The Coming Of The Great Noise (and other tales of mentalism)

Is it better to talk about things that horrify you, is a problem shared a problem halved? Or does writing about it increase the obsession, making you ruminate more on the subject. I’m going to take the risk and tell the story of The Coming Of The Great Noise. I can’t think about it anymore than I already do.

Once some friends and I were attacked by an insane ram, it was a traumatising and frightening experience – and in the days that followed we told the story over and over again, making sense of it, giving the random horror of the event some form and structure. The ‘Great Noise’ isn’t an event, an action that has come and passed, it’s a constant minute-by-minute problem – with me all the time. I try and come up with strategies to deal with it but so far am making little progress. So maybe writing about it in some detail will help, making a story will help change the meaning of the story’s object.

I’ve written about tinnitus before, about how I’d had it since I was young man, and had become completely habituated to it (i.e. it didn’t bother me at all) and that my main frustration with was that it prevented my from wearing headphones. I was quite proud of how I lived with my tinnitus and had the tale down pat of how I had got used to it. ‘You don’t focus on the sensation in you big toe all the time, why would you listen to the sound in your ears all the time. You just let it become part of the whole rather than a point of focus. You could become obsessed with the sensation in you big toe, constantly thinking about how the sock felt next to it, but it would take some effort and probably drive you mad in the process.’

Occasionally it would get worse, if I had a cold or a virus, but it always fairly quickly went back to ‘normal’.

And then the Great Noise came, at the worse possible time. But you need some context to understand this.

In the summer of 2008 I was diagnosed as having ‘probable bi-polar 2’ after a bout of hypomania. On a sensory level everything got ‘turned up’, London assumed a certain Blakean grandeur – quite pleasant in many ways. In the spirit of adventure I took myself off the local psychiatric hospital and they prescribed me the anti-psychoticOlanzapine. After a few weeks things started to calm down and I thought I could chalk it up as one of life’s more interesting experiences. Similar things had happened to me before, though nothing quite so pronounced.

About seven weeks after the start of the hypomania I fell, in the space of just a few days, into an almost comically deep depression. As the weeks went by and it didn’t shift I took myself to the doctors, he recommended the SSRI anti-depressant Citalopram to be taken alongside the Olanzapine. I took it for six weeks but it made me feel very confused, something seemed profoundly wrong with the world; reality was a fragile and sickly construct behind which horror waited. I stopped taking it and returned to the GPs, the doctor suggested I tried another SSRI (‘they’ll be something out there that can help you’), Fluoxetine (Prozac) this time. A similar effect: paranoia and disturbed feelings, very unpleasant. I stopped taking it and, really not knowing what else to do, returned to the GP. A locum decided to refer me to back to the local psychiatric hospital’s outreach team. An appointment was made for early January.

Christmas passed, I worried my family and my state of mind continued – severe depression and suicidal ideation with a nasty psychotic underbelly. A week after Xmas I saw the hospital doctor, she listened to my story, and recommended the tri-cyclic anti-depressant Clomipramine. Clutching at straws and feeling desperate I agreed to give them a go. It was a mistake.

Within a few days of taking the new pills the volume of my tinnitus increased enormously, going from a single tone to a multi-tonal sound. It was so loud that I could hear it over the tube. I stopped taking the medication (whose side effects I later found out can include tinnitus), and which was, in any case, making me feel pretty awful – but the increase in volume and the change in form stayed. The Great Noise was upon me. It seemed like the worse thing that could possibly happen.

(Coming Up: 26 months of hell, my descent into alcoholism and some things I really don’t like about chronic tinnitus)