Healing Image Hi With Eva May – “A Little Bit Of My Life”

Hello, this is Eva May and I'm speaking to you for another in my Healing Image High series for the women's radio station. I'm recording this on the weekend, the holiday weekend for Easter, so you won't hear this for another couple of weeks, but it's been a time when I've been able to. Things in my day to day routine have changed because of having those extra few days off. So I've been able to plan and have spent some time with family and friends, which is not something that I always find easy. I have suffered for many, many years with mental health conditions. My diagnosis now is dissociative identity disorder, which is, if you've not heard of that before, then it's something like complex ptsd. So complex post Traumatic stress disorder where you've had. There's been a lot of trauma and repeated trauma and prolonged trauma in time. For me, mine spanned many, many years and what happened to me was abuse as a child that went unseen. Although now that it is known about and my family and friends know and the people who are around me during that period in my life can now actually see what had happened and how it went unnoticed. And for me as a young child, so we're talking, oh my goodness, probably like 40 something years ago, it wasn't in my vocabulary and it was very confusing. And the person, well, the people who were involved in this, they were also nice to me, as many, many other people in my life were. And these were people that my family put me in contact with because they were friends too. So very, very confusing. No language for it, not the vocabulary of a small child. And so my body had to cope on its own and I can understand that now. For me, understanding I've got to a stage in my life where I need to understand what is happening to me, what happened to me and what happens to me now and how I have to manage every day and how best I am to proceed with treatment and get the right treatment, which has been an absolute fight. And that has actually taken me 33 years. So I've been in the mental health service in some form as a Service user for 33 years. I have actually being. I was elected as a public governor on the board of my local NHS trust a few years ago now. And I was, you know, really quite thrilled to think that I would be on the committee for Mental Health and Social Care and I really hoped that some of my experiences. I'm now 56, so I've got a lot of sort of, sort of years and maturity that those years bring and the way that I've reflected and seen what's been helpful and what has definitely not been helpful, I thought I could bring something to that. I wrote a very, very large report to the CEO of the trust with some recommendations in. And I've also had 70 days of residential care in a facility in the United States which specialized in complex trauma and dissociative identity disorder. And nobody on the board with me had ever heard of such a facility or the way that it was run. And it was an extremely good model of how with the right input, the right timetable, the right amount of activities, learning, being busy, making presenting assignments, having an awful lot of intense one on one therapies and various therapies including equine therapy, which I benefited from hugely from and I still carry that with me today. And that there are other treatments that are effective and have proven to be effective in other countries that we're not offering to people. As I say, I have dissociative identity disorder. It means that. So when harm was being done to me that I couldn't manage or cope, my body took itself away. Now it's very difficult to explain that. So I sort of removed myself because my mind removed itself because my body couldn't. I physically couldn't move anywhere. I did try to once, I was about 13 or 14 and I, I ran away. I ran from them and I went to try to get to a friend's who wasn't that far away, but it was because I'd never had to run there before. I'd always been taken there by car to go and have a meet up and I tried to run and I got stopped with them in a car and I got put in the boot and taken back. So I never ran away again, but my mind did. So it used to leave my body. Now recently on this weekend actually my family and I have been watching a series on the television and the way they filmed it, it shows somebody who's going through an extremely stressful situation and it actually, the way they filmed it is that they are in their body. And then all these sort of flashbacks, thoughts and things that were very difficult come to their mind and then they've done like their body staying still and then filmed it as if that body is being knocked backwards as a second body being thrown away from the first. And I said to my family, that's it, that's like did. That's like what happens to me when I feel myself going. It's a fall backwards and it's almost like it's in slow motion and I'm moving in it, but I'm not getting anywhere. I'm just floundering. And then I can't really remember what happens next. But usually what happens next is that I run. So. And then I stop, I hit an object or something happens. And we've also. I've discussed with my therapist, we've discussed this problem, and I have this as well as this sort of dissociating backwards and being away from my body. And then this experience of me running away and getting caught and putting in the boot of a car. And all I can remember well was that as I'd ran so fast, my socks had fallen down and I couldn't pull them up. They'd, like, gone into my shoe. And that was the thing that I was focusing on, was trying to. I wanted to pull my socks up. But when you're in a boot of a car, you can't do that. And honestly, believe me, don't try it. It's. So that was a way that I kind of tried to minimalize it. There's no way that I could, after all these years, by this stage, this was about five years in that I could suddenly go home or tell anybody at all. So, yeah, so my running is. I can't really run. I can't run fast. The last time I ran fast was that day when I ran away from this barn that I needed to get away from. And from that day till even now, I can't run fast. I can't sprint because I didn't get to where I needed to be. So I can't do it. It's a psychological thing. I'm not going to. If I sprint logically, I know that I'm not going to get caught and put into the boot of a car. But I've tried to sprint. In fact, I like going to a residential boot camp, GI Jane in Kent. And I've spoken with them on my series and I've spoken about it how I get so much out of these residential camps where we have full days of pretty tough exercise, but pretty. It's good fun with new people. I feel completely safe there, very comfortable, looked after, and I really get a lot out of it, physically and mentally. But when we. We do a test, a fitness test where we have to run around a field, we're running on. On the road, but we are running around the outside of a field and it is. It's quite far and it's quite. It's quite hard. Sometimes they make us do it twice. And you think I'm not going to be able to do it, but you do. But all I can do is just one foot after the other and again and again, and I count to 200, and then I do a different stride for 50, then 200 more, and that is how I have to do it. When I get to the end, the trainers are there, they're encouraging you. You're being timed. That's just for a personal thing. It's not a competition. And most people, I would say probably everybody I've ever been with, apart from me, can speed up to get to that finish line. Well, I. I just can't. I try, but my. My legs physically cannot do this. So they're also. Now, I. When I were talking about it to my therapist, there was a session that was at boot camp where we do sprints and we do hill sprints. Now, I know it's going to come up during the week, but we never get told what we're doing. We just get told to turn up at a certain time wearing certain clothing, then the rest goes from there. And I heard a conversation where they said, oh, it was going to be the sprints after a break, then that would be the next session. And I was ill. My body physically was ill. I was too unwell to do the session, and they put me to bed. So next time I go, I'm going to try and tackle this sprint issue. Now I've got some sense to it, then that really helps, because one thing that I do find in anything in my life now, when something doesn't make sense, then it's not good for me at all, because it goes over and over and over in my mind, and it becomes a bigger and bigger problem. Problem that I obsess about. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna give that a go. I think sprint next time. And if I don't do it, then I don't do it. But every other session with the trainers ends fine. And so that's what I'm gonna try and train my body to do and to have that experience and to achieve that, even if I manage one sprint, then that is going to be a massive step for me. So after my 33 years and being a public governor, I had contact with the CEO of the trust, and I wrote a rather huge report of recommendations from being an inpatient within the trust and outpatient and a private patient in the uk, both inpatient and out, and also as a private patient in the United States. And I had a lot of things on There that I thought would be really helpful for them to know. And if it wasn't helpful, then just acknowledge it and say, okay or. But within my report, it was about 32 pages. There would have been something. And in fact, I knew there was a lot, but I just used to turn up for these meetings. You go there, you give your time. And what I learned was that it wasn't something that I wanted to be associated with. And so I resigned and I didn't even get acknowledgement of my resignation, which I found very disappointing. And, yeah, that hurt a bit, really, that it felt like I didn't matter when I was trying to do something. That's very important to me. So my dissociative identity disorder is severe when I split into my different parts, my body, and. And this is not just for me, this is what happens to other people too. In. In this situation. Some people may not even be diagnosed because diagnosis in the UK is quite difficult. It's taken me 33 years to get well. I had the diagnosis before, but there wasn't an awful lot of provision for me, so. And I couldn't afford any more private care, so I had to have. I ended up having a dissociative episode. It's not even a year ago. And it was bad. I was my body in its dissociated state with where I have several parts. So the part that came into play actually tried to end my life. And I have no memory of this. I can remember what the issue was and what had triggered it and how I could not make sense at all. And it got so much so bad, so, so painful and just so, so painful that my mind went and something else took over. So I came round from being in a coma in a critical care bed, not actually knowing if I was going to survive because I was still on life support. And knowing that is extremely frightening. If you feel very lonely and desperately sad and you feel selfish and guilty that you're taking up vital healthcare resources and the distress that you cause to your family and. And your friends is something that you would never want to do. In fact, not many people even know I don't talk about it. My immediate family and the family member who found me, obviously another member of my family drove to the hospital with some of my things and I was in such a state when they left, they weren't allowed onto the ward because of COVID so. So nobody could see me either. So that's distressing for them. And she crashed the car on the way home because she was in such A state. I mean, not badly. She just, you know, in a car park, she hit something. Not a car or a person, but she damaged the car and she was like, dreaded. I think it was the thing that made her just all the distress, all the, you know, the sadness or the anger and things that were going through her caused this to happen. And when she got home, she was just absolutely sobbing and so distressed to the extent that my husband couldn't get any words out of her and he thought that I had died. And fortunately, obviously, a car's a car and a concrete post is fine, but, you know, it's. What it's done to my family, it just. Well, what happened to me shouldn't have happened to me. And I know I'm not the only one that this has happened to and I know that I'm not the only one that, you know, these things are happening now even in today's society. But. But after that incident, I had to go through several psychological assessments which were really, really tough, really triggering, and they went on over a period of weeks and we probably spent a couple of hours by telephone because Covid meant we couldn't go in and do it like that. So I never actually met the person that did this. And the assessments and the summary, the result was that my trust and neighbouring trusts could not provide specialist treatment that I needed for my dissociative identity disorder. So I was discharged. So I had no one. I was discharged back into the care of my gp, my general practitioner. Well, they're extremely overloaded with work with COVID with all those things that were going on during this time. And my GP then had to be the person that I was referred to. It's not her area. General practitioners don't specialise in dissociative identity disorder. But. But we did find I was recommended to go to a specialist centre, the Centre for Safety of Studies, which is in London. But to get there, you have to go through a very lengthy and it's quite stressful process to secure the funding and my treatment prediction, because I had to go to the center for Dissociative Studies for a pretty. That was almost a whole day of assessments. There was a decent break so I could get something to eat in between because it's exhausting. And their recommendations were that I needed to be seen, that it was pretty urgent and that my treatment was predicted to last between five and six years. My GP called me once she'd got their report and she. She read, you know, yes, this, this. And when she told me that it was going to be for five to six. I thought she was going to say months. And then she said the word years. I said I had to clarify. Do you mean years? She said, yes, it's years. And it's two hours of therapy every week, face to face in one session and then another hour spread over the week, that I couldn't use a plan with my therapist to have a telephone consultation or zoom or use text email to write things down. If anything came up, then I had a way of and some time that I was allowed to use. So not to feel guilty and not to feel alone and helpless. And I can't tell you how this has changed my life. I can see a future I can see every day and I can see now that I am speaking to somebody and I'm able to use the language that is needed to explain what went on and what I need to talk about, because there's so much unhealed trauma in all my parts. So it's quite a lot of work to do. But this person, they understand me, they understand what's going on. I've seen so many people who just don't know what to say. Their body language and facial expressions just show that they haven't got a clue what to say. They're quite often. They're extremely young. They've not had training for Dissociative Identity Disorder because it's extremely difficult to get that training in the uk and it's not something that there is funding for. So most of the people in this country who can help with Dissociative Identity Disorder have been trained from the European Society for Dissociative Identity Disorder. In particular, the Netherlands are very good at it, and Germany is too, and also the United States as well as other countries. So there is evidence, there is. There are protocol for treatment in other countries, but the same guidelines aren't actually in place in the uk. We're running a little bit behind. I don't know why. One reason could be funding. There's not funding to. To go into that, because I understand there's a whole load of things that funding is needed for. But I was looking, I. I like to read things. I like to read articles. I'm not very good at reading books. I can't concentrate. This weekend, holiday weekend, I've actually gone and sat in the garden and I thought I would try and read a book because I couldn't get hold of a newspaper. Well, I took two with me, not quite sure whether or not I'd get on with one. And Then at least I'd have one spare. I can't. I just can't concentrate yet to read a book. I used to. I used to read quite a lot of books, especially on holiday, and I used to really enjoy it, but I actually can't concentrate getting to a book. I don't have the recall. I reread and reread and in the end I gave up on it. So I started looking at some things, some articles to read online. Now another thing I have, which I've had for years, is something called restless leg syndrome, so. Or rls. So I found an article on that. It was actually a BBC, like a little newsreel. It only lasted a few minutes, so it's spoken. But they do print, they give you subtitles as well. And it was really interesting because it's fairly common. It's a horrible thing to have where your limbs. I mean, mine's not just my legs, it does my arms as well. They just move sort of involuntary and quite fast and they, they don't stop. You haven't really got control over them. And it's particularly bad at night when I'm trying to get to sleep. And the map, no matter how fast I seem to move them, I can't get this energy out of them. And this little clip was about somebody who suffered with restless legs, who was the presenter, talking to some specialists, talking to somebody who they call a patient expert. So someone who's got it, had. It had a lot of treatment. It's all been. They've been recorded and researched and so they, they had her as well being given an awful lot of medicine that's available and that is recommended by her gp, but then worked for. If something worked, then it stopped working, trying something else and things. Different medicines were introduced and at different stages and. And I mean, she did say at one point she did feel suicidal and she is a, you know, a grown adult. She has a. She was a lawyer and it got to her so much that there's no sleep, no let up from it, that she did even consider suicide. And then there is a society for restless legs. And they were saying that treatment in the UK can be difficult for some doctors because it's not actually in the curriculum of their training. So if you're lucky enough to have a general practitioner who has an interest in restless legs, then they might know a little bit more and keep up with the changes that are happening around, around the world with medication and treatment. And in the uk, we're a bit behind. So again, it's Something else that we're behind with. I would really, really like to see a world where medical evidence, research protocols, proven treatments given in different countries are used, that information for our country and for the people here who need that specialist help. So I'm extremely lucky. I'm with the Clinic for Dissociative Studies. It is a commitment. I've made a commitment to have my session every week, to be on time and I don't go and sit there in silence. I make sure that, you know, I want to use it, I'm receptive and I want to learn and I want to have a life that is better and safer for everybody, not just me, but I am one of only 50 people at this clinic over the UK and I am definitely not. We are definitely not the only 50 people in the UK who have DID or complex PTSD. So I'm just so hoping that by speaking out I can do more good than being a public governor for mental health. And to say that, yes, this treatment is absolutely what I need, to have a trained therapist by the European Society for Dissociative Identity Studies is absolutely essential. And to have the time that I'm given so three hours over a week, that is needed and it's proven that it's needed and I'm going to need that for five to six years. So I'm going to be, when I finish just over 60 and, you know, 60 years is, you know, that's quite a, that's a massive chunk of my life where I've not been well. I've suffered from severe eating disorders, being extremely underweight, I have no functioning bladder. That's a muscle. I, I believe that mental health has actually made that go. The muscle doesn't work anymore. I think years of decades of being in a state of fight, flight or freeze have made all my muscles tense and not relaxed. And if you tense sort of a muscle, you can get problems. Well, my bladder has, it's gone. It will never, never function properly again. And I mean, not many people know that I have this. Some of my friends do, my family do. I don't like it, but I have to get on with it. There are people who have to get on with far worse things, so. And I have to self catheterize and empty my bladder during the day at sort of regular intervals. I'm also quite prone to sort of infections because I need to drain my bladder out properly and that's quite difficult when you're using a catheter. But I'm getting the hang of it and I roughly now get a bad infection probably about once a year and I'm hoping that I can improve on that. So I've also had another muscle, is your jaw muscle. And I did in my abuse experience, physical trauma as well as sexual abuse. And I don't know if it's because that is another muscle and it had tension and the joints have just sort of given up. I've had several years of surgery trying to wash out the joint, to take out damaged cartilage, to repair it, to pick out fragments, to do all these things. But it finally got to the point where I've now had a bilateral jaw joint replacement. So both sides of my jaw, the joints, the hinges, it's clamped down onto my cheekbone as well, are medical grade titanium. And my new jaw and I are getting on fairly well. It's early days, it's only been, well, it's not even been a year and I do find it, it's quite difficult. The way that my, my jaw moves now is, is different. It's limited in the way that it can move because it's a mechanical piece and it does affect, I think it affects my speech. I'm very aware of how I try and articulate words because when I don't do that people can't actually understand me and it's quite difficult and I get quite tired. So with all that I decided to have some help. Well, I went through a police investigation into my abuse which was extremely difficult. It has to be done and I understand why, but the police have an agenda and my mental health was not good. It had taken a severe bashing for many decades and this really was the bashing of all bashings. It was very, very, very difficult. Not only are you video recorded and you're under oath and it's recorded. After I'd left work so done in the evening, I had to travel quite far as well. So I was driven there, couldn't possibly do that myself and drive home and then you have to. Somebody is transcribing your words. So you then have to read through everything and sign it. And I signed and signed and signed and read everything and I got so sick of seeing my signature on all these police reports with all these horrendous things that had happened that I know now are horrendous. They are quite shocking, but they're not exclusively for me. These things do happen and I hope that other people can fight on and find support and I hope that it just encourages people to really, really persist and get the funding. It is quite A stressful and traumatic thing to try and achieve this. But it's worth it. You're worth it, I'm worth it. So I then I had a really bad breakdown. The whole police thing, the realisation of being an adult and realizing what had happened to me as a child and how damaging it had been and, you know, it really isn't something that should happen to anybody. There's no excuse, absolutely no excuse whatsoever. And I also lost my job, something that I was extremely passionate about and I'd done for 20 years. But the police decided. Well, they didn't decide, they had to. It's a safeguarding. Safeguarding. That's what it was meant to be. But what happened was they rocked up unannounced in a marked police car at my place of work and parked in sort of on the site so everybody could see and see police officers getting out. And obviously everybody wanted to know what was going on. They spoke to my boss and they were told, informed them that I was having these after work interviews that they were going on till I wasn't getting home till two in the morning and then getting up at half past six to go to work. So the idea was that work would support me in some way, maybe ask me what I felt I needed, maybe come in an hour later or something in the morning, maybe leave a little bit earlier in the afternoon, give myself a bit more time and feel supported and all right about it in that way. That didn't happen at all. Not at all. In fact, my boss told me that a family member of hers had been abused and she welled up and had tears and. And then she couldn't talk about it anymore, so I left and that was that. And then when it came to renew my contract, it wasn't renewed and I got no support at all. Everybody I'd worked with, who I thought were my colleagues and sort of friends, they all went, they all left me. There's only one person who has actually kept a little bit of contact. It's limited contact, but I do appreciate that contact. And she recognized, you know, what had happened and that everybody else had left me. So I then spent four years sitting in my house, not able to go out, not able to work. I was quite happy being isolated. I isolated myself completely. Apart from going to therapy and the person I was seeing at that time, every session I went to, I was hoping that I would come away with a better feeling and it never happened. I just came away with disappointment. And in fact, the therapeutic relationship broke down in such a way that it could not be resolved and I had to. I had. Some of the actions were just not appropriate for a person in that professional position to behave in. So I reported them to the governing body and we went. I had to go to a tribunal and they got sanctions against them. And even that in itself was difficult, but I'm glad I did it. I hope that person is now, because they then had to meet certain criteria, recommendations are put in place, they get extra supervision and hopefully their practice has improved so that they will not do the harm that they caused to me. And it was harm. And I was also very trapped. It was a private arrangement. So I was paying for this. I was paying quite a lot of money, going twice a week and to have that and not be getting somebody, not giving me the service that I needed. And well, in fact, we spent an awful lot of time making tea and yes, it really got extremely inappropriate. So then I got moved back to the NHS and then I got moved to the cds. So that's sort of my story. And I've been given this opportunity to. To be a presenter for the women's radio station and it's great. I'm hoping that I can help somebody. To other people, I probably just look like a normal person now because I can go out. And that particularly was helped when we got a dog. Could have gone wrong, I think. But I go out with my dog and I feel a lot better when I have her. And some. There's some relationship between an animal and human. You can get this incredible bond and support and yes, she makes demands on me, I make demands on her. But we have had a lot of fun with my dog. It's made me sort of feel loved again and because my family have all grown up and they've left home, so I needed to do something. Sitting in the house for four years was not productive and I could get away with it because nobody was there to really see what I was doing and. And I couldn't even go into the garden. So I then gave myself a really big talking to because I wanted to go back to being the person that I used to be, who was able to do things before everything happened and my world blew apart. And I had to see my friends and my family go through the police process too. They're all interviewed. It's very, very lengthy sort of process that lasts months and months. So there's not really a break from it in your mind. It just goes over and over and this feeling of dread every time I got there and had to start talking, there Also wasn't any support for me. I don't think they have it available. I think it might depend what area you're in. But the support that I got was a victim support letter just in the post, just one. And it didn't even have my name on it. So, yeah, life was pretty difficult. So I then thought, I've got to go out. I mean, I used to go out, I used to work, I used to, you know, go to things and I want to reclaim that person. And the way I wanted to do it was to learn about my appearance. Something that was going to be fairly well, I hope would be quick. So learning about makeup, hair, clothes, things like that, what to look for, what I had that was decent, how to apply makeup, learn about it, do it, practice it. Just a natural look. I don't, I mean, I'm not talking. I don't do anything terribly spectacular. But I wanted to raise awareness as well that I didn't get any of this help for image in anywhere that I've been to raise awareness with image consultants and beauty professionals that they can help. You know, they are trained, it is a profession. And one of my guests in my previous show was, was the events director at an organization called Phippy. So they're the Federation of Image Professionals International and they do accredited courses for members. They have a directory as well of members. And these members have a great understanding of the importance of image and the impact that it also can have on, on your mental health. So if you are thinking about something like that, then phippy. So fippy.com f I p I.com they are an excellent place to start and to contact and they have a directory of members. They also have information on their website that's really helpful. I've also put information on my website, which is healingimagehigh.com so I've got H for healing, I for image and then that spells hi. So it's like you're saying hi to yourself. So that's why I've added hi on the end. And I've got on there some photographs and some pieces to read about working with image professionals. And the people that I've worked with have also written pages too. There's some very good information from Ariane Poole, who has her own range of cosmetics as well, which are really super. I mean, her primer is amazing. It just feels so nice to put on your skin. And Karen Franklin is MBE and another stylist called Jane Galpin and they've put on there some style notes. Now they'd written the style notes before, but they are on my website and it's just really useful tips about how to go out or look at your wardrobe. Think of your clothes as friends. What do I need today? This is a friend. And also not to buy more of the same. So repeated purchases and people with mental health, you know, it's quite. You can get quite a buzz out buying stuff. It's easy to do online. I mean, I can say I dissociated when I bought that lot because sometimes I do forget what I've done and, you know, I don't want to. I can't afford to be extravagant. So if I'm buying a new piece, I certainly don't want a duplicate one already sitting in my wardro. And I've had my children and are a very good friend of mine, they've helped me go through my wardrobe since lockdown and organize it, because I find all of that sort of thing overwhelming. And if I do it in small pieces, there's a physical mess to the room if you clear out your wardrobe in one go. So doing it with somebody is actually really helpful and we've had a lot of fun doing this. A lot of laughs over it. So that's another thing that I would say you could do. So the pages on my website, or the photographs that you might see of me as even my radio presenter, I don't look like that all the time. You know, sometimes I'm just wearing comfortable joggers, a sweatshirt, or sometimes I do have pajama days and I have bad days where I don't want to do anything and I do need to catch up on sleep. When I was in America, which is seven years ago, and dissociative identity disorder is. It's more talked about, known about, there's more provision for it, there's more sort of treatment available in the form of medication. Well, I was put on medication seven years ago and I need to have my medication reviewed by a psychiatrist, but I can't find one. There isn't one. My trust don't have one who's trained by the European Society of Dissociative Identity Disorders. They can't change my medication. I don't think I should be on what I'm on at the moment. I think we should be looking at reducing at least some of it, because I'm on about seven different things and it would be of benefit to me to start coming off. And it would also be a benefit to the NHS because medication is expensive and I'm not the only Person that's not having med review. And my dad, and I'm sure he won't mind me saying, four years ago he had an anxiety attack prior to going on a holiday. So he really is not like him whatsoever, totally out of character and he couldn't go, they had to cancel the trip and he was put on antidepressants. Well, four years on, he is still on those antidepressants. He's not depressed at all. My dad is loving life and I don't think it's the medication that's making him loving life. Dad just went through a bad episode in his life for whatever reason, we may never understand. I don't think he wants to go over it into that detail. But we can't get anyone to take down or reduce the antidepressants because they say, four years ago he had an anxiety attack. So they're not, you know, me being me and I like my reading. I read an article online that said that if there isn't time basically for med reviews, I have a family member who's a gp and I've talked about this with them and they said, no, I would absolutely love to be able to review the medication that my parents, that all my patients are on, but I haven't got time to do that. We don't have enough staff to do that. I do it when I can, when I'm seeing people, but, you know, we have thousands on our of patients, so it's not possible. But it was saying in this article that if meds were reviewed regularly and people were not on as many, then the saving to the NHS could actually fund 10,000 more doctors. So that would be like, fantastic to have 10,000 more doctors. So I, you know, if you can and you could do, get to see your gp, I know it's difficult for them. It's difficult as a patient getting through, it's difficult for the receptionist. Everybody's under pressure. But if you do get a chance and say, you know, can we look at my meds? Or you feel like you want to change something, I mean, it might not be appropriate to change, but if you're. If you have an animal that is on medication prescribed by a vet, then in the uk, they are not allowed to keep that medication dispensed for any longer than six months without seeing the animal. It has to be reviewed and that is the law. So I think it's needed for patients with not just sort of mental health issues like me, but for other conditions and even like this restless legs that I was listening to earlier this evening to find that the lady who was the patient expert she had got herself, she'd gone with the information to her GP and said this is the research, this is the drug. Now there is now showing to be better. Can I try this? Can you find out about it? And that is how she got where she is. And today she's managing and today she's well and being able to live her life. As I said, she was a lawyer. So I'm hoping that I can help people. If I could just help one person, that would be such a great reward, such a great thing for me to have my own series for the women's radio station is something that I'm extremely proud of. I. I'm proud of the fact that Howard, who is the co founder of the women's radio station and the men's radio station actually set about to do this and to get people to talk. And actually over this weekend I've had a very lovely conversation with, with lkj. So Lady Kendall Jagger, and she's also a presenter at the women's radio station and she has her series called Free youe mind with LKJ and her programs are on at 8 o' clock in the morning and 8 o' clock at night and mine are 7 o' clock in the morning and 7 o' clock at night. So we've connected and we feel very strongly that we want you as an audience to know that we are trying to combine and share ideas and talk. We talk amongst ourselves. We also have a lot. We have quite a few laughs as well. And we support each other and we are interested in what each other has to say and each of us are also very good listeners. So we've recorded a show together and so it will go out as my show and then again as her show. So you could hear a lot of us that week, if you choose to listen to all of them. But I think it's really important and being able to record that we're not in the same room, we're doing this over, you know, Skype is. We just connect. We just connect at such a level and it's. We really want our programs every week to try and connect with the people who are listening to the women's radio station. Whether it's for yourself or you're just interested in the topics that we raise or if you are caring for somebody or know somebody who you could even suggest, try listening to the women's radio station or look at healing image high. I really want to emphasize that I I do not look every day as I do in some of those photographs on that website. That was a wonderful manage day. We had a call sheet, I mean, it was the Karen Franklin MBE. She has, you know, her work in the clothes show and all the work. She's done some absolutely incredible work during her career in fashion and, and she's worked with women in many situations, refugee women. She is an extremely fascinating, clever and interesting woman and I am very grateful that I've been able to have her. And she's actually been my mentor for quite a few, for all these years and she gives me advice on, for example, how to present a show. So saying that, talking about advice on how to present a show, I've now got to. I've got 30 seconds to end tonight's show, so I hope this has got something for you in it, please. If you feel there's something not right when you're in the treatment that you're experiencing, say so. Keep on going, be persistent, listen to radio stations like ours and redo your research and be receptive, be reflective and use the power.