The Dark Threads

by Jean Davison

  And sometimes, while still in this post-ECT fuddle, you wonder what they are doing to your brain. Poor brain. Doped and shocked. Numbed and stunned. Has it been damaged? The mental hospital environment is one that can greatly endanger a person’s physical and psychological well-being; that’s not being paranoid, it is a fact.

  ‘What can I do? They are trying to kill me,’ says Eric, a young man I see at OT who, I think, has been given a ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ label. ‘They watch me closely to make sure I swallow the poison and if that doesn’t work then they’ll do it by electrocution. If I don’t kill myself, they’ll murder me.’

  Eric must be very sick to talk like that, I realise, and yet his words do seem to make sense in this place. More sense than the words of the staff. I sympathise with Eric’s dilemma.

  Meanwhile, Mabel rocks back and forth, Deirdre mutters obscenities, Mary laughs and laughs, Lilly sucks her thumb for comfort and Gary plays with his genitals. I am sitting quietly staring down at the small coloured tiles on the workbench used for making ashtrays or sticking on to bottles to make table-lamp stands. I am remembering how, when first admitted, I looked for signs of sickness in other patients behind what I thought was a façade of normality, but now I find it easier, even when watching patients displaying bizarre behaviour, to see the ‘normality’ behind the ‘sickness’. Normality? Sickness? What do these words mean? As I stare at the tiles till their colours blur together, I am coming to believe that the dividing line between ‘normality’ and ‘mental illness’ is a very fine one.

  Danny came to visit me one afternoon when, only a few hours earlier, I’d been given ECT. I tried to pull my thoughts together to make sensible conversation with him.

  ‘Yes, I know. You’ve already told me that a few minutes ago,’ he said, his soft brown eyes full of pity.

  ‘It’s the ECT,’ I explained quickly, anxious to let him know I wasn’t crazy. ‘It makes you forget things, but only temporarily.’ At least I hoped the way I felt would be only temporary.

  I remembered how before my admission Dr Sugden had said I was ‘heading for’ a nervous breakdown. That’s why he’d wanted me to come into hospital, wasn’t it?

  ‘Danny, I’m scared that I’ll go … that I’ll have a nervous breakdown,’ I said, squeezing his hand.

  Danny shook his head knowingly. ‘No, you won’t. Not now that you’re in this hospital where they can prevent that happening.’

  I stared at him in surprise. He might just as well have said: You won’t have a nervous breakdown now because you’re under too much stress.

  ‘But it’s awful in here, Danny,’ I confided. ‘I look at patients in OT who are laughing and talking to themselves and … and I’m scared I might end up like that.’

  He frowned. ‘Well, look at them and think you’re not going to end up like that. Be determined not to. Don’t give up, Jean. Promise me you’ll keep fighting against it.’

  Dear Danny. He tried hard to help me. He came to visit me often at first. When he couldn’t afford the bus fares, he managed to borrow a pushbike and cycled the seven miles through bitter winter winds to arrive at the hospital, red-faced, hands chapped and numb with cold. He put his beloved guitar aside for a while and got a job in a shop. After finishing work, he’d rush straight to the hospital to arrive promptly at visiting time. Then we would sit holding hands, me falling asleep or withdrawing into a private world of despair – what dismal company I must have been. Danny was a Catholic but he went to a meeting at my old church and talked with Pastor West in an attempt to understand me better.

  ‘All the candles I light at church and the prayers I say are for you,’ he said, which reminded me of how selfish my own prayers had become. ‘I lit one for you this morning.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, unable to share his faith but warming a little at the thought of my tiny candle flickering in the cold and darkness of a church, silently testifying that if people care for people, there will always be hope.

  * * *

  I kept careful count of each ECT session, marking the wall behind my bedside cabinet with a pencil. I dressed on Thursday, a morning the ambulance was due to take patients from our ward for ECT, greatly relieved that my course was finished.

  ‘Get undressed! You’re having some more shock treatment,’ Sister Oldroyd said. Just like that. Not a suggestion but a command.

  ‘I’ve had eight,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Yes, but you’re no better.’

  I couldn’t deny I was no better; I’d never felt worse. But I didn’t see how shooting electric currents into my weary brain could help me.

  I tentatively asked her why she wanted me to have more and she replied curtly that her reasons were none of my business. Anger broke through my lethargy despite my passive, drugged state. None of my business? It was my brain.

  ‘I’m not having any more shock treatments,’ I told her. This was my first act of assertiveness in the hospital, my first attempt to gain some control over my life.

  ‘What? Oh yes you are,’ she said. The note of confident authority in her voice chilled me. But how could I live with myself if I meekly allowed this to happen?

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I said.

  She stared at me open-mouthed, then she said angrily, ‘You’d better go home then. I’ve had enough of you.’

  ‘OK. I’ll go home.’

  ‘Right. When your parents next visit, let’s just see if they’ll agree to you going home with them.’

  ‘I’m sure they will,’ I said as she walked away. But I wasn’t sure of anything. I was trembling at the thought that she might be able to persuade them it would be best if I stayed.

  I tried to remember the wording on the ECT consent form I’d signed and realised it hadn’t specified how many treatments I was agreeing to have. And I remembered Beryl’s strange, crooked smile when she’d said, ‘Voluntary. Ah, yes. What does that word mean in here?’ Well, what did it mean? I’d heard others say since that ‘voluntary’ patients who don’t conform to the wishes of the staff could be ‘sectioned’, in other words detained and treated against their will. Could that happen to me? Could I be forced to have further ECT? My stomach muscles tensed up in a painful spasm; I gripped the bed end. Lord, no!

  After breakfast, Dr Sugden arrived on the ward. Since arranging my admission, he had never been to see me, but I gathered he was still ultimately in charge of my treatment. As he was leaving, he nodded to me.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Dr Sugden said.

  I shook my head. ‘I’m going home when my parents come this evening.’

  He stopped. ‘I wouldn’t advise that.’

  ‘I don’t want more ECT. My parents don’t want me to have any more either.’ This last bit was added on impulse because I sensed my own views and wishes about my treatment counted least of all. The truth was I didn’t know my parents’ views about ECT and would have been surprised if they had any. I knew full well they would never have even thought of asking what ECT was and how it was supposed to help me. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about me but it was just the way they were.

  ‘How many have you had?’

  ‘I was told the course would be six to eight applications and I’ve had eight.’

  ‘You’ve had eight?’ he asked, stroking his chin.

  I nodded. ‘And my parents don’t want me to have any more,’ I said again, remembering that Maria and Tessa, both about my age, said they weren’t having ECT because it was against their parents’ wishes.

  ‘Well, you’re not to have any more, but why this talk about discharging yourself?’

  ‘Sister Oldroyd said I’ve to go home if I won’t have more ECT.’

  ‘I’m sure she didn’t say that,’ he said, looking at me sternly as if I was a tale-telling schoolgirl.

  He called her over and confirmed with her that I’d had eight shock treatments, then he asked if anything had been said to me about having some more.

  ‘Well, Doctor, I did put it to her that
perhaps she could be helped by having a few more.’

  Sister Oldroyd’s mannerism, her tone of voice, everything, was totally different now that she was talking to Dr Sugden. She twisted her fingers, bowed her head and spoke softly. She was deferential, but I realised something else as well. She was scared.

  ‘Did you tell this patient she must have more ECT or go home?’

  Sister Oldroyd shook her head. ‘Oh no, Doctor, of course not. I merely suggested that more treatment might help, and she flew off the handle.’

  ‘Was anything said about her going home?’

  ‘I only pointed out that we want to help her, and that the sad thing is she might just as well be at home if she won’t accept help.’

  ‘I don’t want this patient to have more ECT,’ Dr Sugden said.

  ‘Yes, Doctor,’ she said. Then she turned to me with a sugary smile that was so false it made me want to puke. ‘We’d like you to stay here until you get well. You don’t have to go home just because you don’t want more ECT. Nobody is trying to force you to have ECT, dear. Whatever gave you that idea? You must have misunderstood me.’

  ‘That’s not what she said before,’ I told Dr Sugden, then I turned to her full of the anger of weeks of bottled-up feelings about the injustice I’d seen and experienced: ‘You know very well that I didn’t misunderstand you.’

  ‘Hey, that’s enough from you!’ Dr Sugden said, pointing his finger at me and, with these words, he walked out of the ward and Sister Oldroyd went into her office, leaving me standing there alone with flames of anger burning inside until I could no longer contain them. I rushed to Sister’s office, barged in without knocking, and said: ‘But you did say I’d to have some more ECT or else go home. You did.’

  She was sitting at her desk with her head bent forward and, at my entrance, she looked up, startled. What she said next couldn’t have surprised me more than if she had tap-danced on the desk.

  ‘Well, if I did say that,’ she said, brushing her fingers across her lined forehead, ‘then I apologise. I’m sorry.’

  She looked tired and pale. No longer the strict, efficient sister but a woman bending under the burden of a difficult, depressing job. I wondered if she had genuinely wanted to help people at the start of her career, only to become hardened and disillusioned over the years. What was this woman really like behind the stern mask? Her apology, if that’s what it was, stunned me and I didn’t know what to say. In my confusion, I mumbled, ‘Well, I’m sorry and I apologise too.’

  I left her office not knowing what I had apologised for.

  Sitting in the day room, I wondered if I should still try to discharge myself, despite Dr Sugden saying I wasn’t to have more ECT. I felt so low I must need help, I thought, though surely not the kind of ‘help’ offered here. But if I discharged myself, what then? Was she asleep or dead, the girl I’d been before, the girl who laughed and cried and loved the springtime? I think she could have made it. But not now. I’d be an invalid, dependent on my parents, and … oh God, am I really so sick? What’s happened to me?

  I was lost in a dark cemetery and too groggy to find my way out, too crushed to motivate myself. As if in some kind of hypnotic trance, I was waiting to be told where to go, what to do. I would stay at the hospital until such time as they decided to discharge me. Overcome with fatigue, I lay down on a grave and slept.

  CASE NO. 10826

  There is really no improvement in this case at all, the girl seems abnormally introverted and withdrawn, is no longer interested in things and is lacking in spontaneity. There is emotional flattening and she herself says I have still got confused thoughts about right and wrong and I do not know who or what I am exactly.

  Dr Sugden

  CHAPTER SIX

  I WASN’T GIVEN ANY more ECT but the heavy drugs treatment continued relentlessly. I, who was once reluctant to take even an aspirin for a headache, now swallowed an assortment of pills three times a day and, despite being almost too sleepy to stand by evening, a sleeping pill each night. From time to time my drugs were changed or given in different combinations though the dulling effects were the same. Pills of all shapes, colours and sizes. Pills with names such as Largactil, Melleril, Haloperidol, Stelazine, Concordin, Mogadon. Pills, pills and more pills. Stupefying drowsiness, dry mouth, shaking body, blurred vision, colossal weight gain, boils like Job’s on my chin, neck and chest. It was heavy-handed drugging to the point of brutality. And they called this help, not punishment.

  Dull, fogged-up, chemically altered brain, don’t give up on me, please. Keep on functioning so that I can think this out and make some kind of sense of it. Lord, I have no strength left to fight any more. I just want to sleep.

  But even while stoned on drugs that made me too tired to think clearly, I always remembered to walk away from the medication trolley with my hands unclenched.

  ‘These came for you,’ a nurse said, handing me two envelopes when I got back from the OT block one lunchtime. I sat in the day room and opened them. Birthday cards? I’d forgotten.

  ‘I want to die!’ shrieked Madeline, curling up on the floor into a ball of noisy tears. Two nurses promptly removed her to give her an injection.

  We weren’t supposed to show our feelings like that, and I never did. I was crying and dying inside but I just sat quietly. My tongue felt thick, my head fuzzy and I was trying to understand. Who am I now? My name is Jean. I’m a patient in a mental institution. It’s my birthday today. I’m nineteen years old and I wish I’d never been born.

  On the few occasions when Dr Prior talked to me in the Quiet Room, I continued to beg him to lower my medication, but he insisted that the high dosage of drugs was necessary.

  ‘Do you still think about religion?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied sleepily.

  ‘You do? Oh dear,’ he said, tutting and shaking his head gravely as if thinking about religion was a crime. ‘I hoped ECT would have wiped it out. We’ve got to push right down’ – he motioned downwards with his hand – ‘these thoughts about religion.’

  I was sitting opposite him fighting to stay awake enough to take in what he was saying and thinking vaguely that this seemed like brainwashing. I didn’t want my thoughts wiped out or pushed down. None of my thoughts about anything. Ever since my first ECT I’d been afraid of forgetting things that were important to me or becoming unable to put them into words. And if, for example, I was to forget for ever, before sorting it out properly in my mind, why the belief about God sending people to hell had troubled me, then … then I would never be whole.

  ‘I mustn’t forget anything,’ I said.

  Dr Prior sighed and wrote something on the papers balanced on his knee while I stared at the floor thinking: They don’t understand me. They don’t understand me at all.

  And I certainly didn’t understand the reasoning behind the workings of the system, which had pinned me to the ground, as if beneath big powerful wheels, crushed and broken. If they wanted me to relinquish all thoughts of God, why didn’t they try to help me see that life could be bearable, even happy, without a God to believe in? Instead they kept on subjecting me to ‘treatment’ which made me cry out in desperation to this remote, perhaps fictitious, ‘God’ to help me. More than ever before I wanted and needed Him now.

  I went to a Sunday service at the hospital chapel with Lynette. She didn’t like going by herself and I felt I owed her for my passivity during that appalling incident when Sister had been trying to make her eat. It seemed an odd place for a chapel, deep inside the labyrinth of bleak corridors. A large crucifix, above the words ‘Chapel Of Christ The King’, marked the entrance. A Catholic priest and a Church of England chaplain used this chapel at different times to conduct their services.

  The black-robed chaplain took his place at the pulpit and proceeded to lead as ‘normal’ a service as possible, while an elderly woman seated near the front, her head reverently bowed as if in prayer, was muttering a string of obscenities and meaningless mumbo-jumbo. The c
haplain began to speak in what seemed to me like meaningless mumbo-jumbo too. Words fell off his tongue and rolled to the floor.

  What was I doing in this chapel? Had I really only come to help Lynette or was I trying to hold on to religion like a drowning person clutches at straws? Hold on. Hold on. No, I have to let go. But, oh dear God, it’s hard to face up to being so truly alone in a world that’s turned cold and dark and frightening. I can’t bear the suffering and sadness I see and feel and breathe in the air all around me.

  Tension mounted as part of me struggled to hold on tightly to Christian beliefs while another part was telling me I needed to let go. Hold on. Let go. Hold on. Let go. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be trying to do.

  Something I remembered reading in the Bible sprang forcefully to my mind: the warning that we ought to fear him who can kill not just the body but the soul. It was not the usual religious meaning of these words that was making the impact. It was the uneasy feeling that this was applicable to the effects on me of the hospital environment and my treatment – that it was destructive not only to my body but also to the very core of my personality, whether one called it the ‘soul’ or something else. But I must have swallowed the sickness concept along with the pills, for whenever I started thinking and questioning in this way, I would tell myself that this must be the ‘sick’ part of me, the part I had to ‘push right down’.

  Push everything right down: bind tears and feelings and questions into strait-jackets. But what happens to all the incarcerated tears? They don’t go away. They swell up and multiply inside you, then freeze into blocks of ice. How was I to make sense of these experiences? Was it a dream, a nightmare? No, I really was in a Victorian asylum, along with trapped fish, parched plants, a caged bird and other ‘lost’ people. I was loaded with drugs and pain. Like the soil in which the potted plants stood, I was cracked and dry.

  I began to tend lovingly the wilting, neglected plants that stood on a sill in the day room, watering them daily from a plastic cup. I wanted to make their heads stop drooping so that they wouldn’t look like they, too, were drugged senseless. Live and grow; bloom, plants, bloom, and bring some life and colour and beauty to this place of frozen tears.