by Jean Davison
When I got home I was bad-tempered with Mum and continued to brood about it in a disco that night. But gradually this perspective shifted and I began to wonder if I’d been more disturbed by Dr Prior’s remarks about the incident than by the incident itself.
Mandy’s sixteen-year-old sister, Donna, started with ‘psychiatric problems’ and was admitted to Dolby Grange, a new mental hospital with a catchment area for people from the south side of the city.
‘I don’t know what’s happening to our Donna,’ Mandy told me sadly. ‘She imagines she can see and hear things and thinks people are plotting against her. She’s on a drug called Largactil and they’re going to try ECT.’
Several weeks later, when Donna was spending weekends at home, I was invited for tea at Mandy’s.
‘I’d better warn you that Donna might not recognise you,’ Mandy said, her eyes glistening with tears. ‘She’s a schizophrenic. That’s what her psychiatrist told me mum and dad. He said schizophrenia is an extremely serious mental illness but that it can often be controlled, to a large extent, by drugs. He thinks she’ll have to keep taking drugs for the rest of her life.’
‘The rest of her life?’
‘Yes. To prevent relapses. He said if she stops taking the drugs she’ll have to go back into hospital.’
Donna was sitting pale and still, staring at the TV screen, when I entered the room.
‘Donna, say hello to Jean,’ Mandy’s mother said, but Donna remained motionless as a statue. ‘Jean knows exactly how you feel. She’s been through a nervous breakdown herself, so she’ll be able to help you.’
I didn’t know how to respond. I wished I could help, but of course I did not know exactly how Donna felt, possessed no magic key that could reach her and had no words of reassurance to offer Donna or her family.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Mandy said, standing up.
An hour later Donna’s cup of tea remained on the carpet at her feet untouched. She still hadn’t said a word or altered her stiff, immobile stance. The last time I’d seen her had been about eight weeks ago at a party at her cousin Sarah’s house. Watching her gaily mingling with the crowd, I’d envied her because she hadn’t seemed shy. Where had that extrovert, vivacious teenager gone?
More time passed. Then the room filled with heart-rending sobs as the stone statue dissolved away into a flood of tears. Thank goodness she hasn’t gone so far away that she can’t even cry, I thought.
‘Don’t cry, Donna. I’m right here beside you,’ Mandy’s mother said, putting her arm round her daughter.
‘Don’t send me back to that place,’ Donna said between sobs. ‘Oh, please don’t send me back there.’
‘But you’ll have to go back to the hospital for a while to help you get well. Why are you crying, Donna?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you must know. Come on, love, try to tell your mother.’
‘Because I’m scared,’ said a voice barely audible.
‘Don’t be silly, love. There’s nothing to be scared about.’
I was scared, too. Scared that, like Donna, I’d be fogged up with mind-deadening drugs for the rest of my life. No autonomy. Too tired to live. Isolated and imprisoned in this cotton-wool haze for the rest of my life. No! I couldn’t bear this soul-death any longer. So despite Dr Prior’s earlier warning about ‘slipping back’ and despite my promise to him, I knew I had to stop taking the pills.
I stopped them all at once. It never occurred to me that perhaps I should do it gradually. This resulted in a rebound from too much sleeping to insomnia. I got through five days at work punctuated by lying in bed thrashing about and staring at the ceiling the whole night long. By the end of the week I felt ready to crawl up the wall and hang like a bat from the rafters.
I stuffed some pills down my throat.
Goddamnit, Dr Prior must be right; I do need the drugs, I thought sadly, yet I feel so awful when I take them. There seemed no way out. It was a Catch-22 situation.
LOOKING BACK 4
NEW INTERESTS SUCH AS pop stars, clothes and hairstyles began to take the place of my old childhood games, I started worrying about pimples instead of Julia beating me at ‘dares’, and my taste in magazines turned to Valentine from Bunty.
When my family were out, I sang and danced with my friends in our living room to pop music blasting out from a crackly transistor tuned in to Radio Luxembourg. This was shortly before the Beatles leapt to fame. Favourites of mine at the time were Cliff Richard singing ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’, Susan Maughan’s ‘Bobby’s Girl’ and Carole King with ‘It Might As Well Rain Until September’.
In bed at night, I rubbed my fingers over my nipples. They stood up like firm, young buds, pleasurable to touch. My friends and I huddled together in the playground discussing our developing breasts and whispering about this mysterious adult thing called Sex. Mr Watson, our Scripture Knowledge teacher, decided to inform us, his class of twelve-year-olds, about the ‘facts of life’. Diagrams of a penis before and during erection appeared on the blackboard, causing a few embarrassed giggles. After only one interesting lesson the headmaster put a stop to it. Angry parents were complaining and a great fuss was made, so here endeth our sex education. The nearest we got to this subject in biology lessons was learning about the night life of a frog.
I got dressed for school downstairs in front of the fire, stepping out of my pyjamas and flinging them on a chair. I was late that morning. Julia and Carrie knocked at our door before I was ready. Mum, who was on leave from her mill job, let them in.
‘Won’t be a sec,’ I said, dragging a comb through my tangled hair.
‘Hey, look at this!’ Mum said, holding out my pyjama bottoms, the crotch of which was covered in blood.
Joking to hide my embarrassment from my friends, I said to Mum, ‘Oh God, you’d better get an ambulance, hadn’t you?’ Behind Mum’s back, I grinned and winked at Julia and Carrie. ‘Quick Mum! I’m bleeding to death!”
‘No, it’s nowt to worry about,’ Mum said. ‘It only means you’re growing up. You’ve started.’
I feigned puzzlement. ‘Started what?’
Julia and Carrie looked on and giggled.
‘Started having what’s called your periods,’ she said. ‘Blow me! I thought you were far too young to start.’
‘I’m nearly a teenager,’ I reminded her.
I waddled to school with a bulky makeshift sanitary towel stuffed down my knickers. Mum had made it for me from material cut from an old underskirt, and (in more ways than one) it was bloody uncomfortable. What I was supposed to do with the thing when I went to the toilet, I’d no idea. To make things worse, I kept getting spasms of stomach cramp throughout the day. I didn’t like this part of ‘growing up’. Not one bit.
Next day was better though. I swallowed an aspirin after my Weetabix, wore my new sanitary belt, and a towel from the packet of Dr White’s that Mum had bought me from the corner shop. It seemed now that coping with my periods would be easy-peasy compared with sorting out my new, disturbing thoughts.
I did most of my thinking in bed at night. Lying on my back gazing up at the night sky through the gap between my curtains, I tried to sort out my views on topics such as the colour bar, capital punishment and the existence of God. With friends I still giggled a lot and acted silly, but inside a change was taking place. I was questioning things I had long accepted, especially about God.
The Christmas angel might have settled the issue for me when I was ten, but now, two years later, I could smile at the coincidence and see that it proved nothing. I buried my head in the pillow. ‘God, are you really there?’ I whispered, and the silence of the room hung heavily in the air.
I stopped going to the Salvation Army when I was nearing thirteen. I wrote in my diary that this was because I needed to learn about other religions and think things over for myself. It could also have had something to do with the less noble reason of preferring to go out with friends.
Sneaking into
the cinema by the back door to watch ‘X’ films became more appealing than going to Sunday school. Not paying is stealing, you’re under-age, and this is the Lord’s Day screamed my spoilsport of a conscience while the man with an iron hook instead of a hand climbed from one window ledge to another of a New York skyscraper. I gasped when he almost fell. Would he manage to get through the window to murder that woman? Was I really committing at least three sins at once by being here? He fell, scraping the wall with his hooked hand all the way down to the ground. ‘Sorry I’m here, Lord, please forgive me,’ I whispered to Jesus. ‘Great film, isn’t it?’ I whispered to Jackie.
‘Armageddon. That word’s in the Bible,’ I said. ‘It’s in the Book of Revelation. Means the end of the world.’ I was showing off with knowledge gained from years of going to the Sally Army. But Jackie was too preoccupied to be impressed. We were holding a whispered discussion in the school cloakroom. She’d brought a newspaper article to show me titled ‘Children of the Bomb’ in which our generation was described as being the first to grow up under the shadow of the atom bomb. It said we were ‘heading straight towards Armageddon’.
‘Look, Jean. It says that never before has our planet been in such danger.’ Jackie chewed at her thumb nail. She always did that when thinking hard. ‘If the bomb goes off before we get home today, we’ll never see our families again.’
It was scary to think we might not reach our front gates on the way home from school. Talking about it made it more real. I couldn’t imagine how dying would feel. I’d never died before. Or if I had I couldn’t remember.
‘Do you think we’ve lived before?’ I asked Jackie, who was still biting her nail. ‘I’ve been reading a library book about reincarnation. Some people believe that when we die we come back to earth again as a baby.’
‘Well, if we do keep coming back, we won’t this time, will we? I mean there’ll be no earth to come back to if it’s a nuclear war.’
I thought about it. A whole lot of souls lined up and squashed together like in the Saturday matinee cinema queue. All waiting to be sent back to earth. Only there was no earth left to come back to. I didn’t know if that was funny or sad. But the thought of nuclear war wasn’t funny. ‘Oh, Jackie. Don’t.’
The more we talked about it that day among the coats hanging lifeless on their pegs, the more it bothered us. Funny how being nearly thirteen and starting your periods makes you bother about things.
CASE NO. 10826
Had a normal childhood untill [sic] she was about 13. She had friends and could mix very well. Since she changed school at 13 she became acutely disturbed by the feeling that she is not welcomed by the girls at the other school which she changed to at 13. She remained isolated and did not mix at all well. Did not like games and sports.
Dr Prior
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘WHAT ARE YOU THINKING about?’ Mandy asked as we trudged around town on a shopping expedition one cold Saturday.
‘Oh, just an old joke I once heard,’ I replied with a cynical smile. ‘The treatment was successful but the patient died.’
‘I knew you weren’t listening to me,’ Mandy said. ‘I was saying you don’t look at all well.’
‘I’m OK,’ I said, shivering in a chilly breeze.
‘But you’re not OK. You look like death warmed up.’
‘Death warmed up?’ I laughed. ‘Well, that’d be an improvement. I’m not even warmed up.’
A snowstorm started. I giggled as an Asian man walked past us with a newspaper pulled down firmly over the top of his head and a facial expression that said exactly what he thought of English winters.
‘Well, I’m glad you haven’t lost your sense of humour,’ Mandy said, brightening up. ‘C’mon, Jean, let’s go for dinner.’
‘Do you think my illness might be similar to Donna’s?’ I asked Mandy as we sat in a Wimpy Bar indulging in our latest craze: cheeseburgers. Mandy’s sister had been discharged from hospital looking as I had: fat and sleepy. Although Donna’s symptoms were different, her treatment – ECT and the drugs such as Melleril and Largactil – was the same.
‘No, of course not,’ Mandy replied promptly. ‘Donna’s got schizophrenia, not depression. You do both sometimes look kinda distant, but I always get a sensible answer when I talk to you. With Donna it’s completely different. She thinks foreigners are taking over the country.’
‘Sounds like the way me dad and our Brian talk,’ I said.
‘But Donna’s too … too intense about it. And, anyway, it’s not only that. Sometimes she talks to people who aren’t there. Oh, Jean, you don’t know the half of it. Schizophrenia is the most terrible illness.’
I nodded sympathetically, wishing I could think of something helpful to say. How awful it must be for Donna and her family.
But why, I wondered, with Donna’s illness obviously so different from mine, was our treatment the same?
I looked forward to seeing my new psychiatrist, Dr Armstrong, because a different person would have a fresh outlook. Or so I thought. A bespectacled, middle-aged woman, with light-brown curly hair framing a pink, roundish face, was seated behind the desk in place of Dr Prior. She nodded for me to sit down, then continued to read my notes.
‘I think I’ll try changing your medication,’ she announced finally.
I wondered if she’d been one of Dr Prior’s colleagues who, without even seeing me, thought I should have more ECT. She obviously viewed me as already classified, and needing medication, before even bothering to look at or listen to me.
‘You’ve been on the same tablets for a long time and they don’t seem to be doing any good, do they?’ she muttered, half to me half to herself, unaware of my disappointment in her. ‘We’ll try changing your Melleril to chlorpromazine.’
‘Will the new pills make me less drowsy and depressed?’ I asked, a faint hope rising in me. I wasn’t aware then that chlorpromazine was another name for Largactil, a drug I’d been on before the Melleril, which had made me feel equally awful.
‘Well, all these kind of drugs have a sedative effect, but I can include something for the depression.’ She was still leafing through the pages in front of her. ‘Actually, you’ve never been on antidepressants.’
‘Really? What kind of drugs have I been taking?’ I asked.
‘Oh, various kinds to reduce anxiety and help you sleep.’
‘But I can barely keep awake!’ I pointed out.
‘I think you need an antidepressant as well. I’ll try amitriptyline.’
The drugs sorted out to her satisfaction, she asked me to explain my confusion about religion. I was bored of it myself by now and had long ago stopped thinking a psychiatrist might understand, but I trotted out the old story.
‘Hell doesn’t exist. The Bible isn’t meant to be taken literally: it’s full of metaphors,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Heaven doesn’t exist either. The world’s moved on from fairy tales to science.’ She sighed. ‘But really, love, you ought to have had more sense than to try to believe things like that in the first place, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps so,’ I replied sadly.
I left, feeling disappointed with Dr Armstrong’s preconceived ideas about me and her drugs-orientated approach, and was soon to find that my ‘new’ drugs, including the red amitriptyline pills, would do nothing to make me feel less drowsy and depressed. If anything, I felt even worse.
Someone must have dipped all the clocks in treacle to slow down time. The hours between starting work at half-past eight and finishing at half-past five seemed to last for ever. It was only half-past two. A pile of stock-record cards littered my desk ready for me to write a few figures into a column on each card. I saw myself doing the same repetitive, unfulfilling tasks day after day, year after year. You ought to be grateful you’ve got a job; any sort of life is better than being in a mental institution. Yes, I know, but I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it. Yes, you can, you’ve got to. No, I simply can’t bear another three boring hours h
ere. You must. But I can’t, I can’t …
Then, impulsively grabbing my bag and coat, I fled from the office and went home.
I was thankful to find no one was in, and lay on my bed staring at the ceiling. For six months I had clung to a job I hated as if it was my last hope of something akin to a normal life. I couldn’t have tried harder but I had failed. So what now?
Pastor West called to see me one evening about three months after I’d left my job. I hadn’t seen him for some time and soon he and his family would be moving to Scotland.
‘I’ve walked out of my job,’ I told him. ‘I can’t work when I’m so drugged but the psychiatrist says I must keep taking my tablets.’
‘You’re still on drugs and seeing a psychiatrist?’ he asked, sounding surprised. ‘Do you think that’s helping you?’
‘Psychiatry only seems to have made me worse.’
I remembered sitting in the park one crisp, autumn day on my way to that first appointment with a psychiatrist. I wished I could go back in some kind of time warp and find myself, aged eighteen, still sitting there beside the pond that had not yet frozen over. ‘Don’t go. Don’t get involved with psychiatry,’ the me with hindsight would warn the old, naïve trusting me. ‘It’s dangerous.’
‘Jean, why don’t you stop seeing the psychiatrist?’ Pastor West asked, breaking my daydream.
‘What? Stop seeing a psychiatrist altogether?’ It seems I had forgotten that this option was open to me. I stared at Pastor West as if he’d suggested I fly to the moon. Didn’t he realise how ill I was, how awful I felt?
‘Yes, why not? You’ve said yourself that psychiatry only seems to be making you worse, and I’m inclined to agree with you.’
‘But I’ve proved that I’m too sick to hold down even a simple job, haven’t I? I can’t blame the drugs for everything. I’ve always been bored with my jobs. Other people have to do boring work and they manage it.’
