Homeopathy, my experiences/ATA*

 

I can’t recall if I ever wrote about my experiences with the Study Support Unit at my university, but this is certainly relevant to my experiences since with homeopathy.

It was the summer between my second and third years and I decided to stay on at my house and to try and get some writing done. I had become increasingly disillusioned with my course at uni. Despite the fact I had been struggling, rather than because of it, I remember thinking that I would be better off quitting and turning my hand to writing like I would have done had I failed my A-Levels those years before (I got up in the morning of the results and remember desperately thinking up a novel I could write to keep me sane), rather than carrying on.

Living on my own I got a lot more done. I remember it. Ok, so there was the stash of FHM magazines upstairs I couldn’t always keep away from, and Muttley’s bottle of Famous Grouse I would later have to replace, but I got into Zola’s Germinal, then Chekhov and Turgeniev and others besides. I got a little running done, often paranoiacally running a loop I had run with Muttley before in case I should be spotted. And I set to writing Congratulations, a story about a fairly desperate young man with an alcohol problem, as well as others, perhaps including Checkmate, the one I got to writing this last holiday. And I stopped having to deal with the constant fall-out of my solecisms, those faux pas whose mental and emotional half life was so long in relation to their frequency that I never got shot of them.

solecisms

I was slim. Back then fairly muscular, with a pronounced V running from my shoulder blades down my back: in those years the importance of exercise to my manic depression was never far from my mind, and I had gone to the gym two or three times a week. People told me I was pretty handsome, why not.

Some girls moved in next door. To be precise, four or five stunners, the kind that would have men the world over constantly watching the window rather than the TV. They trooped round the one day. I was probably in my shorts and a t-shirt. I answered the door, slightly nervous. I was out of practise with speaking to people, and it wasn’t something I had ever been good at - I would come back from uni holidays paranoid talking like somebody caught in the act of something illicit and taboo. They asked for a lighter. All of them crowding around the door. They may have seen me running, or heading down the Coop a hundred metres down the road.

I stomped off down the corridor to the kitchen and grabbed the lighter, all the time talking over my shoulder - yeah I’ve got one, I was giving up anyway, they could keep it, no need to take it back. I am certain I didn’t make eye contact with a single one of them. I can’t now picture what I did on shutting the door, nor reconstruct what was in my mind, but siffice to say I didn’t think it was my finest moment. From then on and for the rest of the summer I fretted about how they would see me when I would take breaks to put on Al Green’s I’m so tired of being alone or some rock song or another - it may have been Harvey Danger’s Flagpole Sicker with it’s refrain of “I’m not sick but I’m not well” whilst warming up to go for one of my pitiful walk-run-walk jogs.

I felt unstable and wasn’t sleeping. I left a note for myself. For years I had been telling myself that I would sort out my head when I got some downtime. Back when I was doing my A-Levels I had a constant reveries of checking myself into an asylem once the exams were over, sorting my head out before going on to university. I told myself I could ignore it no longer. I did a couple of things. I started riding every day to the medical library and reading the encyclopedic Manic Depressive Illness by Jamison and Goodison[], reading perhaps a couple of paragraphs an hour at times with reveries triggered by every line like those typewriters whose carriages fire off at the end of the line in those old films (they do do that don’t they?). I also stumbled upon the Study Support Centre.

Study Support Centre

The Study Support Centre was run by a few women, one of whom talked to me about my problems asking me such things as “Do you find routines sustaining?” something I didn’t much understand, and telling me I could try dictating essays, even using speech recognition software and the like. I can’t remember if she was the one with the Tippex in her hair that I kept on using as a way to sum the place up to my personal tutor. What I do remember is that she was writing a diploma on Byron, that she told me I definately wasn’t Aspergic, that  she had a son or somebody who was Aspergic, that I told myself off a little for noticing she didn’t shave her legs, and that she recommended using Rescue Remedy.

I think now I did write something about this, but it bears repetition. She told me Rescue Remedy was something that had got her through the death of her mother, or somebody close to her. I didn’t feel from that that I could dismiss it out of hand as I otherwise would be inclined to. I tried it. Nothing. Nothing at all. I had opened my mind to it but dismissed it as a placebo.

I now feel that I have given homeopathy a chance. I have taken a remedy for a number of weeks. It has done nothing. Nothing at all. Here is a man who talks of people in terms of being triangles or circles or squares, understands them as hot or cold, gingers as energetic, extrovert. Who reads up on the research into Gluten and Casein, and the medication that can be given to encourage production of enzymes[], and who gives this as a homeopathic remedy. And his remedies do not work at all. They are nothing but placebos, and placebos may very well have their place, but not with me.

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