Countdown Clock (54 Days)

My topic for today is the bullying, ignorance & discrimination that those of us suffering from depression have to deal with sometimes on a daily basis.  I should also point out that it is quite possible that perfectly healthy people can be nulled by these tactics too but they at least are better able to respond.

As I state yesterday I had been living on my savings but they ran out almost a year ago.  I used to have a senior management position & a salary that recognised the responsibility I held.  This meant that I was a good credit risk & could literally have bought a flat on one of the credit cards I was offered.  However, this also meant when I ran out of money I had a few companies to whom I owed money.  When i realised what was happening I started contacting them to explain my situation, explain I was not shirking my responsibilities but just had no money left to service my debts.  One aspect of depression that often gets overlooked is anxiety, indeed current medical thinking is that the two are so closely linked as being both sides of the same coin.  Anyway, as my stress at my financial crisis rose my anxiety rose too & my depression sank.  This mean that by June last year I was unable to have a conversation with someone on the phone without starting to stammer very badly, then get very upset (often breaking down in tears) & ultimately hanging up as I was unable to talk.  This was not only difficult for me but also for the people I was trying to talk to on the other end of the line.  The fallout from these episodes was to send me to a state of paralysis for an hour or two.

However, I could still type & the benefit of typing was that whilst trying to speak & think coherently was difficult & then nigh on impossible when you add in stress I could type, go & make a cup of tea, come back, re-read what I had typed, correct it & rinse & repeat until it was logical & coherent.  So I started writing to all the organisations I either owed money to or had regular payments arranged.  I was surprised by the response or actually the lack of response.  As the weeks & then months passed it became clear that companies today are unable to process written communications.  Some of the more enlightened offered an e-mail address you could write to but not all of those addresses were actually checked so you were effectively shouting into the void.

The most shocking thing I found was that as my debts went unpaid the companies passed them onto to debt collection agencies, who I then wrote to explaining the situation.  None of them responded, indeed most ignored my letters & kept writing as if I was trying to shirk my responsibilities.  One particularly useless agency then passed matters to their solicitors to take me to court.  I wrote to the solicitors & enclosed copies of the correspondence I had sent to the agency.  Thankfully solicitors still read letters.  I found myself dealing with the agency again, who acknowledged that I had been trying to communicate them without admitting they had ignored me.

Where does the bullying come in?  Well, it is the tone of these letters they send out & the allegations contained within them.  I had another one this week on the day of the court case, which said that I was deliberately avoiding me but they had ascertained that I was still living at my address & if I continued to fail to respond to them they would bring the full force of the law down on me.  This company prides itself on its ethical policies.  Like all major companies it claims to not to discriminate against people on the grounds of ability.  The most telling facts are that I had first contacted them in June last year to explain my situation.  In the autumn my sister offered to phone companies on my behalf as they were ignoring my letters & she spoke to this organisation, explaining my situation & they accepted this & said they would send me paperwork to complete detailing my situation, financial circumstances, etc.  I received this paperwork (the size of broadsheet newspaper), completed it & sent it back. Just before Christmas I received another large form for my therapist to complete, although there was no covering letter, no explanation but I passed it on to my therapist anyway & she is going to have it ready for me next week.  So I am not sure in what way I am deliberately ignoring them.  As a footnote I have found that the companies that ignore letters will phone you daily (or even more often), so I got an answer phone message stating that I was unable to talk on the phone & please write to me & I will respond.  They still ignore this but if challeneged I can not only point to my written & electronic communications with these companies but also that my answer phone message states clearly what the situations & how they can contact me.  I suspect these muppets are ringing, ignoring the answer phone message & then writing threatening letters.  I have used their online feedback to complain about this particular instance of corporate stupidity & have yet to hear back from them (or even an acknowledgment that they have received my feedback).

This is a topic I could write about everyday for the next year & still not scratch the surface but apart from this one remaining company the others have finally accepted the situation & are all waiting for me to sell my flat so I can clear my debts but it did takes months to get them to understand the situation & only one had a process for dealing with people in difficulties because of illness.