I was forcibly placed in a psychiatric unit recently and forced to take Risperidone twice daily for three weeks as a condition of release at all. I'm weaning myself off it currently. They've kept phoning up since to 'make sure' I've picked up my prescription, and that the GP had received it ok, phoning a couple of times daily for the past few days, from a private number, incessantly somehow. I picked up the prescription in the end, but I'm not taking it as steadily as recommended, and hope to detox myself fully from it as soon as possible. By today I'm nearly fully cut down.
The akathisia was terrible. In 'hospital' I was left with no distraction but to either roll around in a hard, uncomfortable bed for hours with a single modern hospital blanket, plastic mattress, and a single plastic pillow, in a barren, minimally furnished room (just three hard-set wooden compartments on the wall for belongings, and a hard-set bedside table, no curtains, and a single grilled window facing a neighbouring fence and letting in hardly any light, with a round, wall-switch controlled flush mounted industrial ceiling light, controllable also from outside the room, and little red and green LED lights flashing on and off in pseudo-irregularity 24 hours a day, making staring at the ceiling a nightmare, and of course their bog standard placard-advertised surveillance tech), unable to get to sleep even, or to nap in the day, just hours in this high-anxiety state, leaping up every 10 minutes to walk down 30m to the tiny, paved concrete outdoor area to pace back and forth in it for as long as I could stand, surrounded on all sides by high plank boarding and inward pointing metal fencing, and three visible CCTV cameras, and no way to observe the outside world, and then back, lying in bed as long as possible until the compulsive urge to get up again presented itself, feeling extremely strung-out and hypertense the while.
No distractions of any sort laid on bar the large screen digital TV fixed inside the locked, glass-fronted cabinet on the wall of the atrium ‘lounge’, with 6 or so chairs lined up against the opposite wall so if you wanted to sit down you couldn’t look away, the TV always on 24/7, playing ITV breakfast programming panel shows and 5-minute BBC overviews, and then digital radio Hip-hop and corporate female pop music at high volume all day, and then the low ranking black ward staff members sitting down late on to watch a horror movie (a gory 70s one, of The Hills Have Eyes sort, full of shrill female screaming and shotguns going off) once the three to four European nurse-grade staff had gone home, and just a bare corridor to the rooms otherwise behind a set of double-doors that you had to push a button to unlock, and another to the staff-only security-sealed entrance doors, and a piece of bread for breakfast, a pre-packed catering sandwich for lunch, and a tiny, bland dollop of cheap, stodgy canteen carbohydrates for dinner with a cup of pre-mixed orange squash, all plastic cutlery and patronizing, indignant staff doing their best to ignore and dismiss the patients, and that for 3 weeks. Aside from that, I have digestive problems now, sharp stomach pains and abdominal muscle aches, and slight weight gain.
All in all, it was hell, worse than any other stay anywhere else has been in terms of the sheer uncomfortable monotony (and I might as well be a guest reviewer of these places by now, having been in so many of them). That this is labelled by them as therapeutic healthcare is damning to me. I had been well completely after 4 days inside but had no way to make them believe me on that, in the 15 minutes I'd be allocated per week to meet with a psychiatrist, so they could take 10 minutes of them simply informing me what the next step was, and saying “oh, it’s too early to see, we have to pursue the standard course for all patients, and you were very unwell, why don’t we wait until next week to discuss this?” to a by now totally sane man.
I'd been placed in there in the first place by the Police. Just a standard unit. It didn’t publicise itself as anything secure, and it was only a month-long review section ordered (bad enough already, but the tip of the iceberg by psychiatric horror incarceration-period standards). I'd been standing out front just playing around with the stock of a hand crossbow, unstrung, unloaded obviously, and with the crossbar (whim) and firing mechanism missing. It wasn’t something I’d picked up fresh and had been in my possession since before the 2021 arrest, something they hadn’t taken any interest in at the time, seeing as it wasn’t a functioning weapon in any sense so much as an inert part, less threatening even than a Nerf Gun, unable to fire under any circumstances, and rendered a literal toy, a cast effigy of no practical function. No scope attached either. Just aiming down, through the hard-bolted sights, at the house bins next to me on each side as I was tiptoeing along minding my own business.
The local budget supply shops are stuffed full of Nerf-gun type plastic products, with things that do look legitimately realistic in places, and certainly have a launch mechanism, albeit only water, or little tipped foam projectiles. I know one reads apocryphal stories of gang members taping metal needle tips to Nerf-gun foam caps, presumably not too concerned about off-balancing an already inaccurate, short distance gimmick toy, or indeed filling super soakers with acidic chemicals or flammable liquids, but that’s hardly common.
It’s like with the school shooter hysteria in the UK, a hysteria that I find odd in the modern public (and Abby) given that there hasn’t been a UK school shooting since 1996 when a paedophilic Scout leader opened fire on a classroom in Dunblane, Scotland. The same year there was a machete attack on St Luke’s in Wolverhampton, with a teacher and three children injured. There are only two other examples of an explicit school shooting crime on UK record, one from 1988 at the Higham Ferrers school in Northamptonshire, conducted by an expelled student, and one from 1987 when two orthodox Sikhs opened fire on a Sikh guru and on other Sikh adults gathered at a prayer meeting at Dormer Wells High School in London.
Even regular shooting practice isn’t entirely uncommon around here, from airguns, forestry service gamekeepers, and licenced firearms aficionados. Andy took the children to practice with air-rifles once or twice, when they were younger, and seemed quite keen on teaching them. He’s keen on installing the girls on martial arts classes, sometimes against their will, and ensuring they never start to fall away. I think it’s Kickboxing he’s had them at. I can never remember.
It seems a black neighbour reported that night that I had a "pistol" and that "they were scared." This same black had beaten me up not long before that same night as I went to fight off two feral druggie white neighbours attacking me out of the blue at the bottom of the street as I walked down to the shop, friends of his I presume, as they were from the same block, him rushing out of his flat from behind me without a sound, whilst I was distracted, and pushing and slapping me down the pavement, twisting my arm behind my back, tugging at my left ear, leaving it bleeding, a steady drip for about 10 minutes afterwards, and a great deal of skinned soreness.
Having stepped down off my little enclosed front ‘yard’ space – and it isn’t much wider in area if you measure the dimensions – I was walking softly about by the ground floor carpark built for the flats. It has never occupied by any vehicles, in all the years I’ve been here so far, and is just a barren room, with a black-sprayed metal roller shutter and a remote access and keypad-lock, security barred along the wide opening to the outside with galvanised steel poles, and with a vicious anti-climb security bar at one corner, in that rotating spikes style that seems like an odd level of overkill given the stated usage for the space, and the very fact that it’s always empty, bar a bit of human rubbish thrown through the bars into it and a few small, scattered piles of industrial detritus, gritty sand, and torn upholstery.
In my covid-era paranoia I worried that it could be used by the authorities as a temporary holding pen in civil unrest, akin to a makeshift detention pen, and indeed might had had a secondary function noted down by them along those lines, given the structural layout and tough security, and the historical lack of any conspicuous usage. It was shortly before then that they added the new spikes and bars, and the shutter gate. You could fit about 60 people in there, or over double that if you just packed them in. That said, Parkeston’s population is, at last record, just over 932, so you’d get less than 1/7 of them into it, which seems futile, unless it was targeting pre-selected suspects or a set sub-demographic (or indeed residents from further afield). I dropped that idea in the end as it seemed too unlikely, even by British standards, much as our official prisons are indeed running at full inmate capacity most days. I’d imagine that if rioting natives started to cause too much of a problem they’d just shoot them dead. It’s still a terrible waste of space and modern security resources.
I was in one of my playful about moods that night, saying hello to a neighbouring dog investigating me from a first-floor balcony, some type of Staffordshire terrier permutation, and character-acting with that boy’s toys pretension, just letting off steam under the streetlights, quiet and unobtrusive, the little piece held in both hands in a cupped left grip, my right index finger pressed above the outside of the trigger guard just out of instinct, in proper safety stance, never pointing up even, just walking down the right-hand pavement. As I reached the bottom of the hill they came into view suddenly, walking round the corner from the wide road junction entrance to the right, boorishly, in the middle of the road, going in the direction of the shops. When they turned and took me in, they stopped and started to engage. They seemed naturally angry by temperament, aggressive without a reason why, a posturing walk, and yob voices in thick Essex slang, quite short, yet stocky, the usual tracksuits & London Grime fashion hoodies allure ubiquitous to this area’s youths and early 20s bracket.
The two started calling out slurs against my mental health, raised voices of confrontation, and swearing at me, and surrounding me intimidatingly, getting up in my face. If I “prodded” them, it wasn’t deliberate. I can’t recall any prods or butts occurring though. I certainly don’t “wave these things about,” as the Police and their public informants and concerned citizen busybodies seem to like hyperbolizing, in standard British hysteria. Really, what was the worst the thought could happen from me or this innocuous, slightly rusted component?
Much as I at first decided to avoid the problem and continue to the shops, I did double back shortly afterwards, having lost the will to be outside at all, and found the two whites still there, though the black man had vanished back in. They came for me again, pacing after me as I circle-stepped and put my fists up defensively and gave non-impact warning jabs, and then bustling forward to follow me as I tried to tactically retreat up the hill. I was forced in the end to separate them, shadow elbowing the weaker one to the rear and adjusting 90 degrees to punch the more aggressive one of them in front, more of a slamming flurry, nothing too effective, and it was enough to drive his neck and head up as he jerked back out of the way of anything else, and then hesitated, lost confidence facially, and stepped back himself, into the other one, giving me opportunity to get back home.
Naturally, the Police took the black man up on his, without even asking for my side of the story, as they never do, and turned up armed, out in the street with a big team and some sort of security vehicle column. I assume his neighbours had backed him up and covered for themselves, and no one likes me around here on account of being the area’s token ‘crazy guy’ enemy no. 1, from a genuine psychosis side more than a ‘fear of the far right’ one, much as the Police never makes any effort to uncouple this.
By that point I was back in the house, upstairs listening to a Brucker symphony and some personal YouTube music uploads, finishing the proofreading of one of my articles, and looking over some new maths textbooks. I was flustered by then, in brain fog, and didn’t really know what they were here for. I’m not sure when they arrived, and it didn’t register with me. I saw someone shine a torchlight in my window from the street, in a line of female officers, but it came to me as if through a dazed screen, and I hadn’t clicked as to the severity of their developing situation. Dazedly, I brushed them aside, waving out to say hello, a little weary grimace on my face, and assumed Abby would go and have a word with them, so turned back to my activities, waiting for her to come up later and tell me they’d gone away. I certainly didn’t want to go out myself. I have a phobia of Police by now. A genuine terror. They’ve been brutal with me too many times, and I don’t even like having to speak to them at all.
They ignored Abby outside though, and what she said to defend me, and about how ridiculous they were being, and how I wasn’t a threat, and hadn’t done anything, and barged down the door into the house, yelling, telling her they would arrest her for obstruction if she came in also. Upstairs, I was just turning away from feeding my hamster and going across to examine the black bookshelf section of my library placed against the wall to the right of our bedroom window when heavy footfalls burst down the tight landing and a press of bodies appeared at the open door. The crossbow stock was back by the side of the bed where I stored it again, and from when I initially came in.
In just over a second, I was agonizingly tazered by two separate policemen, blaming me against my clothes-rack as more stood by with rifles, the jolting pulling my twitching body down onto the bed, and one standing on my chest with their knees to pin me down, holding the neck of his rifle, rested on the bed butt-first, grasping at my wracked shoulders with heavy hands, and forcing a pair of hard-lock handcuffs over what was my prone, mute, unreceptive corpse at that point. Looming down over me, FBI-style checkered cap on his head, and a pair of clear protective glasses, he looked to me at the time like a big game hunter. I moaned gently underneath, soft little noises, no idea what had just happened. This home-invasion didn’t do anything for my worn-down mental daze, pushing it into full psychosis. I’ve never experienced tazering before. It was extremely uncomfortable. Beyond the intensity of the inescapable jolting shock, I felt initial concussive pressure, heavy, like I’d been shot (a sensation I am not unfamiliar with, at least to the level of an air-rifle, much as this was far more powerful, and then a blue-white flash filling my vision, noisy optical stars spinning in front of eyes, and a rumbling, and a lot of pain).
Anyhow, the carted me out to a lockbox in the back of their truck, drove me to Chelmsford Police station and then transferred me the full 60 miles to Rochford. I wasn't sure what was going on by then. I had to get multiple trains back, a journey of some hours. Anyhow, that was my recent life. I hate this country so very much, and its dumb, cruel, dispassionate society. A grim, ghastly police state anarcho-tyranny of feral, hostile individuals, devoid of love, anaesthetised against compassion, the latter a marketed against burden on their finances and scruples. I know it's somewhat glib of me, but sometimes I feel that Solzhenitsyn had easier months.
I'm back down to my garden chair project. I'd say I'll be finished on that in two days, perhaps sooner if I can get the rest of the wood needed, being two planks short. The structure is at least built now. I spent the afternoon sawing up more wood with a jigsaw, as the handsaw is blunt and was tiring me out. I put together the back of the chair with screws inserted into holes prepared by a power-drill. All I have left to work out now is the panelling and the armrests, and then a coat of outdoor varnish. Angles planned to accommodate Abby's back, and the placement of cushions or pillows. Wide armrests for drinks and phones. Sanding treatment needed, otherwise near done. The best I could do given my pressure. I would have liked more time; left to construct more, and to continue learning this craft by practice and trial and error. Abby would like me to plan and construct a 'dog sofa' next for our new puppy.
I was pleased with some of the ongoing harvest at least. Lots of tomatoes picked for my pasta dishes, and a heavy crop of carrots. The many potted herbs are a culinary lifesaver. I was happy to cook some of the spinach last night, sauteed in garlic, with squeezed lemon juice, sesame seeds, peppercorns, and a little sugar. I'll make the side more often. It will go well with my harvested potatoes I think, and perhaps some tinned jackfruit, as a salmon substitute. I'm using the home carrots to make a vegetable soup for dinner.
I have listened, at length, to the first and second violin sonatas of Ferruccio Busoni with much pleasure and found some loveliness in the German folk dance melodies of his bagatelles. Aside from that, I find William Walton's cello concerto to be a rewarding listen, I still have John Ireland's The Forgotten Rite and Satyricon on a little bit. Paganini has always been a composer who seems to return me to some lightness and hope. I picked up a new sheet-music book of easy Classical pieces to practice on my violin, and some refresher grades, scales, and arpeggios theory texts to help me get back up to speed with my playing.
Abby has a lot of outstanding government-wrought fees currently. Her mood is dire over this, and she is quite aloof, otherwise snappy, angry, and short-tempered, defensive to passive-aggression, quite unforgiving indeed, prone to making long-term threats days in advance. It's a torturous place to live, truly. Most days have no joy, and there are always dark skies, and concrete in the rain.
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