I Couldn't Care Less: When It All Gets Too Much

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A hypodermic needle and a vial

When It All Gets Too Much

What do you do? I don’t know why I should be doing all the work here. Well, it is a column I write voluntarily and, in fact, without anyone having asked me to. I send it in uninvited every week and the Post could probably fill the space with a picture of a cat or something. But I really do want your input this week, please. How do you keep going when you get to the end of your tether?


I’m going to dwell on caring for someone with mental health problems this week. It presents a whole different array of problems. I’ve known people caring for loved ones, often children, with varying degrees of autism. I only know a bit about autism, but the one family who’s autistic son I worked with for a while seemed to plan their lives, or what they told me of their lives, around the son. The mother of a friend of our family suffered from Alzheimer’s. I think this is an increasingly common experience, more and more people know, or know of, someone with the condition. I only remember one story I was told. It was always told anecdotally and it seemed funny with the benefit of hindsight but at the time it must have been heart-breaking. Our friend’s mother would be at home in the evening, and would suddenly rise from her chair, gather her coat and get ready to leave. ‘Where are you going?’ her husband would ask. ‘Home’ she would reply. ‘You are home’ her husband would point out, to which she would simply reply ‘Well who are you then?’.


My wife has physical disabilities which limit her ability to work and, frequently, to function properly. She can manage herself most of the time but finding work has been, and will continue to be, hard for her. She also has mental health problems including depression and the various after effects of childhood abuse. The practical upshot of this is that she is restless, tense and bored. I don’t mean bored, I mean, really, that she has not worked for five years or so and does not see the prospect of ever doing so again. This is probably a fair assessment, but the additional problem is that she doesn’t see the rest of her life amounting to anything ever. She sees a future of pain and boredom and there is nothing I seem to be able to say or do which will make her feel any better. There are plenty of well-intentioned things I can do, however, which will make matters much worse


Another side effect of the pain and abuse and probably other stuff is her groundswell of rage. Real, serious anger, which spills out like molten lava when the surface is pricked by some arbitrary undulation. Of late her moods have swung between despair and anger, and then sometimes she is asleep. I can’t blame her for any of these things. She has been through a huge amount in her life and the future does not look rosy for her. It’s rounds of doctors and hospitals and tablets and all of these contain bad things, rather than making any of the bad things that they can’t contain any better. The trouble is that the other thing I can’t do at times is cope with her moods. I know she’s not angry with me and I know she doesn’t mean it and can’t control it, but the fact remains that she is angry AT me. I get the brunt of it. Now I’m working I have to cope with a morning of her yelling and shouting about how pointless her life is and then gather myself and go to work.


I have the following coping mechanisms, mainly: I watch Doctor Who. I play with our animals. I write. I like twitter, because it’s full of people sharing jokes, some of which really do make me laugh out loud, a phrase which I naturally can’t use because ‘LOL’ has been killed stone dead by people who think it’s the same as a fully stop. So then, how do you guys cope when it gets to much?

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