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.
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