Hi Everyone
A bit of history about me and the forum for those who are new and do not know it.
I live in a small village outside Helston, Cornwall UK in a very rural position. I.e. up an unmade track on a moor and my husband is a seaman who goes away for up to 3 months at a time.
I fell off my house in March 2003 big time and am now disabled on the higher rate disability. I do however still do a lot and while I am not currently working I am considering going back to teaching children who are disaffected from school, am applying to be a foster parent – something I have done privately 3 times before. I also run this site which does take a lot of time and I am involved in two other community projects/committees. I am also the local newspaper correspondent for this area and have had quite a few newspaper articles published – one made the nationals.
Recently I appeared in a Channel Five film for mental health week which you can download from here:
www.madforarts.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=34 Download Veritee Film
So you can see in person as it were and also film of my daughter which I took when she was younger.
I warn you that I found filming this very distressing i.e. reliving the PNI so I cry on the film – but I have never said I am an expert or objective and unemotional about this issue– just someone who knows how great this suffering can be.
Consequently I have been on the internet for a long time - before many in this country had ever heard of it. It has been a lifeline to me.
I was helped by the fact both my brothers were computer scientist/ programmers in the early days of the internet ( The older around 65 years old now helped to invent the PC as he attended the first Computer Science degree course at Cambridge in the 1960s and then worked for IBM, who invented the first PC based ie 86x type computer - the other did PHD research into the internet at the National Research Laboratory in Twickenham - on internet networks when it was in its early days of conception. he also worked with Bill Gates on one research project - ironically my younger sister who knows almost nothing about computers was until a month ago working for Bill Gates in England as she was the PR for MSN, and despite all this connection we prefer Linux and I doubt Bill Gates would know who either my brothers or my sister is, (despite she showed him round MSNs Londo Soho office in May) but if there is anything you do not like about MSN and Messenger - she is responsible and while she is now travelling for 6 months she will be back at MSN in about March if you want me to pass on your comments!
My brothers helped me to fix up my early internet connections. At first in the early 90s from around 1990, I had to connect direct to Bulletin Boards which were not HTML based as Hypertext mark-up language HTML had only been invented by Tim Berners - Lee in 1989 - actually the year of my daughters birth - and was not at that time used much outside of private networks
Bulletin Boards were in text only and needed a phone call directly to each bulletin board server, often in the USA. This was expensive but I was so isolated that it was an absolute lifeline. While there were a lot of Porn and other dubious BBoards there were self help and support ones also.
Around 1994 MSN offered one of the first internet ISP services and I joined this and actually became a Beta tester for this service. This was because I was one of the few to sign up in the UK and they needed to test this new service in Britain. (I am still a Microsoft Beta Tester)
I then joined a MSN forum called survivors, based in Toronto Canada , mostly for survivors of abuse but also for survivors of any mental distress. For a time I had an email support partner from Toronto I met on this forum who was a godsend to me. I have never met her and I guess now I never shall as one day she just ceased to reply to my mails and I shall never know why – but I owe her so much.
From then I started a Usenet group ie a newsgroups for women with PND and then eventually wrote my own website which included a forum about 1896 at first it included just a link to the Usenet newsgroup but then I put my own forum on the site around 1998.
The original UK based forum provider went out of business in August 2002 and I changed to the forum that is current now which as was pointed out is based in the USA while I am based in the UK hence the time difference or 6 hours.
( to fix go to your member profile and type in + 5 if you are in the UK)
So I have been on the internet and running a support group on PNI in one form or another since my daughter was about 4 ie over 10 years now.
However I have also done much ‘people work’ work also in that I worked as a youth worker in GLC London and then Cornwall from 1976. I qualified as a professional youth and community worker in 1980 at Roehampton Institute, London and later as a teacher, worked with distressed and disabled young people in Cornwall from 1987
I worked as a youth worker all the time I had PNI and only retired from this fully when I became disabled although I had by this time retained as a multimedia designer and was also lecturing in web design and digital imaging at a local college.
I guess if I had not been living so isolated when I had PNI, I may not have turned to the internet and this site may not have existed.
I was working half to ¾ time when I had PNI as a youth worker but I could hardly talk about the issues I was experiencing due to PNI at work and because my husband was a seaman for much of the time when I picked Caja up from nursery and later school after work we went home to an empty house where I only had my thoughts for company – and we all know what these thoughts can be about when you have PNI.
My computer and the internet provided the outlet I needed to tell others about these horrible thoughts about hurting my child, horrific accidents happening to us both etc etc and to let my feelings out
Well I am sure no one wanted this whole history but I thought it may help to get a bearing on where the forum is based and why it came about.
See my biography at
www.pni.org.uk/pnifram.htm. and my story under the stories section.
All the best
Veritee