Hello all, 

Thought I would share some thoughts on something that has really helped me in getting through psyche med withdrawal so far: reading and learning about History. I’ve found that beyond the entertainment value of reading, it has also helped me with getting more perspective on the psyche med withdrawal experience I've been going through relative to other types of suffering that people have endured for as long as humans have been around. 

One author I’ve discovered and which I have become particularly fund of is James Clavell, who has written a saga on Asia geopolitics and History, and mixes historically accurate events with good fiction to build entertaining, interesting novels.

Clavell’s novel ‘King Rat’, a story of survival amid squalid conditions of Japanese POW camps during WW2, is one that struck a chord. Although the author insists the characters are fictional, Clavell speaks from experience as he himself was wounded in action and captured in Java in 1942, before being sent to Changi prison camp in Singapore, where he spent 3.5 years in one of the most hostile POW camps in History: as many as 14 in every 15 men sent to Change between 1942 and 1945 would eventually die of hunger and disease…

The book has great historical value, as it is one of very few accounts which accurately depicts from experience the conditions in which prisoners of war had to live under the Japanese occupation. The trauma left by his experience in Changi was such that ‘Clavell did not talk about his wartime experiences with anyone, even his wife, for 15 years after the war. For a time he carried a can of sardines in his pocket at all times and fought an urge to forage for food in trash cans. He also experienced bad dreams and a nervous stomach kept him awake at night.’

The closest he comes to mentioning his personal experience is detailed by one of his fictional characters in a subsequent novel (‘Noble House’), when the character is asked about his experience in Changi twenty years earlier: 

‘“Well… Changi’s Changi and best forgotten”

A shudder went through him that he did not notice. 

But I can’t, he wanted to shout. I can’t forget and it’s still a never ending nightmare, those days of the camp, year after year, the tens of thousands dying, everyone starving and no hope of ever getting out, my body rotting away and only twenty one with no women and no laughter and no food and no drink. 21 when I was caught in Singapore and almost 25 when the miracle happened and I survived and got back to England - home gone, parents gone, world gone. And the change: coming back to life after the no-life of Changi, the nightmares and the no sleeping in the night, terrified of life, unable to talk about it, weeping and not knowing why I was weeping, trying to adjust to what fools called normal. Adjusting at length. But at what cost, oh dear sweet Jesus at what cost…’

I the end, the way I relate this to my own experience is this: if psyche med withdrawal is the worst I ever have to endure and results in over a year of my life completely wasted with zero comfort of living, I can still be grateful that I am part of one of very few generations that has not had to experience the horror of war or famine. 

To finish, some words from Ernest Hemingway I particularly like: ’The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places’