The Dark Side of the Mind

by Kerry Daynes

  Jeane didn’t like it, and she made it clear when she didn’t want to follow the rules. She got embroiled in disputes with staff about petty issues. One morning there was a screaming match because she hadn’t been allowed to eat crisps for breakfast. We wanted her to behave more consistently as an adult, and yet she wasn’t granted the freedom to make an adult decision for herself. She shouted, slammed doors, stomped about and threw things, all in front of the other patients.

  As her psychologist, I felt torn. Jeane was being vilified for her unruly behaviour (one nurse said, ‘I’m here to help people who are poorly, she’s just being naughty’). But I couldn’t help privately admiring her fight, and feeling proud that she still had the spirit in her to say no. Being robbed of her right to say no as a child was what brought her here in the first place. I say, let her tell a few people to fuck off if she wants to. Can’t we – the lucky ones – be more respectful of the way the victims of abuse respond to their trauma, instead of ladling on extra shame and guilt when they don’t eat the breakfast we want them to? Why do we find it so difficult to appreciate that the experiences of abused children, often by the people they trust most, are among the most harmful things a human being can ever endure? And what are we aiming for in rehabilitating a person anyway? Someone who is passively compliant or someone with a sense of their own agency?

  Jeane was the subject of some particularly unpleasant debates in our team meetings at the hospital. The manager wanted us to clamp down on her, and even suggested we could show her who was in charge by restraining her next time she became argumentative.

  Physically holding her down, like something from a Panorama exposé, would have not only been unnecessary but deeply retraumatizing, as it would have so closely mirrored her abuse. The dark art of teaching someone a lesson isn’t part of any good psychologist’s toolkit, and restraint-as-punishment was simply never going to happen on my watch – Jeane was obnoxious and insulting, and her size was intimidating, but she was never a true physical threat. That particular meeting ended with the hospital manager walking out of the room (lucky, as I was going to need restraining myself had it gone on any longer). It occurred to me that despite the cheerful diversity of our residents, there was, after all, an unwritten admission criterion here, a subtle cherry-picking of patients who wouldn’t be ‘difficult’.

  All the heat around Jeane was propelling her further and faster to the inevitable conclusion. For hospital staff, it was just more evidence of her BPD. Hadn’t they known it from the start? The more Jeane resisted the rules and expectations of the hospital, the more rules and expectations were heaped on her; the staff’s distaste for her became palpable, especially to her, feeding her own deep sense of being inherently bad. A self-fulfilling prophecy was playing out.

  Then one day Jeane broke a window and went AWOL. Police found her drinking Bacardi Breezers in the park. She said Drew did it (the window bit anyway, the drinking was unashamedly Jeane) but the nursing staff didn’t believe her. I did though, and I explained to her again that Drew was the angry part of herself, and that Jeane had to take responsibility for it, which she accepted. But despite her willingness to learn in therapy, she wasn’t able to comply in the way the institution wanted her to within the timeframe it wanted this to happen.

  I eventually had to concede that our tea-cosy hospital wasn’t the right place for her, although I will never concede it was her fault. Too often we deem patients unsuitable for care, when we should be trying harder to provide care that’s more suitable for them.

  On the day she left, she was picked up by the staff from the supported bedsit she’d been allocated, where she would get the help of a care worker six hours a week. Before she went, she tore the apple tree she’d planted for her brother straight out of the ground. She left crying, begging to be allowed to stay, promising she’d be good and not misbehave again, pleas all made in the language of a repentant child, still clutching her stuffed toy cat.

  I often wonder how Jeane got on. She once sent me a Facebook friend request, which as her former therapist I couldn’t accept. I hope she continued with therapy though.

  She always thought what had happened to her was somehow her fault. She especially blamed herself for her brother’s suicide. I hope she realized it wasn’t.

  *

  That was summer 2016 – I didn’t know it then but by October that year I would have quit my job at the women’s hospital. I had genuinely loved working there, helping women pick up the reins of their lives and waving them off to new beginnings. In truth most of them were champing at the bit to resume their freedom, while other more reluctant leavers (like ‘love-sick’ Maya, who did eventually move on to a more independent home) went with what one of my favourite nurses referred to as ‘Ugg therapy’ – the softest of kicks up the backside to help them on the way. Being part of that group of small hospitals, where the care was individualized and meaningful, was as close as I had come to practising the kind of psychology I felt had most impact.

  But Jeane had left us, not quite kicking and screaming, but still in real distress, begging to be allowed to stay. She wanted to work through her trauma, and we had denied her safe passage. That ruthless moment had left a bitter taste in my mouth, and no amount of rinsing and spitting could seem to get rid of it. I’d dedicated myself to working with women with only the most optimistic of mindsets, but had discovered that the system didn’t work for victims like Jeane any more than it did for offenders. The indignation I felt after watching Mark Bridger’s trial was still there, it had just relocated, an ache that had moved from one limb to another.

  Then, shortly after her departure, a series of events made me wonder if I was in fact colluding with something bigger, feeding a monster who had been hiding in plain sight all along.

  Jeane left on Friday and on the next Sunday morning I was almost run over by a car outside my house. I was taking one of my dogs out, enjoying the simple feeling of sunshine on my face. The car – a bland, middle-management kind of model – came up out of nowhere, swerved quickly into me and out again, narrowly missing mounting the kerb and knocking me or Fozzchops over. No one was hurt, but it seemed like a very deliberate attempt to make me feel momentarily in peril. The road was quiet and empty – there had been no other reason to lurch my way.

  Then the car slowed to a crawl next to me, and the man inside looked directly at me and laughed. I was in the midst of making some very unseemly hand gestures when it came to me. Was it him? It looked like him, but I couldn’t tell. I had deliberately avoided looking him in the face in court, and besides I hadn’t heard from him since 2012. But something about that moment and the way the car stopped for those few seconds made me feel this was no accident.

  Then a week later I got his bill. The same man who had built those unsolicited websites now said I owed him £26,000 and he would be taking me to a business court for non-payment. He included an itemized bill, with a full breakdown of the costs I had apparently incurred, including time he had spent on researching me, the money he had spent on property searches and – what made me really laugh out loud – £500 on travel expenses.

  His letter included an invitation to negotiate. He was willing to meet with me, he said, and thrash this out in a ‘round table’ meeting, as if he was a prime minister extending me a diplomatic invite and not the man who had made my life a misery. I laughed again because the audacity was fleetingly very funny. And then it wasn’t.

  Once again, I had to hire a solicitor to deal with his nonsense, who wrote to him explaining that I would not be attending his round table gathering, however good the biscuits were. The case was thrown out as an abuse of court process, just as I knew it would be. But I found myself thinking – this really was an inconceivable state of affairs, in which a total stranger could intimidate and then invoice me, simply, it seemed, for being alive. I had altered the way I worked, avoided appearing in public, kept my head down trying not to attract any attention, and still he billed me for the pleasure. It dawned o
n me that I was all but colluding in the dynamics of an abusive relationship.

  And then my cat Bijou died.

  I had let the dogs out into the garden one morning and Bijou slunk out along with them. I popped upstairs to have a shower and get dressed, and came back down to let the dogs in for their breakfast. It was a routine we had going and we all knew the drill. Only this morning was different. When I opened the back door again the dogs wouldn’t come back in. Instead they were sat staring at something at the foot of the side fence.

  It was Bijou’s fluffy body, lying limp and inert. I ran to him and knew immediately that he was dead; there was no movement and no sound. His mouth was pulled back so you could see white gums and his teeth. My instant response was to turn to Fozzchops, who was sitting there shifting her gaze between me and the now departed Bijou, and ask her quite sternly whether she had done this. I don’t know what kind of answer I was expecting from a chow-chow, who looked as puzzled as I was, but that’s what I did.

  Deep down I knew that this wasn’t the work of another animal. Years of looking at crime scene pictures helped me reach some swift conclusions. There wasn’t a mark on Bijou’s body, no blood, no sign of a tussle and no teeth had been sunk into him. And besides, I knew he could outrun both of the dogs if he needed to. As I looked closer, I could see that his body was in an unnatural position. He had his front legs underneath him and his head turned to the side, as if he had been thrown over the fence already dead. Had someone run him over and slung him into the garden? Or had someone twisted his neck? I couldn’t say. Bijou was my dear companion for 16 years and I would never know how he died.

  One thing I could say with certainty, though, was that Bijou hadn’t been the one who picked up the pen and wrote ‘JILL DANDO’ on the fence. (Had my cat chosen to pick up a Bic and write his own epitaph at that moment it would almost certainly have said something like ‘Goodbye and thanks for all the Dreamies’, his favourite snack.) I didn’t even see it until the next day when I went to put the bin out, with the remains of Bijou’s last meal among the waste. It wasn’t even written in big letters, no sinister red paint dripping down the slats like you’d get in a bad horror film. Just a plain-looking scrawl in biro on the outward facing side of the fence, as if a kid had been dared to do it by his friends, but had bottled it at the last minute and done it quickly, hoping no one would see.

  Jill Dando. The journalist and Crimewatch presenter who was fatally shot outside her home in 1999 and whose killer has never been found. Five years ago my stalker had told readers of his website to ‘stay tuned… watch this space’. Was this the threat of violence I had been waiting for?

  Police arrested him and gave him a Harassment Warning for sending me the letters demanding settlement of his bill. This is a way of making it clear to someone that their act has caused harassment and if there are further allegations then the police can make an arrest. It struck me as an entirely inappropriate response to a behaviour defined by obsession and fixation. Handing him yet another bit of paper with my name on to add to his collection, fuelling his unfounded sense of having some sort of relationship or connection to me. It seemed to add insult to psychological injury.

  I felt the anger rise again. Only this time it wasn’t so visceral or unwieldy. It was more determined. Receiving that invoice from a man I had never met, a man who had verbally abused and defamed me and made me feel threatened in my own home, helped crystallize my thinking. It was suddenly very clear that no amount of keeping my head down was going to make a difference.

  Filing my paperwork – a second set of court documents – in my now bulging file on this irritating and uninvited situation, I thought of Jeane, and the way we had labelled and then rejected her, pathologized and retraumatized her, even though she hadn’t even committed a crime. And suddenly every single part of the system seemed broken to me. At each and every point on the matrix – criminals and victims, rich and poor, men and women, black and white – there were glaring inequalities and failures wherever you looked. Systemic failures at every level, from the moment a crime is or isn’t reported to the solutions on offer. And I had to ask myself again, had I been part of the problem all along? I had been working within the criminal justice system for all these years, trying to muddle my way through the maze and get the best outcomes possible for my clients, and the public. But was I propping up a system that worked for a select few but failed everybody else?

  I thought of Jeane pulling that tree out of the ground, roots and all, and hurling it across the lawn. She had gone out fighting and I knew I needed to harness her spirit. She didn’t have the voice or the privilege or the platform that I had – but I could do something for her, if I used the insight she had given me.

  I knew I could make a difference, but only by ripping my own roots out of the ground, making myself part of the solution rather than part of the problem. My stalker liked to invite me to ‘watch this space’, the unspecified promise of something unclear and yet entirely sinister. But as my mum would say, ‘Knickers to that.’ I had spent too long with my head down, watching this space. It was time for me to fill the space instead.

  EPILOGUE

  I’m still a forensic psychologist, but these days I choose to effect change by other routes. Part of my day job still involves acting as an expert witness in court and, even after all these years, I’m still never quite sure what each week will bring. But I have also harnessed my inner activist and become a campaigner for change on the issues that really matter to me. Rather than feeling compromised and frustrated within the system, I am trying to effect change from the outside.

  I serve as a proud patron of the National Centre for Domestic Violence, and have been working to support a number of other charities, including the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. This organization works to reduce the risk of violence and aggression through campaigning, education and advocacy for victims. The charity was set up in memory of Suzy Lamplugh who disappeared in 1986 during the course of her work as an estate agent while showing a client round a house. In 2017, I started training police on improving the way they respond to reports of stalking behaviour, which after my own experience I knew was largely inadequate. This wasn’t because police officers didn’t care. The training and guidance on dealing with stalking was almost non-existent, despite a number of high-profile murders. In 2018, the Crown Prosecution Service and National Police Chiefs’ Council announced a new joint package of improvement measures. These included clear instruction that Harassment Warnings should not be used in stalking cases, as they fail to address the root of the stalker’s obsession, and the introduction of new procedures that ensure that risky patterns of behaviour are identified swiftly by police.

  The campaign for a dedicated stalking protection bill continued into 2019. We asked for the introduction of Stalking Protection Orders, which would give police the authority to enforce early measures to immediately protect victims, and to ensure that stalkers get the psychological treatment they need to prevent further offending. This was passed into law in March 2019, and there is still much work to be done to ensure it works in practice.

  I’m fortunate to have a media platform from which to raise awareness of these issues. Through the media I am trying to promote better conversations around both crime and mental distress. I’m firmly of the mind that the well-worn crime and mental ‘illness’ narratives we absorb via the media largely serve only to perpetuate stereotypes, stigmatize and stoke the kind of black-and-white thinking that gets everyone precisely nowhere. The more nuanced and measured we can be in our reporting of crime, the better our conversations around how to tackle crime will be. We need news reports and television programmes that are brave enough to ask the difficult questions so that we can start to look for more effective solutions.

  When I was a year into my first university degree in 1993, then Prime Minister John Major urged us all to ‘condemn a little more and understand a little less’. Since then, whichever political party has been in charge, understanding seems
to have been abandoned altogether.

  Condemnation is a message which speaks to a human instinct: the desire to distance ourselves as far and as fast as we can from the people and ideas that threaten us. When we are faced with crimes and the people who commit them, it is far easier to shout, ‘Throw away the key!’ and then look away – out of sight, out of mind – than try to get to the underlying causes. Criminal behaviours challenge us – and I should know because I have been personally and professionally challenged. I haven’t always found it easy. Far from it. There have been times when I’ve felt extremes of both empathy and anger. We cannot allow either emotion to set the tone for how we respond to those who have committed crimes or who are in an extreme state of distress. I know that the balance between cool, objective reasoning with respect for the rights of others – what Paul Bloom refers to in his book Against Empathy as ‘rational compassion’ – is difficult to achieve. But achieve it we must.

  I’ve come to realize that whenever I am asked ‘What is wrong with these people?’ it has really been an exercise in ‘othering’ my clients. We categorize rule-breakers as ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ – they must be one or the other – we say they did this because they were psychopathic, evil or [insert Disorder Of The Day]. For some of ‘these people’ it provides a convenient label to hide behind. It demonizes others and can make even themselves wonder if they are beyond redemption.

  If your reaction to that is a shrug of your shoulders, I understand. But consider that not only do we ‘other’ criminals, we do the same to victims too. Too often we hear that a person was targeted because they were naive, vulnerable, promiscuous or put themselves in harm’s way. Then we pathologize their distressed reactions to being victimized. The label of dysfunction we tar them with can almost entirely dictate their experience in the years ahead.