I think the best way for me to illustrate the violation of human rights which I believe is happening in the mental health system, is to simply tell you the stories of some of the people I have met both in psychiatric units and afterwards at out-patient services.
A lady, who I will call Jan, was in a Psychiatric Unit for more than 4 years. She had been behaving strangely in the street after the death of her partner, with whom she lived in a flat above the launderette where she was the manager. The police were called, and they arranged for a doctor to see her, who arranged for her to go to the Psychiatric Unit. She had never had a mental health problem before, and was now in her mid-60s. Her partner had died suddenly, of a heart attack, before her eyes, and what she was most concerned about was the fact that the last thing he heard in his life was his two daughters arguing over who should get the largest share of the money he was to leave them. One daughter felt that she should get more because she had a larger family.
Jan was homeless because going into the Unit meant she lost her job and also her flat. She was always telling me how her social worker had arranged for the flat to be given up without even informing her about what had been decided. She was therefore kept in the Unit long after she had been deemed fit for release by her consultant psychiatrist, because she had nowhere to go.
The highlight of Jan's week was when her benefit giro arrived, but rather than cashing it herself she used to let a nurse do this and also buy her week's supply of cigarettes from the hospital shop. Jan never went outside the ward, and she never had any visitors or a single get-well card. The other patients did not talk to her much because all she ever said was exactly the same story about how her partner had died and how she had lost her flat. She had come to the hospital with nothing so she was dressed in things from the clothes cupboard which were like jumble sale items, and she never wore socks because she had to wash her own in the ward laundry. Every day she would sit in the same seat in the "Games Room" alone and smoke her cigarettes. I don't recall any nurse ever speaking to her except to take the giro and hand over the cigarettes.
The thing about Jan that is most sad is that she had been prescribed electro-shock therapy which had permanently damaged her brain, and because of this, her memory was very bad. She could not remember having told someone her story before, which is why she constantly repeated herself. She instantly forgot people's names and could not recall where the dining room was. One day we played a game to see just how bad her memory was, which she was happy to take part in, we were not mocking her at all. We hid a tennis ball in a certain place in one room and showed her where it had been put. She then walked out of the room and came back in again a few minutes later. She could not remember where the ball was.
I do not know how many sessions of electro-shock therapy she had been given, but it is clear that whatever mental health problems she had when she came onto the ward, they were now greatly compounded by this disabling inability to remember the simplest things. How can this be called "treatment" and how can it be considered to have "helped" her in any way?
Several years later I visited a friend at a hostel for ex-patients, and I was pleased to see that Jan was living there in much more comfortable surroundings. However, she was still sitting silently, alone in a corner smoking her cigarettes, just as she had done on the ward. For someone who had previously been an extremely lively and sociable person (she met her partner at a dance) with the sole responsibility for running a lauderette and dealing every day with customers, this is a truly awful outcome.
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