I have been thinking about how to start writing on my blog again for a while. Most of 2025 it was unavailable because the hosting company I previously used was taken over and getting my files out was a nightmare. Then I got detained under the mental health act, for about two months between October and December.
Being sectioned, again, was an experience I don’t really know how to talk about yet. I’ve had many inpatient admissions in the last six years and a reasonable number of section detentions. You think you know how they are going to go. Consider yourself an old hand. Then something appears unexpectedly, and sideswipes whatever stability you had achieved out from underneath your feet.
So you end up in hospital. Again. Only this time it’s the longest inpatient admission you’ve had in over a decade and the first ever section 3 detention you’ve ever had. A section 3 is a frightening experience. It is being in hospital and held by law for a maximum of six months before it can be reviewed. Many autistic people end up on repeated section 3s because hospital doesn’t suit them. It makes them ill; the environment, the drugs, the constant scrutiny. So they/you/we always appear like were not recovering. Always unstable.
I was lucky that after I was moved to the enhanced psychiatric I had an understanding and compassionate responsible clinician who perceived the anguish I was suffering in hospital for myriad reasons and discharged me to home.
It has not been simple or easy since I came back from the other place again. There are still assessments to complete. Meetings and reviews to be held. Appointments to keep and support to arrange. I might write more about my hospital experience here, or I might not. There are things about it that I did, had to do, that I am not ready to share yet.
I am spending time in nature, as much as I can. With my family, my partner and son, who I missed terribly when in hospital (you know when you have been away too long when you call returning to the ward “going home”). I am trying to write, but feel blocked. It has become a demand. Writing a blog post has become a performance. Reading my very earliest forays into blogging, it was refreshing to see how open and spontaneous they were. There was all manner of content on their pages, unencumbered by SEO scores and headline analysers. I just logged on and wrote. So this is what I am going to do now. Log on and write.
Hopefully some meaning and sense might emerge in the coming weeks and months. I could do with some.
