by Jean Davison
‘You’ll be in trouble if Sister Oldroyd sees you wearing those.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re supposed to wear shoes during the day, luv. That’s the rule, and in here you’ll keep to the rules without asking questions if you know what’s good for you.’
After breakfast Sheila asked me to go to the shop with her. We walked through a maze of long, bleak corridors, which branched off here and there leading to the recesses of the hospital. I was in another world. A world that reeked of cleaning fluid and urine and sadness and pain. A world inhabited by strange men and women who wandered these corridors like the living dead, muttering to themselves, arguing and fighting with their own personal demons, or just staring blankly into space as they shuffled past us with heads down, shoulders drooping: the dejected demeanour of the institutionalised. My heart filled with sadness. How did people end up like that? What had happened to them? Were they once just ordinary babies, children, teenagers? Who were they?
After what must have been the longest indoor walk I’d ever taken, we arrived at the small shop where patients were queuing to buy items such as cigarettes, sweets and tissues. The man behind me in the shop queue stroked my hair, drooling, ‘You’ve got to stroke women, women like to be stroked. Just like this, gently and easily. They like it. You’ve got to stroke women, women like to be stroked …’
‘Give over,’ I said, turning round.
‘I’m sorry, young woman, no offence meant,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m going.’
I watched him shuffling away.
We returned to the ward where patients had formed a queue at the trolley to be given drugs. I hung back because Dr Sugden had said I was being admitted for ‘a rest and observation’. Nothing had been said about drugs.
‘Come on, we haven’t got all day,’ Sister Oldroyd barked at me. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Jean Davison.’
She fished out an indexed card from a box on the trolley.
‘Ah yes, you’re on Largactil, seventy-five milligrams three times a day.’
She poured some golden-brown liquid from a large bottle into a small, plastic container. Obediently, I swallowed the medication.
‘Where’s everybody going?’ I asked Debbie who, like the others, was putting on her coat.
‘To the therapy block across the grounds,’ she replied.
‘What’s therapy?’
‘Don’t you know that?’ She sounded amazed at such ignorance. ‘It’s making things. You can learn how to make lampshades, baskets, ashtrays or soft toys.’
The ward emptied of patients except for three old women and me. A nurse sent me to my dormitory where I had to strip to my waist in front of a Dr Prior who placed a stethoscope on my chest and gave me a blood test. Later, I was called to the Quiet Room where he was sitting, feet spread out, smoking a cigarette, and looking at some papers on his knee.
‘Sit down,’ he said, motioning to the chair facing him. I sat stiffly, perched on the edge of my chair, shyness making me feel ill at ease.
‘Relax, I don’t bite,’ he said, smiling, showing a neat row of gleaming white teeth. He looked to be in his late twenties and wore a grey tweed jacket, crisp white shirt and dark-grey trousers.
‘I work under Dr Sugden and I’ll be seeing you from time to time. Can you tell me why you’re here?’
‘Well, for quite some time I’ve been thinking life seems meaningless and empty.’ I stopped. What else was there to say? Besides, I wasn’t in the mood now for talking. I was feeling very sleepy.
He leaned forward in his chair. ‘Go on,’ he said, nodding encouragingly.
‘And I’m confused about religion.’
‘Is it very important for you to believe in God?’ he asked, looking at the papers on his knee.
‘I wish I had summat to believe in.’
‘Do you think about religion a lot?’
‘Yes.’
‘All the time?’
‘A lot. Not just about religion. About beliefs generally. I can’t sort out what to believe in. I’m confused with so many different ideas.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
‘I started thinking about lots of things and questioning all me beliefs until I ended up not knowing what to believe in, and it’s made me feel kinda lost. I feel as if I don’t know what I am.’
He wrote something down, then looked at me. ‘When you say you don’t know what you are, what exactly do you mean?’
I searched my mind in vain for the words that might get him to understand. ‘Oh, I can’t explain it any further than that,’ I said, feeling weary. ‘I don’t know how to put these feelings into words.’
‘I see,’ he said, writing something down. ‘So it’s as if you’ve got a thought-block?’
‘Is it?’ I didn’t know if he was asking me or telling me. It was especially difficult for me to find the right words to explain what I meant when trying to talk about personal things to a man I didn’t know who was making notes about me. So that was a thought-block? ‘Yeah, well I guess I’ve got plenty of those, then,’ I said, managing a smile though I felt embarrassed and nervous.
‘You say you don’t know what you are. What sort of person do you want to be?’
‘I want to be a good Christian,’ I said. ‘Or at least I thought I did. But, like I say, I can’t believe in the Christian doctrines any more.’
‘Is there a particular religious belief that’s causing you most problems?’
‘Well, it’s all of them really, but I can give you an example of one of the teachings which confuses me very much. It’s the belief about heaven and hell.’
‘Heaven and hell?’
‘Yes. It’s a belief of the Pentecostal church I used to go to that Christians go to heaven after death and non-Christians go to hell. I can’t believe a God of love could send anyone to endless torment.’
He scribbled on his notepad again, then, glancing at his watch, said, ‘I must go.’ He stood up, flashing a smile. ‘I’ll see you again soon and we’ll have a good talk.’
The other patients came back from therapy at midday. After dinner, the drugs trolley reappeared and we were each given further medication. Visiting time in the afternoon was from two till four. Danny arrived at two. We sat holding hands at a table in the dining area where I struggled to stop my eyelids from slowly closing. I kept glancing at my watch longing for four because I was too drowsy to enjoy a conversation.
‘God, they’ve really doped you, haven’t they?’
‘Yes, I am very tired. I suppose it must be the drugs.’
A frown crossed his face. He sighed. ‘Oh well, they must know what’s best for you,’ he said.
‘Yes, I suppose they do,’ I murmured sleepily.
After tea, it was drugs time again, so I swallowed more Largactil syrup, then everyone settled down either to watch TV or to put their heads back in the armchairs and sleep. Evening visiting time was seven till eight. My parents and Danny arrived promptly, but I longed to go to bed and sleep.
When bedtime finally came at nine, I didn’t join the queue for sleeping pills until a nurse called me to the trolley.
‘Am I supposed to take sleeping pills every night even if I can sleep without them?’ I ventured to ask her. I could barely manage to keep awake so it seemed absurd.
‘Oh yes, it’s written on your card,’ was her curt reply.
A dark interlude of oblivion. And then morning again. Or something like that. After a drugged sleep, wrenching my head from the pillow was much harder than it had ever been. Groggy and dazed, I pulled on my dressing-gown and stumbled along the corridor to the washroom. There, I let the water from the cold tap run icy cold before splashing it on my face in an attempt to make myself feel somewhere near alive.
After breakfast I joined the queue at the trolley and dutifully swallowed my medication. I stood by the fish tank and watched the fish darting back and forth, round and round, in their glass prison. Utter futility. Then I sank into an armchair a
nd closed my eyes while listening to the budgie beating its wings against the bars and making a lot of noise. It’s cruel to put birds in cages, I realised with a jolt. Funny how I’d never thought of that before.
When I opened my eyes the ward had emptied.
‘Why aren’t you at OT?’ a stern voice demanded to know.
‘OT?’
‘Occupational Therapy,’ Sister Grayston informed me. ‘Where the other patients are and where you should be too. Off you go.’
The OT building was a place where male and female patients from the various wards came together to engage in activities such as Debbie had described. Miss Burton, the Head Therapist, introduced me to a therapist called Tina, a small, auburn-haired young woman with an old-fashioned beehive hairstyle, who seemed to be attempting something a little more stimulating with a group of about seven teenage patients; it looked like a discussion had been taking place.
Tina pulled a pen and paper from the top pocket of her stiff white overall and added my name to a list.
‘This is Jean,’ Tina said, addressing the group and motioning me forward. ‘Now, Jean, I want you to do some role-play with Peter.’
She placed two chairs in the centre for Peter and me while the rest of the group formed a semi-circle round us.
‘What I want you to do, Jean, is to pretend Peter is your fiancé and you’ve just found out he’s a drug addict. OK?’
Peter, a shy-looking, painfully thin, pimply youth of about nineteen looked heavily drugged anyway, which added a touch of reality. He was slouching forward in his chair staring at his shoes. After an awkward silence, I said, ‘So you’re a drug addict?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied, without looking up.
‘What kind of drugs?’
No reply.
‘Well, is it something you swallow or are you injecting?’
Still no reply.
‘How long have you been on drugs?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Why did you start taking drugs?’
Tina said, ‘That’s a good question. Now come on, Peter. Tell her why.’
‘I … I don’t know,’ he said, raising his head just enough for me to see he’d turned crimson. My heart went out to him; he was shyer than I was.
‘Do you want to come off drugs, Peter?’ I asked. ‘Are you willing to see a doctor and try to come off them?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Peter. And then we both lapsed into silence. End of act.
Tina clapped her hands.
‘That was very good. Tell me, Jean. If he wouldn’t come off drugs, would you break off the engagement with him?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, not giving it much thought. I couldn’t imagine being told by someone I knew well and loved that he was a drug addict, and not having had the slightest idea until then.
‘Very good,’ Tina said again. ‘So would I. You’d be well rid of him if he was on drugs.’
Next came a quiz. I was surprised to find that the teenage girl who appeared to be the most severely disturbed patient in our group, Joan, knew more of the answers than any of us. But her answers were interspersed with senseless laughter, tears, screaming, rocking back and forth, asking everyone silly questions and hitting those of us who didn’t answer her. This fair-haired, blue-eyed teenager was the disruptive element in the group. The joker was Raymond, aged about eighteen, who kept everyone amused with his own bubbly brand of humour.
‘Joan was at grammar school not long ago doing A levels,’ Raymond told me at break when we sat together in a corner of the noisy hall sipping stewed tea from badly stained plastic cups. ‘She got meningitis. Left her with permanent brain damage.’
‘Oh, isn’t it sad?’
‘Yes, it’s sad but that’s life,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Anyway, what about you? Can I ask the old corny question: what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’
‘Well, I think the diagnosis is acute depression,’ I said. ‘So perhaps they believe giving me a dose of this dismal place will make me realise I’d got nowt to be sad about before.’
Raymond grinned. He offered me a cigarette.
‘No thanks. Tried smoking but gave up while stopping was still easy.’
‘Very sensible,’ he said, lighting up.
‘And you?’ I asked. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Oh, I’m a really bad case.’ His dark eyes twinkled. ‘I’ve been here a year.’
‘A year!’
‘Yeah, well, it’s somewhere to live, isn’t it? I suppose if I’m a good boy and don’t talk as if I might cut my wrists again, I’ll eventually return to the big bad world and then …’ His smile faded. ‘And then I can do what I want to do with my rotten, lousy, fucked-up life.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘End it.’
‘But that wouldn’t solve owt, would it?’ I put to him hesitantly, aware of the need to tread carefully now that his cheerful mask had slipped.
‘It would solve everything. But let’s quit this morbid talk.’ His painted grin returned. ‘Do you know any good jokes?’
After tea break I was sent to the therapy workshop where patients were sitting in rows at long workbenches. Here, I was shown how to make an ashtray with small coloured square tiles by tearing off the gauzy backing material which kept the tiles together and then gluing each tile to a metal base. It was dreadfully boring, but there were distractions. Enid, the stout, elderly woman on my right, kept talking to herself. Mary, on my left, shuffled about in her seat, sometimes clapping her hands while she laughed and laughed.
Occasionally I glanced at Fred opposite to see if he still kept breaking off from the basket he was making to pull faces or wink at me. Only a few days ago I’d been laughing with Jackie when we’d joked about me sitting ‘basket-making with the loonies’. It didn’t seem funny now. Nothing seemed funny now.
CASE NO. 10826
Mental state:
Young apprehensive girl, reasonably well dressed and co-operative and pleasant.
Capable of holding good stream of conversation. Finds it difficult to express herself of the thought disorder – as she cannot express the feelings in words.
Thought disorder of bizarre in[sic] nature:
‘I am confused with so many different ideas.’ ‘Heaven and hell confuses me very much.’ ‘I do not know what I am at times,’ etc. Expresses these thoughts with particular reference to religion – ‘I want to be a good Christian.’
Perceptual disturbance:
Absent.
Passivity feeling perhaps present:
Not deluded with depersonalisation.
Orientation: full. Memory – Intact.
General Informations:
Intact.
Schizophrenia (Simplex) in a young girl with ? family history.
Dr Prior
CHAPTER THREE
THE FIRST FEW DAYS in High Royds passed in a blur. My thoughts became fuzzy as the drugs took a firm hold, and I sank into the regimented routine of the institution. Up at seven. Bed at nine. And in between, a drowsy dream-state of longing for bedtime. I would wake in the morning to face another day stretching ahead of me like an endless, gloomy tunnel.
At OT, I sometimes escaped from the monotony of knitting dishcloths and making ashtrays by lingering in the toilet. The door wouldn’t lock but a measure of privacy for writing could be achieved by sitting on the floor with knees to chest, feet against the base of the pot and back against the door holding it firmly shut. This was where I sat, scribbling copious notes for my diary, pouring my heart out on wads of toilet paper.
I was standing alone among the crowd of patients in the therapy hall at tea break watching a tall, wiry woman with a ‘basin’ haircut on what seemed to be her daily scrounge for cigarettes.
‘Have you got a cig?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t smoke.’
She eyed me up and down whilst nervously twisting a lock of hair around her shaky, nicotine-stained fingers,
with nails bitten to the quick.
‘I’m Beryl. What’s your name?’
‘Jean.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear, I thought so. I knew it,’ she said, frowning. ‘I can see it all again now.’
The way she was staring at me and shaking her head mournfully made me feel uncomfortable.
‘You remind me of myself about thirty years ago. This is your first time in a mental hospital, isn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘Yes, like me. I was eighteen. I’ve been in and out ever since and I expect I’ll be a permanent resident now. It all starts when you first come in. Once you’re in, they’ve got you.’
This reminded me of my mother’s warning that you’d never get away once they got their clutches on you. But what did my mother know about it? As for Beryl, well, surely this was her illness talking, and of course it was completely different for me.
Beryl’s eyes darted back and forth like a trapped animal. ‘It’s like being in prison, only worse. You’ll see.’
‘I’m a voluntary patient,’ I informed her.
‘Voluntary. Ah, yes,’ she said with a strange, crooked smile. ‘What does that word mean in here?’ Her breath was coming out in noisy puffs; she seemed very agitated. ‘Have they given you any treatment yet?’
‘Just drugs.’
‘Yes, like me. First the pills. Lots of pills. Make you very sleepy, don’t they? Have they given you electric shock treatment yet?’
‘Electric shock treatment?’
‘Yes. They zap your brain with electric.’ She pointed a finger to her head like a gun. ‘Pow! It’s supposed to shock you back into sanity by destroying your brain cells.’
‘No, I’m not having that. I only came in for about a week, so I’ll be going home in a couple of days.’
‘Oh, sure you will. Is that what they told you? They told me that, too. I was only eighteen. You’re only eighteen. It’s terribly sad. I hope you’ll be OK but I know how it can happen and …’ She bent her face near to my mine. ‘I’m scared for you, Jean. Really scared for you.’
