Brilliant News!

Chipmunka is going to publish my book which is based on this Blog!  I have added quite a bit of extra stuff but it all came together because of this Blog, where it all seemed nice and neat and easy to add to. Previously, the writing book had seemed like too big a task.  But a Blog suited my conversational style and it just seemed to flow.  It will be out in paperback in 3 months.

A Betrayal of Trust

When I was waiting at home to have a visit from Dr Longton, my good friend Jimmy came to see me. He had a way of understanding what I was going though, I think because his step-dad had mental illness and was in hospital for a long time, he used to think he was Napoleon or Julias Cesear.  Jimmy knew that a psychiatrist was coming later, so he said that the next person who came to the house, I could trust.  He wrote this down on a piece of paper and after he had left, I sat holding the piece of paper and occasionally looking at it again for reassurance.

Dr Longton was the next person to come, so when he said that I should go into hospital, I immediately agreed.  Once I was at the hospital though, I did not see Dr Longton again for several days, and I was beginning to wonder if I was at the right place.  The fact that I was given a leaflet about the hospital and a map of a village near Birmingham which had the same name as the village where I was, and the pillow cases had "Doncaster Royal Infirmary" stamped on them, made me even more worried.   I did see him eventually and he put me on various drugs.

After I had been at the hospital for a couple of weeks, one of the nurses said that Dr Longton wanted to see me in the main building.  She did not say what it was about, but she took me there.  I opened the door to see that Dr Longton was in a lecture theatre, with an audience of medical students.  Straight away I felt awkward because I was so scruffily dressed and wearing slippers, while these people were all smartly dressed.  Dr Longton beckoned me to sit next to him, and he asked me some questions, to which I gave suitably psychotic answers.  I think the plan was to introduce me as an interesting case, show how mad I was, treat me with X and Y medication, and then invite me back some weeks later when I would be shown to have been "cured" or at least improved.

I was mortified to have been used and scrutinised in this way.  I felt like the elephant man.  I had not been asked for my permission to take part in any sort of study, and I did not like it at all.  When I was summoned again, I refused to go, which I hope messed up his stupid little display.

Later on I needed Dr Longton's help when Iain, Callum and I were trying to get rehoused.  We had moved from my first flat to a bigger, ground-floor one, but it was in a rough area and we kept getting burgled and the communal gardens and stairwells were occupied by gangs of teenage drinkers who were quite menacing.  Dr Longton wrote to our housing association saying that the environment we were living in was making me ill, and, as a result, we were classed as "category A" to be moved to a house.  We were offered a really lovely old 2-bedroomed house with a huge garden, in a very quiet area, and we jumped at the chance to move. A few years later though, when I was telling Dr Longton, thinking he could only have a positive reaction, that I had been going to Mass and was enjoying the social side of being part of a Church, he actually said, "If I'd have known you were a Catholic, I would never have helped you".  When I filled out my admissions form when I was first admitted to hospital, I somehow felt that I should not mention the fact that I had been raised a Catholic, so I put "no religion" as my reply to that question.  I have not felt comfortable about practising my religion ever since, and I no longer go to Mass.  It is unbeleivable that someone who is in such a position of power over the lives of so many people, should be prejudiced against any particular group, be it Catholics or black people or whatever.  Of course, he said this to me when we were alone, knowing full well that if I told anyone I would not be believed. 

A Hospital for Loonies

Perhaps the mental hospital itself could be seen as a character in my story.  Like most mental hospitals in Britain, it was Victorian, and quite grand-looking in an ugly, red-bricked sort of way.  There was always steam pouring out of various orifices in the building.  I don't know if the steam was coming from the kitchens or the ancient heating system, or both.  It used to make me think of a sleeping dragon puffing out smoke with each breath.  At the front of the building where all the offices were, was a grassed roundabout to drive around, and a few parking spaces.  There were lots of mature trees which made a carpet of leaves in the Autumn, which were fun to kick around.  There was always the sound of crows cawing, and I still find that this sound disturbs me, because of the memories it evokes.  In the grounds there was a small and very old church, where services of various denominations were sometimes held, with usually about 3 or 4 people in the congregation.  There is nothing worse than being in a tiny congregation and then realising that you are expected to sing a hymn!

There was a larger car park at the side of the building, and the staff social club, which reeked like a brewery.  Patients were not allowed in there.  At the back of the hospital there was a football pitch, but I never saw a match of any kind played there.  The grounds were, as I have already mentioned, quite massive, and you could do a very pleasant circular walk which would take in the nearby river and the fields of cows.  These grounds were open to the public so you would often see dog walkers and they were, as dog walkers usually are, very friendly and liked to stop and chat and would let you fuss their dogs.

The interior of the hospital had polished wood everwhere like a stately home, and the floors gradually sloped down to the various wards rather than there being stairs.  There was a shop which sold cigarettes and sweets, and a tea bar, in the centre of the main building, and there you would often see the poor long-term patients who had been badly affected by being on the older medications for many years.  Some of them had weird contorted faces, alarming facial tics, and limbs that moved around wildly, and many of them did what we called "The Loony Bin Walk", where their legs wobbled and they would do a kind of a "Heil Hitler" salute every other step.  They would mumble to themselves, or shout unintelligably, and ask you for cigarettes.  They were quite a tragic sight and I found it quite difficult to go to the main building because of this.  Bearing in mind that many of these people would have been incarcerated at a time when just being gay or having a child out of wedlock was enough reason to be committed, then what had become of them seemed even more awful.

The ward I was forced to call home for three months, was not part of the main building.  It was a self-contained annexe which had been built much more recently, in the 1960s. It was built in the shape of a cross, and this meant that the male and female dormitories could overlook each other, so a wall was built to offer more privacy.  One of my friends on the ward had thought, when he was ill, that this was the wall against which he was going to be shot at dawn by firing squad!

My ward was open to patients from other wards during the day, and a lot of them came over to play pool or just to hang out, because it was much larger and more open-plan than the others, which were quite claustrophobic.  The ceiling of the Games Room was high up and made of varnished wood, and bowed like an upturned boat.  It had huge double doors and long windows and at night the blackness outside could be quite creepy, or quite comforting, depending on how you were feeling.  The furnishings on the ward were very grotty, old armchairs with wee stains and big holes in the seats, low black coffee tables made grey with cigarette ash, and big oblong industrial ashtrays.  Sometimes a kind person would donate a stereo system, but these would not last long and the cassette doors would be missing and tapes regularly unravelled.  Usually only the radio part worked, and there would be rows over the volume or the choice of station.

The only time the ward looked presentable was when the inspectors were coming.  Then, framed Monet prints would appear on the walls, new pretty floral curtains would be put up, and new chairs would materialise, only to be taken away again once the inspection was over.  The ward was always cleaned every day though, the lino floors were mopped, the carpets were hoovered, and the brass knobs on the doors were polished.  The corrdors had side-rooms where you could be seen privately by doctors or nurses, and there was a laundry for the patients to use.  I found the bathrooms quite scarey places.  You had the feeling that diabolical things had gone on in them in the past.  The bath, a huge white enamelled monstrosity on metal legs, with old-fashioned brass taps, was in the middle of the room, and there was also a sink if you just wanted a strip wash.  There was always lots of hot water and you could have a long soak, but you didn't really want to stay in too long because the surroundings were so bare and clinical.  It was not very relaxing because you could hear people walking around in the corridor outside, and if you forgot to lock the door people would often burst in. Shower units were not added until years later, and everyone complained that they were too hot, but nothing was ever done about it.

The food arrived every day in massive silver-grey trolleys which were electically heated to keep the contents warm.  I have to say that the food was actually very good, for institution-type catering.  We had a cooked lunch, with fantastic stodgy puddings and custard, and then a tea which was usually soup and cold meats with salad and potatoes. The portions were very generous, and there was always a choice. The best meal was the roast Sunday lunch, the roast potatoes were delicious.  We used to queue up to get our meals, and some people used to find it amusing to say while we were waiting that the chicken or the beef or whatever was poisoned, and then hardly anyone would have it!  In the evenings, snacks were left out such as apples, small packets of biscuits and yoghurts, and you could always help yourself to toast, butter and marmalade or jam.

The ward used to smell of polish, mashed potato, and disinfectant.  It was similar to the smell of a primary school.  It probably did not seem like such a bad place to visitors, but being locked in anywhere is never very pleasant.  I often used to wonder what would happen if there was a fire and the person with the keys could not get to the doors, because the windows were designed only to open a few inches so that people could not escape, and they were made of toughened glass, so breaking them wouldn't be an option.  Louis did actually escape once by using a towel as a rope to climb up through a skylight and out onto the roof. He had a few pounds and a credit card on him, and he caught a bus to the next town, and spent a very pleasant weekend at a hotel watching movies and raiding the mini-bar.  If he had not decided to visit an ex-girlfriend, who called the police, he might have been at large for longer, maybe for good.  It was disappointing to see him brought back, a bit like at Colditz when someone did not make it to Switzerland. 

I was quite pleased to hear that the ward had been demolished to make way for a housing development.  If I had known when it was to happen, it might have been nice to go along and watch it being wrecked.  If only the attitudes of consultant psychiatrists and mental health workers could be just as easily torn down.

Mad to be Pregnant

The first time I was on a psychiatric ward I was just 29.  Like most women I hoped that one day I would have at least one child, but when I was told that I had Schizophrenia and would have to be on medication for the rest of my life, it dawned on me straight away that this would make a pregnancy very difficult, if not impossible.  All of the psychiatric medications pass over the placenta into the unborn child, and breast feeding is impossible.  When I talked about this to my parents, my Dad said that he would get me a puppy, but it was hardly the same.  I was so depressed over this.  I know a lot of women cannot have children and they have to come to terms with it, but this fact does not make it any easier when it affects you personally.

My diagnosis of Schizophrenia turned out to be wrong.  When I left hospital I felt so ill on modecate injections (I was not only zombified, but I had that awful inner restlessness which is a common side-effect) that I stopped having them. I then made a complete recovery, and was able to work full-time.  My consultant then admitted that he had been wrong about me, that I was more likely a "manic depressive".  The misdiagnois came about because of a student doctor constantly badgering me to admit that I had "heard voices".  I never had, but because I wanted to please these doctors who had the power to let me go home, in the end I said that I had.  The same doctor also asked me if I had been "high" when I was at College, prior to coming into hospital.  I thought she meant "high" on illegal drugs, so I said "absolutely not!".  On this very flimsy evidence my whole life was mapped out for me, I would be on medication for ever, or risk being ill and having to go through the whole dreadful hospital experience all over again.

Schizophrenics actually dream of being manic depressives, it is a much less serious diagnosis, and medication breaks, although frowned upon, are more likely to be possible.  So now it seemed that having a baby might actually be something I could think about in the future.

When I was 34 I met a lovely man who I knew almost instantly I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.  We are definitely soul mates. We got on so well that when people heard us laughing together, they said "I want some of whatever they are on"!  He was tall, blond, handsome, with an unusual red beard, and he had a wonderful gentle nature, as well as being a bit of a hippie and into mystical things.  Not only that, but he was half-Scottish, and I have always had an attraction to people with a Scottish connection.  I am pleased to be able to say that we are still together today, 18 years later.  We never bothered to get married because neither of us like the whole "wedding day" thing and consider it be be a waste of time and money.  All those hats and tears - yuk!

We did not exactly plan to have a baby, but after a romantic week at a holiday cottage in Scotland, I found that I was pregnant.  My son was the world's most wanted baby.  I was so happy, I could hardly believe it, and after everything I had been through, it was like a miracle, my miracle.

I had a psychiatric social worker at the time, and she had helped me to get my first ever home of my own.  It was a one-bedroomed flat which had just been built, and it so happened that Rebecca, my friend from hospital, was my next-door neighbour.  The communal gardens behind the flats backed onto open countryside, and so they were always full of birds, and roe deer were regular visitors.  There were unusual dark purple, and white poppies growing wild in the grass.  Next to the gardens there was a school playground and the happy sound of children playing was wonderful.  I used to love to sit at my desk writing poetry or letters, and looking out onto those gardens. 

Soon after I had moved into my flat, I told my social worker that I was pregnant.  Her reaction was not at all what I expected.  She was not happy for me, there was no "Congratulations", only "How on earth are you going to cope?"  My partner, Iain, had not moved in with me yet, and because of my mental health history, she thought I would never manage as a single mother.  I think that all expectant mothers probably worry about whether they will be a good parent, but to be told before I even had the chance to prove her wrong, that parenting was not for me, was quite devastating.  She even said, "You don't have to go through with it you know".  She had recently had a baby, but had gone back to work and was happy to leave the child with strangers all day.  I don't call that good parenting.  I know some mothers have no choice but to work, but she had a husband with a good job and had no reason to carry on working other than, selfishly, not wanting to give up her career.  I know this is an unpopular view to have, but young children need their mothers, or, at least, a parent, either the mother or father, should be at home, if only for the first five years.  Well if she wanted someone else to witness her child's first step or first word, I suppose that was up to her.  But she had a hell of a cheek to tell me I would not be a fit mother.

Without telling me what she intended to do, she filed a report with the children and families department at social services, with a recommendation that my unborn child be put on the "At Risk " register. This meant that a social worker in that department had to do a very detailed study about my family circumstances.  The main worry was what would happen to the child if I had to go into hospital.  My parents and Iain's Mum were interviewed as well as Iain and myself.  It was a very stressful process to go through.  Fortunately, Dr Longton was prepared to help me, and he wrote a letter saying that as far as he was concerned, there was no need for my child to be on the At Risk register.  Without his input, the outcome might have been different, but the final report agreed with him.  It was so awful for there even to have been an implication that my child would be in any sort of danger, even before I'd had a chance to prove that I could be a good mother.  I was lucky that Dr Longton liked me.  (When I was in hospital he said to my Dad, "We are all thinking that, if a nice person like Anne Brian is Schizophrenic, then we ALL want to be Schizophrenic".)

I also had a CPN at the time who was really nasty.  When I told her I had given up smoking, and was reading books about child development, she said "So you think you're the perfect mother, do you?"  My parents made a complaint about her

Up until the seventh month of my pregnancy, I had been completely medication-free. However, all of this unwelcome attention from social services took its toll, and, inevitably, I had a "breakdown".  I had also had problems at my flat because most of the other tenants were only there temporarily, and they used to have loud music on and parties late into the night, and someone actually slashed all the tyres on my car.  I also used to have my milk stolen all the time and parcels left by the postman were taken too.

My partner, Iain, moved in with me then, but I did spend a few days in hospital which was terrible because I had quit smoking for the baby's sake, but there was nowhere to go on the ward which was not full of smoke.  People even smoked in the non-smoking areas.  At least Dr Longton realised that it was not a good place for me to be, and I was not sectioned or made to stay.  He had previously prescribed tablets for me, but I refused to take them because they looked like Ativan, and in the past I had a terrible time with withdrawal symptoms when I came off it. I also was not keen for my baby to be born addicted to Ativan.  Dr Longton said that the tablets he had recommended were Ativan under a different name.  They are often used in pregnancy because they do not stay in the blood for long and therefore are supposed to have less effect on the foetus than other drugs.  When I explained my misgivings about Ativan, he said that I could have a low dose of Clopixol, in tablet form, instead.  It was such a low dose that it did not really have much of an effect on the way I was feeling, and I did not really get well again until after Callum was born.

My labour was long and difficult, but it was wonderful to hold my baby in my arms.  Iain was there with me, and afterwards he looked as tired as I did.  Callum was delivered by a lovely big black midwife, he weighed nine pounds and he was born at 9pm.  I did not expect to have such a big baby, so all of his first baby-grows were too small. I was not able to breast feed him because of having medication in my milk, but he thrived on formula milk. He was a gorgeous baby, at first his hair was dark like mine but it went blond later, and he had lovely blue eyes.  When he was little he was full of fun and an absolute joy to play with.  I never tired of playing with him, and I had a great book called "How to Entertain a Toddler" which suggested doing interesting things like going on a train journey or things you could make together.  We both hated "Teletubbies", which was a big disappointment and not nearly as good as Playdays, which had been in that TV slot previously.

When Callum was seven we took him out of school and home educated him.  He is a very bright and talented boy, and he found school frustrating and boring.  He used to hide his shoes so that he would not have to go.  He is 16 now and doing a diploma in Creative and Media at our local FE College.  He is heading for a "distinction". He is an accomplished pianist, and writes pieces of his own.  He goes horse-riding every weekend, and he's a great swimmer now, although he used to hate school swimming lessons.  He has already written a novel and has begun a second one.  He is planning to go to film school, and he would like to be a screenwriter.  He was chosen to interview Kate Humble for the Radio Times "Kid's Special".  He is very interested in birds and all wildlife, and he's vegetarian.  I am so proud of him!  He is a lovely lad and wherever he goes, people love him.  He's the bright star in my life that makes all of my past suffering not matter any more.

Mental Health Professionals

I have already touched upon my views of clinical psychiatrists.  In the very hierarchical mental health system, they are treated by their minions like omnipotent gods, they are never questioned and never have to question themselves.  My parents called Dr Longton "The Big Cheese", and that's the way he is seen and the way he sees himself.

Now I would like to turn to the other professionals who work in the mental health system, the psychiatric nurses, and psychiatric social workers.  All of these people believe in the "chemical imbalance" theory (it has yet to be proven).  As a result, like the psychiatrists, they do not think it is wise for patients or ex-patients to even attempt to stop their medication.  This is considered heresy.  In fact, even wanting to try to come off medication is seen as a sign of "illness" in itself.   Dire warnings are issued about "becoming unwell again" and this is enough to make most people in this situation keep taking their drugs.

The fact is that when people do try to come off their drugs they are usually advised by their psychiatrist or GP to reduce the dose a lot quicker than even the drug manufacturers advise.  This can cause severe withdrawal symptoms, which mimic the original sympoms of the "illness", and so the person thinks the doctors were right all along, they do need the drugs to stay well.  They start taking them again and the unpleasant symptoms go away and everyone is happy, not least the drug companies.

I have never met a mental health professional who did not adhere to this theory that drug therapy should be constant and continue for a life-time.  This is inspite of the fact that the side-effects of long-term use are known to be extremely disabling, such as facial tics, jerky and unnatural movements and so on.  (Imagine that your tongue suddenly shot out of your mouth every few minutes, how would this affect your life?)

Before I get on to the subject of psychiatric nurses I have known who really should not be in that job, I should point out that I have also known nurses who were angels and who really did care about their charges.  I have already mentioned Chris the night nurse who was a wonderful person, and there were a few others who were almost as wonderful.  So don't let me give you the impression that all of them were evil!  But some of them were.

I don't think it is appropriate for a nurse looking after psychiatric patients to have 2-inch long fingernails painted black.  This particular nurse admitted to me that it was her way of scaring disturbed patients into obedience.  It is not appropriate for a nurse to say in reply to an innoccent enquiry about what time it is, "It's midnight - the witching hour" in a creepy voice.  It is also not at all funny to call someone a "whore" while half-disguising it as a cough.  And for a nurse to interview you ostensibly about your problems, but then use this as an opportunity to off-load all of her problems about having to care for an invalid mother and struggling to pay the mortgage, is so selfish and unkind.

Sometimes the worst nurses were young agency nurses who were enjoying their first taste of power.  There was a young man who was always picking on me and deliberately saying weird things to unsettle me.  For example, he said he had something to show me and he took me to see a picture which was hanging in the nurses' office.  It was one of those strange pencil drawings of a building where the stairs go around and around but do not actually go anywhere.  I don't know who it was by, I am not very well up on artists.  He let me look at the painting for a while and then he said, "It's a bit like your predicament, isn't it?" 

The first time I was on my usual psychiatric ward, there was a good atmosphere where the patients were kind to each other.  However, when the ward manager's job had been taken over by a particularly unpleasant woman, the atmosphere became one of bullying and teasing.  The nurses teased and bullied the patients and so they were like this to each other.  It was not unusual to be kicked or slapped by another patient, and if you told a member of staff they did not believe you.

There was a particularly horrible male nurse who, after I had been forcibly injected with drugs in the usual rape-like way, got a kick out sidling up to me and whispering "I was there".  He used to be a cook in the hospital but then decided to train to be a nurse because of the opportunities for sexual harrassment.

There was a night nurse who was a bitch and everyone hated her.  When Peter, a patient who she knew had no family or friends to look out for him, staggered up to the night medicine trolley in a daze, with his pyjama bottoms undone and accidentally exposing himself, she called him "disgusting", and followed this with a tirade of abuse.  The next day, Peter walked down to the railway line and took his own life.

During one of my stays on the ward I had extremely blistered feet.  But because I was on numbing medication, I did not realise how sore they really were.  So when a male nurse asked me if I would like to go for a walk, I jumped at the chance because I had been indoors for days.  On the way back, my feet started to hurt like hell, even through the medication, so I must have really been damaging them.   I was walking like a cripple, wincing with every step, and my nurse escort said, "Well, we all have to do a bit of penance now and then, don't we, Anne?"

I don't think they did it on purpose, but the nurses did not seem to be aware that the numbing effect of the medications they made you take, meant that your lips could not feel if a drink or food was too hot to swallow.  They often gave patients scalding hot drinks of chocolate, and the puddings they served up were always covered in extremely hot custard.  I have a friend who even now, years later, likes to drink her tea cold, because of the experience of waking up in the morning with a severely burnt throat (and probably oesophagus) which she did not feel until the night medication wore off.  I often had to run to the loos and drink gallons of cold water because I had eaten or drunk something too hot.  It is something which is indicative of the lack of consideration or thought which is often manifest among the staff.  I was always given antibiotics which are supposed to be taken with food, on an empty stomach, which renders them useless.  When I was eventually aware enough to point this out to a nurse, she shrugged and said, "well, you can always help yourself to some milk", but there was never any milk left in the evenings, and anyway, it was not up to me to make sure I was taking medicines correctly.

It may seem like a nasty comment here and there is a trivial thing, but when a person is going through a mental health crisis, such comments can cause sleepless nights, increases in medication, and a great deal of suffering. 

Some nurses are cruel by omission, by the things they don't bother to do, like talking to patients and trying to make their time in the ward a little more bearable by taking an interest in them.  It is very easy to do very little during a shift.  I knew one nurse who would literally sit on a chair doing nothing for the whole of his shift, if he possibly could.  I have also often seen two nurses playing Scrabble or cards with each other - what is the point of this?  Why bother to do courses and get qualifications if in the end you just ignore the people you are supposed to be helping?    

Complaints made by mental health service users are never, but never, taken seriously.  Nurses know this, and they therefore can get away with anything.  Angels or devils, they can be whatever they want to be, and nobody cares, least of all the consultant psychiatrist, who will not have a bad word said about them.

Community Psychiatric Nurses were nurses who visited patients at home once they were discharged.  These days it is more usual just to call CPNs and Psychiatric Social Workers "Mental Health Workers" and they can come from a nursing or a social work background.  My CPN was a man and he used to come to my home to give me the injections of modecate which I was told I would have to have for "at least five years" (this was like a death sentence, as modecate zombies are the living dead).  For these injections, we used to go into the bedroom, and, because the female nurses did it like this in the hospital, I would lie on the bed with my trousers down, exposing my whole bum, to have the injection.  It was only later, when I had the injections at a clinic, that I realised the injections could be given with me standing up and just exposing a tiny part of my buttock.  Why did this male CPN let me undress and lie down like this every time, without telling me it was not necessary?  Perks of the job I suppose!

After I was discharged form hospital my Social Worker suggested that I might like to have a look at a hostel in Oxford, as an alternative to living with my parents.  She drove me to the hostel but left me there on my own for the whole afternoon while she went shopping in Oxford.  When she picked me up the back seat of her car was full of shopping bags from Harvey Nicks and Laura Ashley.  She said that she did not really want to be a social worker, but she was studying accupuncture.  She also got me to visit people I had met on the ward who she said were "lonely and needed cheering up".  So I was like an unpaid social worker myself.  And I did not really want to be one either.

I was taken to do my weekly food shopping by a social worker who on the way dropped off some clothes for her son who had been to a party the night before and needed some clean stuff to wear.  She parked illegally and left me in the car while she did this.  She was gone for ages and a vicar came out of a nearby church to tell me off for parking there.  Once we were at the supermarket she did her own shopping at the same time.  She was being paid for looking after me as well as getting a petrol allowance, while she just did her own thing.

But on a more positive note, I did eventually find a lovely social worker who was completely dedicated and she helped me enormously, even coming to my son's school with me to talk to the headmaster about problems we were having.  She was the social work equivalent of Chris the wonderful night nurse.  But unfortunately, as is often the way, because she was so exceptional, she was promoted to head of department and I lost her as my worker.  Now she spends most of her days in meetings where she is, in my view, wasted.

My most recent social worker is a kind person and she works hard too, but for some reason she would not let go of my case when I said I no longer needed support.  When I said I did not want any more appointments, she wanted me to phone her every week to let her know how things were going.  I did not see why I should "report in" like this, so I did not bother, and then she started turning up at my house without an appointment.  In the end I had to involve the abovementioned head of department to get her to leave us alone!  I think that because by then I was home educating my son, she and her immediate boss were worried that if I was not looking after him properly, there were no teachers in our life to notice this.  If this is the case, it is extremely insulting to say the least.  She also did not seem to understand how autonomous home education works, and she thought because we did not do "school-at-home" (sitting at a table with work books - yawn!) that he was not getting an education.  Well he's 16 now and at FE college doing brilliantly, so there Miss Busybody!!

I will be talking about psychiatric social workers again later when I tell the story of what it is like to be pregnant when you have be labelled "mentally ill".  You will not believe what they put people through, just because they want to be like everyone else and have a child.

How I came to be on the ward

Perhaps now I should turn to my own story, how I came to be living on a psychiatric ward.  I think my descent into madness began when I became involved with a man who was not only an alcoholic but also a compulsive liar.  I could be kind and say that Mike suffered from low self-esteem, but actually he was just a bastard.  I met him in a local pub and we got talking and I happened to mention where I worked.  He phoned me there and got chatting to a lady who worked on reception and for a few weeks he tried to get off with her by hanging out at the pub where she worked in the evenings.  She saw right through him straight away and did not believe any of his boasting about being a pilot, a radio DJ (at a made-up station that was of course too far away to get a signal), having a Ferrari on order, losing £80,000 in the stock market crash, and so on.  The fact that he drove a battered old Volvo estate and lived in a grotty flat with hardly any furniture should have been a clue, but when he turned his attentions to me, as I had been brought up not to lie, I thought everyone was the same and I believed everything he told me.  I was in my late 20s and I should have known better.  He even lied about his age, and knocked off 10 years.  Paul said I had been "naieve in the extreme", but many people he knew were taken in by him.  He was able to talk knowledgeably about flying as if he really was a pilot because he had built and flown model aircraft. Sometimes a young man would come up to him in a pub and ask him to play a tape of their band on the radio.

The main thing that attracted me to Mike was the fact that he made me laugh, and I was very much into drinking to excess and so was he.  He was very out-going and wherever we went we made friends, whether it was in a pub, or on a walk in the park, or on a package holiday. Being drunk most of the time can really cloud your judgement, and after a year or so we got married.  He said that he had ordered a one-off engagement ring which he had designed himself, but, of course, the jewelers went bust and he lost his money.  I actually bought my own wedding band. 

The wedding itself would have been funny if it had not been so tragic.  It was December.  I wore a scarlet Laura Ashley evening gown. Mike had not even booked the registry office until a few days before the date we had given to the guests, but he got a cancellation which was at a different time - 10am - and I had to phone everyone to tell them.  He was supposed to have booked a reception at a nice rural pub, but on the day he made up some story about the pub landlord letting him down.  So all the guests came back to my parent's house and my Mum had to get all of the Christmas food out of the freezer to feed everyone.  It was her worst nightmare, having the house unexpectedly decended on by a crowd of people who needed to be fed.  His parents did not come to the wedding because he did not invite them.  He told me his father was ill so they couldn't make it.  He was worried that if his parents met mine, all of his lies would be found out. They did not know we were married until they saw the ring on my finger. Once we were married. Mike started to get violent and in the end, in fear for my life, I left him.

Before I met Mike I had been offered a place on a Sociology degree course at Kingston Polytechnic.  I completed one year of the course and then took a year out because Mike had a heart attack.  It was a mild one and he made a full recovery, but went straight back to heavy drinking and almost chain-smoking as soon as he got out of hospital.  We were evicted from our flat and it transpired that he had not made a single payment of rent since we moved in.  I was working and I used to pay for all of our day-to-day living expenses.  Mike used to pretend that he had a job.  He would get up early, put on a suit, take a train to London and spend all day in a wine bar boasting about his imaginary wealth.  He also had two affairs that I know about and probably more that I don't know about.

After leaving Mike I went back to College to start the second year of my course.  One of my subjects was Research Methods, and through Mike I had found out about Alcoholics Anonymous and been to a few meetings with him.  I decided to do a project about them, but I wanted to do covert research and not tell them.  I had some daft idea about writing some sort of literary masterpiece.  It is actually quite a serious matter to break confidentiality if you are a member of AA.  My Research Methods teacher was so concerned about me doing this that he would not supervise me.  He said that it would be a "dangerous" thing to do, and that I should instead go back to my place of work and study social attitudes with a questionaire.  I was so determined though, to do the AA project, that I found a lecturer who would supervise me, and went ahead.

While I was attending AA meetings, I became confused about why I was there.  I thought that I was an alcoholic, and I used AA and my AA friends as an important prop.  I became a much stronger person with their help, and I remember arguing with my Comparative Religion teacher that AA was actually a religion to me and to many people.  He said that it was just therapy for a particular problem. but I did not see it that way.  I found all the talk of "a higher power" very compelling and, for me, attending AA meetings was more like going to church.

Somehow, someone at AA found out that I was there to do covert research, and they were understandably not at all happy about it.  At AA meetings, there is always a sign on the table "What you see here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here".  They arranged a "shunning", which looked like an ordinary meeting when I arrived, but the speaker did a long speech about honesty.  Then a young girl came up and did a talk about how she was doing a project about AA with their blessing, but was only attending the "open" meetings which non-members are allowed to go to.  At the end of this I was ready to fall apart, I felt so guilty. Then one of the members said, "Does the room feel cold, Anne?"  I then blurted out the whole story and said I was sincerely sorry.  I was in floods of tears, and afterwards my friend Dave spoke to me and he was obviously not at all comfortable with the way they had treated me, because I had not even written a single word of the project yet, and I was unsure whether I would actually go through with it.  Dave told me to "keep your College life and your AA life separate", but I felt as though my prop had been kicked away.

I found this experience of the "shunning" extremely disturbing, it was the last straw, after having such a difficult and stressful life with Mike, and then the added pressure of a degree course with essay deadlines, and living in a strange town where I always seemed to have the problem of looking for somewhere decent to live on a small budget, and, overnight, I went insane.

When a psychosis happens, it is like not being in this world at all.  You are in a world all on your own, where trivial things have great significance, where your senses are heightened, where you see and hear things which are not there, and you have an overwhelming feeling that you are in some kind of grave danger.  I went to my last AA meeting feeling like this, and because of the strange things I was saying, the people there were worried about me and someone offered to drive me home in my car while his friend followed us in his car.  They said "You're just having a very bad rock-bottom".  When we got to the shared house I was living at with other students, I could not go inside, I felt very scared and as soon as I was in the car on my own, I drove off like a mad thing, wheels spinning.  I ended up on Putney bridge and at traffic lights there I started deliberately bumping into other cars.  Somebody called the Police and they came in a riot wagon - for little me!  I sat in the Police van with a policeman either side of me, each of them holding a wrist, and four other policemen looking on.  I kept asking them to let go but they wouldn't.  They took me to a police station where I had fingerprints and blood taken to see if I was on drugs or alcohol.  As the tests were negative, I was not charged with anything, and after seeing a doctor, I was taken all the way to my parent's house, some 80 miles away, in a police car.  I quite enjoyed the journey, the car was very comfortable, and they drove very fast.  I was still in my psychotic world though, and I saw an armoured knight on a horse trotting along the hard-shoulder of the motorway.

It was just a week or so before Christmas, and my parents had to go out to get the turkey they had ordered, from a local farm.  I got confused and thought that I was the Christmas turkey, that I was going to be killed and eaten!  I ran away across country, and threw away my glasses (because they contained transmitters) and took off my shoes, socks, and trousers.  After running for several miles, with feet that were cut to ribbons,  I came upon a pub, and went in wearing just a T-shirt and knickers.  The landlord gave me a skirt to wear, and called the police.  I was taken to a police station, where they locked me in a cell.  I thought that they were going to gas me.  For some reason when I am unwell I always have a fear of gas.  I was too scared to give them my name, so I spent a long time in that cell.  A social worker came to talk to me but I thought if I told her my name I would be killed.  Then a fax came through to the desk sergeant, which had my description on it as a missing person.  My parents had reported me missing.  My Dad came with a friend to pick me up, and that evening, Dr Longton came to our house and said I should go into the psychiatric ward straight away.  I agreed to go, so I was a voluntary patient. I had to wait hours for an ambulance to take me.  All the way there I was chatting to the ambulance men in a completely lucid manner.  Psychosis comes and goes, you go in and out of madness.  That's why I think that the intervention of a caring person to talk you back to sanity would be a much better option than brain-disabling drugs.

I arrived at the ward quite late in the evening, and I had to fill out an admissions form and have a medical.  Women also have to give a urine sample to make sure they are not pregnant (this would affect the choice of drugs).  I was getting along very well with Val, my key nurse, and I think she was wondering why I was there as I seemed pretty normal.  However, she went off duty without explaining to me that she had to go, and the night nurses were very scary.  One had a cast in her eye and a very lined face with a mean expression, and the other was so tall and thin she looked freakish.  They were not friendly at all, did not want to talk to me, and when they tried to make me take tablets I refused.  After a lot of badgering I did take them, but then I thought better of it and went to the loos and made myself sick.  I kept saying "Don't kill me, please don't kill me", but instead of making any attempt to reassure me that I was not in danger, that this was a hospital, and that I was quite safe, the nurse I was talking to totally ignored my distress, turned to her colleague and said, "I'm going for me fag break".

Over the next few days the ward drove me a lot more mad than I needed to be.  The worst part about it is the frustration of being locked in and not even being allowed out alone to get any fresh air, and there is never a staff member available to go out with you.  If you want to go for a walk with a nurse, there are always six other people that want to come, and it takes 30 minutes before everyone has got their shoes and coats, and you're just about to go when someone else says. "Are you going for a walk?  Can I come along?" so then you have to wait even longer.  When you are used to having been an autonomous adult with the freedom to come and go as you please, it is maddening to be treated like a child.  You can also never get away to a quite corner by yourself, there are people everywhere.  The frustration gets you to a point where you want to scream.  I think a psychiatric unit is one of the most stressful environments there is.  Imagine 30 mad people all locked in together.  The fact that anyone ever gets well enough to leave is nothing short of a miracle, a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.

After several days of refusing medication and a few escape attempts, I lost my voluntary status.  This makes an enormous difference to your life on the ward, because not only are the nurses nicer to voluntary patients, but also once you are "sectioned" (held under section 3 of the mental health act), you can be forcibly injected with drugs.  This would be a frightening experience for anyone, but for a mad person it is like being raped.  Two nurses get you into a special arm-lock where you can't move because it's painful to try, they frog-march you down to your bed, force you to lie face down, your jeans are ripped off and you are sat on while a needle is jabbed into your glutious maximus.  I still do not know what drug I was given, but I was out cold on my bed for 24 hours.  This does not make you more compliant because the drugs help, but because it is such an unpleasant experience that you will do anything to avoid having to go through it again.       

So that is the story of how I came to be living on a psychiatric unit under a "section".  I hope that it never happens to you!

Other Patients I Grew to Love

There were also lots of people on the ward who I did not really get to know all that well, so my accounts of their stories will be brief.  I was so fond of all of them, and missed them when they left.

Billy had been unwell, in a psychotic (mad) state, for almost two years, living in a van and travelling all over the south of England.  In the end he was stopped by the police and they discovered that he was in need of hospitalisation.  I can't imagine what it must have been like to be unwell for that long.  Billy was very kind to me when I first arrived, so I did not mind sitting with him for hours getting him to imagine nice things such as, a robin in the snow, children laughing, the moon on a cloudless night, and so on.  It helped him with his strange thoughts to push them out with pleasant things. He was the middle child in his family, and his brother and sister were both high-fliers in their respective fields.  This made him feel a bit of a failure I think, as he never really had a career of any sort.  He was very good at photography though.  Later on when we were both at home, we went to Spain together on a package holiday.  But I never felt as though I knew him really, he was a bit hard to read.  He was put on very strong anti-psychotics, by depot injection (in the gluteous maximus) as his diagnosis was Schizophrenia.  He used to go around without "SENAKOT" written on his hand in biro, to remind him to take it.  One of the side effects of some of these drugs is severe constipation.  It seems that they slow everything down, even bodily functions.

Barbara looked too young to be on the unit, and she was very young in her ways too.  I think she had a learning disabilty as well as mental illness.  On the day she arrived she was very upset when her parents left, so I put my arm around her and let her sob on my shoulder.  After that, she seemed to think of me as her own personal nurse, and she followed me around everywhere, even leaning over me at night and waking me up with a start.  I had to have extra sleeping tablets to get any rest when she started bothering me at night.  Eventually I had to tell her to go to a nurse, that I was only a patient like her and I had my own problems, but it was weeks before she finally got the message.  Then she wanted me to be her "best friend".  She was very sweet really, and so unhappy on the ward. I don't know why she was in there, she seemed pretty coherant to me.  One day Paul took her for a walk, and he got into trouble because they went in a "borrowed" rowing boat on the river, and she got really bad sunburn because her drugs made her extra sensitive to UV rays.   

Mark was a strikingly handsome young man, who said that he was Jesus.  Looking into his beautiful, bright blue eyes, I could have believed him.  He had long light brown hair just like Jesus, but no beard.  He used to like to massage the feet of any willing females, with baby lotion.  We used to queue up!  After 3 months on the ward he hardly looked like the same person.  A combination of the metabolism-slowing drugs he was on, and sleeping until three in the afternoon out of boredom, had made him extremely overweight, and he had a bad back because of the extra weight he was having to carry around.  He used to hobble around with his hands clutching the small of his back, like an old man.  He was a brilliant artist, and on the wall of the gents' toilets he painted a fantastic depiction of the crucifixion, complete with brooding clouds and Roman guards and Mary and Peter at the foot of the cross.  The reaction of the nurses was simply to make him wash it off "because it might disturb the other patients".  I think they should have at least got someone to take a photo of it first.

June was an alcoholic. She had come into the ward to try to get off the booze, because she had almost died after a particularly huge binge.  I really do not think that a psychiatric ward is a suitable place to detox and to accept that you have to give up drinking for life.  She was on antabuse tablets which make you violently sick if you drink alcohol.  However, after every single home leave she went on, she arrived back at the ward totally inebriated.  There is hardly any counselling to be had, and I don't know how a person is supposed to get the the root of the problem, the reason why they drink, in such a drug-oriented system. 

Mary walked with a pronounced limp, and I asked her what was the matter with her leg.  She said, "I had a virus and it affected my muscles".  In actual fact, there was nothing wrong with her leg.  She had been on the ward for 7 months, perhaps because no amount of reasoning could persuade her that she had a perfectly healthy leg.  In the end she went home, still limping.  She was very kind to me when I had food poisoning on the ward.  It had been mixed grill for tea, and about an hour afterwards I started to have a terrible stomach ache.  A nurse said that I had "probably just eaten a bit too much", but later on I was violently sick and this carried on for the whole of the night, even after my stomach was empty and I was just bringing up bile.  Mary brought me a jug of iced water.  I wonder if her psychiatrist had gone along with the poorly leg idea, and given her sugar pills for it, or even put it in a splint for a while, she might have felt that he was on her side and then he could have said, "Look, it's all better!"  Sometimes these psychiatrists just have no imagination.

Edna was an elderly lady who had suffered her first "breakdown" when her husband died.  They had no children and they had been together since she was just 16.  You can imagine how devastating this would be for anyone.  Because she was elderly and therefore prone to get worse side-effects from medication, she was prescribed Electro-Shock Therapy.  She rapidly went from being a very smart and tidy lady, to someone with unkempt hair and a tendency to wander around naked.  I remember one night in particular when she was being just a bit troublesome to the staff, insisting that she did not want to go to bed or to take her sleeping pills.  The nurses do not like people to be up in the night, because it means that they themselves do not get any sleep.  They always make up beds using armchairs put together and with their nursing capes for blankets. So they are actually being paid for sleeping.  A nurse decided that to stop Edna from wandering around the ward, she would barricade her into one room with chairs, and with herself stationed at the door to make sure Edna did not escape.  After a while Edna said that she needed the toilet, but the nurse would not let her out of the room.  Eventually the inevitable happened, and Edna peed herself.  The nurse got very angry at this point and called her "disgusting".  In fact, this particular nurse used to call almost everyone "disgusting" at some time or another.   She just did not seem to like us, and I wonder what she was doing in that job, which is not particularly well-paid, except that perhaps she enjoyed the power and being able to be mean to people without reproach.  If mental patients complain, they are never, ever believed.  Most do not complain because they are worried about repercussions.  A vindictive nurse could quite easily lie and say you had been behaving strangely and should not be discharged yet, for example.  It therefore pays to have the nursing staff on your side.  I spent a lot of time trying very hard to make friends with the nurses, because they have so much power, as they report to the consultants about your day-to-day progress.  You only see your consultant once a fortnight so they depend quite heavily on nurses' reports.

Margaret, or Mags as she like to be called, had anorexia and she had been sectioned to make her gain weight because she had been not far from death at only 6 stone.  She had to get up to a more healthy weight before she could be discharged, and she eventually complied because she wanted to go home.  However, the eating disorder had not in any way been cured, or her problems addressed, and so when she went home she immediately went back to her starvation regime.  She used to leave chocolate bars on my pillow, and she liked to watch other people eat.  I remember one night hearing her screaming "NO! NO!" because she was being force-fed.  I had thought that sort of treatment had gone out with the suffragettes, but it seems they can do almost anything to a person an a section, "for their own good".

Jon had a neurological disorder of some kind, most likely caused by long-term medication.  He had a very strange, robotic, way of walking.  I found seeing him quite disturbing because it fitted in with some of my current "mad" conspiracy theories about what they were doing to people on the ward.  Someone told a nurse that they had seen Jon and I walking hand in hand and that we had gone off into the bushes together. This was a total fabrication, but the nurse believed it and gave me a lecture about "inappropriate emotional attachments".  The more I insisted that it was untrue, the more convinced she seemed to be that there was "something going on". 

Anna was a "free spirit" type.  She had five children, each one with a different father.  She had been discharged previously, but the mini she was travelling home in was involved in a very bad accident, and she found herself back on the ward, in a wheelchair with broken legs.  She told me one weekend that one of her teenage sons was trying out LSD, with her blessing.  She said, "He'll only try it anyway and I would rather he did it somewhere safe".  She got very cross one day when there was veal on the menu, and made almost everyone refuse to eat it.  One evening I went to the nearby pub with her, and a very strange thing happened.  Just as we were opening the door to the bar, somebody got angry and smashed an ashtray, and shards of glass flew everywhere, and one hit me on the lens of my glasses.  If I had not been wearing glasses I might have been blinded.  We felt so disturbed by this that we could not stay long, and Anna phoned Chris, the night-nurse, who came down on his bike to walk us back to the ward.  I am not sure what was supposed to be wrong with Anna, because she never seemed "mad" in any way.  Chris was one of the better nurses, and he treated us like human beings.  If we wanted to go to the pub he did not see it as his place to try to stop us.  I remember one night when I had not been on the ward long, I was very unwell, feeling as though my blood was on fire as my whole nervous system was in a state of collapse, Chris sat by my bed all night long, gently holding my hand.  All the patients loved him, and when he was on duty there was a relaxed and caring atmosphere on the ward.  He was quite an accomplished guitarist, and would often play for us. Amazingly, he had never met Dr Longton, their paths had never crossed because they worked such different hours.

Robert was a fantatic artist, he could draw almost anything in a few minutes.  His eyes darted around all the time.  He used to draw things like leopards and tigers, completely from memory.  I got him to draw a picture from a photo of my partner, Iain, playng the penny whistle in the woods.  He asked me to pay him a fiver for the drawing, and he did quite a few commissions for other people too. He lost the power of speech and used to communicate by writing in a notebook or sometimes sign language.  He had been brought up by parents who were strict Jehovah's Witnesses.  From a young age, he had been led to believe that the world was going to end soon, and he was terrified of armageddon.  He had a problem with numbers.  If he was going to visit his ex-wife, for instance, he would have to drive past her house exactly fifteen times before he pulled up.  He fell in love with a lady on the ward, Jess, and wanted to marry her and have a family.  He had two children with his first wife, but she had made sure that he did not have much to do with them, and he wanted another chance to have children and to be more involved in their lives.  He confided his feelings and hopes to a nurse, who immediately suggested that he should not marry Jess because she was Schizophrenic and so the children would probably be as well.  "You don't want to bring people into the world who will suffer the way you have", she said.  What a Nazi!  There is no scientific evidence to support a genetic or biological origin for mental illness.  Researchers have been trying to find such evidence for years and keep drawing a blank.  And even if they did have an increased chance of having children with mental illness, would we have wanted to rob the world of such people as Van Gough and Tchiacovsky?  There seems to be an unwritten consensus among mental health professionals that it would be better if people with mental illness did not breed, or pass on the as yet un-discovered faulty gene that is supposed to cause their illness.  Robert never did marry Jess, he took the advice to heart, and he never had another family.

The Gang of Four

Having introduced Rebecca, Louis, and Paul, perhaps it would be good to tell you about the things we got up to.  Someone once said that on a psychiatric ward, the doctors are the Daddies, the nurses are the Mummies, and the patients are the Naughty Children.  And that's what it can be like.

Our little gang met up every morning after breakfast and the Community Meeting, and we would either sit in the "Games Room" (where nobody ever played any games, it was really the smoking room) or go for a walk in the hospital grounds, which were huge and beautifully rural, with a river and fields of white cows.  In years gone by there had been a farm on which inmates worked to supply some of the food for the hospital.

On one of our walks we collected twigs of pussy-willow which had the pussy paws on them.  I suppose it must have been Spring.  There was a bench by the river and Louis took a photo of Paul, Rebecca and I sitting on it and laughing, it is a picture which I treasure.  I am wearing an old pair of glasses which had been all done up with wires by my Dad because they had got broken.  They were not really the right prescription and I could probably see better without them.  My parents wanted to get me new glasses, but the staff kept saying that it would be a waste of money because my eyesight would be affected by the medication and so they should wait until I was on a "maintenance dose".  Then they would ask me why I would not go shopping in the local town on the bus, from the ward.  How was I supposed to see the numbers on the buses?  My Dad thought this was ridiculous, he did not care about whether the glasses would have to be changed again, but the ward staff would not let me go to the optician.  They did insist, however, that I went to an appointment for a cervical biopsy, at a hospital miles away, which I think could have waited until I was better able to cope with it.  But more about that later ...

In the photograph, we are all sitting very close together, which shows how close we were emotionally, we all have cigarettes (the boredom of the ward quickly turns light or moderate smokers into heavy smokers), and Rebecca and I are smiling in a banal, drugged-up way.  When we were getting ready for the walk, I had problems doing up my shoelaces.  God only knows what damage these drugs do to your brain, when they render you unable to do something which you learnt to do when you were three.  Louis actually had to do them up for me.  If you are wondering what Paul was doing with a camera on the ward, he was always smuggling in stuff that he was not supposed to have, such as herbal medicines and pornographic postcards.

On the ward, you become close to your friends very quickly.  You care about them like they are family, and you help them out as much as you can.  In fact, the patients look after each other much more than the nurses ever do.  I noticed that an old Irish man called Edward had not been out of the ward for weeks, and I persuaded him to let me take him for a walk, which he enjoyed enormously once he was out.  He was a Catholic and he thought the Pope was after him or something.  I can't imagine why the Pope would be after such a nice man, and I told him so, and he seemed comforted by this. If you saw someone struggling to carry a cup of tea because their hands were shaking (a side-effect of medication which is especially common in the elderly), you would rush over to help them.  If a forgetful patient had lost their handbag, you would look for it.  If someone was being chased by a gang of nurses with a needle, you would let them hide under your bed and say you hadn't seen them.  If someone ran out of cigarettes, you would give them a few of yours, especially if they were making roll-ups from butt-ends they found in the ashtrays (I told someone, a homeless man called Jed who taught me how to play Black Jack, that he could get TB this way).  And always you would be prepared to listen to somebody's story, even if you had already heard it many times before.

Paul actually had a beaten-up old dark red Ford Capri parked in the carpark in front of the ward.  Its MOT and tax had run out and that was Paul's excuse for leaving it there.  One day the four of us sneaked out into the car with the nurses looking at us through the windows, obviously worried we were planning to escape.  But in the car Paul had stashed a bottle of Chianti, which we hastily opened and swigged away at, giggling and shouting out the windows, "We are off to Mexico!  Arrrrriva!!!"  We had this dream of all going to Mexico "when this is all over".  We never did, of course, but it was fun talking about it.

It was quite usual for ambulances to come and go at the entrance to the ward, either bringing in new patients or picking up blood samples.  They always left the keys in the ignition, and one day I got into the driver's seat but chickened out of actually driving it away.  However, I did manage to steal the driver's hat.  My sister visited me in her car and I had a go at driving it around the hospital grounds, it was fun because I had not driven for so long.  Amazingly, I did this with the blessing of one of the nurses.  "Aw - go on then!" she said after I pleaded to be allowed to.

Sometimes there were concerts in the main hospital building, and Paul insisted that we go to one.  He did not tell me anything about it beforehand, so when this tiny man in Austrian nederhosen came on the stage, dwarfed by his piano accordian, I could not stop laughing.  His name was Billy Moore and he had been on Channel 4's "Eurotrash".  He did not seem to mind us laughing, or asking him to play "Jumping Jack Flash".  Some of the long-term patients were there, doing ballroom dancing in the aisles or just jigging around.  At the end of the concert I got Billy's autograph and Paul called me a "groupie".  I also went to what Paul used to call the "Munster's Disco".  I remember dancing my heart out to Michael Jackson's "Beat it".  Louis said later that he fell in love with me that night, watching me dance.  At the disco there was a man with only half a face.  He was known as "the Major" and he had been in some sort of jet fighter accident.  I found seeing him so disturbing that I had to have "extra chlorpromazine" that night, to be able to settle to sleep.  The nurses are not really supposed to alter your dose without you seeing a doctor, but they often do.  It was so funny, everyone in the queue after me was saying "I would like extra chlorpromazine too, please", as if they were ordering a gin and tonic, and the nurse was letting them have it!

Paul and Louis got up to a few capers of their own.  Louis had been discharged from the ward and Paul was "on leave" at home, so Louis went to visit him.  They were walking around the local town and happened to be standing outside a Chinese takeaway when a van drew up, a man got out with a huge cardboard box containing ten bottles of wine, and said to Louis "Sign here please".  He assumed because Louis looked Chinese that he worked at the takeaway.  Louis, thinking quickly, signed with a false name, and they ran off with the wine.

On the same weekend, they went hunting for magic mushrooms.  Louis knew where to look, and they found quite a few, which they dried into a hallucinagenic tea.  Paul actually brought some back to the ward with him, stuffed in a coffee bag.  It looked quite an innoccuous brew, but I was being Miss Goody-Two-Shoes and following Dr Longton's advice to the letter when it came to such things, so I did not try any.  I did drink alcohol sometimes though, which does not really mix with medication, as it accentuates its effect.   

One evening a friend of  Louis took us out to a local pub in the car, and we all got quite pissed, including the driver.  I had had my section lifted by now because I was being more co-operative, and when you are a voluntary patient you can more or less come and go as you please, but you are not supposed to actually leave until your consultant says you can, although technically you could.  The day I had my section lifted, Paul gave me a lovely card saying "Congratulations!"  It was so hard, to get it lifted, it took months, and I had to be so compliant and I felt as though I was being constantly assessed by the nurses, so I could never relax.  One of them told me how to get out of the ward.  She said "Don't let any of the nurses see you crying, and when you have home leaves, be very positive about them and say they went really well, and impress upon the doctors that you have no objections to staying on the medication long-term, because you feel so much better on it".  A few months later, after I had been discharged and I had stopped my medication, Dr Longton said to me angrily, "If I think you need to be on lithium I will take you in and MAKE you take it!!!"  I think he felt threatened by someone so obviously doing better without the modecate he had made me have, in injections, after he had incorrectly diagnosed me as having Schizophrenia when I am actually probably Bipolar.  

Mixed Wards - A Dangerous Place for Women?

Although I am aware that if I had not been on a mixed ward I would never have met wonderful men such as Louis and Paul, I cannot help feeling that single-sex wards would be a much safer place for mentally ill  women.

I knew a man called Clive who was violent and dangerous and he had worked out that it was easy to coerce drugged-up women into sex and that because he was "mentally ill" and on a "section" he would never be prosecuted for rape.  In any case, he only had to say that they had consented, and perhaps they had, but most of them were not in a fit state to make a choice one way or the other.  He had several slashes all up both of his forearms which still had black, bloody stitches in them.  He also had tattooes, and he was very strong physically.  His line of approach was to sit next to a woman, any woman, and say "I love you" and then follow them around until he found a moment when they were alone, then make his move.

One girl had sex with him when she had just had an AIDS test result that was clear.  She said to me afterwards, "I was so confused I thought he was raping me".  Another girl, who had just been admitted that day, had sex with him when she was supposed to be on "ten minute observations", that is, being looked at every ten minutes, by the nursing staff.

After one of these incidents, Clive would be taken off to the lock-up ward, but a week later he would be back, preying on the women again.

I hardly think that the presence of such men on the ward makes it a safe place for women to recover from their mental distress.

When he approached me with his "I love you"  I just said  "No you don't, fuck off!" and he left me alone.  There was another man on the ward who kept asking me, "Are you on a lot of chlorpromazine?" obviously hoping that if I was I might be fair game.  It did not exactly help me to feel "safe" to be followed around like this, and he happened to have "Anne Marie" tattooed on his neck, which I found very disturbing.  There was also an occasion when a man actually started masterbating in front of me.  A nurse told him to "put it away" and she was obviously used to this behaviour from him, but I was quite shocked.  

One evening a male friend of mine offered to massage my feet, and I let him, but then he turned up with some pillows and a blanket and I had to make a very quick exit!

I would have felt a lot happier on a single-sex ward.  There still could have been somewhere for the sexes to mix, supervised by staff.  Also, I don't think it is always appropriate to look for a life partner in these places, not at a time when you are going through a breakdown, and they are too.  

When I pointed out to my Consultant Psychiatrist what was happening on my ward, he just said "I am aware that there is a lot of bonking going on", but he did not seem to see it as a problem or as anything that he was prepared to do something about.  This shows how they really do not have the welfare of the patients at heart, but they are only concerned that the hospital runs smoothly, and if putting women in with men supposedly keeps the men calmer and less violent, they will continue to do this, regardless of how difficult this makes the lives of the women on the wards.  

"The Prof"

Paul, or "The Prof" as we liked to call him, was a gentleman of 60-something although he would never tell me what his age actually was.  He was a very well-read and clever man, having studied English at Oxford.  He was fluent in Italian as he had lived there and his ex-wife was Italian.  In his youth he'd had a job teaching Italian servicemen to understand English words of command.  His students called him "Professori" and that is where our nickname originated.  He really did look the part, with wild white hair and thick, tinted glasses. It was not unusual for him to wear a sweater which had a hole the size of a saucer at the back. He smoked untipped cigarettes through various cigarette holders, he had quite a collection, many of them antiques.  He was supposed to be suffering from depression, but I have never seen anyone laugh so much who was supposed to be feeling "low".  I don't know what medication he was on, perhaps it gave him the giggles, or perhaps it was me!

One day there was a very fat lady in the dining room eating a huge plate of mashed potato.  I said "She's the dietician" and Paul thought this was hilarious.  We also used to talk about what he called "Reeve's Law of Opposites", such as "dieting makes you fat", "mental hospitals make you mental", I wish I could remember all the others, but we were always finding incidences to "prove" this theory.  Paul also said that people were being turned into daleks on the ward.  People came in, and daleks went out.  He said that not watching the television all day would save us from being turned into daleks like the others.  And he drew me a fantastic cartoon of the ward populated by daleks going about doing the things that mental patients do, such as saying "I want to go home" all the time.  It was so funny because this is just the sort of ridiculous thing that people believe when they are in psychosis.  One day Betty, one of the older patients, was wandering around aimlessly as if she did not know where she was going and she bumped into a chair, and Paul said in a dalek voice "Gui-dance sys-tem not op-er-a-tional".  This was the sort of thing that made us laugh uncontrollably, to the extent that often the nurses would tell us to be quiet, and not to get "so hilarious".  I think perhaps they were a bit jealous of us being able to sit around laughing all day while they had to work.

Rebecca and I once ran up to Paul all giggly, exclaiming "Professor Paul!  Is it really you, can we have your autograph?" He was just coming out of the dining room and happened to have a sausage in his hand, which he then pretended was a cigar while he signed our bits of paper and put on an American accent like he was some sort of famous visiting doctor and told us to meet him in the recovery room later for "personal tuition".  The nurses used to hate it when we both sat on his knee.  So we did it all the more.

Paul said that he had been prescribed a drug for 6 months which you are not supposed to have for longer than 6 weeks.  He thought that this might have been the cause of the terrible problem he had once he went home, where he would go to sleep and not wake up for several days.  It was not unusual for him to sleep through social arrangements he had made, and his girlfriend got so fed up with this that she split up with him.  When Louis used to visit him, the only way to make him wake up was to get a ladder, climb up to his bedroom window, enter the room, and physically drag him out of bed.  Paul had lots of tests at the Maudsley Hospital in London, and they found that he was the only person in the world who had no seratonin in his blood whatsoever.

Because of this problem where he was asleep most of the time, I started to send him letters to keep in touch, and we had a lively correspondence for many years.  Sometimes I would include cartoons such as cuttings of Noddy and Big Ears captioned, "Dr Longton restrains a difficult patient".  We knew very little about Dr Longton's private life, so we made up a whole persona, where we said his hobby was Morris dancing and he kept goats.  If ever we saw a picture of someone who looked a bit like him in a magazine we would cut it out and think up a funny caption.  As well as writing funny stuff, Paul helped me enormously when I was doing English literature A level in evening classes.  We would discuss my essay titles and he sometimes gave me insights I had not thought of, and I always sent him copies of my finished essays.  I managed to get a 'B' grade after only one year of tuition, and he helped me to keep up my enthusiasm and see it through to the end, while in the past I had often dropped out of such courses.

Paul moved to the coast and got a flat overlooking the sea, so I saw him even less-often.  I was just thinking that I would visit him soon, when I had a letter from his daughter telling me that he had died.  His smoking habit had affected his heart and all the sleeping he did and lack of exercise probably did not help.  I am glad that he did meet my son, Callum, who was just two at the time.  Paul remarked that Callum "thought I was a climbing frame".  He was a very dear man and I miss him very much, I will never forget his wonderful intelligence and subversive sense of humour, and the way he kept me sane in an insane place.

The half Chinese Romeo

It is the current practice for psychiatric wards to be mixed.  The main reason for this is that the presence of women is thought to make the men calmer and less prone to violence.  It is not unusual though for some of these men to became rather predatory, looking for sex with female patients who are too drugged up to mind.  It is also not unusual for people to pair off into couples, and this is what, eventually, happened to me. 

My ward boyfriend, Louis, had a Chinese Mum and an English Dad.  He was strikingly handsome with thick black hair and slightly Anglicised oriental looks.  I had never seen a tall Chinese man before, and I was instantly attracted to him.  This was inspite of the fact that when I was first admitted, he thought it was funny to kick my chair under my bum, from behind, to make me jump.  I first met him properly late one evening when he and Paul, someone who also became a close friend, were sitting in the dining room writing a pornographic poem and laughing their heads off.  The room was thick with cigarette smoke and inbetween thinking up a line or two, Louis was strumming on a battered Spanish guitar.  Paul had a pot of "gentleman's relish" and he thought it was funny to smear some on my chin and get me to lick it off.  I suppose we were all being a bit flirty and I didn't mind.  I also used to make them laugh by lying on my back, spreading my legs, and saying "Ready!" but fortunately they did not take me up on it!  I was so "out of it" on my various medications that I clowned around and laughed a lot. 

One day in the "Community Meeting" (this was held every morning and I suspect that it was just a way of getting everyone into one room so the cleaners could hoover the rest of the ward, rather than really having any therapeutic purpose) Louis was winding everyone up about his Libido being greatly enhanced on his current meds, and what could he do about it.  One lady got very upset by this and exclaimed, "If you come near me you'll get a hat pin in your balls!"  The Meeting often became quite chaotic, with people all talking at once, or a man kneeling in the middle of the floor claiming to be "praising Allah" and someone else coming in and out of the room unable to decide whether they wanted to stay or not. 

I was quite determined that I was not going to compound my problems by having sex and risking getting pregnant while I was on the ward, but when Louis and I became an item we did go for a long walk together and put straw in our hair to make it look as though we'd had a romp, and everyone cheered and clapped and winked at us when we got back.

Louis had a very strange sense of humour and he liked to leave banana skins lying around in the hope of someone slipping up.  He also had a very strange reaction on discovering dog poo on our walks.  He would leap around it exclaiming, "Hmm, a very interesting specimen!  Turdicus smellicticus, if I am not mistaken!"

He was in hospital because he'd had a breakdown following the death of his father.  His Mum did not speak much English even though she had lived here for a long time, and so he was closer to his Dad.  She only visited Louis once, she brought Chinese food, and she gave me a little black plastic turtle that might have come out of a Christmas cracker.  When I read on the bottom "Made in Hong Kong", I said "like Louis" and she thought this was hilarious, as that was where his parents met and she became pregnant with Louis.

When I found out that Louis had been on the ward for two years and he had not had a single home leave, I suggested to my parents that he could come on leave with me to our house.  It was the practice to, if possible, allow people to regularly go home for a few days or a week to see how they got on.  You would be given TTOs (To Take Outs), drugs to take home with you, and you had to be back when the ward staff specified because you only had enough drugs for the time you were allowed home.  I think that this practice has the effect of making "home" seem like a fantastic place, and "getting home" becomes a goal.  My parents and the rest of my family were so kind to me and made such a fuss of me that "home" seemed like paradise compared to the harsh surroundings of the ward.  Even just little things like clean glass ashtrays, drinking from a glass instead of a plastic beaker, and having carpet on the bathroom floor, made it seem wonderful.  Then when you are discharged, the reality is totally disappointing and quite devastating.  You have no job, all your old "friends" don't want to know you, there is nothing to do all day but play Scrabble with your parents and go for walks.  If you are lucky you may get an afternoon a week at a centre for ex-mental patients,  where you will make paper flowers and smoke cigarettes.   The first time I went to one of these centres, I cried and cried at what I had become, a drugged-up idiot who could only make paper flowers.  But no-one, not one of the other "clients" or a single member of staff, noticed.

The ward staff agreed that Louis could come home with me for a weekend.  When we arrived home, the first thing he wanted to do was to get a bus to Tadley to visit a friend of his.  It turned out that this friend was a supplier of marijuana and he had jars and jars of grass on shelves all over his house.  He was also a very good guitarist and we spent the afternoon listening to him play and Louis got stoned but I didn't.  I had been warned by my consultant to stay off the "funny fags".  I did not mind Louis smoking it there but I was not at all happy when he took a supply of it home to my parent's house.  I actually made him put it in the bin!  I can't believe did that, what a prude!  I think I was thinking of my parents getting into trouble if we were busted.  I said, "They have treated you like a son and this is how you repay them."

Louis slept on a camp bed in the lounge, and he spent most of the night watching TV and constantly swapping channels with the remote.  My Dad said that he was "shot away"!  I suspect it was the marijuana that made him like this though.  On the Sunday we went to visit Louis' sister, who lived locally.  She was very beautiful with a long black plait.  She had lots of children and a pet lizard.  They told me I could touch it and that it would not bite, but it immediately bit me!  They said it had never done that before.  We stayed for lunch and I took lots of photos, because I was not allowed a camera on the ward and I had missed taking pictures, which had been a major hobby of mine in the past.

At the time I really thought Louis and I would end up getting married.  I said it would be lovely to have Chinese babies.  I admired the way he got himself somewhere to live by phoning landlord's adverts in the paper from the ward.  He had to make sure it was quiet and that there was nobody screaming or shouting in the background while he made the calls.  In the end he found a bedsit, it was not much but at least he could leave the hospital, he had been told he was fit to go for a long time before he found somewhere to live.  He also got himself an old banger of a car, a rusty white Ford Fiesta, and he applied for a job somewhere where he had worked before, as a nurse looking after mentally handicapped people at a residential home.  Eventually he became a gardening therapist, and he had a flat in the grounds.  In past times he had been a boat builder in Greece, so he was quite a clever man.  But I used to find that he was very quiet when we were on our own, he was happy not to say a word for hours, and I felt as if I did not really know him, much less understand him.

After I was discharged I was not particularly "well" and became very depressed, and I think Louis found it hard to cope with.  He met a woman at work, another nurse, blonde with a large chest or so I have been told, and he decided to marry her instead.  She was very controlling and she made sure he lost touch with all of his former friends, including Paul.  She even chose the best man at their wedding, her brother.  They had a son, but then divorced and she moved up to Lincolnshire to be near her parents, and she made it difficult for Louis to keep in touch.  She made sure he did not get joint custody by playing the "mental illness" card.  He would drive up there in his white Mercedes and he had to take the boy out, because she would not allow him to be in their house.  In the colder months there was not much for them to do and they would end up at McDonald's or something, and the boy would play up because he was bored and Louis would get angry because he was tired from the long drive, and because of the situation.

I don't know how things are now, as we have lost touch.  I know that Louis has had further periods when he has been unwell and has had to be in hospital, but I think he always seem to recover well because the first thing he does when he gets out is to stop his medication, which is usually lithium.  He has been employed for most of his adult life and I am not sure this would be the case if he was on medication all the time. I am not convinced that staying on medication for years does not create more problems than it solves.  I think it is better for people to try to tackle the causes of their mental distress, and dulling the mind with drugs really does not help in any journey of self-discovery.  Even the most disturbed patients can be helped by kindness,  someone listening, and talk therapy.  This has been proven in many studies, but of course the modern psychiatrists who rely on drugs, like to keep these ideas surpressed, for fear of undermining their profession as a "biological" science like general medicine.

A Beautiful Jewish Princess

I used to call Rebecca "a beautiful Jewish princess" because she was Jewish and she was beautiful, with thick dark hair, huge brown almond-shaped eyes, and very lovely long nose.  When she came back to the ward after going home for the day for her 18th birthday, she was, as I said at the time, "dripping with jewels", her presents had all been silver jewelery and in particular I loved the unusual oval silver watch.  The ward's surroundings are so drab that seeing something pretty and shiney can have a lasting impression, I will never forget that sight of her in all her birthday finery.  I think also that some of the drugs can make things look extra dazzling.

The first time I ever saw Rebecca she was sitting in the TV room looking drugged-up and dazed.  Her round glasses were crookedly perched on her nose, her hair was long, unwashed and dank like "Neil" on The Young Ones, and she had a grubby white brace around her neck.  She was actually lucky to be alive, as she had jumped out of a second storey window at home, thinking that she had to do so "to save my brother's life".

Over the weeks that followed we grew quite close.  We would sit in the "Games Room" chatting and smoking while she weaved friendship bands.  She would attach several strands of silk onto her jeans with a safety pin and make patterns she thought of as she went along.  She custom-made these bands for people and got them to choose which colours they would like.  I still have the band she made for me.  She also could make gorgeous hair-braids which were actually weaved into the hair.  One day we both got high on procyclidene, which is a drug prescribed to alleviate the Parkinsonian-like side-effects of the neuroleptics we were both on, and we were doing handstands against the wall, giving some of the guys a bit if a thrill as we were not wearing bras and our T-shirts lifted up over our heads.  It is not unusual to feel "euphoric" on these drugs.  In fact, some people in hospital save up a whole week's worth of the drug by only pretending to swallow it, and then take it all at once, to get totally stoned.

Sometimes we would go for walks down to the river by the hospital, which was set in very beautiful grounds.  Our respective medications had adversely affected our vision, so on those walks we'd say "What's that blob, is it a duck?"  "No, I think it must be a goose ... no, wait a minute, it's a dustbin, ha ha ha ha ha!"

I gradually learned Rebecca's story.  Her parents had divorced and her Mum had re-married and had a young son in this new relationship. This left Rebecca and her elder sister feeling rather left-out of things.  Their Dad had also re-married and lived a long way away.  Rebecca had been very unhappy when they had moved to Manchester, as she missed her friends.  Her sister discovered something which they both found they could use to escape from their problems: LSD.  Rebecca told me that she took this drug more than 30 times.  It is therefore hardly surprising that she had a "psychotic episode" which became life-threatening and necessitated hospitalisation, but I doubt very much that she was really a classic"Schizophrenic", but this was her diagnosis.  Like me she was treated at first with Stellazine and Ativan, and then with injections of a powerful neuroleptic, but she was on a different one, Depixol, while I was on Modecate.  The drug you end up on depends entirely on the current preference of your Consultant Psychiatrist, and she was a Dr Smith patient while I was a Dr Longton patient.  While I became very unwell on Modecate, Rebecca was relatively stable on her drug and she seemed to be making quite a good recovery.  She got better a lot faster than I did, and was discharged.  

After having spent 3 months on a psychiatric unit and having such an awful time, at such a young age, she decided that she now wanted to "have some fun", and she thought that the best way to do this was to take as many street drugs as possible.  While her parents were trying to keep her penniless so that she could not buy the drugs, I would unwittingly succumb to her hard-luck stories about needing bus fare to get to a job interview or to get to London to see her Dad, and unbeknown to me she would spend the money I loaned her on drugs. All of this of course did not do much good for her future mental health and she was hospitalised several times over the coming years . 

I wonder if she had not got back into street drugs, then her psychotic breakdown might have been a one-off.  I feel strongly that young people like Rebecca never get enough in the way of counselling or support.  All they get is a "Here's your prescription, now off you go." The psychiatrist in charge of her care did not seem to think that the LSD use was a significant factor.  He said that it was most likely that she had been "self-medicating" to try to combat her mental illness - but she had not had any "illness" before taking a lot of LSD!  Modern psychiatrists do not seem to be remotely interested in the causes of mental illness.  They seem to all see it as a "chemical imbalance" caused by some vague biological and genetic factors.  However, the idea of a "chemical imbalance" has only ever been a theory and it actually has no scientific basis in fact.

Rebecca has had to be on prescribed medication for many years, and this can cloud a person's judgement when it comes to life choices such as finding a partner.  As a result she let a very unsavoury character move into her flat with her, who abused her in terrible ways, both physical and psychological.  He would play games such as placing pairs of her shoes around the corridors of the building and taking her to see them and saying "Don't you remember what happened here?"  You can imagine how weird mind-games like this could really harm a person who is already confused on medication.  People like Rebecca are often at risk of such abuse.

But there is not such a tragic end to this story, because Rebecca did actually eventually find love and get married.  She has been advised not to have children because of her constant need for medication, and I think when I was pregnant she was rather jealous, but having children is not everything and lots of women are happier without them.  Rebecca's sister, however, did not have a happy ending to her story - after years of struggle with her own mental problems which were exacerbated by a big marijuana habit, she took her own life.