Finding Sanity

by Greg de Moore

  My favorite prostitute colleague was 4ft 10 inches, seven stone and the terror of the Fitzroy Police when demon drink was upon her. Teeth, claws and stiletto heels could do terrible damage, and they did. But when the demon was exorcised, then she became the sweetest person one could remember.

  He further extolled his ‘colleague’s’ sharp sense of humour and said that, within the bounds of her own profession, she possessed the highest of ethical standards.

  John and Jean packed up the bits and pieces of their lives at Royal Park, among which were John’s Bible and bottled olives. They had lived virtually their entire married life within or near mental hospitals. Now they were to move to the old Cade family estate—at 655 Orrong Road, Toorak. It was a homecoming of sorts for John. As a medical student he’d boarded there with his aunt Rene, for a time. Eventually John and Jean came to occupy one half of this splendid mansion.

  John continued some professional commitments, notably as a member of the Medical Board of Victoria. He also flirted with the idea of private practice—the prestigious ‘Melbourne Clinic’ tempted him. It seemed that Jean, after all these years, would get her way—a husband in private medical practice. But either the patients dried up, or John’s lot had never been the world of the entrepreneurial doctor. He settled for seeing just an occasional patient if a special request was made. Almost relieved by the release from daily contact with patients, he set about observing the world from his Toorak home. Between reading fairy stories aloud to his grandchildren—Rapunzel was a favourite—John pottered around the garden, once finding an ancient-looking stone which he sent to the Museum of Natural History in Melbourne for analysis.

  The Toorak home was an obvious yet odd choice: obvious because it was in the family and available; odd because John was not a man of ostentation and everyone knew Toorak was the city’s most expensive postcode. John lived plainly, with the asceticism of a monk. Watching his pennies, he drove a 1973 Peugeot sedan, and to the continuing annoyance of his wife, he never threw anything away. So they lived a frugal life in Toorak, the swankiest suburb in Melbourne.

  In February 1977, the University of Melbourne held a scientific meeting to honour John Cade’s retirement. Mogens Schou flew out from Denmark and was an honoured guest speaker. When John was called on to speak he gave a talk as distinctive as himself. It had pretty much nothing to do with research, but he chaotically took a ride through medical history, like a Don Quixote of psychiatry, with personal reflections laced with humour. At one point he stopped abruptly and eyed his audience: ‘I doubt whether any of you know what Juglans regia is, still less of its valuable properties.’ This, part-question, part-accusation, came from nowhere. He informed his now-bewildered medical audience that it was the common walnut tree and quoted an 1883 source that the walnut tree’s leaves were outstanding in treating certain forms of illness. And then, oblivious to his audience’s bemusement and without skipping a beat, John returned to his lecture.

  After the conference John took Mogens Schou to Healesville nature sanctuary, one of John’s favourite haunts. Within minutes of arriving, John, without a word to his distinguished Danish guest, took off into the bush. Jean remembers:

  I had packed a picnic lunch and when I unpacked the sandwiches, John took his first sandwich and disappeared. Schou, looking around for John, said: ‘Where has John gone to, Jean? I hope I haven’t offended him.’ I explained that he always did that. John didn’t spend time just gossiping. He was back soon with some orchids for Schou.

  In July 1977, John and Jean were invited to the First British Lithium Symposium, where John was to give the opening address. This occasion was organised by Neil Johnson, a British psychologist who would later write the first history of the discovery of lithium as a treatment for bipolar disorder. Neil and John became the closest of friends. On the evening before the symposium, displaying warm hospitality to his Australian guests, Neil took John and Jean out for dinner. Neil recalls the events that night:

  On the evening before the Congress my wife and I took Jean and John Cade to dinner at a small country inn where, between the main course and the dessert, John presented us with a sizeable and clearly quite lethal boomerang, and proceeded to demonstrate the energetic arm movements involved in throwing it. Two elderly ladies at an adjoining table became visibly alarmed, and John’s confident and loudly pronounced assertion that, had a kangaroo been situated at the other end of the dining room, he could quite easily have taken its head clean off with the boomerang, led to the immediate abandonment of their sherry trifle.

  John had long been fascinated with boomerangs and had taken to constructing them with the carpenter’s kit he had kept from boyhood. Indeed he became adept at throwing them. His son David remembers how at Royal Park Mental Hospital, an Aboriginal man, Jack, taught the boys and John the art of boomerang construction and throwing. Clearly, in England that evening, John was simply putting into effect the many hours of training he’d undertaken at Royal Park, and for which his English guests were quite unprepared.

  When John returned to Melbourne he set about the task of writing a small book about the history of psychiatry—he called it Mending the Mind. Jean explains his ambition for the book:

  He didn’t want it to be a technical treatise. He wanted it to be just something that somebody, anyone, could buy at the airport and shove in a pocket and if they left it behind it didn’t matter. He wanted to tell people the simple things of his psychiatric life.

  On the cover of this slender volume is a marvellous Bruce Petty cartoon—specially commissioned—showing a slightly maniacal psychiatrist lifting the top of the head of a patient to see what’s inside. It is a book full of witty asides and intelligent observations. John’s humour shines from page one, including one of his beloved subjects—the ‘dangers of madness’ from masturbation. Those who knew him well said that when John was amused, he chuckled and allowed himself an extravagant lift of an eyebrow. Eyebrows must have been buckling all over the place as he wrote.

  In his book, John’s language is, at times, blunt and flies from the page. This is John the boxer. He’s not wordy, and there are no low blows, but, like a fighter, his words aim to hit their target with precision. Fearless with his medical colleagues, he never missed an opportunity to prick their conceits. Deliciously, he took aim at his fellow psychiatrists: ‘this book . . . does not pretend to be a treatise on human wisdom, in which field the last significant advance, many would say, took place nearly 2000 years ago’. A reference to Christianity, of course. ‘Quite bluntly, I do not think we as psychiatrists are any better at helping people solve purely human problems of the heart than man has ever been.’ Professor Ed Chiu once remarked that: ‘John has no fear of criticism; he is well established in his own self-esteem, who he is.’

  John was unafraid of whose politics he might step upon—whether the left, or the right—or gender slants; it meant nothing to him if he couldn’t square it with honest thought. In Mending the Mind, he pulled together what he saw as important mental health advances during his medical life. In a disarming act of modesty, in the chapter on lithium he made no reference to himself as the discoverer of its wondrous charms in taming manic depression. Such a refreshing lack of self-promotion seems unbelievable in our modern society, where every self-invested bit-player struts on the internet to the world.

  John continued to receive letters from grateful patients and men and women he’d never seen: ‘I started to get a lot of fan mail from all over the world . . . even the dogs were barking lithium.’ One typical of many he received came in July of the first year of his retirement. It was written by a young man who suffered from schizoaffective illness, a disorder that hovers midway between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia:

  I write to you as a young man of 34 who was diagnosed as suffering from schizo-affective psychosis in 1972. In 1976, after all else failed, I was placed on Lithium Carbonate . . . I have made a dramatic and almost complete recovery.

  I thank you from the bottom of my
heart for your wonderful discovery of 1949. I am even hopeful of eventually resuming my life’s work as a lecturer in German.

  But not all ‘fan mail’ was well received by John. In late 1978 there dropped into his postbox a small parcel. It was a book on psychiatry, written by an overseas professor. The professor—who was unknown to John—went on to say that he was in the process of writing another two books, and he’d be thrilled if John would send him a couple of autographed photos so they could be included in these upcoming books. The professor, adducing for himself a close relationship with John, perhaps based on his academic title, finished his letter by gushing: ‘Your discovery of lithium has opened a new era in psychiatry!!!’ It was all just a bit over the top; John’s instincts sniffed cheap flattery. For a man as formal as John, we know he would have bristled at the assumed intimacy when the professor called him by his Christian name. John was not a self-promoter and he cast a caustic eye over those who were. At the end of the professor’s bit of bumf, John jotted with customary candour: ‘I don’t know this gentleman from a bump in the road—no reply. J.F.J.C.’ These were gruff words but John Cade was not a man to stoke anyone’s vanity. Ed Chiu remembered this dimension of John, ‘he did not tolerate fools. If you’re not genuine he wasn’t interested in you.’

  John’s demeanour did not change in retirement. Never one to blaspheme—‘damn’ or ‘blast’ were the worst things you got—his temper was leashed at all times. In his second year of retirement he travelled to New York for the 1978 International Lithium Conference. There he met up with Neil Johnson from England, who noted that John was somehow different, ‘quieter and more pensive’, maybe even a little sad. Johnson went on that John Cade ‘confided in me that he had quite simply lost touch with the majority of developments in the lithium field’, especially the more esoteric experiments underway around the world.

  Lithium had now entered the modern world of big pharmacy, where assembly-line drugs are constructed by committees, forged in factories and crystallised by computers. Lithium had been old-school, hand-crafted, but now it too had entered a different, corporate world. Lithium research was now an abstraction, carried out in distant places in multi-storey buildings. It left John cold. It was a long way from injecting the urine of patients into guinea pigs—an earthiness that John missed. Slowly he drifted away from reading about lithium and following the latest developments in psychiatry.

  But, just once, nostalgically, he reflected on those early days:

  I returned from three and a half years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese mourning the wasted years and determined to pursue the ideas that had germinated in that interminable time. I was able to go my own way unhindered by advice, criticism or caution. This is important. I don’t think it could happen these days. One would be suffocated by hospital boards, research committees, ethical committees and heads of departments. Instead I was answerable only to my own conscience and personal drive.

  Just about everyone remembers John Cade as a kind man. We find evidence of this wherever we look, sometimes tucked away in some corner of his clinical notes, just a word here or there of compassion. Although he’d stopped formally seeing patients, he was always approachable. Towards the end of researching this book, while visiting Beechworth, one of the authors met an elderly woman who’d grown up there; now retired, she had returned to see her childhood home. In 1979, she came across John Cade’s name in a local newspaper and took the chance to write to him about her son, who suffered from schizophrenia. John wrote back to her, a letter she keeps to this day. This is a snippet of that letter:

  Many thanks for your recent kind letter. I am sad to learn that one of your children is so grievously afflicted. And God knows and you and I know that schizophrenia is a grievous affliction in spite of modern advances in treatment.

  John then offered the kind hand of friendship and some professional advice: ‘I would look forward to meeting you. I think the most mutually convenient venue would be the Melbourne Clinic . . . where I visit on Wednesday afternoons.’ Even today, nearly 40 years later, memories of meeting John Cade bring an afterglow of warm reflections from this elderly woman: ‘He was such a lovely man. He understood. I knew he couldn’t really do anything more, but who knows. I came away feeling good.’

  The war never went away for John Cade. He continued to meet his fellow POWs from the 2/9th Field Ambulance at their annual luncheons, events that brought back memories of the war. John, in turn, went back to Singapore numerous times, where he relived the years from 1941 to 1945. One of those occasions was always remembered by Jean:

  It was hot. He’d say: ‘I’m alright I can sweat’. He just had his hat on his head and kept up the fluids. He was a tough sort. He said he had a good old greasy skin that sweated well. We did get to Changi gaol . . . We went to the cemetery. As soon as he got there he said he had to find John Park’s grave. There was no one to ask. We had this enormous cemetery to look around. He said, ‘You go this way I’ll go that way.’ And I kept looking to see wherever he was. We didn’t know how long we’d be. Then, he held up his arm. By the time I got there tears were pouring down his face. He had found his beloved John Park.

  Sometimes, John’s written words suggest an unresolved bitterness towards the Japanese but those who knew him well would not agree. Ed Chiu, who worked with John Cade for over a decade, remembered this point: ‘John doesn’t show a great deal. But his Catholicism and Christianity underpinned a lot of his decision making. He would come back to these principles when he made difficult decisions. God created humans to be equal. Equality is a religious one not a political one. His forgiveness for the Japanese is very much a Christian way. He never joined the RSL; he never marched; he never bore grudges.’

  It’s true, John never joined the RSL, and he never marched on Anzac Day. Yet he met his men of the 2/9th Field Ambulance for their annual lunches with a certainty one could set a clock to. Among them he was still ribbed as the ‘mad major’. John indulgently smiled and accepted this title; it was a typical Australian backhanded term of affection. There was no pulling of rank here; a sweeper of shit was respected as much as a doctor of men. That’s the way it was; John was comfortable among these men of the 2/9th. No professional jealousy soured their conversations. John was among those he loved.

  And so he found himself among them, again, on 17 February 1980.

  At the head of one of the most beautiful boulevards in the world—St Kilda Road—stands the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance. It’s the war memorial that every schoolkid in the state gets to visit; you step up from the boulevard, up the smooth green slope of parkland, to a peak atop which stands the Shrine—a heavy grey pyramid with steps that sweep upwards to a colonnaded portico. Everybody in Melbourne just calls it that, the Shrine. On that February day, the celebrated elms sweeping down St Kilda Road were in full flight; an emerald foliage illuminated the city. John was at the Shrine, as were the men of the 2/9th Field Ambulance, assembled, respectfully, for that day was a day for memories. They stood on the stone steps and looked up towards John Cade. John was about to address them, and their wives and their children. He did so, we imagine, in the same clear way he spoke to his men in Changi nearly 40 years before, when repeating verbatim the BBC radio broadcasts—recitations that would have brought him death if uncovered, but that resurrected his men’s spirits. This day the ‘mad major’ was back, speaking again. But this day was different. And John needed God’s wisdom to lean on:

  My dear friends,

  This year is the fortieth of the comradeship that we have been privileged to share. It is a very precious bond that binds the living and the dead and today we pay special homage to those who have gone before us and whom all of us must follow in God’s good time. We remember all those fine men who have died but particularly those whose memory lives on in our hearts.

  It is said that it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead. Why should it be wholesome? I have thought about that and I think I know part of the answer. We reme
mber their virtues—their courage, their fortitude, their generosity, their wisdom, their loyalty: and remembering we emulate; and are better people for it. One gallant comrade, and you all know who that was, was recommended for a posthumous VC which was never awarded. As we think of him and the brave men who died with him the flickering flame of our own courage burns just that much brighter and stronger. As we think of the wisdom and loyalty of our only commander . . .

  ‘Our only commander’—that, of course, was John’s God, to whom he’d been so faithful over the decades. And the ‘one gallant comrade’? Well, that was naturally Dr John Park; his death on Singapore soil 38 years earlier was the deepest ache John bore from the war. If John Cade’s spirits were still not at peace, and they weren’t, then the good doctor never found a balm in life to soothe them.

  Death would be the only salvation for John’s troubled spirit. As he said to his men that day at the Shrine, death and peace would all come in ‘God’s good time’.

  And for John, God was about to come a-knocking.

  32

  Among John Cade’s surviving possessions there is a tiny treasure. It is a tan-coloured diary for the year 1980. In it Jean jots her memories of her husband’s final year of life—his illness and, eventually, his death. One gets the impression that some, perhaps most of it, was actually written after John died, for the dates at times seem confused, as if she was reconstructing the events of the year. They offer a private glimpse into her world and, in the end, an insight into her husband. Each of her pencilled scrawls, usually just a line or two long, signpost the last months of John’s life. Although we read of John’s decline, it is Jean’s emotions, rising and falling, that we feel.