by Jean Davison
At Rossfields, my last school, I used to wonder how it would feel if I was at a boarding school or some other place where I’d have to endure my shyness at evenings and weekends as well as through the day. Now I knew.
My three colleagues from work had visited me during the first week of my stay and told me of their great surprise on hearing where I was.
‘We’d noticed how you’d always been quiet at work,’ Rose had said, ‘but we’d no idea that anything was wrong with you. I mean, we thought it was just shyness.’
‘But that’s right, it was just shyness,’ I had said emphatically, though I’d known this couldn’t have sounded very convincing in view of my present address.
I realised now that my shyness, confusion about religion, dissatisfaction with my job and social life, letting my family situation get me down, boredom, wondering what life’s all about, and other adolescent turmoils, could all be construed through the perspective of psychiatry as symptoms of mental illness. Later, I would think about how this wasn’t a constructive way of looking at these kind of problems, and I would wonder why I colluded with the mental health professionals for a long time.
Dr Prior once described me as a ‘good patient’. And indeed I was. Good patients believe they are sick and must obey their doctor if they want to get well. Good patients keep on at least trying to believe that the doctor knows what’s best for them, even against the evidence of their senses. Good patients co-operate with staff, follow the rules and passively accept their treatment. Yes, I (with the one exception of refusing further ECT) was a very good patient.
Lee’s held my job open for as long as possible. I’d worked there for three years since leaving the factory. About three months after my last day at Lee’s, my parents brought me a letter at visiting time. It was from Mr Harlow, the Director, asking when I would be returning to work. They had not anticipated such a long absence and were sure I would understand that it was hard for the staff to continue coping with extra work, and temps were expensive. I tried several times to answer this letter, but words wouldn’t form on the page; I didn’t know what to tell them. I was in the hands of those who were treating me and they never even asked me about my job. I supposed there was no point anyway. My treatment put work out of the question. I asked my father to ring Lee’s to tell them I wouldn’t be going back.
Mandy visited several times during my stay and she also wrote to me. I was grateful for her reminders of the world outside. Life in an institution – and that’s what it was despite any other name they may wish to call it – can be hellish.
I can’t make it in this world, I’m simply not going to survive, I thought despairingly, as a dark wave of gloom washed over me, knocking me off balance. I was sitting alone among the crowd of patients in the hall at OT sipping tea from one of the dirty, brown-stained reusable plastic cups. The fact that these cups were never washed adequately had bothered me at first, especially when I watched patients, usually elderly males, using them as an ashtray or spittoon, but now I was past caring. I hadn’t seen Raymond for a long time and wondered if he’d cut his wrists again. I looked down at my own white wrists where the veins stood out clearly and knew I hadn’t the courage, or whatever it takes, to do it; suicide could never be a way out for me. But how was I to cope with the overwhelming feelings of despair if I couldn’t end it all? I couldn’t hold on and I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t live and I couldn’t die. Panic gripped my soul. For me, there was no way out.
With my nose pressed to the window pane, I noticed that the white carpet of snow covering the hospital grounds had given way to greenery. Newborn leaves were appearing as tiny shoots on branches of old, gnarled trees. The air smelt of springtime, a season I had once loved. In the mental hospital world it was too easy to lose track of time, but while I was wandering round in a drugged stupor, months were tiptoeing by …
I managed to escape some of the afternoon OT sessions when Dad’s friend Joe brought my parents to visit in his car and then took us all out for a ride. On sunny days with the windows open wide we drove down narrow, winding country lanes, past fields, trees and hedges, where the sights and sounds of nature caused a faint stirring within me, a kind of nostalgia for life. It didn’t last long. Sister Oldroyd continued to allow Maria and Tessa to go on afternoon car rides with their parents but she told my parents not to visit me in the afternoons because it was causing me to miss OT which was an ‘important part’ of my treatment.
At OT I fought to keep awake while typing page after page of meaningless prose for copy-typing practice. I had long been a competent typist and at least I’d been paid for doing it at work. When I could bear no longer this ‘important part’ of my treatment, I would escape to the toilet and allow myself the luxury of drifting off to sleep for a while. I was too drowsy now to write on toilet paper for my diary and, anyway, writing had become as pointless as everything else. But I held on tight to the nostalgia for life that the car journeys had strengthened. In moments of despair I tried to focus my mind on winding country lanes and fields and trees and sunshine till my heart cried out: I want my life back.
Some of the patients were like bloated robots. I looked at them, sadly, and made the connection. I had become just the same. My weight gain was apparently a side effect of at least one of the drugs. I wore long, loose sweaters that hid the large gap where my size 12 skirts wouldn’t fasten. Another side effect was that my face and neck kept breaking out in angry, red lumps – far worse than my previous teenage pimples. And Danny had seen me change from the girl he’d known into a lifeless automaton.
When Danny visited I couldn’t stop myself from slumping forward and falling asleep at the table where we sat at visiting times. I knew I owed him, and my parents, more than a view of the top of my head when they travelled to see me, but it was so hard to fight against this drowsiness caused by my current dosage of 125 mg of Melleril three times a day, 5 mg of Concordin three times a day and Mogadon every night. I don’t think I gave Danny any reason to feel that his visits were worthwhile or that I cared for him at all. On top of this, he’d been putting up with increasing hostility from my father. Danny had told my father he intended to speak to my psychiatrist to query my treatment since its adverse effects were obvious. Dad had told him not to interfere, and couldn’t manage even to be civil to Danny after that.
‘Jean, wake up and listen to me!’ Danny said, one visiting time.
An uncharacteristic tone of agitation in his voice reached my dull senses. I raised my head mechanically and opened my eyes.
‘Since you came into this place you’ve changed beyond recognition and … and I can’t stand to see you like this. I’m sorry but I … I just can’t.’
‘It’s OK, Danny, I understand,’ I murmured sleepily.
‘You want me to go? You want us to finish?’
‘Yes. It’s for the best,’ I said, though I didn’t really know what I wanted, except to ease the pain I was causing him and make it easier for him to leave if he wanted to.
A long silence followed.
Finally he said, ‘I might go back to Devon, see if I can sort myself out.’ His voice was shaky and there were tears in his eyes.
My eyes remained dry; I felt too drugged and distant for tears. I didn’t say anything. There seemed nothing left to say.
‘Oh God, I … I’m sorry,’ he said standing up. ‘I can’t bear it any more.’
I followed him to the door of the ward where we kissed goodbye. Suddenly he took hold of me by the shoulders and shook me: ‘Please, Jean, don’t …’ His voice faltered but his grip on my shoulders tightened till it hurt. ‘Don’t allow this to happen to you.’
With these words he walked out of the ward and out of my life. I never saw him again.
Jackie visited me just once towards the end of my stay. We’d been friends since primary school but now I felt self-conscious with her, aware of how four months in this institution had taken its toll. She didn’t disguise her shock at seeing the pathetic, drugg
ed creature I had become.
‘My God, what’s happened to you? You’re a big fat zombie!’ She screwed up her forehead in shocked surprise.
‘Let’s go sit down,’ I said, nodding to the visiting area. Since I’d greeted her at the door of the ward she’d remained standing there, looking reluctant to come right inside.
We went to sit down and she continued to stare at me. ‘Your eyes are half closed, your speech and movement is all slow, your body is swollen and your face is so bloated you look like you’ve got mumps.’
‘It’s only a temporary thing ’cos of the drugs,’ I said, attempting to make light of it.
‘But, Jean, I’ve never seen a person change so much and in such a short time as you have since coming in here. I’m absolutely staggered.’
‘Hey, steady on, it’s OK, Jackie,’ I said, smiling weakly. ‘I’m still the same person underneath.’ I was desperate to convince myself of that. But I feared I would never be the same again.
And when the transformation was complete; when I had lost my job, my boyfriend, my self-esteem, and had turned into a fat, spotty, zombie-like creature who moved and thought slowly, when I had become withdrawn even with my closest friends (with whom I’d never been shy before), when I felt worse than I had ever felt in my rotten, lousy, fucked-up life and wished I could sleep for ever in a deep, dreamless kind of slumber, they finally decided I was ready to be discharged.
CASE NO. 10826
Progress:
None. There was no essential change in the patient’s state in spite of treatment.
Condition on Discharge
Not improved.
Final Diagnosis
Schizophrenia.
Dr Sugden
PART TWO
THE TUNNEL
Selves diminished
we return
to a world of narrowed dreams
piecing together memory fragments
for the long journey ahead.
Leonard Frank, from ‘Aftermath’
CHAPTER SEVEN
I AWOKE AT SEVEN but there was no green light above my bed and no uniformed figures reminding a sleepy ward that it was time to get up. My parents and brother were out, doing their bus-conducting shifts. I turned over, and the next time I awoke it was three in the afternoon. Hunger brought me downstairs just long enough to eat several slices of bread and jam. I swallowed the prescribed dosage of pills, climbed back into bed and pulled the sheets over my head. This is how I spent most of my time during the first days, weeks – how long? – following my discharge.
I couldn’t help but reduce my drugs, being often asleep when a dose was due, so gradually their knockout effect eased up a bit. One day while hovering in a twilight world between sleeping and waking I thought about Danny’s last words to me: ‘Don’t allow this to happen to you.’ I wondered if I forced myself to go through the motions of living, something might connect and I’d come alive again. With this in mind, I dragged myself into a sitting position, disentangled myself from the dirty, dishevelled sheets and covers, and swung my legs over the side of the bed.
The sight of my dirty arms and legs filled me with repulsion and I was about to go to the bathroom to have the wash I so badly needed when, catching sight of myself in the full-length wardrobe mirror, I gasped. It wasn’t me! A mental patient wearing my nightgown stared back. She had heavy-lidded, dull eyes set in a bloated face, a floppy fringe and long, straight, greasy hair which hung lankly down to her waist. A big, red lump stood out angrily on her chin and another on her neck. She was a very fat girl.
I backed away, my face still riveted to the girl in the mirror, then hurriedly pulled open a drawer and fished out a crumpled newspaper cutting of an article I’d written a few months before going into hospital. Below the words ‘“Let’s bridge that age gap” says teenager’ there was a photograph of a slim, attractive, smiling teenager with my name underneath it. Yes, this was me: the girl in the photograph. And these were my clothes – the size 12 mini-skirts and dresses, which hung lifelessly in the wardrobe, were made to fit a neat, slim figure. I stared back at the fat, ugly girl in the mirror and tears sprang to her eyes.
‘That’s not me,’ I said, wiping my moist eyes on the back of my hand, while the girl in the mirror did likewise. ‘That girl who is watching me and mimicking my every movement is not me.’
‘I can’t go out tonight. I look a sight and none of my clothes fit me,’ I lamented to my mother as I sat on the settee one Saturday afternoon drying my hair, my old blue dressing-gown pulled tight round my swollen body. In an attempt to rejoin the world of ‘normal’ teenagers, I’d arranged to meet Mandy that evening.
‘Listen, love, why don’t you go into town and buy some new clothes?’ Mum suggested. ‘You can buy a bigger size until your other clothes fit you again.’
Until my other clothes fit me again? I brightened up at the thought that perhaps this fat, ugly, dozy, pathetic creature I was learning to live with had only taken up temporary residence in me. Mum got out her purse and pushed some money into my hand. ‘Here, love, take this and go buy yourself summat.’
I went outside feeling like a toad that had crawled out of a hole, blinking uncertainly in the bright sunlight. On the bus I thought the conductor kept staring at me. Had he seen me before and was surprised at how my appearance had changed? Perhaps my brother had told him I was a mental hospital patient. Brian had said everyone working on this bus route knew. Or was I getting paranoid and just imagining the conductor was staring?
In a boutique I tried on a skirt two sizes larger than my normal size but even that was too tight. I’d never before had a weight problem, except for a slight worry that I was too thin. As I returned the skirt to the rack, a young assistant approached me. Her short, psychedelic-patterned mini-dress hugged her sylph-like body and revealed long, slender legs. ‘Would you like to try it on?’
‘I have done, but it’s too tight. I’m just putting it back.’
‘The larger sizes are over there,’ she said, pointing to the racks cruelly marked ‘Outsize’. ‘Would you like to look …’
‘No, I’ll leave it, thank you,’ I said abruptly, hurrying from the darkened boutique clutching tightly to remnants of battered vanity. Being fat was a new experience for me.
I went to a large department store and quickly bought a cheap skirt made with ample material and an elasticated waist. I’d always enjoyed buying clothes before, but this shopping expedition was painful. As a reward for getting a tiresome chore over with, I went in the coffee shop and treated myself to a large cream bun, and as soon as I finished eating it I bought another one. Who cared?
I couldn’t get too hung up about losing my looks once I got over the initial shock because what worried me most was the death-like change that had taken place on the inside.
No, Dr Sugden, you were wrong to think that there was ‘no essential change in the patient’s state in spite of treatment’. By the time you were writing this in my case notes I had, indeed, been changed. Wholly and deeply and for ever changed. If the treatment brings greater problems and pain than what is supposedly being treated, isn’t there something wrong, Dr Sugden? Isn’t there something horribly wrong?
It was hard going out in the evenings again, trying to pick up the threads of my life where I’d left them four months ago. The world of pubs, discos and nightclubs still seemed shallow but I daren’t withdraw from the social scene any longer in case I lost touch with my friends. Friends. How precious they were to me. Friends like Mandy and Jackie. How much I needed them. How much I owed them. Without friends, I don’t think I could have survived.
Flower Power was still alive in the spring of 1969. Long-haired hippies wearing bells and flowers around their necks pointed the way to a glorious ‘alternative’ society. It didn’t seem as if almost two years had passed since the ‘Summer of Love’ when Scott Mackenzie topped the charts with ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’. Everyone seemed to think this was a wonderful
era. Before hospital I’d often failed to see what there was about the sixties to get so excited about, but at least there’d been some fun times too. Not so now. The drugged and electro-shocked me found life more bewildering and depressing than ever.
I tried to tell myself that our generation was lucky to be freed from the sexual hang-ups and inhibitions of previous generations. We could carry a condom in our handbags. Or, better still, take the pill. Have an abortion. Experiment with drugs and blow our minds. Wow! Wasn’t it great to be a teenager in the Swinging Sixties? But, having grown world-weary beyond my years, I didn’t need to scratch far below the surface to see the pain and sadness beneath the glamour.
Sitting in a pub with Mandy one evening she looked at me sadly and said, ‘You’re only a shadow of the old Jean I knew.’
‘Quite a large shadow though,’ I laughed.
Mandy smiled. ‘Well, it’s good to see you haven’t lost your sense of humour. I still keep seeing flashes of that. But tell me what happened. What was it like in the hospital?’
‘I didn’t exactly enjoy it,’ I said flippantly. ‘Cor, look at that lad over there. He’s dishy, isn’t he?’
I didn’t want to talk about the hospital, didn’t even want to think about it just now. The feeling that I’d been violated and perhaps permanently damaged was more than I could bear.
‘I don’t understand,’ Mandy said. She put down her glass of lager and stared at me. ‘You seemed OK until you went in there and then you became all slowed down and it’s as if the drugs are draining the life and soul out of you. But what’s supposed to be wrong with you? I mean what are they treating?’
‘Mental illness, I suppose,’ I offered by way of explanation.
‘But you’re not mentally ill,’ Mandy said.