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.
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