek (now sadly emigrated) – a number of times and he helped me gain the strength to refer my Mom to the psychiatrist and get her the help she needed. She told him nothing and displayed no insight at all into her condition, but I was able to testify to it.
Any doubts I might have about that action had were dispelled that night. Mom got angrier and angrier; yelling made-up words and ruminating over the same conspiracy theories she’d told me before. She threatened to run away forever unless I went back to the psychiatrist and said I’d been mistaken. Luckily Al prepared me for this scenario and I was able to call in the Crisis team at once to admit her to the Shady Willows Home, which has been her home and my greatest comfort ever since.
Mom’s gone up and down over those two years. We had some success with olanzapine, but as any of you who’ve seen relatives on these drugs will know, tolerances change. She still has no insight into her condition, and has to be kept on an intensely nursed ward to prevent her breaking out. It can be hard, somedays, seeing how low she can be and how fuzzy the medication makes her. But I live in hope and I trust in science and I truly believe that some day soon she will get her life back.
- - -
So, there is my story. Apologies to those who have read it in previous years, I hope you can use your experience (and so many of you have shared wonderful and inspirational stories with me in these years) to help new members vocalise what has happened to them.
Also, there is good news to add to my personal tale. As you will all no doubt be aware, Shady Willows Home is the leading private care home in America today, and experts from around the world come to study its methods and add their expertise to the treatment plans here. Next week we will welcome Dr R. McKay, recently returned to this country after a prolonged course in Antarctica studying psychiatric interactions in the men on assignment at our military bases there. He has expressed a particular interest in the Ward 12 patients and especially Mrs Hewes, Mr Dunroe, Mr Barton and my Mom, who he believes his new treatment protocols may be of great assistance to! Let’s all send our good wishes to him and hope for success in his plans.
Wishing you all a blessed and prosperous New Year
Matt Emmagen (President)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: McKay/Teyla implied
Notes:
'My name is Matt Emmagen, my Mom’s name is Teyla and she has been at Shady Willows Psychiatric Home just over two years now. I’m entering my third year as President of our network and I hope to meet all of you personally over the coming months at our regular socials (please see attached flyer for details).'
Dear Friends, both old and new,
Welcome to ‘Release’, the dedicated support network for relatives, partners of individuals currently at the Shady Willows Psychiatric Home. My name is Matt Emmagen, my Mom’s name is Teyla and she has been at Shady Willows just over two years now. I’m entering my third year as President of our network and I hope to meet all of you personally over the coming months at our regular socials (please see attached flyer for details).
Watching a loved one go through mental health issues is one of the hardest and most challenging times anyone can face. We have to accept harsh realities that often they themselves are oblivious to, and deal with the fact that they may blame us either for their condition or for the fact that they receive treatment they don’t believe they need. In such times the support we can offer one another is invaluable. Joining our organisation and subscribing to this newsletter is your first step in getting help, so well done!
Here at Release we believe in honesty. We aim first and foremost for the truth; for ourselves, for our suffering loved ones and for the world at large as they encounter psychiatrically challenged people in the community. We encourage all of you to share your stories and in that spirit I like to set an example at this, the beginning of the year, and tell mine:
- - -
Teyla, My Mom:
When I was a very little kid I thought pretty much everything my Mom said was true. Santa Claus, the virtues of carrots, plug-sockets kill and that we – she and I - came from a city called Atlantis.
She encircled my world, my Mom. She made every day I can remember from then something precious and warm. I can still smell KFC buckets on the treat days, when she’d drive us out to the beach on a summer evening and let me sit up on the car top, legs dangling through the sunroof, licking breadcrumbs from my fingers. She loved the sea. She’d sit back and close her eyes and smile, listening to the waves, maybe sing a little in her own, made-up language.
We never had much money, but back then I wasn’t to know that. Mom could make do with odds and ends like you wouldn’t believe, and I know now that she got by on very little herself to get me things I wanted, stupid things like plastic toys that ran on batteries and Sesame Street slippers.
There was one smile she only ever got when she sang, but the days that she did never seemed to be days she was really happy. What I loved, what I really loved, were her stories.
Atlantis. She told me that we used to live in a water-bound city on another planet, called Atlantis. She told me that my father (who has never in my memory been present in my life), had been there too, and she would tell tales of their exploits there.
To illustrate what these stories meant to me, let me explain that when I was in first grade my teacher – Mrs Henderson – made a point of telling Mom how proud she ought to be of my contribution to the Craft-and-Create Table (a model of uncertain symmetry made mostly from egg-boxes and plastic straws, painted blue and carefully labelled ‘ATLAMTISS’).
But she also said, quietly, that she’d asked the class to make a model of their homes, and maybe your little boy has a bit of an over-active imagination, wouldn’t you say Ms Emmagen?
I asked Mom, later on, why Mrs Henderson didn’t know that we came from Atlantis.
Mom laughed, I think. But that was when it started. She sat me down and said, quite sternly, not to go around telling the other kids, or the teacher, the Atlantis story. Being a kid I naturally asked why, and she replied I’d understand when I was older.
She avoided Mrs Henderson after that, too.
Like all kids growing up, my school and my friends grew in importance in my life. I started to rebel in little, stupid ways and sometimes we fought like any other parent and kid. Once, aged about eleven, in the heat of it, I remember yelling: ‘Why don’t you just go back to Atlantis then? Huh? Go back to it and leave me the hell alone!’
We probably hadn’t spoken of Atlantis in years, then. I remember she jumped when I said it, and then folded her arms and said I *was* picking up the plates I’d left on the Living Room floor and that meant *now*.
But she was shaking.
I was very afraid, and ashamed, of provoking that reaction, and almost from that day I tried to do better. It wasn’t hard – academic achievements came easily to me and Mom supported me all the way. Despite a demanding job as a physical fitness instructor she turned up to every Math contest and every quiz and she sat up late into the night each year, helping me sort out whatever experiment I had constructed for my Physics project. The year I turned fifteen it was a beauty in circuit boards and needing soldering for most of twenty-four hours. I remember her coming to my desk at about four am that night with a mug of coffee and some cookies.
(She herself has never drunk coffee. But she makes it almost every day. Usually she stands, looking out of the window, as it cools. She says she does it for the smell.)
She hugged me, tight and close.
“My clever boy” she said, “you always find the answer.”
I squirmed, naturally, and said “Mom! I need to finish this!” and she laughed, squeezed tighter and said “Just like your father.”
Well, see, we just *never* talked about him. I was floored, absolutely freaked out. She stroked my hair and smiled, and suddenly I realised she’d planned to do this. She took a deep breath and, still kneeling before my chair, she launched into the story.
Personally, I don’t like to repeat Mom’s delusions word for word. Some people find it helps, I find it mostly hurtful. Let me leave it that she told me, in astounding detail, about how we had come from the ‘City of Atlantis’ in another galaxy through a special kind of speed-travelling gate; how she herself had been born in that galaxy and had met my father – an Earthman – when a exploratory team went there from Antarctica.
You remember the ‘SuperSoldier’ scandal some years back? Well I’ve since read in the light sections of the paper that all along some conspiracy theorists had claimed those men killed 93 civilians of Denver under the influence of an alien enzyme harvested from another planet, but until that night I had no idea my Mom had tied that story into her own, previously benign, psychosis.
“We could not stay, of us who still cared” she said, very seriously to me. “The government – this country’s government - were coming to take over and the last of us daring to take a stand in opposition were in real danger. We had the spaceship, but after the earlier fighting that was going to mean a twenty-five year journey. Your father,” she stopped here and swallowed, “your father managed to find a way to get two people through the gate undetected. We all took a vote and it was you and me, Matt, you and me. No one wanted a little toddler to grow up in twenty-five cubic metres of air.”
I was shuffled back in the chair by this point. She took my hand. “I do not know what happened” she said, and there were tears in her eyes, “I do not know whether they even escaped. He told me to build a new life, a separate one, and I have tried but I…” she stopped, took a breath: “We have to wait, Matt. We have to wait and pray that one day he will come back to us.”
“Stop, Mom, please” I cried, and finally she did. I couldn’t bear it, hearing like that.
During my teen years the situation fluctuated. I still had no idea that Mom’s behaviour – the stories, the delusions, the paranoia about giving out our address, the strange language she sometimes talked to herself in – were symptoms of an illness. I tried to cover for her with other people and I would do anything to avoid confrontation and so avoid hearing the stories again.
Once when I went to the attic to get some old clothes for a yard sale that I found nests of wiring attached to a deeply dangerous looking LED display and a bunch of satellite dishes welded together. I called her up and she tried to laugh it off, but wouldn’t hear of me moving it. Eventually I dragged it out of her that it was ‘protecting’ us. I was fairly nervous of it setting fire to the whole house but I put it back to please her. She also disappeared at odd times, sometimes for up to a week, and once came back bruised and bloodied. In answer to my questions she would only say “You do not need to know,” by which we both knew she meant it was ‘Atlantis’ stuff.
Don’t get me wrong. She was still my Mom, my wonderful Mom. I still loved her and knew she loved me. I just thought I could cope, and manage her safely by myself, when in reality I was now spending nights waiting up for her and having to scrape together damages payments after she trashed a black van she claimed had been monitoring the house.
I started doing less well in school, which was the last thing I wanted because it could mean home visits and parent-teacher events. I began to dream along with her delusions – I dreamt I was in a city surrounded by water, with tall, brown rooms and a magic circle. I dreamt about the warrior who was the runner, carrying me – a child – on his back and running through a field. I dreamt about a man who – in my dream – I knew to be my father, lifting me up to an orange rock and reading trigonometry over my bed.
Two years ago, when I was 23, the crisis came. One day I came back from the store in the pouring rain to find my Mom had somehow ripped up all the cable TV cord from the front of our house and had connected it to a sort of PDA I fear she probably stole from somewhere. She was standing in the garden, soaking wet, yelling into this thing, and when I ran to her she twisted round and for a second squared up to me like she was going to punch me.
I didn’t know what to do.
Then a wonderful event happened. A guy came into my college to chat to us about the stresses of student life and at the end, I don’t know, maybe he’d seen in my eyes that I had issues, but he came up to me and offered to talk. He asked me if I was carer, and when I broke down and told him one or two things he gave me a book and told me to call him anytime. He was very interested in Mom’s delusions and vocalising them for the first time to an outsider really put into perspective their abnormality for me.
‘The most dangerous thing that can happen to a carer is that they become involved in the patient’s psychosis.’ I read that phrase in the book and it set me onto the right path. I also read another, key, idea: ‘For many, a delusion may mask an uncomfortable truth.’
I had never before thought *why* my Mom believed these things. Once that door opened so much fell into place. My absent father, her lack of family, her mistrust of almost everything in the USA system - I feel she truly does believe if she just waits long enough my father will come back to her, but has cloaked this waiting in a mantle of mystery and self-aggrandisement that takes away the sting and the shame.
I chatted to the guy – Al Krychek (now sadly emigrated) – a number of times and he helped me gain the strength to refer my Mom to the psychiatrist and get her the help she needed. She told him nothing and displayed no insight at all into her condition, but I was able to testify to it.
Any doubts I might have about that action had were dispelled that night. Mom got angrier and angrier; yelling made-up words and ruminating over the same conspiracy theories she’d told me before. She threatened to run away forever unless I went back to the psychiatrist and said I’d been mistaken. Luckily Al prepared me for this scenario and I was able to call in the Crisis team at once to admit her to the Shady Willows Home, which has been her home and my greatest comfort ever since.
Mom’s gone up and down over those two years. We had some success with olanzapine, but as any of you who’ve seen relatives on these drugs will know, tolerances change. She still has no insight into her condition, and has to be kept on an intensely nursed ward to prevent her breaking out. It can be hard, somedays, seeing how low she can be and how fuzzy the medication makes her. But I live in hope and I trust in science and I truly believe that some day soon she will get her life back.
- - -
So, there is my story. Apologies to those who have read it in previous years, I hope you can use your experience (and so many of you have shared wonderful and inspirational stories with me in these years) to help new members vocalise what has happened to them.
Also, there is good news to add to my personal tale. As you will all no doubt be aware, Shady Willows Home is the leading private care home in America today, and experts from around the world come to study its methods and add their expertise to the treatment plans here. Next week we will welcome Dr R. McKay, recently returned to this country after a prolonged course in Antarctica studying psychiatric interactions in the men on assignment at our military bases there. He has expressed a particular interest in the Ward 12 patients and especially Mrs Hewes, Mr Dunroe, Mr Barton and my Mom, who he believes his new treatment protocols may be of great assistance to! Let’s all send our good wishes to him and hope for success in his plans.
Wishing you all a blessed and prosperous New Year
Matt Emmagen (President)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-10 03:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-10 12:19 pm (UTC)I love, love, love POV. I am OC!POV's bitch, it seems...