by Jean Davison
THE DARK THREADS
A Psychiatric Survivor’s Story
Jean Davison
To Ian
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:
‘Time-bomb’ poem. Reproduced by kind permission of the author, Professor Valerie Walkerdine.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell, 1949) by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Secker & Warburg Ltd.
Extract from ‘Aftermath’ poem. By kind permission of the author, Leonard Roy Frank.
Two lines of ‘Stings’ from Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath. Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Quotation from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, published by William Heinemann Ltd. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Extract from ‘The Weaver’ poem. By kind permission of E Sue Wagner and family of the late Benjamin Malachi Franklin.
Published by Accent Press Ltd – 2012
ISBN 9781908917621
Copyright © Jean Davison 2009
The right of Jean Davison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, The Old School, Upper High St, Bedlinog, Mid-Glamorgan CF46 6RY.
Cover Design by The Design House
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Dark Threads is an autobiographical account of ‘breakdown’ and psychiatric treatment. I have used some of the techniques of writing fiction (dialogue, imagery, fictitious names/identifying details) to protect people’s privacy and also to facilitate self-expression. The names of medical professionals have been changed. Instead of using my maiden name I have used my married surname of Davison throughout the book (although my actual case notes were, of course, in my maiden name). In some instances I’ve fleshed out half-remembered scenes with invented minor details, such as the colour of a bedspread, the weather, an ink stain on a desk. But I have not, to my knowledge, distorted the substance of the true story.
No more, I will accept no more
be sorry no more
be quiet no more
They will have to hear my story
and they will not dare to say it
made me mad
Of course it made me mad
After all they pathologised
my history
No more, no more
my shouts today will be
so loud
My tears drops of pure fire
you will no longer take away
my past
for today I take my life
into these two hands
I am a time-bomb
and I have started ticking
Valerie Walkerdine
PROLOGUE
‘WE ARE IN GRAVE danger!’ a voice insists.
I can hear the words, but from somewhere distant. I keep floating away. A blurred, drugged sensation. Sounds of moaning. Stench of vomit and urine. I feel the hardness of the mattress, the roughness of the blanket. I am trying to focus my eyes on a ghostly figure beside my bed, but semi-darkness encircles me.
I remember hearing screams. I grip the blanket. What else do I remember? My befuddled brain throws up a vague recollection of being held down firmly and suffocating blackness. Nothing makes sense. Exorcism? Purgation? Trials and torture? But where are the witches? We don’t burn witches any more. We don’t believe in witches now. The Dark Ages are gone but, oh, it is not safe here. There is a grey mist about me; someone keeps warning of grave danger; and my head hurts so badly. I have had a very strange dream, a terrible nightmare. Am I awake or am I still dreaming?
After a half-hearted attempt to sit up I succumb to the seduction of the pillow to rest my aching head. This is not the same as an ordinary headache, more like the soreness of a nasty bump. But not a surface lump. It is somewhere inside my head; this soreness, this dull, throbbing pain.
My eyes follow the white-clad figure. It is not a ghost but a nurse. She is moving to the next bed. There on the bed, a thin, straggly-haired woman is stretching her arms towards me and warning of danger.
‘We are in grave danger!’ She is even more insistent. Her voice is shaky and hoarse.
I am aware now that my bed is in a row of beds. One woman is sitting on the edge of her bed vomiting into a bowl. Some are moaning, others lying quiet and still.
Where am I? What day is it? Who are these people? And who am I? Please don’t give me a number or a label or a curious sidelong glance. Tell me my name.
Creeping tentacles of fear spread over my body, reminding me of waiting – that long anxiety-filled stretch of waiting. Before ECT. That’s it! We’re waiting for electric shock treatment. The nurse is standing near my bed. It must be my turn. Ripples of apprehension run from my stomach to my throat, then settle into a tight knot of fear somewhere inside my chest. Perhaps if I tell her I feel ill I’ll be able to get out of it. God knows it isn’t a lie.
‘Can I be excused ECT today?’ I am begging her. ‘I’ve a bad headache.’
The nurse laughs loudly as if it is all a huge joke. ‘Excused ECT? You’ve had ECT.’
‘Have I?’ I say, bewildered. ‘But I don’t remember.’
I feel as if half my brain has been bombed out but, oh, what a relief to know it is all over. At least for today.
‘Be a good girl and get up now, then you can have a nice cup of tea.’ The nurse is beaming pleasantly. Meekly I obey. Just like a good girl.
I am handed a cardboard container full of warm, muddy-looking liquid, which I suppose must be the nice cup of tea. It tastes foul.
‘Don’t drink it! They’re trying to poison us!’ a woman in a hospital dressing-gown whispers in my ear as she shuffles past.
Still in a trance, I survey my fellow sufferers. We’re a mixed bunch. Some look as if they would give the devil himself a fright but most seem just lost, confused and so very vulnerable. ‘Where are my teeth?’ ‘Where are my glasses?’ ‘Oh, the pain, I can’t stand the pain.’ ‘I’ll sue you all for this, you fucking bastards!’
As I listen to the other patients and watch them wandering around in a daze, I find it hard to believe it’s real. Aren’t these people mentally ill? But not me too? No, no, it must be a bad dream. Or there must have been a dreadful mistake. I shouldn’t be here; a part of my mind is weeping and protesting against the horror and humiliation of it all. I’m losing my powers of reasoning and my self-respect. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to get the hell out of here. Before it’s too late.
But is it already too late? I have been violated at a deeper level than words can say. How can I ever be the same again?
Looking back through the drugged haze and post-ECT fog it seems strange to think that, only a fortnight earlier, I was walking through the park on my way to that first appointment at the outpatient clinic. I had never seen a psychiatrist, never even heard of ECT as I dawdled along, crunching underfoot the autumn leaves, those lovely golds and reds and russet browns which swirled about and decked the tree-lined path near the pond. Here I sat on a bench for a while, savouring the scene. It was turning cold but the pond was not yet frozen. The leaves were falling but the trees were not yet bare. Squirrels still darted about now and then, birds still sang and the ground was not yet shrouded in snow. But winter was fast approaching. Soon all would be changed.
Shouldn’t there have be
en some kind of ritual, some rite of passage, to mark such a sudden and awesome transformation? One day I was living in a teenage world of discos, pop songs, dating, giggles with female friends, religious angst and worries about pimples. The next day I was in a nightmare world of drugs, ECT, humiliation and long, bleak corridors leading me far from home. And the only connecting thread, it seemed, was when I had calmly, and I thought sensibly, decided to see a psychiatrist and then agreed to be hospitalised.
How can this be? Have I forgotten something that might explain it all? If I begin by following that connecting thread, will it lead me to answers?
I am still trying to sort out my thoughts when the nurse tells us that an ambulance is waiting to take us back to our wards. How could I have been stupid enough to let my life get into such a mess? And how am I ever going to get myself out of it? I stumble into the ambulance feeling dizzy and disorientated.
The ambulance is bumping across the broken tarmac. In the far corner the hoarse voice keeps on saying, ‘We are in grave danger!’ I am sitting wedged between two plump, dressing-gown-clad patients with vacant, staring eyes. I am thinking about the God I don’t believe in, my need of ‘Him’ accentuated by sheer desperation. Dear God in heaven. Friend of my childhood. Comforter and Guide. Where, oh where are You now?
PART ONE
A GOOD GIRL
Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
CHAPTER ONE
WE WERE AT BUTLINS, Skegness, in the August of 1968, my friend Mandy and me. Two weeks with no boring lists to type or envelopes to stick. Two weeks of sun, sand, sea and boyfriends galore. Lots of kissing, petting, dancing, laughter and … and, all the time, the thoughts and feelings that had plagued me for so long. Who am I? What am I? What to do? How to be?
The jukebox in the disco played loudly while we, wearing mini-skirts the size of napkins, danced the night away with two handsome security guards, stopping now and then to kiss, and to drink all the port and lemons they bought for us. We giggled and clowned about all the way back to our chalet, locked the lads out, and collapsed onto our beds, heads spinning. Still chuckling, we prattled on about what a great time we were having, what fun things we’d do tomorrow, and then on to the bigger things such as how to put the world to rights. Teenage life in the sixties. Who could wish for anything more?
We went to bed, then read for a while. I can’t go on like this, I told myself as I lay in my top bunk silently crying, a magazine covering my face. Mandy was lying in bed beneath me reading her magazine. She thought I was still reading mine, but, in the middle of a girl-meets-boy romance, I’d started to cry. It was nothing to do with the paper-thin girl in the shallow, meaningless story. It was to do with me and my shallow, meaningless life.
‘’Night, Jean,’ Mandy murmured sleepily.
‘Hang on, Mandy, don’t put the light out yet. I’ve just got me diary to write.’
It all came out in my diary: a place where I could be totally honest. ‘I’m so terribly depressed,’ I wrote. ‘I’m eighteen and should be enjoying myself. It’s not normal to be so sad and confused about life all of the time … I’ve got to do something sensible about it.’
I decided that doing ‘something sensible about it’ meant that when I got back from Skegness I’d see a doctor.
Even so, I put this off until November, perhaps hoping I might yet manage to sort things out by myself. Came November with its fog and rain, and me still as adrift as a cork in the sea, I visited my doctor.
I first went to see Dr Russo on the pretext that I wanted some sleeping tablets, although what I really wanted was to talk. I thought asking for these would help me by providing me with an easier starting point. But ten minutes later, I left his surgery with a prescription for a small supply of sleeping tablets and the comment that I shouldn’t need them at my age.
A few days later, my friend Jackie told me that she was at a low ebb, too. We both decided to visit our respective GPs, and so I tried again to talk to him.
‘The beliefs of the church are disproved by science,’ Dr Russo said when I tried to tell him about my confusion with religion.
With Dr Russo, I found myself defending the very beliefs which, in front of Pastor West and my family, I’d been so ardently rejecting. Yet beneath my rebellious onslaught against religion, there had been a challenge and an appeal to Pastor West: always, a silent plea for him to convince me that I was wrong.
When Jackie and I next met she told me that her GP had said she was suffering with nervous anxiety. We compared our bottles of tranquillisers, which we both found made us drowsy and impeded our concentration at work. I went back to Dr Russo and told him I felt worse than ever. He increased the dosage.
I couldn’t see the point in taking tablets that made me too tired to talk or do anything. There was so much inside me that needed to come out. I wanted to be understood. I needed to talk. It occurred to me that a psychiatrist might be more helpful than an overworked GP.
‘What? You’re going to ask Dr Russo if you can see a psychiatrist?’ said my mother. ‘What on earth for? There’s nowt up with you.’
‘Listen, Mum,’ I began, though listening was something she never seemed to do. She always looked pale and exhausted; perhaps her job as a bus conductress was too tiring for her. ‘I need someone to talk to and maybe a psychiatrist could help. I mean they’re trained to understand people and –’
‘You don’t need a psychiatrist,’ Mum said. ‘You ought to go back to church.’
When I asked Dr Russo if I could see a psychiatrist he wrote out a medical certificate with the diagnosis ‘acute depression’ and said, ‘Yes, I suppose we could try that, if you like.’
So that was it. If I’d known how easy it would be for me to see a psychiatrist I would probably have asked to see one a few years earlier. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen I’d gained my knowledge of psychiatrists from The Human Jungle, my favourite TV programme at the time. Young and impressionable, I’d seen the psychiatrist Dr Corder, played by the actor Herbert Lom, as a wise, caring person who could help people with their problems. How wonderful it would be to have someone like that to talk to, someone who would take the time to really listen to me, and understand. It’s embarrassing to admit it now but I’m sure The Human Jungle had something to do with my decision to ask to see a psychiatrist.
And so, on a crisp autumn day in 1968, I was fidgeting on a hard chair in the crowded outpatients department of St Luke’s Hospital waiting to see Dr Sugden. I was surprised by the apparent normality of the others in the waiting area. But I looked ordinary too, didn’t I?
Trying to ignore my butterflies I picked up a magazine and flicked through the pages. What if he didn’t take me seriously? I had a boyfriend, female friends, an active social life, which might make it seem that my shyness wasn’t such a problem. When boys chatted me up I could reciprocate. I’d had several boyfriends and I can’t have seemed shy when laughing and chatting with them.
However, shyness did still keep me subdued in my office job at Lee’s, and it had been an enormous problem before that in my first job at the Fisk Television factory. And at Rossfields, my last school, oh, God, I’d been crippled by shyness there.
And would this psychiatrist be able to understand my difficulties in coming to terms with the loss of my religious beliefs, about life seeming empty and meaningless, and those hard to explain ‘What am I?’ feelings? Perhaps he would try to impress upon me all that I ought to be thankful for. Or perhaps, like Pastor West, he would speak about that difficult transition period from adolescence to adulthood. Perhaps he would say there was nothing wrong with me and, horror of horrors, that I must go back to work tomorrow. I had no idea that this was the last thing I need have feared. Or that there would come a day when I would wish that he had.
When I was called into the
consulting room my stomach was still churning. Dr Sugden was a frail, elderly man with metal-framed glasses, which slid down his nose every time he bent his head forward. It was hard to imagine that he could have much understanding of teenagers. But I tried not to judge on the basis of first impressions.
I shifted about on my seat. The pills prescribed by Dr Russo were making me feel too tired to want to talk but I tried to explain things. I even told him about the strange ‘dream feeling’ I used to get when I was a schoolgirl at Rossfields, and he seemed particularly interested in that, despite my admission that I only got it now when I’d been drinking. He scribbled on his notepad and kept saying ‘I see’, but I wasn’t at all sure that he did.
For so long I’d been wanting the opportunity to have a good talk, but now all I could think of saying had come out in a few minutes and sounded like nothing much. I felt embarrassed for wasting his time.
‘I’m scared. I’m scared I’m going insane,’ I said. Shyness made my voice shaky, adding to the drama of this statement.
‘Do you sometimes feel like killing yourself?’ he asked.
I didn’t, but would a straight ‘No’ make him underestimate how bad I felt? I paused for a while, then replied, ‘I know that wouldn’t be the right thing to do.’
‘I see. And are you happy at home?’
Another pause. I’d told Mum I would talk about me, not my family. In any case, I was aware that many teenagers came from worse homes than mine.
‘I feel as if I’m different from me family,’ I said. ‘And me brother gets on me nerves.’ I hung my head guiltily. Sorry, Mum, but I need to talk.
‘How old is your brother?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘You don’t feel able to talk to him about your problems?’
‘Brian? Good heavens, no. I can’t talk to him about owt.’
‘What’s his occupation?’
‘He’s a bus conductor. Like me mum and dad.’ I gave a nervous smile. ‘A family of bus conductors. Except me. I’m a typist at Lee’s, an electrical firm.’
