Morphine is a depressant. It makes depression worse. I've had psychiatrists tell me to avoid taking morphine at all costs. I've had psychiatrists refuse outright to treat me unless I went off morphine completely. My current psychiatrist sees me for 15 minutes every three weeks.

Chronic pain makes depression worse. The two are notorious for feeding each other. The depression and suicide rates for chronic pain sufferers are quite alarming. I've read somewhere that pain and emotions go thru the same pathways in the brain. Sadly, I have also learned that depression is worsened even when the chronic pain is under control. Merely having the condition of chronic pain can make someone very suicidal.

My chronic pain is under good control for the moment. The pain of which I write now is emotional in nature. It has followed me since early childhood, when I was undergoing emotional abuse at the hands of my parents. I eventually left home because of it. I wrote to my sister recently and she wants me to stop living the past. She also is upset because any contact between me and my parents damages all parties involved. She dreads the day she will have to phone me with the news that one or both my parents are dead. She even fears I will celebrate their deaths. She says my mother and father are "wonderful people".

These wonderful people tried to institutionalize me for the rest of my life and against my will and they tried to do it secretly. They told my friends and my specialists I need to be put away. They asked my psychiatrist to have me declared incompetant so they could force me to come back to their neck of the woods and in an institution.

It was bad enough that they went to the parish bookstore and told a friend there I was on a fixed income, shouldn't be spending money there and I needed to be protected from that. It was also bad that they told friends "We can't be her parents any more unless she is in an institution". The finishing blow was that they told a case manager: "It's a lot easier to get our daughter to do things when she's in severe pain." And they had insisted on coming up here on a weekend when I was in severe pain, bad enough to ensure I couldn't even read what I was signing; I had asked them to postpone.

My parents have treated me like dirt almost from day one. I told my team to stop co-operating with my parents because I had serious concerns about who else they would tell that I was easier to manipulate while in pain; the nursing home staff perhaps?

When my father couldn't pressure me into co-operating, my mom sent me a nasty e-mail telling me that they were withdrawing all financial support. I had a $1200 debt that my parents were helping me with until I didn't play ball anymore. It was only the next day that I learned from my psychiatrist that my parents had written to him begging him to declare me incompetant, pleading burn-out.

My poor "burned-out" mother is still working with terminal cancer patients as far as I know.

I wrote to my sister trying to keep some contact with my family, seeing as my parents no longer see me as their child...and she thinks they are wonderful people and that I should forget the past.

I had nightmares for three nights in a row before my parents came to visit me in the mental hospital. In them, I dreamed that Mom and Dad took away my apartment and put me in a nursing home. My parents made a surprise visit to the hospital to beg me not to go back to my apartment, but to hospitalize myself until more "suitable" living arrangements could be found. They never told me they were trying to declare me incompetant and force me into a home.

I've had two botched surgeries blamed on me. As a child, I was yelled at and tormented by my mother every morning before school. I was sent to a mental hospital for the retarded for 18 months starting at age 5. By age 8, I hated when my father came home from work because screaming usually follow. By my teenage years, I knew there were three ways to avoid yelling: having an operation, going to summer camp or being alone.

I've been sworn at. I've even had my face rubbed in excrement and was thrown on a bed. The physical abuse seemed to stop with my admission to the mental hospital, when it was learned my bones were fragile. My father told me once: "I wish I could hit you."

I had problems with toilet training and my father was always screaming at me about immaturity...there were times when my parents acted normal but let's face it. My childhood was a time of great mental anguish. It got to the point where I would be shocked when people treated me well. I figured if people truly knew me, they would scream at me just like my parents did.

The last straw came when I had one of my hips removed surgically. My parents expected instant and total and permanent pain relief from a dislocated hip. (Replacement was not an option). The pain was excruciating and during a post-op appointment I must have been snappish with the doctor because my mom called me a five letter word rhyming with witch and I was sitting

Morphine is a depressant. It makes depression worse. I've had psychiatrists tell me to avoid taking morphine at all costs. I've had psychiatrists refuse outright to treat me unless I went off morphine completely. My current psychiatrist sees me for 15 minutes every three weeks.

Chronic pain makes depression worse. The two are notorious for feeding each other. The depression and suicide rates for chronic pain sufferers are quite alarming. I've read somewhere that pain and emotions go thru the same pathways in the brain. Sadly, I have also learned that depression is worsened even when the chronic pain is under control. Merely having the condition of chronic pain can make someone very suicidal.

My chronic pain is under good control for the moment. The pain of which I write now is emotional in nature. It has followed me since early childhood, when I was undergoing emotional abuse at the hands of my parents. I eventually left home because of it. I wrote to my sister recently and she wants me to stop living the past. She also is upset because any contact between me and my parents damages all parties involved. She dreads the day she will have to phone me with the news that one or both my parents are dead. She even fears I will celebrate their deaths. She says my mother and father are "wonderful people".

These wonderful people tried to institutionalize me for the rest of my life and against my will and they tried to do it secretly. They told my friends and my specialists I need to be put away. They asked my psychiatrist to have me declared incompetant so they could force me to come back to their neck of the woods and in an institution.

It was bad enough that they went to the parish bookstore and told a friend there I was on a fixed income, shouldn't be spending money there and I needed to be protected from that. It was also bad that they told friends "We can't be her parents any more unless she is in an institution". The finishing blow was that they told a case manager: "It's a lot easier to get our daughter to do things when she's in severe pain." And they had insisted on coming up here on a weekend when I was in severe pain, bad enough to ensure I couldn't even read what I was signing; I had asked them to postpone.

My parents have treated me like dirt almost from day one. I told my team to stop co-operating with my parents because I had serious concerns about who else they would tell that I was easier to manipulate while in pain; the nursing home staff perhaps?

When my father couldn't pressure me into co-operating, my mom sent me a nasty e-mail telling me that they were withdrawing all financial support. I had a $1200 debt that my parents were helping me with until I didn't play ball anymore. It was only the next day that I learned from my psychiatrist that my parents had written to him begging him to declare me incompetant, pleading burn-out.

My poor "burned-out" mother is still working with terminal cancer patients as far as I know.

I wrote to my sister trying to keep some contact with my family, seeing as my parents no longer see me as their child...and she thinks they are wonderful people and that I should forget the past.

I had nightmares for three nights in a row before my parents came to visit me in the mental hospital. In them, I dreamed that Mom and Dad took away my apartment and put me in a nursing home. My parents made a surprise visit to the hospital to beg me not to go back to my apartment, but to hospitalize myself until more "suitable" living arrangements could be found. They never told me they were trying to declare me incompetant and force me into a home.

I've had two botched surgeries blamed on me. As a child, I was yelled at and tormented by my mother every morning before school. I was sent to a mental hospital for the retarded for 18 months starting at age 5. By age 8, I hated when my father came home from work because screaming usually follow. By my teenage years, I knew there were three ways to avoid yelling: having an operation, going to summer camp or being alone.

I've been sworn at. I've even had my face rubbed in excrement and was thrown on a bed. The physical abuse seemed to stop with my admission to the mental hospital, when it was learned my bones were fragile. My father told me once: "I wish I could hit you."

I had problems with toilet training and my father was always screaming at me about immaturity...there were times when my parents acted normal but let's face it. My childhood was a time of great mental anguish. It got to the point where I would be shocked when people treated me well. I figured if people truly knew me, they would scream at me just like my parents did.

The last straw came when I had one of my hips removed surgically. My parents expected instant and total and permanent pain relief from a dislocated hip. (Replacement was not an option). The pain was excruciating and during a post-op appointment I must have been snappish with the doctor because my mom called me a five letter word rhyming with witch and I was sitting right behind

my parents at the time.

Sorry about the glitch. Cat walked on my keyboard.

I don't wish anything bad to happen to my parents. To forgive someone is one thing, but to forget something is another. When you are repeatedly told that you were sent away for 18 months for behavioral problems, you believe it. When you are told you were kicked out of school around kindergarden and then sent away, it's not something your proud of. I had tremendous emotional pain for much of my childhood, including flashback. Some of my friends have pointed out that my parents treated me like trash and one reported hearing my father screaming in the next room.

I recently learned that my parents lied about why I was sent away and about my being kicked out of school. I had my files from that time pulled to find the truth. My own psychiatrist would only give me the age and length of time spent there. Anything more, he feared, would push me over the edge. I know for a factor that even discussing my childhood sets me off. That surprise visit from my parents so upset me that when my mother called for a family meeting, the mental health staff kept news of it from me until discharge.

My father pushed me to sign a Power of Attorney form that he said was needed to help me with chronic pain...which I later learned he planned to use to forcibly institutionalize me, because the case manager had to explain things to him and that I had to be declared incompetant for them to make decisions for me.

They acted nice prior to the signing. Too nice, I realize in retrospect. My mother even promised to get me into a pain clinic "right away" if I would sign the forms. She said she would have pulled strings at work. (There is no such thing as "right away" in the Canadian medical system. I have waited years for a pain clinic. I will wait months to have a wheelchair replaced while my spinal curvature deteriorates.

I wrote to my sister because my sponsor and friend. (He's a deacon, but I also had a priest as a friend. The latter has transfered out of town and I will never see him again). He offered to help explain things to my sister. He's known me for seven years, and knows too about the isolating. But my sister didn't want to talk to "a stranger".

Once again it strikes me that my family is just as dysfunctional as when I was a kid and that my parents HAVE NOT CHANGED AS MY SISTER CLAIMS. Listening to the letter they sent my psychiatrist, it was like I was nine years old all over again, with them screaming to counsellors that nothing was wrong with them, I WAS THE PROBLEM....and the way they treated me has destroyed my life. I don't dare switch psychiatrists because my current one didn't obey my parents' request to put me away. With a new one, I might not be so fortunate.

I don't know why my parents want me institutionalized. It was THE thing to do to disabled people 30 years ago. My hydro bills have doubled since my parents pulled financial help. My mother's e-mail basically said: "We know you have rights but we don't care, we're punishing you for making the wrong choice." My father in particular is not happy unless he exercises complete and total control over my life, my friends even what I took at university. I am terrorized by human contact and my deacon friend has had to work with me to make new contacts.

Most of my friends are from Church and they cannot understand what my parents did to me. My friends are praying for things to be patched up in my family. But any contact with my parents has led to tremendous stress and tension at the very least and at worst, some have been blow-outs that have led to my hospitalization. With my depression as it now is, when I have a bad day, I want to kill myself.

My sister claims my family loves me. But there are things loving families don't do. Using pain to manipulate a family member is something medieval torturers did. I had real fears about who they were going to share that insight with, which is why I told my staff to stop co-operating with my parents, after a case manager phoned me, clearly concerned by what she was seeing. It was she who told me I had the right to tell my parents no. Rights my parents saw as a burden, after the good side of them taught me to fight for disabled rights.

I have recently learned of mental illnesses that lead to sufferers screaming at, lying to and manipulating family and friends at will for the most mundane reasons, like a get well card-or no reason at all. I feel there is much more that depression afflicting my family. But I am the only one with such insight. My parents wear one face for me and one for everyone else and heaven help me if I talk about my situation with a nurse, or if I don't gloss things over while our family self-destructs.

Any reason I have left for living is in my apartment. I would have had to forfeit all I owned and my cats, to go into a nursing home, including any control over my life. I would rather go to jail for a real crime commited that to a nursing home at my parents' demand. I am writing to my sister because I want some family contact, but she told me: If you are really interested in being less isolated, you'll write more. That's kind of telling someone: If you love me, you'll snap out of that depression.

I cannot defend myself if someone tries to take advantage of me. Isolation is my only defense, or the digital wall provided by the internet. The worst thing about what my parents did was my mother proclaiming how famillies stuck together no matter what. Over and over again, in a tone of voice that said "Be grateful that we are even helping you." And all the time, they were trying to institutionalize me 500 miles from the friends and life I had out here. I cannot trust my parents. I have learned that a family member can just as easily hurt you when you are disabled, as your worst enemy. It is easy enough for my sister to say "Forget the past." I am a physical and emotional wreck, the latter because of my parents' "loving care." To this day, I am still shocked when someone is kind to me and I fear I will go to Hell because of how my parents feel about me. I feel I have to walk on eggshells around my parents. I have feared them for decades. They have been Jeckyll and Hyde at best and when they were Hyde, my life was hell.

I am trying to save some family contact, but just dealing with these people, I run the risk of a nervous breakdown just by trying to figure out how "wonderful people" who "love" me could make me so miserable...and punish me so badly because I didn't imprison myself for life. Just that one thought is blowing out multiple brain cells, as is my sister's assertion that I will celebrate my parents' deaths. I may not break down crying, but that was something else I was yelled at for...crying frequently. In fact, I realize now I had all the warning signs of childhood mental illness and it wasn't recognized until I left home for good. I never knew what peace was until I became a Catholic and even now, that peace is fleeting. It sickens me to return home after Mass.