by AB Morgan
‘You had your doubts about his credentials, didn’t you, Monica?’
‘Was it that obvious?’
‘No, not really. I read your lips through the glass.’ Phil pointed in the general direction of the goldfish bowl of an office. ‘I’m sure you were doubting whether he was a qualified doctor … or was I wrong?’
‘Guilty your honour … but keep that to yourself.’ Good grief. I hadn’t thought about that. Lip reading. Phil wasn’t even deaf.
The article in the Saturday Albion detailed why it was that Rodney Wells’ sister had accused Dr Sharman of medical negligence and the manslaughter of her brother. Police were reportedly following up with a full investigation at the Coroner’s request. That was a depressing added bonus.
I eventually left Phil with other patients, sharing his own theories about the downfall of Dr Sharman, as I was keen to read my own copy of the Saturday Albion extremely thoroughly. I checked and double-checked, but there was no mention of my role in Mark’s escape. There was also no reference to my guilt in supplying a copy of confidential Section paperwork to Mark’s solicitor Richard Huntley. According to the newspaper, Richard had reported Dr Sharman to the police for fraud under the Mental Health Act, on behalf of his client. The expression ‘irrefutable evidence’ was used.
The article did emphasise and enlighten me as to how much trouble I was in.
I was painfully aware that what I had carried out would be considered to be a case of gross misconduct, and instant dismissal would undoubtedly ensue if anyone ever found out that I had enabled Mark to abscond while on a Section; but I didn’t know that it had a Section number of its own. Section 128 according to the newspaper was ‘the offence of assisting someone under the Mental Health Act 1983 to go AWOL.’ Mark had carefully woven the facts into his article, without any specific member of staff being referred to in relation to his escape. In fact he appeared to have fabricated that part of his story, matching my fictional version of events at the time.
‘ I made a dramatic bid for freedom whilst my escort’s back was turned. It was my only chance to escape from the hospital and into the freedom of the driving rain outside…’ Good grief, surely someone would ask questions about who the escort was and why they had been so negligent. Pressure was building up inside me, threatening to turn into a screaming eruption of biblical proportions.
Then, gathering myself, I read in depth the detail of Dr Sharman’s formal charges of forgery, and I finally grasped the seriousness of what else I had done.
‘Under Section 126 of the Mental Health Act 1983 is the Offence of Forgery. This applies to forgery of documents used in the administration of the Act, such as, forgery of signatures on Section papers, but also applies when false information is knowingly written on the papers with the deliberate intention of deceiving others. It is an offence to knowingly possess them as well as to forge them.’
Oh my God! I had committed another crime. I’d had a copy of an illegal Section paper in my possession, and I knew the information had been a lie. Heartsinkingly, I therefore concluded that I was guilty of fraud, or was it forgery? Or was it possession of forged documents under the Mental Health Act?
I read on in a state of despair for my career as a nurse. My only consolation was, that if it could be proved that Mark had been illegally detained, then he would not be considered to have been under a Section. If that were the case, then I perhaps could avoid the issue of enabling a patient to abscond. Wishful thinking on my part, I was sure, but it helped to quell the unholy scream, which still threatened to explode.
Days and weeks went by, as the newspaper disclosed more sordid details about Dr Sharman’s past, and eventually produced the scandalous results of the national research project ‘into the integrity and robustness of the psychiatric profession.’
The results were damning, and with them came a salvo of rebuttals: ‘Research method was biased and morally questionable’ said psychiatry.
‘Psychiatry is based on sound clinical evidence,’ came the strong message from the Royal College.
Conversely the papers announced that the ‘Psychiatric Abuse Research Experiment reveals Psychiatric Services to be Fundamentally Flawed.’
However hard they tried to defend themselves, or refute the findings, the damage was done to the reputation of the psychiatric profession and to public confidence. Not one of the pretend patients participating in the experiment was exposed as an imposter. None of them were even accused of malingering. Each one attracted a diagnostic label and were expected to engage in treatment with medication. On a cheerful note, three experimenters were offered psychological therapy for management of voice hearing, despite not having any hallucinatory voices to contend with.
It was a repeat performance of the Rosenhan Experiment twenty years previously.
‘Psychiatry is still in the dark ages,’ concluded Mark Randall in one of his final pieces for the Daily Albion.
The exposure of coercion and abuse of consultant powers galvanised a clamour of debate in the press, which called for a radical overhaul of the Mental Health Act. While the debate raged, at Hollberry Hospital not one person was arrested or charged with poisoning. It felt as if nobody cared enough to ask about that particular incident after a while, even though it could have killed Dr Sharman.
Not one detail about my role in supplying confidential information as evidence appeared in the press. Richard Huntley never mentioned it.
Dr Siddiqui passed his exams, and became a considerate consultant psychiatrist.
Gordon Bygraves and Harriet Morris, no relation, were dismissed.
Welsh Phil went home, as did every other patient. No one stays on a psychiatric ward forever. Not even the nurses.
Dr Sharman recovered from his heart attack, and was formally arrested on his discharge from hospital. His court hearings and trials were reported in the national press, and he drew enough attention and notoriety, to fulfil the needs of his narcissistic personality disorder even though he was never seen working in psychiatry again. He was the only doctor in this country to have been removed from the GMC register twice, and to be found guilty of forgery under the Mental Health Act requiring him to briefly serve time at her Majesty’s pleasure, most of it suspended.
A few people were of the opinion that he was not punished enough.
38
Phil Lynott, Che Guevara, and Jesus Go to a Bar
Twenty years or so later, I found myself in a cosy pub with my husband Max and our good friends Dave and Carol Williams. I had also arranged to meet an old acquaintance, but he and his wife had not yet arrived. They had tracked me down through the power of the Internet, and by good fortune lived a short taxi ride away.
We had barely arrived in our favourite watering hole, when I noticed, sitting at the corner table, by the fireplace, a group of bright chatty young people in their late twenties or thereabouts. My grandmother was right, the older I become, the more difficult it is to identify the age of those younger than myself. One of the group struck me as having a disconcerting likeness to a young Phil Lynott, the long-since-dead lead singer of the band Thin Lizzy. I mentioned this to Dave, who, as an easily excitable person, burst into his own rendition of “The boys are back in town” which he thought was comical.
Dave is funny. He’s a salt of the earth Essex man, with a ripe and fruity sense of humour and a generosity of spirit that is often hard to find in others. He’s taller than Max, and walks with an untrendy walking stick as a result of a motorbike accident years ago.
After a short interlude, during which Dave exhausted his repertoire of Thin Lizzy songs, badly sung with a lot of la-la-la-ing at forgotten lyrics, we noticed another famous lookalike.
‘Bugger me,’ Dave said to Max, pointing rudely in the direction of a man at the other end of the bar. ‘It’s Che Guevara! Look. He’s got the beret and a beard. He’s got the combat trousers. He’s even got one of those tea towel scarf things round his neck!’
‘And would you believe it,�
�� added Max, caught up in Dave’s childlike joyfulness, ‘El Che’s wearing a T-shirt with his own picture on it!’
The whole scene caused a lot of amusement, to the extent that Carol and I joined in with the witty banter as we tried to make a joke from ‘Che Guevara and Phil Lynott walk into a bar …’ but nothing even remotely funny fitted with the opening line. All four of us sidetracked ourselves into a series of “man walks into a bar” jokes, for a while, until Max, slurping at his beer announced that ‘Jesus’s dad has just walked in.’
Dave was thrilled, and looked round immediately. ‘It is Jesus! Hasn’t he got old? He’s a bit grey and look he’s married! He’s coming over. Carol …’
Dave has a habit of thinking things out loud. He speaks in a booming voice, and behaves as if he’s watching television, rather than part of the scene that he’s commentating on. At times, he inadvertently causes offence, but mostly he’s hilariously entertaining. It was his usual ploy, if he had overstepped the mark, to alert Carol that she might have to stand by to diffuse the situation. He may put on a tough act, but he’s a real softie underneath it all, and hates confrontation. He was at his most mischievous because Max was about. They egged each other on something terrible.
Carol, is a woman with endless patience, and like her husband, she has a heart of solid gold. Being the type of person who is interested in what other people have to say, she includes everyone in conversations, and has a warmth and friendliness that makes it a privilege to be counted as one of her true friends. She also has a special gift: an ability to extract information, to negotiate a deal, and to haggle a discount like no other woman I have ever met. She does this with an innocent air that wrong-foots the opponent. When she has completed the transaction, whether it be compensation for a complaint, or to agree a price on a new handbag, the defeated party is more often than not seen scratching their heads and trying to determine how she deprived them of the upper hand.
Carol prepared herself to humorously fend off the approaching stranger who resembled what Jesus might have looked like if he had lived into his half century.
The man walked towards us, and I recognised him immediately. He was staring directly at me as he reached for his wallet. Every man reaches for their wallet as they get to the bar in a pub, which is normal, but on this occasion this particular man took out a ten-pound note and offered it to me. A huge smile lit up my face. ‘Mark! I’d forgotten that you owe me a tenner! That’s brilliant!’ and then I laughed as I took the money.
Just for a moment, Max was confused until he realised that Jesus was the journalist I had been expecting. I made introductions all round, and tried hurriedly and sensibly, to explain to Carol and Dave why Jesus had walked into a bar with a ten-pound note to give to me. I had told them all, including Max, that I had arranged to meet up with a journalist – which was true – also that the journalist and his wife wanted to do a documentary based on a true story about medical malpractice and they needed to interview me. We had planned to meet so that the details could be explained to me before the filming took place. I wanted Carol to be there because she was not afraid to ask questions that I wouldn’t even have thought of. Max hadn’t been listening when I tried to explain it to him. He couldn’t understand why I wanted to discuss this in a pub.
‘Why do you need to discuss it at all? Do the documentary and be on the telly. Anyway, what if these people are boring? They’ll mess up the whole evening.’
Max soon forgot about his objections. The evening passed in a blur of beer, wine, cider, and stories of such detail and entertainment value that the time seemed to whiz by. Mark and I informed the rest of the group, that we had not seen each other for about twenty years. Not since the day I gave Mark ten pounds and allowed him to abscond from my care and from Hollberry Hospital.
Although I had never spoken to anyone about the events of that September twenty years previously, for an unfathomable reason I felt able to confess my sins in a welcoming pub in deepest darkest Essex by the sea.
Mark took up parts of the story telling, to fill in the details that I had not known about until I read them in the Daily and Saturday Albion newspapers. Max, Dave, and Carol didn’t even seem to remember the case of the scandalous Dr Giles Sharman. Then, as we recounted the unsavoury details, vague memories of the story in the press came back to Carol, and she probed in more depth. She loved a bit of intrigue. She asked how the idea for the research project had come about, and how Mark and the team had managed to get away without having to give an NHS patient number.
‘Our administrative system was rubbish, that’s why,’ I recollected. ‘We had an old computer system, but not a national database or anything of real practical use. We were lucky if we had an address and telephone number accurately recorded.’
Once he had regaled us with his own naked exploits at Hollberry Station, Mark told us about the other journalists, the research team, and how they had fared during their time in hospitals across the country. We cried with laughter to hear about how Linda had caused a traffic jam dressed as a queen, but even more so when he told us about Jock’s Monty Python attempt. Then Mark disclosed that it was Jock who had interviewed Dr Sharman at the National Conference, as a complete set-up.
He also revealed that Jock kept the man in his sights for a lot longer than the assignment had required, and had uncovered more than he had bargained for when it came to revealing Dr Giles Sharman’s sexual depravity. It had only required a bribe to a couple of well-paid prostitutes to reveal the unwholesome truth. ‘Jock became obsessed with dishing as much dirt as possible when it came to Dr Giles Sharman,’ Mark said. ‘Meeting the man in person unnerved him so much that exposing him became a life’s work for our Jock.’
Carol pushed for more information. ‘When you say sexual depravity, what sort of thing do you mean?’
Mark would only offer one example: Dr Giles Sharman had regularly paid a suspender-clad woman to throw cream cakes at his genitals, while he was naked, and he paid extra for every direct hit.
Dave and Max were beside themselves with this salacious titbit. They begged for more, but were declined. They threatened to trawl the Internet to find the rest of the twisted sexual antics that would surely be found in glorious Technicolor.
‘That’s all you’re getting. The rest is unspeakable and not for discussion in a pub.’ We were left hanging.
In contrast to the howls of laughter, the mood between us became quietly reflective. When Mark described how it had actually felt when he took the liquid antipsychotic medication, his description brought a tear to my eye, which Carol did not fail to notice. In order to regain composure, I excused myself and went to the ladies toilet, and I caught her understanding expression when I returned. I smiled weakly in response. Emotional memories seemed harder to contain after a cider or two.
The second brief, but sombre mood, came when we talked about how Rodney Wells had killed himself. Carol was again asking questions about how consultants were allowed to get away with that level of abuse, especially as nowadays there would be an expectation that other staff would blow the whistle. She then realised that she had answered her own queries.
‘Oh, I see. The research project brought to everyone’s attention that there was bullying and abuse going on, because it was brushed under the carpet. The bullying was covered up. Monica, I can’t imagine you ever being bullied.’
Mark answered for me. ‘She wasn’t. She was the only one who stood up to Dr Sharman. That’s why we want her for this documentary. It will be twenty years since the research project, and we want to do a comparison between then and now. Monica took real risks to protect her patients and we can’t do the documentary without her.’
Mark asked my permission to discuss the finer points of his escape from hospital, and I had no reason to be concerned that this disclosure in The Queen’s Head, amongst friends, would cause me a significant problem. Mark’s perspective was fascinating to hear. He had been stunned at what I’d had planned for him in order for
him to abscond from the hospital, and shocked that I had given him money, an umbrella, and a means to contact for help.
‘I’m not sure how you’re going to take this.’ Mark said to me directly. ‘But I had planned to run anyway. I was caught like a rat in a trap and desperate to escape, whatever the cost.’
My face must have been a picture.
‘But I couldn’t do it,’ Mark revealed.
‘Why not?’ Carol queried, before I could ask the same.
‘Oh, I wanted to, in my head, but that hideous medication sucks the life out of you. I couldn’t get myself together enough to plan my escape. I could barely imagine giving Monica the slip. I had no energy and no motivation.’
‘Now you tell me!’ I pretended to find this fact funny.
Max, Dave, Carol, and Mark’s wife Julia listened politely, and gave supportive nods and comments until I revealed that what I had done on that day in 1994 was illegal.
‘In truth I shouldn’t still be a nurse. In fact I should have been charged, and sacked from my job and removed from the nursing register.’
There were a variety of facial expressions around the table, not least from my husband who, it seemed, was not impressed.
‘You’ve kept that a secret for over twenty years?’ he exclaimed, eyes wide, eyebrows raised.
‘Yes.’
‘Unbelievable. I thought I knew everything about you.’
‘Maybe you don’t …’
Max laughed. I had completely misunderstood him.
