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!
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