The Dark Threads (6 page)

I left her office not knowing what I had apologised for.

Sitting in the day room, I wondered if I should still try to discharge myself, despite Dr Sugden saying I wasn't to have more ECT. I felt so low I must need help, I thought, though surely not the kind of ‘help' offered here. But if I discharged myself, what then? Was she asleep or dead, the girl I'd been before, the girl who laughed and cried and loved the springtime? I think she could have made it. But not now. I'd be an invalid, dependent on my parents, and … oh God, am I really so sick? What's happened to me?

I was lost in a dark cemetery and too groggy to find my way out, too crushed to motivate myself. As if in some kind of hypnotic trance, I was waiting to be told where to go, what to do. I would stay at the hospital until such time as
they
decided to discharge me. Overcome with fatigue, I lay down on a grave and slept.

CASE NO. 10826

There is really no improvement in this case at all, the girl seems abnormally introverted and withdrawn, is no longer interested in things and is lacking in spontaneity. There is emotional flattening and she herself says I have still got confused thoughts about right and wrong and I do not know who or what I am exactly.

Dr Sugden

CHAPTER SIX

I
WASN
'
T GIVEN ANY
more ECT but the heavy drugs treatment continued relentlessly. I, who was once reluctant to take even an aspirin for a headache, now swallowed an assortment of pills three times a day and, despite being almost too sleepy to stand by evening, a sleeping pill each night. From time to time my drugs were changed or given in different combinations though the dulling effects were the same. Pills of all shapes, colours and sizes. Pills with names such as Largactil, Melleril, Haloperidol, Stelazine, Concordin, Mogadon. Pills, pills and more pills. Stupefying drowsiness, dry mouth, shaking body, blurred vision, colossal weight gain, boils like Job's on my chin, neck and chest. It was heavy-handed drugging to the point of brutality. And they called this help, not punishment.

Dull, fogged-up, chemically altered brain, don't give up on me, please. Keep on functioning so that I can think this out and make some kind of sense of it. Lord, I have no strength left to fight any more. I just want to sleep.

But even while stoned on drugs that made me too tired to think clearly, I always remembered to walk away from the medication trolley with my hands unclenched.

‘These came for you,' a nurse said, handing me two envelopes when I got back from the OT block one lunchtime. I sat in the day room and opened them. Birthday cards? I'd forgotten.

‘I want to die!' shrieked Madeline, curling up on the floor into a ball of noisy tears. Two nurses promptly removed her to give her an injection.

We weren't supposed to show our feelings like that, and I never did. I was crying and dying inside but I just sat quietly. My tongue felt thick, my head fuzzy and I was trying to understand.
Who am I now? My name is Jean. I'm a patient in a mental institution. It's my birthday today. I'm nineteen years old and I wish I'd never been born.

On the few occasions when Dr Prior talked to me in the Quiet Room, I continued to beg him to lower my medication, but he insisted that the high dosage of drugs was necessary.

‘Do you still think about religion?' he asked.

‘Yes,' I replied sleepily.

‘You do? Oh dear,' he said, tutting and shaking his head gravely as if thinking about religion was a crime. ‘I hoped ECT would have wiped it out. We've got to push right down' – he motioned downwards with his hand – ‘these thoughts about religion.'

I was sitting opposite him fighting to stay awake enough to take in what he was saying and thinking vaguely that this seemed like brainwashing. I didn't want my thoughts wiped out or pushed down. None of my thoughts about anything. Ever since my first ECT I'd been afraid of forgetting things that were important to me or becoming unable to put them into words. And if, for example, I was to forget for ever, before sorting it out properly in my mind, why the belief about God sending people to hell had troubled me, then … then I would
never
be whole.

‘I mustn't forget anything,' I said.

Dr Prior sighed and wrote something on the papers balanced on his knee while I stared at the floor thinking: They don't understand me. They don't understand me at all.

And I certainly didn't understand the reasoning behind the workings of the system, which had pinned me to the ground, as if beneath big powerful wheels, crushed and broken. If they wanted me to relinquish all thoughts of God, why didn't they try to help me see that life could be bearable, even happy, without a God to believe in? Instead they kept on subjecting me to ‘treatment' which made me cry out in desperation to this remote, perhaps fictitious, ‘God' to help me. More than ever before I wanted and needed Him now.

I went to a Sunday service at the hospital chapel with Lynette. She didn't like going by herself and I felt I owed her for my passivity during that appalling incident when Sister had been trying to make her eat. It seemed an odd place for a chapel, deep inside the labyrinth of bleak corridors. A large crucifix, above the words ‘Chapel Of Christ The King', marked the entrance. A Catholic priest and a Church of England chaplain used this chapel at different times to conduct their services.

The black-robed chaplain took his place at the pulpit and proceeded to lead as ‘normal' a service as possible, while an elderly woman seated near the front, her head reverently bowed as if in prayer, was muttering a string of obscenities and meaningless mumbo-jumbo. The chaplain began to speak in what seemed to me like meaningless mumbo-jumbo too. Words fell off his tongue and rolled to the floor.

What was I doing in this chapel? Had I really only come to help Lynette or was I trying to hold on to religion like a drowning person clutches at straws? Hold on. Hold on. No, I have to let go. But, oh dear God, it's hard to face up to being so truly alone in a world that's turned cold and dark and frightening. I can't bear the suffering and sadness I see and feel and breathe in the air all around me.

Tension mounted as part of me struggled to hold on tightly to Christian beliefs while another part was telling me I needed to let go. Hold on. Let go. Hold on. Let go. I didn't even know what I was supposed to be
trying
to do.

Something I remembered reading in the Bible sprang forcefully to my mind: the warning that we ought to fear him who can kill not just the body but the soul. It was not the usual religious meaning of these words that was making the impact. It was the uneasy feeling that this was applicable to the effects on me of the hospital environment and my treatment – that it was destructive not only to my body but also to the very core of my personality, whether one called it the ‘soul' or something else. But I must have swallowed the sickness concept along with the pills, for whenever I started thinking and questioning in this way, I would tell myself that this must be the ‘sick' part of me, the part I had to ‘push right down'.

Push everything right down: bind tears and feelings and questions into strait-jackets. But what happens to all the incarcerated tears? They don't go away. They swell up and multiply inside you, then freeze into blocks of ice. How was I to make sense of these experiences? Was it a dream, a nightmare? No, I really was in a Victorian asylum, along with trapped fish, parched plants, a caged bird and other ‘lost' people. I was loaded with drugs and pain. Like the soil in which the potted plants stood, I was cracked and dry.

I began to tend lovingly the wilting, neglected plants that stood on a sill in the day room, watering them daily from a plastic cup. I wanted to make their heads stop drooping so that they wouldn't look like they, too, were drugged senseless. Live and grow; bloom, plants, bloom, and bring some life and colour and beauty to this place of frozen tears.

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.