The Dark Threads (23 page)

It was going to be a painful birth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I
DIDN
'
T KNOW
I was a drug addict. I thought drug addicts were illicit-drug users who belonged to the shady world of dealers and pushers, shifty transactions in discos and bars, fixes in lavatories; and I was never part of that scene.

I awoke early on Sunday morning, feeling shaky after a few hours of restless sleep. As the day wore on I felt irritable and Brian's behaviour grated on my nerves more than usual. Tomorrow I would have to face the day hospital. I went to bed early.

My mind raced here and there, raking up incidents from the past few years. When I eventually fell asleep, it was as if my brain was processing stored-up information like a computer. Every so often I awoke with a start, sat up and thought: Yes, that's right! Most of these insights had been kicking around for a long time, at least on a cerebral level, but somehow never before hitting me on this deeper level with such shattering intensity. My thoughts and criticisms of psychiatry, formed gradually and tentatively over the years, now hung forcefully together as a dazzling confirmation of truth which must be acted on without further delay.

Throughout the night I kept waking to flashes of insight into myself, my family situation and psychiatry, especially psychiatry. Clear, painful, disturbing, illuminating glimpses of truth. Although I sensed I was wobbling precariously near to an emotional upheaval which might cause me to lose my balance, I had never experienced a state that was more self-revealing. By morning I felt weak and exhausted, but amidst the hovering fears and ambiguities that threatened to clog up my mind, two things stood out with soul-shaking clarity: I had to get away from the hospital and I had to leave home.

I wanted to do both things immediately, but first I had to find suitable accommodation and I needed hospital staff to back up my attempt to get a job. But no longer would I delay plans to achieve these two objectives now that I'd taken the first step to freedom by discarding the drugs.

When I arrived at the day hospital, Geoff stared at me with unconcealed disappointment. ‘Oh! You've cut off your long, beautiful hair,' he said, looking as if he was going to cry.

The day passed uneventfully. I felt reasonably together, although a bit preoccupied and I almost forgot to pour Arnold's coffee. On the bus home I began sweating and shaking but managed to control the ripples of panic which threatened to take hold.

When I arrived home Brian began talking about people ‘taking over the country'. My father, too, believed this and, to my dismay, had become a member of the National Front.

Oh God, not today, I thought. I can't face this kind of talking today. I pictured Samuel sitting in the hospital library, his face contorted in painful recollection as he cried out, ‘I hate the Nazis! They killed my mother and my father and my sister …' Poor, poor Samuel, and he's just one victim out of so many.

Brian grinned and said to Mum, ‘Look at her face.' He turned to me again. ‘What's wrong, Jean?' He began tapping with a spoon on a milk bottle. ‘Come on, answer me.'

He stopped tapping. ‘Mum, why isn't Jean like us?' he asked. ‘Why is she so different?'

‘I've told you before to stop saying that,' Mum said as she put the kettle on. ‘She's not different.'

‘I should bloody well hope I
am
different,' I exploded. ‘It's not my fault I was born into a crackpot family.'

Dad and Brian laughed at this, but Mum was indignant. ‘Don't include me in that. I'm not a crackpot,' she said.

‘Neither am I,' said Brian.

‘Oh yes, Brian, you are definitely a crackpot,' Mum said. ‘But Jean's not a crackpot, and neither am I.'

‘Hey, Jean, if you're not a crackpot, then why are you a nuthouse patient?' Brian asked. ‘You can't answer that, can you?'

‘Shut up, Brian. I've told you before to stop saying that as well,' Mum said. ‘You've got no sense.'

‘At least I'd got enough sense not to go into High Royds.'

Well, he has got a point there, I thought bitterly.

Brian grinned again, and resumed making a noise: belching, animal noises, jingling coins and tapping with a spoon on a milk bottle. Clink. Clink. Clink. Each sound jarred inside my head, my stomach churned and I felt like screaming.

I skipped tea and went up to bed.

The night wore on. I was wide awake. And aching. Aching all over. I tossed and turned until I was sweltering hot. My blankets were in a lumpy, soggy ball. And I couldn't stop thinking, thinking, thinking. Could I afford a bed-sit on my DHSS giro until I got a job? Yes, there must be a way. Other people without jobs lived in bed-sits and they didn't starve, did they? I went downstairs for the newspaper and, struggling against waves of nausea, headache and fears of impending insanity, I scanned the accommodation column and drew a circle around a few possibilities that were the cheapest.

Almost anywhere would do for a start till I got a job, till I felt better and got on my feet. God, I wished this damn headache would ease up, I couldn't think straight for it. What about hostel accommodation? Cheaper? A YWCA perhaps? And would living with other people be good for me, help me get over my shyness? Live at a hostel, get a bed-sit later. Yes, that seemed – dared I use the word? – sensible.

I took the telephone directory upstairs and sat in bed flicking through the pages. No YWCA here in Bradford, but there might be one in Leeds. I'd ring round tomorrow; yes, that's what I'd do. Got to make a start, it was now or never, my last hope. But there was nothing I could do then at three in the morning so I had to try to get some sleep. Hell, I couldn't stand this headache and my mind was racing feverishly.
Must switch off. Must get some sleep …

Came four in the morning and I was sitting up in bed, my mind a frothy, seething whirlpool. They had messed up my life … Can the blind lead the blind? I was nowhere near as screwed up as this when I first saw a psychiatrist. If only I could get back to how I was then and start all over again. Without psychiatry. Without drugs. Oh, if only …
Dear God, please don't let it be too late.

My pillow slithered off the bed to join the blankets on the floor. I picked it up and hugged it to my chest. How had this happened? How in the name of common sense and sanity had it happened? I was a teenager … I had a job, was coping, could think clearly. But I was sad and confused about life, wanted someone to talk to, felt I needed help. Without encouragement from anyone else and against the wishes of my mother, I asked to see a psychiatrist, and agreed to come into hospital. Naïve. Trusting. Unaware. So why, then, did Sister Oldroyd accuse me of denying I needed help? And why did she believe I was secretly not taking the drugs when she snatched at my palm?

Get undressed. You're having some more Shock Treatment…

No, no, no. I cried into my pillow.

God help you if you slip back!

Dr Prior warned me not to stop taking pills. Slip back to what? I was much better before I started on them. You
must
keep taking your tablets … No, no. I listened to you then but I won't now, not any more. I want to live.

I was confused, disorientated, exhausted. I badly needed to sleep but something didn't make sense and I had to try to sort it out right now. My brain raced on feverishly. Then I thought I'd got it. My case notes were wrong! That was it, of course. That was why they gave me all that inappropriate treatment. It was all some kind of misunderstanding right from the beginning. A wrong diagnosis. Because they didn't know me at all.

I'll have to see Dr Shaw and tell him my case notes are wrong, I decided. Sister Speight, while reading my case notes, had once told me that Dr Sugden wrote I was quiet and withdrawn in Thornville. But had he failed to record how, right up to being admitted, I was going out with friends, and that I was never quiet and withdrawn with my close friends, at least not until
after
I was heavily drugged? Perhaps Dr Sugden hadn't realised that? After all, he'd never even met me except for the two brief interviews before admission, never even seen me when not on tranquillising drugs. And then, WHAM! Hospitalisation, heavy drugs, ECT … But it was all there in my diary – dancing at the Mecca only three days before my admission. No, they can't have known all this or else surely they wouldn't have treated me as they did. And what about Sister Oldroyd misjudging my shyness as an ‘attitude' and wrongly believing that I thought everyone was against me? Had her misinterpretations of my behaviour gone down in my case notes? Did other staff, then and today, think it must be true if a member of staff had said it?

Yes, I'll have to tell them my case notes are wrong, I thought. But they won't believe me, they won't listen, they won't admit it.

But they'd have to. Other people could confirm most of these things. They'd know it was the truth if they spoke to my family, my friends, and the people I used to work with at Lee's.

The anger inside me boomeranged back and forth between being directed at psychiatry for what it had done to me, and at myself for complying. Once somebody sets foot inside one of those places, they can never get out of their clutches. My mother's warning. And I had just laughed. Laughed! Take no notice of me if you like, but one day you'll remember what I've just said, she had warned me. And you won't be laughing then.

‘Oh, Mother, you were right, I'm not laughing now,' I whispered as I pressed my forehead into my pillow to mop up the perspiration. ‘I'm not laughing now.'

I could understand my naivety in believing I was going into hospital for ‘about a week' and for ‘a rest and observation'. That's what Dr Sugden had told me, and how was I to know any different then? But even when I'd been given strong drugs from the day of admission, and ECT after barely a week, even when I was being pained and humiliated and virtually destroyed, I let them do it. And I kept on letting them do it. Who was I to think I'd more sense than my family? Even Brian had more sense than to allow that to happen to him. So when my family said things which seemed silly to me, supposing they were right after all? Like my mother's warning about psychiatry? How could I trust my own perceptions about anything? The ground was slipping away. I was light and hollow. But then I re-entered myself with a new surge of anger against psychiatry because they had let my mother be right and
she shouldn't have been right!

The night was long and dark and perilous. Unlike the well-spaced, clear-sighted, rational insights of the previous night, my thoughts tonight were tumbling about in my head and then spilling out in a jumbled heap. A mixture, I realised, of balanced and unbalanced thinking. I thrashed about on the bed as I struggled to sift out precious insights buried like jewels near the edge of a cliff, regaining my balance each time I felt myself toppling.

With shaking hands, I began writing a letter: ‘Dear Mr Jordan, I hope you won't feel annoyed at me for writing to you when you are no longer the day hospital charge nurse and therefore have no concern with my “case”,' I began. ‘Perhaps I should not be writing to you (for the above reason) and I'm going to try not to post this letter. If I do it's just because I feel at the end of my tether and at a loss as to who to confide in …'

I never meant to send it. The letter was just a means of getting my jumbled thoughts down on paper as if I was confiding in someone while trying to sort out my sense from my nonsense. I wrote about how I'd felt worse since the Case Discussion Meeting. I expressed my concern about how Dr Shaw, even with my case notes in front of him, didn't seem to know that I, alone, had made that decision to see a psychiatrist in the first place at a time when, despite my depression or whatever, I'd been coping, ‘functioning' as they called it. I wrote, also, how it bothered me that Dr Shaw had said I'd be seeing more of him in future. I didn't feel he understood me at all.

When I finished the letter, I stared at the words. Words belonged to the world of logic and order, but I knew now there were other worlds, other truths: that some things, important things, couldn't be put into words. Still, they would have to do. Words were an inadequate but necessary tool. I tore the page from my notepad and let it join my blankets on the floor, then fell into a restless sleep.

Time to get up when I realised, with shocked surprise, that my nightgown and the sheet on which I was lying were soaking wet. Sweat? Urine? Whatever it was, it wasn't normal. Panic! Heart beating fast.
Thud, thud, thud
. Too fast, too loud. Imagination switched on to ‘high'. Feverishly high. I could imagine I was turning into a quivering lump of jelly that might dissolve leaving no trace of me except my soggy nightgown and a wet patch on the sheet where I'd been lying. I held out my hands in front of me and watched them trembling. Mr Jordan had told me this tremor was a side effect of my drugs. So what was it now? I tried to control it with my mind but to no avail. And then it wasn't only my hands. I was shaking all over. I felt sick.

I dashed to the toilet and, gripping the edge of the bath for support, I thought: I'm going insane, I'm going insane … I clung to the bath, still shaking all over and sweating in fear, until somehow I managed to get a hold on myself. When the anxiety attack subsided, I filled the basin and had a good wash. I wasn't going to vomit after all and, if I was going insane, I said to myself with a wry smile, at least it was to be postponed for a while.

I felt shaky and sick again when eating toast for breakfast and my head ached horribly. So I phoned the day hospital and told Tony I wouldn't be coming in as I'd got flu. It wasn't a lie: I thought I probably had got flu.

Back upstairs, I picked up from the floor beside my bed the letter I'd written to Mr Jordan. I glanced at the untidy writing, crossings out and noticed spelling mistakes but didn't bother to correct them. I put it in an envelope which, with shaking hands, I addressed, stamped and sealed. Then I went out and posted this letter which I'd never meant to send.