by Tim Lott
They need not worry, for I have already refused to accept any kind of treatment. I am suffering occasional religious delusions now and have decided that I am damned to hell, deserving of every ounce of my suffering. Anyway, if I am simply ill, then my mind is not my own, I do not possess a real, choosing, consequential self. My thoughts are not autonomous, they are a bunch of chemicals, and this is a conclusion intolerable to me.
I do not shave any more and sleep as much as I can. Jean comes and sits on my bed, often not saying anything, simply sighing and staring at the space above my unmoving head. Jean is caring for me the best she can, but it is clearly hurting her.
I stare at Jean, as if through too-thick spectacles. She reminds me of someone else now, though I can’t think whom. Then I see it. It is Mary Tyler Moore, late, as in Ordinary People, rather than early, as in the Mary Tyler Moore Show. She has that same stretched, too-fixed-place air, that sense that she has become tight, as if her life no longer fits. I liked that film, Ordinary People, I vaguely remember. There is a moment at the end, when Donald Sutherland turns to Mary Tyler Moore and says something that has always stuck in my mind for some reason: You are determined but you are not strong. You are determined, but you are not strong. I wonder if there is a Latin translation of this. It will make an ideal motto one day for our family, or at least for Jean and me.
Jean still makes a fist sometimes of being cheerful and optimistic. At other times, though, the pretence is clearly too much. She stares down at me and says, It’s like a living death.
I nod in agreement, then attempt myself, hopelessly, to be cheerful: It will probably be all right again.
The echoing nod of Jean’s head is unconvinced and unconvincing. She sighs once more and shifts her gaze to somewhere above my head, as if staring at some point very far away. You were always so full of… wonder, as a child. Such an imagination. Now it’s all turned into a nightmare. Her eyes refocus on me. You know, the trouble is, I’m becoming very depressed. You’re making me depressed, too.
Doubtless, this is true. The room is dark. I close my eyes and try once more to fall asleep.
A few weeks later, Jack and Jean finally achieve what they might consider to be a form of progress. They convince me to go and see my doctor, Dr Soboniescu, in Notting Hill Gate. I consider it to be a waste of time, but I go anyway. The moment I enter the door, I burst into tears and do not stop sobbing throughout the interview. Calmly, Dr Soboniescu makes an appointment for me to visit the Acute Mental Health Unit at St Charles’s Hospital in North Kensington.
The Acute Mental Health Unit. How these words shame me, for I am now a designated other, a crazy person. Even as I trudge towards the hospital, I feel disgusted by the idea that I am entering the Cuckoo’s Nest. I nearly turn round and go back, but some residual sense of duty to my parents, or perhaps unacknowledged hope, insists that I continue. I reach the waiting area, and it seems that some other sinking of my already drowned self-image is taking place. Appalling wretches smoking sad, rolled-up cigarettes wander around in dressing gowns. There are young men with tattoos on their knuckles. One girl is walking around on crutches and smiling sweetly. I wonder why she isn’t in another part of the hospital. Then I overhear a snatch of a conversation she is having with another patient.
No, well. They dont want to let me out just yet.
Why not?
They’re worried I might, you know… She nods at the smashed legs. Do it again.
She gives a lovely smile and a wave, and moves towards the doors of the closed ward that adjoins the waiting area. My sense of wretchedness increases.
I am called into a small interview room, where a young woman is sitting with a clipboard. She introduces herself as a trainee and begins to ask questions in order to make a diagnosis. I have puffed myself up, clenched myself. I am determined to prove to this woman that I am not a cretin. I am also irritated that I merit only a trainee.
So – Mr Lott, isn’t it? Timothy. May I call you Timothy?
I’d rather stick with the formalities.
As you wish. Now, I’m going to ask you some questions and I want you to answer as best you can.
All right. Can I ask you a question first?
If you like.
Are you a Freudian or an organicist?
I think it would be best if you just answer the questions. Now, how has your sleep been?
OK. I sleep too much, if anything.
Do you have trouble concentrating?
Yes, I suppose so. Sometimes I can hardly think at all.
Do you find it easy to make decisions?
I’m not really sure.
Try and think.
That was a joke.
I see.
No. No, I don’t find it easy to make decisions. What’s the point of all this?
I have fixed her with an unrelenting stare now and when she speaks again, she will not meet my eye.
It’s me who’s doing the interviewing.
Ach, so it is ve who ask ze kvestions.
Do you feel guilty?
Do you?
Do you think you have done wrong?
Define your terms.
Do you feel you have sinned?
‘Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?’
Do you feel that you have sinned?
Sinned? Not in a religious sense. I feel that I have failed.
Are you interested in sex?
Is that a proposition?
And so on. The woman is only slightly flustered and in the end manages to extract the relevant information. I cannot make decisions, I cannot concentrate, I feel emotionally cold and distanced from everything. I have lost interest in sex. I fantasize about suicide. I am tormented by feelings of guilt and worthlessness. Most of these feelings I have been having for years, although they have worsened recently. She dismisses me from the room and I feel that I have put in a decent enough performance; that she will not put me in the wrong category.
The consultant psychiatrist arrives and enters for a conference with the young woman. On impulse, I put my ear to the door and listen. I can pick up only snatches, but they please me.
He’s extremely intelligent. He made me nervous.
The intelligent ones are the worst. You have to be firm.
He doesn’t seem remotely crazy.
I feel vindicated. My sense that my reasoning is solid is reassured. The door opens and the consultant beckons me in. He is a man in late middle age with a brittle and impatient air. He bids me sit down, then tells me that I have been suffering from a severe but treatable illness for the last four years. Those four years, he is sorry to say, have been unnecessarily wasted. The pathology, he says, makes it quite clear that I am experiencing something quite distinct from ‘unhappiness’ or simple despair. The illness can be cured quite quickly with drugs. Some therapy will also help.
I snort and shrug my shoulders in a way that I have developed over time when I wish to express contempt. The idea of taking pills remains repulsive to me; the idea that my filigree thoughts and beliefs can be reduced to a simple malfunction of neurotransmitters. He tries to explain to me about serotonin, reuptake inhibitors, synaptic gaps, but I do not wish to listen. I simply do not believe in depression as a medical condition. Certainly, someone as self-reliant as myself could never suffer from it. Depression, in my philosophy, is a word to excuse self-pity and weakness.
I refuse the pills. Perhaps I have nothing to lose, but to take them is to concede some principle I cannot quite articulate, something about ownership of my self. And I know they are only the thin end of the wedge. They still do ECT and, for all I know, lobotomy. They can still hospitalize mental patients against their will. Tablets were simply step number one. They opened the awful Pandora’s Box of the psychiatrists.
The psychiatrist seems to become quite agitated. This may be for the benefit of the student who is still sitting by his side. I sense he needs to put me in my place.
Look. Do as you
damn well like. If you want to go on suffering like this, it’s your decision. You will come out of it eventually anyway – if you don’t kill yourself first. But if you want to save yourself a lot of pain, these tablets will help you. They are not addictive, they have no serious side-effects. They work. It’s up to you. In the long term, you should also seek counselling. I will make an appointment for you at our King’s Road centre.
He hands me a prescription and begins to prepare for his next appointment. The student gives a faint smirk. I pick up the prescription, slightly cowed by the psychiatrist’s performance, put it in my pocket and leave. I have no intention of taking them. To do so is, I think in some strange way, cheating, second rate. To take them is to lose, although I am not quite sure what the game is, or how it can be that I have not already lost. However, I meet the doctor half-way and go to visit the psychotherapist he has suggested. I have as little faith in therapy as I do in tablets, but I find it less threatening somehow. It seems less entirely dismissive of my personality.
The Chelsea centre is by the river. Before going into the appointment, I take the towpath down to the edge of the Thames and try to find the will to throw myself in. It looks very cold and I am not sure that it will work. The series of suicide non-attempts is by now farcical. I am a para-parasuicide. Gathering my coat about me, I walk up from the river and towards what is called the World’s End Centre. Had I any sense of humour left, the name might have raised a smile. But now it just seems another harbinger.
When I am led into the psychotherapist’s office, I think I have been the victim of an elaborate joke. The man sitting in front of me is clearly a Freudian, at least in terms of fashion. He has the little pointy beard, the high forehead, the grave, professorial air. But in a nod to the contemporary, he wears a baggy sweater and loose-fit jeans. He puffs on a pipe whose smell revolts me. He strikes me as insufferably smug and I am more than ever reassured that psychotherapy is bunk. I chain-smoke, and wait for him to tell me the secret of my life.
He asks me a few questions about my childhood and family relationships, and seems doubtful when I suggest that both were and are very good, and that it is hard to remember much fault with either my mother or my father. Although I knew them not to be perfect, I am unaware of having been abandoned, under-loved, overloved, untouched or abused. It is clear that he believes me to be in denial.
He asks me if I take drugs and I mention that I took LSD as a teenager. In one of the only moments of our consultations that I find diverting, he tells me that it is far from rare for depressed patients to have taken LSD, once itself prescribed for depression. And it is true, now I think of it, that life has perhaps always been a disappointment, a diluted thing, since the intensity of that experience.
After I have told him some more basic facts, he lapses into silence. I guess that this is a therapeutic technique to make me talk about what concerns me, but I can think of nothing whatsoever to say. The result is that we sit in absolute silence for thirty minutes, at the end of which the therapist picks up his diary and says, When can you make it again?
I attend on two more occasions, but find myself spending the majority of the time in embarrassed silence, punctuated occasionally by unprovoked tears. When asked to remember dreams, all I can recall is one in which I go up too fast in a crowded lift, so fast I crash through the ceiling and into the sky. I imagine that he is disappointed in me, that despite his professional distance, he dislikes me. In the end we both give up.
My mother and father, despairing now, urge me once more to take the tablets, which I have reluctantly cashed in the prescription for. They sit in my bathroom cabinet. Out of absolute indifference as much as anything else, and the insistence of my parents, I begin to take them. Two Mianserin and six Trimiprimine every day. I have absolutely no faith that they will work; I just want to be able to tell Jean and Jack that I tried.
I have absolutely no faith, in fact, in anything. In a muddy way, I see that depression manifests itself as a crisis of faith. Not religious faith, but the almost born instinct that things are fluid, that they unfold and change, that new kinds of moment are eventually possible, that the future will arrive. I am in a time-locked place, where the moment I am in will stretch on, agonizingly, for ever. There is no possibility of redemption or hope. It is a final giving up on everything. It is death.
Idly I calculate when the absolute failure of my life will be proved, when it will be realized that my crisis is spiritual and Shakespearian rather than some tawdry off-the-shelf illness. Since the tablets supposedly take about three weeks to work, that day, I estimate, will be 28 December 1987.
In the meantime, I am still spending a great deal of time with my parents. My mother seems entirely normal, except for some hollowness in and about the eyes which is noted only later, through memory. She does not cry or seem unduly irritable. Never an obviously neurotic woman, lacking in phobias, addictions or obsessions of any kind, she goes about her business as ever: tennis, golf, yoga, art, housekeeping, gardening.
Still, she is behaving strangely in some ways, I think, worrying about odd, trivial details. The telephone she has just had installed trills electronically in the modern fashion, rather than ringing a bell. When it sounds on one occasion, she stares at it fiercely as if she has been slapped. I hate that phone, she says, through clenched teeth. It seems an odd thing for Jean to be worked up about – Jean, the soul of patience.
On another occasion she lays her paintings out for me to take a Polaroid of. They aren’t at all bad and she has always, despite her habitual self-doubt, shown a certain pride in them. Now she stares at them balefully. They’re no good, she mutters, smiling ironically as if discovering something she should have known all along.
Unshaven, I sit up and try to jolly her. I really do think they are OK. No, Mum. Really, they’re very good. They’re lovely.
She shakes her head firmly. No. They’re no good.
She looks unutterably sad. I close my eyes, blank as air.
A week or so later, after a painful and strained family Christmas during which I sit in a corner, not speaking, I have gone back to my flat. I watch the seasonal broadcasts about Christmas for starving children in war-torn countries. It occurs to me that I am wearing a £400 jacket and sipping at a £10-bottle of wine. My sense of guilt and worthlessness is once more heightened.
The next day is 28 December and I awake, unusually, first thing in the morning. I am alone. I have an odd perception. There is a pigeon cooing on the balcony outside my bedroom window. It is pleasant and soothing. I haven’t noticed birdsong for a long time. I imagine, pleasantly, that it sounds like a woman climaxing.
I shave and wash, and make myself some coffee, in which I take simple enjoyment. I feel strange, in that I feel normal, average. It occurs to me that I have not felt like this – neither stiff with tension, nor collapsing into chaos – for several years. As if by magic, all my thoughts about sin and redemption, God and the devil, have disappeared. It occurs to me that the desire to kill myself is utterly ridiculous. Why would I want to kill myself anyway? I know, quite clearly and calmly now, like a camera suddenly finding focus, that I really have been ill, and equally that I have begun to recover.
I pick up a newspaper and read it from cover to cover. Yesterday, I think, I could hardly read a headline. There are pictures of starving children; they do not bother me. Is it OK not to feel guilty about this now? Does it show proper adjustment? I smile with a sort of dazed incredulity and reach for the telephone. Above all, I want to tell Jean. I want to tell her that everything, after all, is going to be all right.
In fact, it is my father who picks up the phone. He is placid as usual, but seems extremely pleased. He says he knows that Jean will be thrilled. In fact, I do not see my mother again until our birthday celebration a few weeks later (all of us, apart from Jeff, have our birthdays in January). We all meet to have dinner at a PizzaExpress restaurant in Soho. When we swap gifts, it turns out that James, Mum and I have all bought Dad wristw
atches. We laugh out loud. It turns out that Jack already has three unused watches in his drawer anyway.
I explain to my mother, as I have to my father, how I have been ill and have recovered. She seems pleased and quite normal in every respect. It is a nice evening, and at last there is a sense in the family that things are getting better. Not only have I recovered but Jeff’s new marriage appears to be happy and the divorce from Helma forgotten. Jack is adjusting well to his redundancy and has finally received a pay-off from his former employers.
However, in the weeks and months after my recovery, my sudden discovery of ‘illness’ is treated with some scepticism. Neither my parents nor my friends feel comfortable with the idea that the mind can be healed by medication. To come from somewhere so wretched and low must surely involve a greater struggle than the swallowing of tablets, as if for a headache; years of therapy, perhaps, some… penance. And there is a part of me that even now doesn’t quite accept the psychiatrist’s simple assertion that I have been unwell. Although in some ways it is obviously true, it also obviously falls short of an explanation. And it is true that I am not suddenly transformed into someone jolly, optimistic and life-enhancing. I remain rather gloomy and reserved, and pessimistic about the future. I feel weak and milky in the head. I still spend too much time in bed. Yet I know it to be incontrovertibly true that something inside me has changed, has regained a long-lost equilibrium. Instead of barren, I feel fallow. I presume that Jean will begin to believe it over time, when I get stronger.
Continuing to take the tablets, I do set about my life with a new sense of purpose. An old acquaintance has come to me with a project for a new magazine, and I set about it with application and some flair. When working on the project, my mind clears completely, and seems incisive and fast. I begin to go out to dinner parties – oh, I can pass easily as middle class nowadays – where I laugh properly for the first time in years. The muscles that allow me to smile feel out of condition. It is at first an effort, but the sense of humour that was once sharp enough to be saleable to newspapers is beginning to return. I can laugh at the world and myself.
