by Jean Davison
No. Oh, no. I will sort it all out and come to terms with it in some way. I will learn to get it all in the right perspective. I will not let this bitterness and confusion I feel about it take hold of me and poison my life.
Brian followed me upstairs. ‘What about that woman who was walking backwards and forwards all the time?’ He meant Iris, the poor soul. ‘And what about that other one who kept banging her head with her hands? Did you see her? Look, banging her head like this all the time.’ Brian was so impossible.
‘Well, what about them?’ I said irritably as I slammed my bedroom door. ‘What about them?’
I lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Outside the door Brian was making his ‘animal noises’. I closed my eyes, suddenly feeling very tired. Yes, what about them? I thought. What about them? What about all mental hospital patients? And what about the terrible misunderstandings, lack of knowledge and poor communication between staff and patients, leading to treatment and attitudes which can, surely, only do more harm than good? Can nothing, absolutely nothing, be done to help?
‘Won’t you do something about it, please, God, oh please?’ I prayed to the four walls and ceiling. Well, did I really expect an answer?
It was a mistake to ring Dad from work. I should have used the pay phone at the hostel, but I’d only intended a quick call to arrange a visit.
‘Tell me when I see you,’ I said as he began telling me his troubles: about the situation at home, even about his confusion over religious beliefs. I explained that I couldn’t listen now as I was at work. Apparently he wanted a sounding board and he wouldn’t stop.
‘Sorry, Dad, but I can’t listen to all that just now,’ I said again as he continued. ‘I’m at work. I have to go. This is not the time or place.’
‘Not the time or space?’ he said mishearing me.
‘Time or place.’
‘Time or space?’ he said again. ‘You do say some funny things.’ He began laughing. Laughing and laughing. I pressed the phone close to my ear and glanced anxiously at my colleagues.
‘I’ve got to go now,’ I said, but the hysterical laughter went on and on, then I realised it had turned to tears. Lord, what was wrong with him? I couldn’t hang up now, but was aware that Martin, the Office Manager, would be ready for me to take dictation.
‘Dad, what’s wrong?’
No reply. Nothing but the sound of hysterical sobbing at the other end of the line.
‘I’ve got to go now,’ I said again, but I couldn’t bring myself to put the phone down until the sobbing stopped. Silence.
‘Dad? Are you still there? What’s wrong?’
‘Sorry about that, Jean. I got a bit carried away, didn’t I? I must be depressed.’
‘I know, but I really can’t talk now. Listen, we’ll talk later. I’ll see you tonight. OK? Bye.’
Before knocking on the door of Martin’s office with my shorthand pad, I paused to gather my thoughts: even though I love you very much and wish I could help you, I … I want you to leave me alone now, Dad. Let me breathe. Let me live. Let me be free. Please.
I simply must do something about my shyness, I said to myself as I sat in my attic room poring over my How to Overcome Shyness book. Vivian, who sometimes seemed as frustrated as I was by my shyness, said I wasn’t trying hard enough to overcome it. I was trying as hard as I possibly could.
I sat quietly and self-consciously in the lounge one evening while the others there, mainly young students, chatted. I was glad when Elspeth came in. I suspected the younger ones might think me strange for not talking but that Elspeth, being older, would be more likely to understand. They were all talking about another resident and agreeing that ‘if she smiled, her face would crack’. The girl they were talking about was suffering from depression, as they well knew, and had recently attempted suicide for reasons they did not know. I was surprised and disappointed when Elspeth, a teacher, joined in with their unkind remarks.
I was about to go up to my room when Elspeth said, ‘And I don’t like that girl who has the room on the top floor either. She never bothers to speak.’
I froze. Did she mean me? She must do. I was the only person who had a room on the top floor since ‘Nutty Norah’ had left a few months ago. Did she realise I was here now? She must do. I wasn’t invisible. I looked down at the magazine on my lap and pretended to be engrossed in it, while Elspeth continued.
‘And it’s not as if she can’t help it. Last Friday I saw her laughing and talking with that friend of hers who comes to see her. Oh yes, she can talk all right when she wants and to whom she wants.’
I said nothing. What was there to say anyway? It took more courage to leave the lounge than it had done to enter it. I pretended to read a while longer, then, without looking at anyone, I stood up, walked past them all and climbed the stairs to my room.
Sooty, one of the warden’s cats, was sitting near the top of the stairs. I sat next to her. ‘Oh, Sooty, what can I do? How can I make myself talk to people? Why didn’t I at least stick up for myself just then?’ The cat climbed onto my lap and I cuddled the bundle of soft, warm fur. ‘I’ve heard them say they don’t like you either, Sooty. They say you hiss and scratch whenever people try to touch you. But you’re not doing that now, are you?’ Deep, contented purrs were rumbling from the cat as I tickled behind her ears and stroked her body.
‘They say you’re a funny, unfriendly cat who doesn’t like people and won’t let anyone near,’ I whispered as a few teardrops dripped onto her shiny black fur. ‘But we know that isn’t true, don’t we Sooty? It just isn’t true.’
CASE NO. 10826
Mrs Green, O.T. Dept., described her behaviour, admitted that she had attended the typing school over a period of two years and during that time her mental state had remained unchanged. She is still aloof, cold, isolated and impossible to know well.
Dr Shaw
CASE NO. 10826
(Extract from Psychological Report)
There does seem to be some discrepancies, between what Jean sees as the problem, and how she actually is. In the Day Hospital she does not appear to be as shy and introverted as she described, and at home she does have at least one friend who visits her, and with whom she goes dancing.
Also on the 16 P.F. – the profile presented is certainly not that of an extremely introverted individual and the 2nd order factor of introversion falls within the normal range. Neither does she appear to be extremely submissive – in fact the reverse appears to be true, in that she appears to be a rather independent-minded and assertive individual, in some instances. In line with this she appears to be somewhat mistrusting and doubtful about the motives of others and tends to have a rather worldly, shrewd and unsentimental approach to life.
Laura Barnes
Clinical Psychologist
CASE NO. 10826
I agree with her own assessment of her problem ‘I find it difficult to talk to people.’
Dr Copeland
CHAPTER THIRTY
‘SAMARITANS. CAN I HELP you?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not suicidal. Do you only deal with people who are suicidal?’
‘Oh no, we’re here to listen to anyone, suicidal or not. My name’s Richard. Would you like to tell me yours?’
‘Jean.’ I had meant to use only my middle name, Margaret, but somehow couldn’t bring myself to do this.
Some achievement … After at last FINISHING MY CONNECTIONS with the hospital and getting myself off drugs, wasn’t I spoiling things by giving in to this need to talk to someone? I was annoyed with myself for ringing the Samaritans.
‘I’m annoyed with myself for ringing you,’ I said as I watched a tramp shuffling around outside my kiosk. ‘I’m OK really. It sounds nothing, but … Oh! Just a minute.’ A whiskery face was pressed up against the door. I was about two hundred yards from the hostel in a dark, lonely street near a crypt for down-and-outs. The tramp gave me a blank look, took a swig from a bottle and then turned away to pick something u
p that caught his eye on the pavement.
I said far more than I meant to say to Richard. I told him how I lived at the YWCA, worked at Ravens, which was my first job after years of being a psychiatric patient, how I felt so much better since stopping taking pills, but that I just couldn’t overcome shyness. It was the shyness that had prompted me to ring the Samaritans. I felt I was dealing positively myself with all other problems, but this was the most unyielding.
‘Why don’t you make another appointment with a psychiatrist?’ he suggested.
‘Because finishing with the hospital and stopping the pills is the sanest thing I’ve done in ages,’ I said with feeling.
‘But perhaps this time you could get a good psychiatrist …’
His views about psychiatry, I realised, were as naïve as mine used to be before I’d had any experience of it.
I need a bloody psychiatrist about as much as I need roasting alive, I thought bitterly. ‘I don’t need one,’ I said.
‘OK. I’ve another suggestion. There’s a club for people who have difficulties in mixing socially –’
‘I suppose it’s called the Felix Club,’ I said with a sigh.
‘That’s right. Have you been to it?’
‘No, but my social worker, I mean my ex-social worker, told me about it, and I don’t think …’
The tramp I’d seen earlier pulled open the door. I recoiled as the smell of his foul breath and dirty meths-stained clothing filled the kiosk. ‘Gimme a cig,’ he drooled. Memories of bleak hospital corridors flooded back.
‘I haven’t got one,’ I said.
‘Well, gimme a light,’ he said, holding out a cigarette stub that looked long past being smokable. The stench of meths was unmistakable. God, he’ll ignite if he lights up now, I thought.
‘I haven’t got a light.’
‘Fuck off!’ he said, before shuffling off down the street again. I watched him, wondering what problems I’d got compared with some people.
‘What’s happening? Are you OK?’ the concerned voice at the other end of the telephone was asking.
‘Yes, but I’d better go. It’s dark and lonely in this street.’
‘Please ring again, won’t you? I’ll be here alternate Tuesday evenings, but do ring whenever you want. Any time at all. You can even ring us in the middle of the night if you need to talk.’
I thought the owner of the middle-class voice at the other end of the phone must live in a different world from one where ringing someone in the middle of the night would mean walking dark, lonely streets to search for a public telephone that worked.
Two weeks later I rang again and Richard invited me to meet him at the Samaritan Centre. I rang the bell of a large old house nervously. A dark-haired man of about thirty, wearing jeans and a green polo-neck sweater, answered the door and, in the well-spoken voice I’d heard on the phone, introduced himself as Richard. I followed him up some stairs to a small, carpeted room furnished with four easy chairs and a low coffee table. A long-haired, bearded young man appeared with coffee and a plate of biscuits, then left us alone. We talked for about an hour. He suggested I come to the Centre every fortnight for a chat with him.
As soon as I got back to my room after the second of these fortnightly visits, I scribbled away furiously in the thick, ruled exercise book I was using as my ‘Coming to Terms’ journal. I don’t remember where I read the words that I wrote on the front, but I understand a similar version of this prayer is commonly attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr: ‘Give me the courage to fight for what can be remedied, the patience to bear with fortitude what cannot be taken away, and the wisdom to know the difference.’
Journal
I liked Richard from the beginning because I felt he was kind and warm and very sincere, but even from that first phone call some of his views and attitudes stirred up feelings of hurt and anger in me. Perhaps it’s me being too sensitive about a certain subject, but tonight he had hardly settled himself down in the chair opposite me before he managed to find exactly the right words to make me see RED.
‘Have you had any depressions or elations since I last saw you?’ he asked.
Depressions. Elations. The psychiatric jargon for abnormal mood swings. Doesn’t he know he is hurting me when he talks like that? Why doesn’t he know?
I decided I would have to think about it later when alone so that my anger wouldn’t be diagnosed as a symptom of illness. I smiled sweetly at him while I raged inside. I began talking to him about trivial things, surprising myself by the calmness of my voice. Inside I was hopping mad.
I stopped writing here, put my pen down and read what I’d written. No, you mustn’t stop here, Jean, I told myself. Stay with it now and think it through. OK, so I knew my anger wasn’t really against Richard. He was a catalyst helping my anger to surface. I picked up my pen again and scribbled away feverishly:
I am sick and tired and weary of almost everything I think, say or do being analysed for signs of illness. Can’t I be happy, sad, laugh, cry or do anything without being ‘ill’? Will I ever again be able to convince others – or myself – that I am just an ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’ person? Will the scars never heal? When I was eighteen years old I made the biggest mistake of my life. Will I have to go on paying for it for ever?
For years I was told I was sick, it was implied I was sick, I was treated as sick. And I came to believe I was sick. I meekly submitted while they moulded me into the sick role of their own creation. I let them dope me with pills and shoot electric currents into my brain. How naïve, how stupefied with pills or how damn SICK I must have been to let them add to my problems by subjecting me to needless suffering, mental and physical abuse and great humiliation. For all those years, I let them turn me into a zombie and virtually destroy me while I looked on passively through the drugged haze with hardly a murmur.
But now I want answers to the questions burning inside me. It was these same angry questions which finally broke through my drug-induced apathy and shocked me back into life, despite all the brainwashing I’d undergone. Perhaps without the angry questions pounding my brain I would never have found the courage to discard all the pills which they would have me believe I need to help keep me well.
Why shouldn’t I be allowed to reach down and touch my painful innermost feelings and accept them as a real part of myself, not a ‘sick’ part from which I ought to be separated? When sadness and despair are narrowly interpreted as ‘symptoms of illness’ it’s easy to miss the indication that some things in a person’s life need urgent attention by facing up to, altering or accepting. All psychiatry did for me was push my real hurts deeper down while I was being treated in a way which might have caused permanent physical and psychological damage. God knows that what I endured at the hands of the professionals was truly out of all proportion to the unhappiness (or ‘sickness’ if I’m supposed to call it that) which originally prompted me to seek their help at the age of eighteen. And I want to know WHY.
Why am I sick? In what way am I sick? Won’t somebody please tell me? Is it ‘sick’ to feel frustrated when shyness hides my personality and strengthens my chains? Is it ‘sick’ to yearn for a meaningful life, something more than a superficial existence? Was it really ‘sick’ to feel out of step when caught up in a way of life that purveyed cheap thrills, phoney values and shallow relationships among the psychedelic lights and tinsel-decked thorns (Teensville of the Swinging Sixties)? Or perhaps it’s all just because as a teenager I wanted to be understood, needed someone to talk to, and was foolish enough to try to discuss my feelings with a psychiatrist instead of keeping them to myself???
Oh, please won’t somebody tell me why I have been labelled as ‘sick’? Is it because jobs like putting screws into television parts on a factory assembly line bore me silly and drive me to distraction? Is it because I cannot squeeze myself into a hole which is the wrong shape for me? Is it because I am different from my family? Or is it because I cry and ache and hurt deep down inside???
During my first few visits to the Samaritans, the subject of the Felix Club arose again, this time with the suggestion that I go as a voluntary worker. Curiosity finally got the better of me. Helen called unexpectedly as I was setting off, so she came with me.
A tall, thin man in jeans and trainers took Helen and me aside on our arrival. ‘My name’s Ernest Wormald and I’m a social worker. First, let me say it’s important to understand there’s no difference here between workers and members. No one is in charge.’ Having said this, he took us back into the main room where he proceeded to take charge.
We sat in fold-up chairs in a semi-circle around Mr Wormald, who tried to organise a discussion but some members kept making disruptive comments. The man sitting next to Helen was constantly masturbating and I was aware of her discomfort. I remembered a little room at the OT department which bore the name ‘Group Therapy’. I thought of how Mrs Winters had described the Felix Club as being for ‘people like you’. And I thought perhaps I should know better now than to draw up divisions between ‘them’ and ‘me’. But, still, I couldn’t help thinking that these people had problems which were quite different from mine.
We didn’t go to the Felix Club again. I couldn’t see what I could offer the others there, and I certainly didn’t feel the club had anything to offer me. Months afterwards Helen still kept saying, ‘Do you remember that awful club we went to? Oh, wasn’t it disturbing and depressing?’
Richard introduced me to Jim, the Tuesday evening leader at the Samaritans. He was a kind, caring person, probably in his late fifties, who, like Richard, spent a lot of time with me during my fortnightly visits, which were to continue for about a year. Richard soon stopped seeing me as a potential candidate for further psychiatry, so I, in turn, stopped being defensive with him. And Jim, dear Jim, never seemed to view me in that light from the start. He said I was the right kind of person to be a Samaritan and even suggested I join them.