by Jean Davison
I grew very fond of Jim and Richard. We chatted informally, laughed a lot, and built up a relationship based on trust, warmth and respect for one another. They talked to me as if they simply believed I was a perfectly normal and likeable young woman. Call it ‘non-directive counselling’ or ‘befriending’ or whatever, it was a wonderfully positive experience, not only for me but for each of us, I believe. When I decided the time had come to break contact, I knew what Jim meant when he wrote me a letter in which he said he felt I knew, too, that the three of us had been part of ‘something a bit special’.
I also received a lovely letter from Mrs Broadhurst, the self-expression tutor, who said she was writing to commend me for my courage and attitude in dealing with my problems, which had, she wrote, been a tremendous source of strength and inspiration to her.
But things went from bad to worse at the hostel. It got to the stage where other girls shouted unkind remarks through my door at night. A rumour had got round that I was a lesbian, for apparently no other reason than that on Friday evenings when Helen visited me we sometimes spent the evening in my room. This, coupled with the way ‘she keeps herself to herself’ had made them add two and two together and get five. There was no truth in the rumour but even if I had been a lesbian – so what?
One evening as I arrived back at the hostel, two giggling girls who lived there jostled and teased me at the door. Lydia linked my arm and said to the other: ‘I’ve fallen out with you, Fiona. Jean is my friend. You didn’t know I was one of them, did you?’ And then to me, ‘Come along, darling. How about my place tonight?’
A few other residents who were watching laughed as Lydia tagged on to my arm and snuggled up to me.
‘See you tomorrow, my love,’ she called, noisily blowing a kiss as I pulled free and climbed the stairs to my room to the sound of more giggles. I told myself I wasn’t going to get sensitive over stupid remarks, that I just didn’t care. And I remembered Gerry from the Rehabilitation Unit. Yes, Gerry, it’s hard not to care.
Policy at the hostel changed and males were accepted. The first I knew about it was when, wearing only my towelling robe, I was washing my hair in the communal washroom next to my bedroom. A young man came in who, without a word to me, proceeded to fill one of the other washbasins and begin to shave.
‘I’m going to put two young men in your room,’ Mrs Stroud announced later. I had visions of lying in bed in my small attic room with two snoring men in hammocks stretched across the room, but of course what she had in mind for me was less interesting than that. I was moved down a floor and into the smallest ‘bedroom’ imaginable, which had previously been a boxroom used for storing mops and brushes. All that would fit in it was a single bed with some storage space underneath. There was a one-bar electric fire in the only place there was room for it – high up on the wall, with a pull cord to switch it on and off. Of course there was no room for a wardrobe so I had to use one that was out in the corridor. Worst of all, there was no table on which I could write or type.
‘Most of the others here need a desk or table because they’re students. I didn’t think you needed one,’ Mrs Stroud said when I mentioned the subject.
‘I’m studying for O levels so I’ve got essays to write and … and I do other writing besides. I need to use my typewriter.’
‘Well, can’t you sit on the bed and use it on your lap?’
Later that day I brought Vivian to see my new room.
‘It’s awful! It’s so claustrophobic,’ Vivian said. ‘You ought to complain. You’ve lived here longer than some of the other residents and they’ve all got proper rooms.’
It didn’t matter. I intended leaving anyhow and was scanning the paper each day in search of accommodation.
* * *
On a wintry Saturday morning, I moved into my ‘furnished bed-sit, own kitchen, shared bathroom’ on the first floor of a large, old, shabby terraced house. A nail was protruding from the wall above the fireplace and I had just the right thing to hang on it. I pulled out of my bag a joke notice I’d brought back from Somerset: a white card with fancy black lettering on it which read ‘Bless This Mess’. How appropriate, I thought, as I hung it on the wall, chuckling to myself. I knew my bed-sit wasn’t the kind of accommodation most people would get excited about but it was another step towards independence and, although the words ‘dilapidated dump’ would have been an apt description for it, nothing could take away my thrill of pleasure as I unpacked my bags and surveyed my new home.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
MY SITUATION AT WORK improved dramatically when three new girls, Roz, Trish and Paula, started. Somehow we got talking and I soon got over my shyness with them (why this doesn’t happen with everyone, I don’t know). No more sitting alone in the canteen or at tea breaks. The work was still as boring, of course, but having people there whom I could laugh and talk with raised my daily portion of happiness to heights never before attained at work.
Paula and I got a month’s extended leave from work to go travelling in Greece with Josie and Sarah, two of Paula’s friends who were students at York University. As on the holiday in Somerset with Helen, I revelled in the joys of being alive, open to experiences again, and … somehow, I couldn’t quite believe this – still young!
I was happy, too, with my bed-sit despite all that was wrong with it. The sash window didn’t fit into the framework properly. Wind, rain and snow came straight through, defying my attempts to block up the gaps with newspaper, cardboard or whatever I could find. When it rained heavily, a huge puddle would quickly form on the sill then spill over onto the floor so freely that I imagined the occupant of the bedsit below me having to sit watching TV with an umbrella. I survived bitterly cold winter nights by wearing thick woollen clothing over my pyjamas, a dressing-gown, and zipping myself up inside a sleeping bag with blankets piled on top.
I awoke with a start in the middle of my first night there. No, not the ‘green light’ dream again, I didn’t have that now. My bed had collapsed! One of the legs had obviously been broken before and didn’t fit properly, but a pile of books made the bed only slightly tilted. There was also a deceptively comfortable-looking rocking chair with a broken leg, and a broken buffet. The safest, and warmest, place to sit was on a tatty rug in front of the gas fire. Each time I opened the door from the inside of my room, the door knob came off in my hand – until I acquired the knack of turning the knob extremely slowly and carefully.
The previous occupant had made some attempt to turn the walls from a sickly mustard to a dreadful pink but had given up after half a wall. I kept meaning to try decorating the place myself but never got round to it. It wasn’t worth buying decent curtains to get them saturated but I acquired some cheap ones from a jumble sale. The curtains that were up when I moved in didn’t fit the windows, leaving about a three-inch gap when I drew them, so I took them down and used one at the door as a draught excluder and the other on the windowsill to catch and muffle the rain and snow.
The young man who lived in the attic room above me sometimes played his stereo late at night (like my brother used to) and I’d be trying to sleep with the annoying thud, thud, thud sound of the bass instruments. Once, at about three in the morning, he treated me to a loud rendering of ‘Rule Britannia’. I sprang out of bed in a temper, grabbed my sweeping brush and, standing on the bed, banged on the ceiling with the brush handle. A shower of plaster fell onto my head, but he got the message and I got some peace. For weeks after this incident there was a welcome but eerie silence from above. Then one night I kept hearing a heavy thudding sound moving around his floor, which made my ceiling shudder and my light flicker. What the hell was he doing now? I found out later that he had a leg in plaster and was hopping across his room.
The light for the landing and stairway was on a timer to go out automatically. It was supposed to give you enough time to get up or down the stairs, but you’d need to be a prize-winning athlete to manage it. At night I always had to negotiate the last few stai
rs in the dark.
On the one occasion I went down into the basement of the house I stepped off the bottom of the stairs to find myself standing ankle-deep in dirty water.
‘It’s wicked of people to rent out houses that are in this state,’ Vivian said.
I was very busy. There were lots of new things to learn, from getting just the right amount of soap in the machines at the launderette down the road to the realisation that man (or woman) cannot live by tinned food alone. My cookery skills were almost non-existent, so I bought the most basic cookery book I could find, and filled my bed-sit with weird and wonderful smells.
I was out most evenings. I had classes three nights a week, my aim being to get several O levels in the shortest possible time as I was keen to make up for my wasted years and get on to higher education. I was also enjoying myself at nights with my new friends from work, still visiting my old friends Jackie and Mandy occasionally (though they were both married now), plus seeing Helen and Vivian regularly. Vivian had recently graduated as a mature student and was shortly to take up a teaching post in London. I would miss her and our stimulating talks very much, but we planned to write often and meet when we could.
As time passed, my ‘Bless This Mess’ notice started to look even more appropriate than when I first hung it on the wall. This won’t do, I scolded myself, on arriving in late and tired one Friday night to trip over a pile of my belongings on the floor. I got up early the next morning to declare war on clutter. Where to begin? There was an overspill of books on the floor that wouldn’t fit into the small bookcase which Ricky, Mandy’s husband, had kindly made for me. I also had an assortment of papers and files that wouldn’t fit into drawers. These were stuffed into four large carrier bags and left lying on the floor.
‘I’ve got to stop hoarding things,’ I told myself as I opened the first carrier bag, which contained two large ring binders with the notes made at evening classes the previous year. But I thought they might come in useful again as I intended to build on the basic knowledge gained and go into depth on whatever subjects most interested me.
The next carrier bag I looked inside contained lots of airmail letters from Mike. I reread a few of them and smiled sadly. I didn’t love him, could never marry him, but he was a friend and neither of us seemed capable of breaking contact completely. I replaced the letters, unable to throw them out.
I delved into another carrier bag and pulled out some notebooks containing autobiographical poems written by Gerry. He had done a ‘runner’ before finishing his course at the unit and had given me his poems just before then. I reread them with a sigh and a tear. What they lacked in that indefinable quality called literary merit they made up for in their honest and poignant portrayal of the experience of being an outsider. I couldn’t throw them out.
The fourth carrier bag contained my old diaries. Among these was the 1968 diary, which gave a painfully accurate description each day of my state of mind and circumstances as a troubled teenager, from the beginning of the year up to, and including, that fateful day of hospital admission in December. After that came the few extracts scribbled on toilet paper at the hospital and copied into my diary when home for Christmas. Later, in my 1969 diary, an entry written on a weekend leave: ‘Slept all day’. After discharge from Thornville, a few more entries saying ‘Slept all day’. Then blank pages. Nothing. It was as if I’d died. And in a way I had.
On rereading these diaries I was struck afresh with the way my treatment completely mismatched the problems for which I was supposedly being treated. It fuelled my anger, but I was so glad I’d written, and kept, these diaries, especially the 1968 one. Otherwise maybe I’d be wondering if I’d gone into hospital more ‘sick’ than I’d been aware of at the time or could now remember. Along with these diaries was my current journal and a folder containing papers on which I’d written my recent thoughts, mainly the questions about psychiatry that kept bouncing around in my head. This was part of my coming-to-terms writing. I had a lot more work to do before I could dispense with the contents of this bag.
So much for getting rid of the bags that cluttered my floor, but I did have more success in discarding some of the things which had accumulated in my drawers.
As I went through my hoard of belongings trying to sort things out, deciding where to put things, what to hold on to, what to discard, I knew my mind was undertaking a similar task. In my bed-sit, at work, out with friends, with my family, in the warmth and quiet of a library, amidst the noise and clamour of crowded places, at evening classes, tucked up inside my sleeping bag at night … anywhere, everywhere, alone or with people, my inner struggle to come to terms continued, sometimes calmly and quietly, and sometimes in flames of anger or bursts of self-pity. Learning to deal constructively with my antagonism towards psychiatry was a lengthy and difficult process.
‘What happened, Jean?’ Jackie asked. ‘Do you remember how not long before you first went to see a psychiatrist we were sitting here in this pub trying to understand how Christians can believe in a God of love sending people to hell to suffer for all eternity?’
I nodded, and smiled sadly. ‘Yeah, I never did figure that one out.’
‘When you told me you’d asked to see a psychiatrist, I was dying to find out what he’d say because I was just the same as you.’
‘I remember how, when I told you I was going into hospital, we laughed at the thought of me “basket-making with the loonies”, didn’t we?’ I stared into my lager.
Never again would I use an abusive term such as ‘loonies’ to describe those of us who, rightly or wrongly, receive psychiatric diagnoses. ‘It seems an awfully long time ago, doesn’t it?’ I said, fiddling with a beer mat. ‘Like something remembered from a previous life.’
‘And then I saw you when you’d been in hospital a while, and I couldn’t believe it. They’d turned you into a zombie! But before that, we were both just the same. I was as confused about religion and life as what you were. So what happened?’
‘What happened was an attempt to cure my headache by chopping my head off,’ I replied cynically. ‘The psychiatric solution to misery. Oh, but pardon me, Doctor, I’d rather keep my head on. I do need it at times.’
‘It doesn’t make sense, Jean, treating you like they did.’
‘No, and it doesn’t make sense that I complied, and for so long. Who’ll be the next to volunteer for the chopping block? Come this way, Jean, that’s a good girl. God, I’m so angry with myself for allowing it to happen.’
‘Don’t blame yourself, Jean. How could you understand what was going on when you were so drugged? It’s me who should’ve done summat when I saw you like that. Honestly, Jean, I feel so guilty for not trying to do anything.’
‘Well, you’d better get off the guilt trip at once ’cos there was nowt you could’ve done. Remember how young we were, Jackie? Just a pair of silly teenagers.’
‘We were both just the same,’ Jackie said again. ‘It could’ve happened to me.’
‘How do I seem now?’ I asked.
‘Oh, like Sleeping Beauty who’s at last woken up,’ she said, with a grin. ‘Seriously though, since stopping the tablets you’re back to the old Jean I used to know. Thank goodness.’
‘That’s what Mandy says, but I’m not really,’ I said, picking up my drink. ‘The old Jean wasn’t bitter and angry and cynical. I’ll never be the same again.’ I finished off my drink quickly. ‘Still, at least I haven’t ended up with two heads,’ I added, smiling, in an attempt to avoid the self-pity trap.
‘Don’t kid yourself there, Jean,’ Jackie said, giggling. ‘A few more drinks and you might even have three.’
Wanting to make myself useful, I attended a course of evening classes aimed at giving a broad outline of different kinds of voluntary work. One evening the topic was ‘Mental Health’ and an invited speaker, a mental health professional, said that if hospitalisation, drugs or ECT was prescribed for a patient the role of the volunteer befriender could be to allay that pat
ient’s fears and encourage him or her to co-operate with the doctor.
It seemed to me both absurd and dangerous to believe that doctors were infallible. And if a wrong initial diagnosis was made, what chance was there of it being rectified once the person was in hospital for ‘observation’ where (as in my ‘case’) all the staff could observe was how a patient behaved while heavily drugged and in a certain kind of stressful (hospital) environment? Wouldn’t the staff have preconceptions anyway about the ‘already labelled’ person? Once hospitalised, drugged and shocked, how could the effects of treatment be distinguished from whatever ‘symptoms’ were supposedly being treated? And how much did the doctors know about the causes of the thoughts, feelings or behaviour that supposedly needed treating? Can the complex range of human misery, with its opportunities for both damage and growth, really be legitimately reduced to crude diagnostic labels and theories about brain chemistry?
My brother once worked hard to annoy me so that he could record my angry reaction on a small, hidden tape recorder. Later, I heard him playing it back to laugh about with someone. I did sound upset. Weaker personality? Neurone transmitters not firing correctly? Poor coping responses? But only my voice was on the tape; the cause and context of my anger had been cut. How many psychiatrists are basing important treatment decisions on such a distorted, one-sided perspective?
All my questions raise further questions. Was (am?) I ‘mentally ill’ (whatever that means)? And, more importantly, because this applies whether or not I was ‘mentally ill’: what wisdom, morality, or even just basic common sense was there in the treatment I received?
