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Short answer. Yes. I didn’t want to lose my husband and the family we had created. He and baby boy were my life. I needed them. They needed me.

We agreed to continue to keep trying for a baby and my husband went back to supervising my medication. As we near a year of trying to conceive we are faced with the decision of whether we try medical intervention given our fertility history and age.

This will make for a new emotional journey but one that I hope will be a positive experience.

My husband couldn’t take it anymore. How could I lie and dupe him into thinking I was being compliant when we were trying to fall pregnant. This coupled with the previous deception was now straining our relationship to breaking point. What would happen?

We had an appointment with my care coordinator and husband at our house. It became emotionally intense and it was becoming unbearable. The guilt I felt, the hurt I had caused….my husband said he couldn’t take anymore and he was thinking it was over between us. My heart shattered….devastated does not truly describe the pain I felt when I heard those words. What had I done?

As the meeting progressed, I could no longer bear the scrutiny of my deception and I stormed out of the house. I grabbed my car keys and got into the car.

I didn’t get very far. Maybe 5 metres down the road and I realised what a childish thing I had done to run out like that. I knew I would feel embarrassed going back but I also knew it would look a lot worse if I didn’t show my face. Anyways, I didn’t know where I was going to drive to.

I returned to the house and apologised. I think my care coordinator was surprised that I had returned. Perhaps in her experience she was used to people storming out and not returning.

My care coordinator told me that my husband was very tolerant and that many would have left their marriage before this stage. She was right of course. He was far too tolerant of my lies and although the hurt was there my husband was prepared to continue on with our marriage. But he made it very clear that the next deception will not end with us being together.

At the end of the day I had to decide was I prepared to stop messing about and save our marriage?

I was understandably scared of falling pregnant again. Who wouldn’t be…?

The instinct kicks in to do everything right to conceive and not to do anything that could potentially damage baby if you do fall pregnant. I started to think again I didn’t need medication and I can stay well without it. It was like I was going back into default mode.

I started to deceive my husband all over again… he had stopped supervising my medication under the belief I understood I needed it and could be trusted. But I couldn’t be trusted.

For a couple of months I was ok skipping my medication but the paranoia was creeping back in. Care coordinator and husband started to become suspicious of my mood and as I started to decline in mental state, I had to admit once again that I was not being fully concordant on medication. I knew this was heading to the last straw for my husband. How many times can one forgive a wife’s deception? Would he leave me? It was looking possible…

Husband and I decided we would have another child. Deep down we both envisioned our family with having 2 children. My sentiment after having baby boy-“never again”, fades along with the memories that go with it. I don’t think we would continue to procreate if women didn’t forget the horror of childbirth.

We wanted to discuss pregnancy and mental health with the psychiatrist and the first thing he said was “most people are happy with just one child”. It was clear where his opinion lay on the issue of having another child. He gave a sombre speech on the risks of relapse. He stated there was a 50-60% chance of relapse, that my illness was in the severe category and that I had not seen a great deal of illness free period for the last 2.5-3 years. His recommendation was to postpone having a child for 18 months if I am at least stable during that time.

We thanked the psychiatrist for his views and decided “let’s try to have another one now”. We weren’t getting any younger and knowing how long it took for me to fall pregnant last time meant time was not on our side. We would see the private gynaecologist and start the journey of trying to conceive.

One day I was looking for my baby boy’s favourite toys but couldn’t find it anywhere. Nor could my husband. Weeks passed and they didn’t turn up.

Then one afternoon I came home to find the toys inside on the floor as if they had been posted through the letter box. This freaked me out and all sort of thoughts went through my head. One of those thoughts was that someone had been in the house, taken the toys and posted them back through to scare me and make me realise they were watching me. I tried to rationalise this and considered whether it had been my care coordinator who had visited not long ago -had the toys accidentally fallen into her bag and she was returning the toys. I convinced myself this was what happened.

At my care coordinator’s next visit I explained to her about the toys and she told me that she had not done what I thought may have happened. I groaned and told her then that means people have been in the house. I told her how you see people on tv have their houses entered into and hidden cameras and microphones put up. She tried to reason with me but couldn’t.

“It is my impression that her insight into her illness is not 100% into the gravity of seriousness of illness and the relapsing nature of the illness and the prognosis in view of her 2 relapses of this psychotic illness.”

This is what my psychiatrist wrote about my insight.

Luckily I had enough insight at this stage to agree to take the medication supervised by my husband even though I felt it was poisoned but at this point I saw hospitalisation was being discussed and I wanted to do anything to stay out of hospital.

In the last few years I have sporadically been asked if I hear voices. I’ve always said no. It’s always been thoughts in my head. Despite saying this several times, my psychiatrist would always ask if the voices are telling me to not take the medication. The psychiatrist wasn’t convinced I would take the medication and indeed would come close to putting me into hospital if it wasn’t for my care coordinator who supported community treatment.

I had come to the conclusion that hanging yourself was the best way to kill your self. All other ways sounded painful and no guarantee of the desired outcome.

It was also the way a patient I had a brief encounter with ended up killing himself when I worked at a CMHT. A death that happened when I was pregnant and blamed myself for. I cannot go into details but I and most likely my psychology team believed I prompted his action to suicide. This was not the conclusion at the inquest but it still didn’t get rid of the guilt I carried around. I was pregnant with my child and a family had just lost theirs.

Whatever the reasons may be I fell quickly into a dark hole of intense sadness and despair. Why couldn’t anyone understand that I was a bad person and that was why I was being watched by the government. Husband and baby boy would be better off without me constantly being a source of stress and burden.

I ordered a rope online from Amazon. I had researched methods of how to tie the rope and what thickness of rope to use. I had thought about where I would do it so that my husband would not be the one to find me. I had planned out the details. I just hadn’t written what I wanted to say to everyone and I had things that needed to be sorted first. I started getting house jobs done which we had neglected, like the bathroom. Before I go I wanted things to be ok. I had previously written down all details of my finances etc for my husband to know in the event of my death.

But deep down I was scared and not fully committed to my plan. I shared my plans with my counsellor which led to my care coordinator getting involved and almost led to another MHA assessment. They had it all lined up for when I visited my psychiatrist for a review.

I always maintained and still do to a certain extent feel I would be ok without the medication. I reasoned with my husband it’s only fair to give me a chance to be off medication and learn to cope in other ways. He gave me the benefit of the doubt and against psychiatrist advice I stopped my medication. In truth I should have had a plan of alternative methods for coping and staying well in place but I didn’t.

I wouldn’t advise this to anyone. I was being foolish and risky to suddenly go cold turkey with no phased medication reduction over a period of time, but I was also going against medical advice. I was warned my the psychiatrist I had a life long condition that required medication. I could not and would not accept this.

With sudden clarity and lack of sedation I started to feel again and think more coherently. I didn’t realise how numbing and slowing down my being had become on the meds until I was free of them. I had forgotten what being ‘normal med free’ felt.

I seemed to get a new lease of life and was reading again. I read 3 books in a month. I was feeling good and had energy. Some could argue I was high and I certainly felt it but I was definitely not manic.

Everything went well to a certain extent for a 3 months but for most of those 3 months I was also getting constantly physically unwell. On reflection I wonder whether my body was having a withdrawal reaction to a sudden stop in medication.

Although things felt well and I wanted to so believe it to be, bubbling under the surface was paranoia and depression. It was as if I had a lid on a pot of boiling water. On the outside you couldn’t see what was going on inside the pot. It looked fine. Every so often it would overspill as the pressure inside got too much. I would feel down, I would worry about vans following me. I would lift the lid and look in and allow the water to level back down but I’d be scared of what I saw inside- the government conspiracy, fear, panic and depression. I’d quickly replace the lid, the lid of denial. And for 3 months I did this process and what I thought was me being free and well again was me being deluded. I was tirelessly trying to keep the lid on but losing grip of it the more I did it and eventually I got scalded. I couldn’t keep it up anymore. I was hurting myself with my denial.

I attempted therapy 3 times over the past few years. I found it hard to accept the help and allow myself to be the client/patient. Just as I found it hard to be the patient with my psychiatrist.

When you’ve been in hospital you aren’t allowed to drive for 3 months after discharge. For me losing independence from use of my car was difficult. It was due to a lack of a license I found my first therapist, a counsellor, just around the corner from my house. Unfortunately she gave the impression she was intimidated by my level of training and qualification but also felt out of her depth dealing with my experiences. However rather than say this upfront she cancelled on me due to her poor health and when she recovered did not get back in touch with me to restart. I decided I needed someone more qualified to see me and would not be scared of the word “psychotic”.

The second therapist was a psychologist that was too expensive and summarised my reasons for not continuing (apart from the cost) after 2 sessions in his discharge letter…my self critical nature, discomfort in expressing emotions (yes it is possible for psychologists to have this- we are still human), and being a very private person were the reasons I stopped seeing him.

After a while I decided to try one more time. Third time lucky right? I found someone that wasn’t a psychologist but had NHS experience and seemed to be reasonably priced. I saw her for over a year and throughout she remained on my side when it came to treatment plans. She supported me in wanting to try other ways other than medication to be well but at the same time did not advocate the messing around with medication I was doing.

During the time I was having the depot to regain a sense of control I decided to reduce the dosage of sertraline I was taking. This was of course done without consulting anyone. This was something at least in my control. Unfortunately the timing and sudden change left me with a level of withdrawal symptoms that led the psychiatrist to increase it back up again once I had come clean I wasn’t being compliant.

After some time on all the medication and feeling well I was probably at the point in the cycle where I was coming to some level of acceptance and in the words of the psychiatrist:

Full acceptance…. I just couldn’t reach there. And whilst I could rationally understand the words in black and white, it would just not sink in that I had an illness. As I’ve said I can’t remember how I am when I’m unwell but in the words of my husband I’m a “f***ing nightmare”. The nightmare part of it according to my husband is me not accepting I’m unwell rather than the illness itself being a nightmare.

There is no reasoning with me at times. I’m stubborn anyways but when I get ideas into my head, paranoid ones, I would get stuck on them. “They’re following me”, “the medication is poisoned”, “they’re trying to mess with my head”. And the problem is not with me but with everyone else not believing me.