by Jean Davison
For a moment, Mrs Winters sounded more embarrassed than I was.
‘Jean? Oh good heavens, is that really you?’ She gave a nervous laugh. ‘Well, here am I thinking I’m talking to the Head of the Department and I’m talking to you!’ There was an uncomfortable pause. ‘Anyway, it’s you I really want to speak to,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
‘OK.’
‘Do you need any more tablets?’
‘No.’
‘Well, do let us know when you need them, won’t you?’
‘Yes.’
I was trying to make it sound to Darren and the other staff within earshot like I was dealing with the usual business call.
‘You are taking your tablets, aren’t you? That’s important.’
I felt like asking her if she thought I would die or go stark raving bonkers without them, but I meekly replied, ‘Yes.’
‘Well, I won’t keep you from your work any longer. I just wanted to make sure you’re all right and have enough tablets.’
‘Thank you for calling. Goodbye.’
That evening, in the early spring of 1974, I wrote a polite goodbye letter to Mrs Winters. I thanked her for her concern and explained that I now felt the time had come for me to finish my connections with the hospital and to stop taking tablets.
Back came Mrs Winters’s reply by return of post:
I am concerned about your intention to cease taking tablets. I am sure they help to keep you well. You could get them from your GP instead of the hospital if you prefer that. If you haven’t yet registered with a GP you must do so. I’ll be in Leeds on Thursday and I will call at the hostel to see you …
I flung the letter down on the bed. If enduring the awful, zombie-like state which ensued when I followed the advice of mental health professionals meant being ‘well’ then no wonder we couldn’t communicate: we didn’t even speak the same language.
I grabbed a sheet of notepaper while my feelings were still running high. ‘Dear Mrs Winters,’ I wrote:
I thought I had made it quite clear in my previous letter that I wish to FINISH MY CONNECTIONS with the hospital. However, you can come to see me on Thursday if you like as it may be better to say goodbye to you in person instead of just through a letter …
Before sealing the envelope, I reread what I’d written and double underlined ‘FINISH MY CONNECTIONS’.
The next day I registered with a GP in Leeds so that I wouldn’t end up without pills before completing my withdrawal. I gave Dr Cawthorne the drugs’ names from the containers and told him I’d been on psychiatric drugs for about five years. I explained how it had all begun with my need to talk to someone about, among other things, my confusion over religion. Dr Cawthorne told me he was a Christian. We talked about religion for a while, then he suddenly announced that he wouldn’t prescribe medication for me. I stared at him in surprise. I’d certainly had no trouble getting pills before.
‘Shall I come back for them when you’ve received my medical details from the psychiatrist?’ I asked, convinced that Dr Shaw’s recommendations would change his mind.
‘I don’t believe you need medication,’ he said, standing up to signal the consultation was over. Then he did something that seemed odd for a doctor. He followed me through his full waiting room and outside where he stood talking to me on the gravel path. ‘Come back and see me if you want to talk about religion or anything,’ he said, ‘but I feel I ought not to prescribe you these drugs.’
Two extremes. Both dangerous. Dr Cawthorne didn’t know me but he had quickly decided I should stop medication at once (without even knowing I’d already reduced it). The psychiatrist I first saw when I was eighteen didn’t know me but was quick to decide I should start medication. And no one had ever bothered to inform me of either the risks in taking the drugs or the risks in stopping them abruptly.
I arrived home from work on Thursday wondering what Mrs Winters would say about my curt letter. Mrs Stroud met me in the hall and asked me to come into her living room.
‘Mrs Winters was here earlier,’ she said. ‘I told her you were fine. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering where this was leading.
‘Well, she hadn’t time to wait. She just wanted to pass on her good wishes and she left these for you.’ Mrs Stroud handed me a bunch of daffodils. A goodbye present?
I went up to my room feeling touched by this little act of kindness. I placed the daffodils in a Cola bottle retrieved from my bin, and stood them on my bedside table. I love daffodils. Up they come each year pushing their golden heads through the dark soil, bearing silent witness that winter has turned into spring. I bent forward to inhale their clean, fresh fragrance. Mrs Winters had only been doing what she believed was best for me. But now I must do what I believed was best for me (although faster than intended, thanks to Dr Cawthorne).
Over the next few days I stopped taking all medication. It was done now. I awaited my fate.
I awoke at four in the morning after a restless night and flung back the dishevelled bedcovers. Three more hours before my alarm would ring for work. Sitting on the edge of the bed, feeling a bit delicate, I picked up my few remaining pills. I would probably have flushed them down the toilet had I not been made cautious by my previous attempt at withdrawal.
I am sure? Keep you well?
NO!
I replaced the tablets in the drawer without taking one. Standing on the chair I pulled back the curtain to gaze at the sky. The words of Mrs Winters’s letter went round my head. Words which epitomised my treatment over the years and fostered psychological dependence on drugs. ‘I am concerned about your intention to cease taking tablets. I am sure they help to keep you well.’
What made them ‘sure’? The training, the textbooks, the theories? Certainly not knowledge of me. I stretched up and opened the window wide. A soothing breeze wafted over my face and body as I stood there in my nightgown, listening to the dawn chorus. Feeling more settled, I went back to bed and slept.
When I awoke again there was still no green light. Just radiant sunbeams flooding my room. A glowing reminder that spring, my favourite season, was here in all its glory, drenching with warmth and colour and beauty a cold, grey winter world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
NO MORE PILLS. NO more zombie days. In the spring of 1974 I really did make it. I could see, feel, taste, smell, laugh and cry. Had I ever really been alive before? When you emerge from a long, dark tunnel, the light dazzles.
With each passing day, my fears that something awful might be about to happen to me decreased until the psychological dependence on drugs caused by years of brainwashing, culminating in that Job’s comforter letter of warning from my social worker, melted away. Out with the pills went the horrible, drowsy depression that had been a part of my life for so long. Thank God no one forced me to continue with medication. Could they have done that if today’s Community Treatment Orders had been set up? I didn’t fall through the net: I scrambled out of it. At last.
No more drugs meant release from a grim bondage, freeing me to start catching up on the living I’d been missing. I took driving lessons, planned a holiday with Helen, read novels, poems and non-fiction books. Intellectual curiosity awakened in me, which led me to library books on all kinds of subjects, opening up a whole new world. Vivian lent me her books, too, and our talks in her room continued to provide the intellectual stimulation that I’d never had in my life before.
My feelings about psychiatry still needed dealing with, but I had so much living to catch up on. Coming to terms could wait. I went to weekly dancing classes with Helen as we’d planned when she’d visited me in Prieston Ward. When the course finished we were still lousy dancers, but had become good friends.
Summer was incredibly short that year. It came and passed with wings. On holiday in Somerset with Helen, the sun shone for two glorious weeks and we enjoyed long, leisurely walks in the beautiful countryside surrounding Minehead. At nights I slipped into a res
tful sleep and, in the mornings, waking up to the sun streaming through the pink curtains of our little guesthouse bedroom, I felt good.
In September I enrolled at evening classes for GCE O levels in English Language and English Literature. My doubts about whether I had the ability for this were soon eased by the high marks I got for my work. The literature tutor said I ought to be doing A, not O levels and asked to borrow my work to use as examples to help students who were struggling. Despite this, I was still beset with the fear that ECT and drugs had damaged my brain. I could write essays which impressed my tutors and in many ways my memory seemed amazingly good. Incidents of the past few years kept returning to me in vivid detail even before I read my diary extracts which confirmed their accuracy. But my memory for faces was very poor. When characters in films made their second and subsequent appearance I often couldn’t recognise them. I also kept getting lost in the college corridors, unable to remember the way to my classroom or the way out. And when talking to people (including my old friends whom I wasn’t shy with) I often forgot what I was about to say. Had I been like this before the drugs and ECT? I couldn’t remember.
One lunchtime I visited the large medical bookshop near where I worked and browsed through the Psychiatry section. I learnt that many of the drugs I’d been prescribed from first being admitted to hospital were ‘neuroleptic’ drugs, usually prescribed for ‘psychotic illnesses, mainly schizophrenia’. Listed among the ‘common side effects’ of neuroleptics were drowsiness, lack of interest, social withdrawal, lethargy, depression: the same ‘symptoms of illness’ which had caused me so much suffering during the years of taking them and which had miraculously disappeared when I finally got off them. The serious risks in taking these drugs, it said, had to be weighed against the severity of the patient’s illness.
What illness? Among the symptoms described for ‘psychotic’ illnesses, there was nothing I could relate to my experiences (though if I’d looked harder I might have come across the ‘negative’ symptoms of schizophrenia which, ironically, are the same as those ‘common side effects’ of the drugs used to treat it). I had perceived depression as my predominant ‘symptom’ but judging by the cocktail of drugs I’d been on – tranquillisers, antidepressants and neuroleptics – it seemed they’d been treating me for anxiety, depression, and even psychosis. Everything!
And what risks? I turned the page and read how neuroleptic drugs can cause akathasia (restlessness), cognitive deterioration, pseudo-Parkinson’s disease (tremors), and tardive dyskinesia, a brain-crippling disease characterised by uncontrollable movements of face and limbs. I read that taking other types of psychiatric drugs with neuroleptics increases risk, and that patients on long-term treatment (defined as over three years) are particularly prone to developing neurological disease such as tardive dyskinesia (TD). It went on to say that risk of TD was increased further if, instead of lowering the dosage or ceasing neuroleptic medication, patients were prescribed procyclidine (as I had been) to mask the effects. Once this devastating condition takes hold, it can prove irreversible after discontinuation of the drugs that caused it. I shuddered. Fortunately, for me, I’d been fine since coming off medication. But the psychiatric profession had seen fit to put me at such risk. Why?
I glanced at my watch. It was time to go back to work but I remained sitting on the floor in the bookstore with a pile of psychiatric textbooks at my side and a sick feeling in my stomach. Having learnt as much as I could take for now about the drugs I turned to the index and looked up ECT. ‘Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) is used to treat severely depressed patients who have not responded to other methods of treatment.’ Really? It seemed that much controversy surrounded ECT and the question of whether or not it caused permanent brain damage. Memory impairment was indicated as the most common side effect, ‘which may be permanent’.
Questions, questions, questions again, bouncing around in a mind which was now, at long last, unclouded with drugs. Why had I been treated with such dangerous drugs and ECT? Why had these been the first, not the last, resort? Why had no one informed me of the risks? And what on earth had my diagnosis been? Surely Tony wouldn’t have lied to me when he said I’d never been given one. But, then, why administer such deeply distressing and damaging treatments without knowing what they were treating?
I looked at my watch again. Damn it, I’d be late for work if I didn’t hurry. I replaced the books on the shelf and returned to work still feeling sick inside. I had so many questions, so much anger, to face. I needed to think about it and sort things out. But the pain of thinking about it made me want to forget.
‘The O level exams are really just like memory tests,’ my tutor said, so I thought if I passed with good grades it might help reduce my worries about treatment-induced brain damage affecting my memory. I read and reread King Henry the Fourth, Part One, the first Shakespeare play I’d read, spending my lunchtime each day studying in the library. I had to prove to myself that my rusty, bruised brain was capable of functioning properly, that the damage was not permanent. And I couldn’t allow any painful thoughts and feelings to intrude and hinder my progress.
For several months I relegated thoughts about my hospital years to the back of my mind. Then, one evening at my literature class we were reading from Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, when I was struck by the words:
Atticus said that Jem was trying hard to forget something, but what he was really doing was storing it away for a while, until enough time passed. Then he would be able to think about it and sort things out. When he was able to think about it, Jem would be himself again.
And I thought, Oh yes, that’s like me and psychiatry. I will be able to think about it and sort things out. Some day.
The first stage of that ‘some day’ arrived (of all times) on the eve of my literature exam (but I still got my grade ‘A’) and maybe it wasn’t so much a case of becoming ‘able’ to think about it as becoming unable to push it from my mind any longer. I was tidying up my room and singing to a pop song on the radio which had topped the charts around the time of my first spell in hospital. One moment I was singing happily, then suddenly my mind was flooded with distressing feelings, which formed into a huge question mark about my tunnel years. All the pain. All the wasted time. NEED IT HAVE BEEN SO?
I broke down and wept bitterly for my lost years.
After the outlet of tears, I began writing about the previous night when I’d slept at my parents’ house after going out with Helen:
Journal
As I walked down the dark street towards my parents’ house, I was puzzled by several flashes of light, but when I saw Brian, with his camera equipment, I knew the explanation. Flashing lights in my face is just one of the many ways in which my brother tries to irritate me. He was looking out of the window, grinning.
‘I do that at night,’ he said. ‘From my bedroom window I can flash a light into the window of the flat opposite. I bet that man who lives in the flat wonders what’s happening when his room suddenly lights up.’
‘What pleasure do you get from that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I get a lot of pleasure from it,’ he replied. ‘I’ve done it at half-past three in the morning and then his light’s gone on so it’s woke him up, but he doesn’t know what it is, then I’ve waited until his light’s gone off and, after a while, I’ve done it again and then his light’s gone on again.’
‘But why?’ I asked, although I knew it was useless to try to reason with him.
‘Why shouldn’t I? We lived here before him,’ he said, as if this justified his behaviour. ‘Besides, I used to do that when the flat was empty, so he’s not going to stop me now.’
I sighed, and looked to my father for support, but he just laughed, and went up to bed.
Brian followed me into the kitchen pointing his camera at me. The kettle seemed to take an age to boil. ‘Why aren’t you talking, Jean? Come on, answer me.’ I ignored him. ‘Come on. Don’t you know it’s ignorant to ignore people?’ I
still said nothing. He picked up a metal spoon and began banging it on a milk bottle as he often does and it makes a horrible noise.
‘Brian, be quiet. I’ve got a headache,’ said my mother, putting her hands to her head.
He continued and Mum snatched the spoon off him but Brian picked up another and the same process was repeated. He laughed idiotically. ‘You can’t beat me,’ he said. ‘No one can.’ He began tapping on the table. Tap. Tap. Tap. On and on and on it went.
I often wonder how my family situation would seem to an outside observer, if he or she could somehow listen in on it all. What would be ‘normal’ feelings and reactions to my situation if I must (according to my psychiatric treatment) assume that mine are not?
‘I still say …’ he began again. He was talking about things too daft or offensive to listen to and asking if I agreed.
I said nothing at first, but could not stop the churning feeling in the pit of my stomach.
‘Don’t talk so silly,’ I said, despite my intentions to keep quiet. He was slinging insults at me about anything he could think of. Somehow he got round to calling me a slut.
‘Shut up, Brian,’ my mother said.
‘Oh, balls!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll say what I want. Look, Jean’s still not saying owt so it must be true.’
‘You talk like you’re sick. You want seeing to,’ I said quietly as I poured my tea.
The words were out now. It was too late to regret having said them. Now, I knew what would follow. But I would NOT be sensitive about it. I often think that the unhappiness inside my brother which makes him as he is must be far greater than any depth of unhappiness I have ever known and, I must admit, I would not wish to swap places with him for the world.
‘I don’t want seeing to. There’s nothing wrong with me. I haven’t been on a funny farm …’ Now he was really on a sore point of mine, and so much for my good intentions, I’m afraid. I still have not learnt to cope with hospital memories without feeling so hurt inside, so confused and so bitter. What happened to me all seems so wrong, pointless, senseless and so bloody unfair. Emotional wounds are very slow to heal. I sometimes get the feeling that long, long after I come to terms with the things which led up to me seeking psychiatric ‘help’ I’ll still be struggling to come to terms with my so-called treatment and some of the things which I saw and experienced at the hospital.
