Get a haircut, get a job!*
Woke up to people on the radio talking about benefit reform. Great way to start the day.
I keep thinking about getting a job/careers options, but I come up with a few problems:
I tell the truth compulsively. This can include such phrases as 'on my last suicide attempt', 'when I lost my daughter to adoption', 'my mother was an alcoholic, it was quite funny sometimes, the bitch is dead now', 'I have absolutely no interest in your holiday photos', various truthful answers to the question 'how are you'.
I still get hypomanic, though it is quite mild. Many people are used to dealing with depression and anxiety, but various forms of mania can be really quite difficult for people to cope with. They don't usually get that I'm not trying to be overly enthusiastic and bouncy, that I can't *stop* being like this until it
goes away. This means I end up behaving quite inappropriately. I find hypomania really difficult to manage, especially considering that I don't know I'm hypomanic half of the time.
Hygiene/appearance. If I don't feel capable of preparing food I can eat take-out and ready meals; if I don't feel capable of washing myself/doing laundry/dressing myself in clean clothes (it's easier to grab what I was wearing yesterday and put that on)/getting haircuts when necessary - what do I do? I had to be told off by a boss once for pretty much all of the above. I respond well to orders in this area: if someone tells me to have a shower/do the laundry *now* I can do it, but I don't have someone who can do this on a day to day basis without prompting. Heh, prompting someone to prompt me.
I don't think this is connected to my mental health: I am really crap at dealing with some social things that most people seem to understand. Unwritten rules, translating questions into orders. 'Would you like to sweep and mop the floor?' doesn't mean 'do you feel like sweeping and mopping the floor right now? Someone else could do it, or we could just leave it today.' - it means 'sweep the floor now'. There are different ways that question/orders happen, there's probably a way of learning that. Doing small talk. Knowing when to stop small talk and get on with something else.
Worries about being off sick because of my mental health. There's a bit of shame her for me which makes it hard for me to continue in a job. I had a voluntary position a while back, and ended up having to take time off sick but I was too depressed/anxious to tell my boss anything. I couldn't deal with any communication (apart from with the pizza delivery guy), and when I was well enough I was too embarrassed to go back. I would need a way of dealing with this both in practical and emotional terms. *If* I had the right coping strategies/support, I'd be able to go back to the same job even if I'd been mad for a time. That is within the realms of possibility.
Lack of self-worth/ambition. This is something that I had way before I had my breakdown, but it's been compounded by the decade or more that I have been out of full-time work. I had a tendency to go for the lowest paid jobs I could find, partly because I didn't want to fail at getting a better position. This is something that needs quite a lot of work. Bah. If I got a minimum wage job I would be worse off financially than I am now, unless I was to get some housing and council tax benefit.
The big thing is that the benefit reforms are going to be first applied to new claimants. This is a huge disincentive to getting a job. A big thing I worry about is having a job for a while and then losing it because of my mental health, having to re-apply for benefits and being on the bare minimum/being pressured to get a job when I am ill. There *was* a policy whereby people on sickness benefits, if they got a job that didn't work out within 12 months, were allowed to go back on the same level of dole that they were on before. I don't know if this is still in place, and how it will be affected by the benefit reforms. A worry here was that I would get ill after 13 months or something, and be back to square one.
A positive thing about the benefit reforms is that I would actually be helped to deal with some of these problems (at least, according to the spin of politicians, don't know if that's true or not). A couple of years back I tried to get support in this area, and was told I could get a menial job working in a Remploy factory with support; there was no support for me to get a job that somehow involved at least my literacy, and better still my intellect. There is no flipping way I would want to do depressing factory work.
Discrimination against transsexuals and people with mental health problems. There is a lot of this apparently.
I have suicidal thoughts when thinking about all this. That's just an escape fantasy.
* People used to shout that at me when I was selling the Big Issue. Selling the Big Issue was so good for me at the time, it helped me engage with regular members of the public (rather than just day centre users/staff), there was a lot of support should I have needed it from the Big Issue Foundation, I liked the work. I stopped after I had a conversation with a girlfriend of my ex who was a teacher, she told me that surely I could do better than that. Er, no, not at the time I couldn't. I was living in a really scummy B&B in King's Cross (very near to where I live now actually, it's a bit unsettling) and could barely look after myself. That dismissive comment tipped the balance for me, I was already on the edge.
I keep thinking about getting a job/careers options, but I come up with a few problems:
I tell the truth compulsively. This can include such phrases as 'on my last suicide attempt', 'when I lost my daughter to adoption', 'my mother was an alcoholic, it was quite funny sometimes, the bitch is dead now', 'I have absolutely no interest in your holiday photos', various truthful answers to the question 'how are you'.
I still get hypomanic, though it is quite mild. Many people are used to dealing with depression and anxiety, but various forms of mania can be really quite difficult for people to cope with. They don't usually get that I'm not trying to be overly enthusiastic and bouncy, that I can't *stop* being like this until it
goes away. This means I end up behaving quite inappropriately. I find hypomania really difficult to manage, especially considering that I don't know I'm hypomanic half of the time.
Hygiene/appearance. If I don't feel capable of preparing food I can eat take-out and ready meals; if I don't feel capable of washing myself/doing laundry/dressing myself in clean clothes (it's easier to grab what I was wearing yesterday and put that on)/getting haircuts when necessary - what do I do? I had to be told off by a boss once for pretty much all of the above. I respond well to orders in this area: if someone tells me to have a shower/do the laundry *now* I can do it, but I don't have someone who can do this on a day to day basis without prompting. Heh, prompting someone to prompt me.
I don't think this is connected to my mental health: I am really crap at dealing with some social things that most people seem to understand. Unwritten rules, translating questions into orders. 'Would you like to sweep and mop the floor?' doesn't mean 'do you feel like sweeping and mopping the floor right now? Someone else could do it, or we could just leave it today.' - it means 'sweep the floor now'. There are different ways that question/orders happen, there's probably a way of learning that. Doing small talk. Knowing when to stop small talk and get on with something else.
Worries about being off sick because of my mental health. There's a bit of shame her for me which makes it hard for me to continue in a job. I had a voluntary position a while back, and ended up having to take time off sick but I was too depressed/anxious to tell my boss anything. I couldn't deal with any communication (apart from with the pizza delivery guy), and when I was well enough I was too embarrassed to go back. I would need a way of dealing with this both in practical and emotional terms. *If* I had the right coping strategies/support, I'd be able to go back to the same job even if I'd been mad for a time. That is within the realms of possibility.
Lack of self-worth/ambition. This is something that I had way before I had my breakdown, but it's been compounded by the decade or more that I have been out of full-time work. I had a tendency to go for the lowest paid jobs I could find, partly because I didn't want to fail at getting a better position. This is something that needs quite a lot of work. Bah. If I got a minimum wage job I would be worse off financially than I am now, unless I was to get some housing and council tax benefit.
The big thing is that the benefit reforms are going to be first applied to new claimants. This is a huge disincentive to getting a job. A big thing I worry about is having a job for a while and then losing it because of my mental health, having to re-apply for benefits and being on the bare minimum/being pressured to get a job when I am ill. There *was* a policy whereby people on sickness benefits, if they got a job that didn't work out within 12 months, were allowed to go back on the same level of dole that they were on before. I don't know if this is still in place, and how it will be affected by the benefit reforms. A worry here was that I would get ill after 13 months or something, and be back to square one.
A positive thing about the benefit reforms is that I would actually be helped to deal with some of these problems (at least, according to the spin of politicians, don't know if that's true or not). A couple of years back I tried to get support in this area, and was told I could get a menial job working in a Remploy factory with support; there was no support for me to get a job that somehow involved at least my literacy, and better still my intellect. There is no flipping way I would want to do depressing factory work.
Discrimination against transsexuals and people with mental health problems. There is a lot of this apparently.
I have suicidal thoughts when thinking about all this. That's just an escape fantasy.
* People used to shout that at me when I was selling the Big Issue. Selling the Big Issue was so good for me at the time, it helped me engage with regular members of the public (rather than just day centre users/staff), there was a lot of support should I have needed it from the Big Issue Foundation, I liked the work. I stopped after I had a conversation with a girlfriend of my ex who was a teacher, she told me that surely I could do better than that. Er, no, not at the time I couldn't. I was living in a really scummy B&B in King's Cross (very near to where I live now actually, it's a bit unsettling) and could barely look after myself. That dismissive comment tipped the balance for me, I was already on the edge.