The Dark Threads (9 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

I
WAS DUE TO
attend the psychiatric outpatient clinic at St Luke's on 17 June 1969, about ten weeks after my discharge from High Royds.

‘Are you still having problems with religion?' Dr Prior asked, lighting a cigarette and leaning back in his chair.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Religion and other things.'

‘What other things?'

Ironically, one of the ‘other things' was the whole dreadful experience of hospital, but he seemed hardly the right person to understand that.

‘My shyness is still a problem,' I said.

I wondered if he realised it was shyness that was making me, even now as I was talking to him, act with nervous gestures and not maintain eye contact. And if he was interpreting signs of shyness as symptoms of illness, did he realise that my social behaviour was quite different with people I knew well?

‘Get a book on how to overcome shyness,' he suggested. ‘There are plenty on the market.'

We talked next about my need for a meaningful life. At least that's the way I saw it, but when I spoke of feeling restless and unfulfilled, he said, ‘I think there could be some underlying sexual frustration.' Trying to discuss my ‘identity crisis' brought a similar response.

‘I still feel as if I don't know what I am,' I said.

He looked interested. ‘Do you mean you don't know whether you're a boy or a girl?'

I shook my head, but he repeated this question at least three times during the interview. I struggled to explain that I meant ‘What am I?' not in terms of which sex but something along the lines of: what is a person and what's life all about?

Towards the end of the interview, he chewed his pen. ‘I wonder …' he said, looking thoughtful, ‘I wonder if you have a spiritual problem and not a psychiatric problem after all.'

A bit too late for my psychiatrist to be wondering this
after
I'd been hospitalised, drugged, given ECT; gone through the whole machinery of treatment for ‘mental illness'… Whether or not it had been a ‘psychiatric' problem
before
my admission, I had not emerged unscarred from my journey into the mental hospital world.

I remembered how Dr Prior had pushed the ECT consent form at me while I was too drugged to think straight and how he'd sat with me in the Quiet Room like a cold, unmovable stone while I'd begged him to reduce the drugs when the drowsiness was unbearable.

‘I don't understand why I was given ECT,' I said, suppressed anger rising in my throat.

‘Well, er …' He looked down at the notes again. ‘You were very quiet and withdrawn in the hospital.'

‘Yes,' I agreed, ‘but don't you think that could've been partly due to shyness and those drugs? Why didn't you
try
listening to me first instead of drugging me and sending me for shock treatment?'

I sounded accusing, and probably put him on the defensive.

‘But you couldn't have talked to me like you have today when I saw you in hospital. That proves the ECT and medication helped.'

It proved no such thing. Dr Prior had only seen me once before getting me to sign the ECT consent form and that was when I was already in hospital, medicated and too tired to talk. Even when I'd first seen Dr Sugden at the outpatient clinic I was groggy with the tranquillisers prescribed by my GP. So neither Dr Sugden nor Dr Prior could possibly compare how I was ‘before' and ‘after' commencement of treatment. All Dr Prior could compare was how I was ‘then' (in the hospital) and ‘now'.

‘If I was back in hospital now having the same treatment, I'd be just the same as I was then,' I said. But he was reading the notes again instead of listening to me.

‘Right, Jean, I'll see you again in a few months. I'm pleased with your progress. Don't you feel you've improved?'

‘Well, I have started feeling a bit better since I was discharged,' I said, ‘and especially since I reduced the pills.'

‘You've done WHAT?' He almost leapt out of his chair, his face changing instantly to a frown. ‘Aren't you taking your pills exactly as prescribed?'

‘No,' I admitted. ‘I'm only taking one dose. At bedtime.'

‘Naughty girl!' he exploded. ‘If you don't take them properly, you'll end up back in hospital. We don't want that, do we?'

He shook his head gravely, and I shuddered. I hadn't realised the pills were so important. Yet something didn't make sense.

‘When I was taking the correct dosage in hospital I'd never felt more depressed,' I pointed out.

‘The depression is part of your illness,' he said. It seemed he'd already forgotten that only a few minutes ago he'd been wondering if my problem was ‘spiritual' for he was back firmly to the ‘illness' definition. ‘Now listen to me. It's essential that you comply with the medication. God help you if you slip back!'

Could it really be true that my sanity depended on taking drugs that made me feel so awful? But how come that it was only since treatment had started that I'd been unable to work and began to feel much worse?

‘I don't understand,' I said, watching Dr Prior rolling up some papers headed ‘History Sheet', his eye on a fly crawling across his desk.

‘Well, never mind trying to understand,' he said, swatting the fly with the history sheets.

He looked at me and sighed. ‘Just believe what I'm saying,' he said, sweeping his hand in the air as if symbolically sweeping away all the questions that were clamouring about in the part of my brain that was starting to think again. So I was supposed to use blind faith instead of exercising my critical faculties? Wasn't this the same stumbling block upon which lay the weather-beaten remains of my religious beliefs?

‘You want to get well, Jean, don't you?'

‘Yes, of course,' I said flatly, looking down at my hands resting in my lap. My hands. My lap. Who am I? I am me. What am I? I am me. What is
me
? A naughty girl, a bad child. A mentally ill person who needs mind-bending drugs.

‘Promise me you'll take the pills properly.'

I was reluctant to make a promise but the note of urgency in his voice chilled me.

‘OK,' I said, feeling scared and confused.

‘That's a good girl,' he said. ‘I was only angry with you because I want to help you. You do understand that, don't you?'

‘Yes. Thank you,' I said quietly, nervously fidgeting and fiddling with my fingers.

He leaned back in his chair balancing it on two legs while staring at me. I felt very uncomfortable with him. The fly that he'd swatted was near the edge of the desk, upturned, crushed and half-dead now: the fragile wings broken but its feet still wriggling.

Starting from when I first saw a psychiatrist, my past was rewritten to fit a ‘mental illness' label. No longer a ‘normal' teenager with problems but a ‘case'. My thoughts and experiences were devalued, their content seen as nothing but ‘symptoms'. What little self-confidence I had was crushed out of me. The messages I received were loud and clear: I would never be a writer; never amount to anything much. Something was fundamentally wrong with me; my brain needed changing. I was tragically flawed. If I couldn't believe this, it meant I lacked what psychiatrists define as ‘insight', that I was so sick I didn't even know I was sick. With hindsight it's obvious that I should have stopped complying. But the vulnerable, naïve teenage me at the time was frightened into trying to be a ‘good girl' by Dr Prior's warning about going back into hospital if I didn't take my medication. I threw away my correspondence course lessons in Journalism which I'd been hoping to resume, if only as a hobby, suppressed my questions, swallowed my pills – and spent most of each day sleeping my life away.

About a month after Dr Prior had scared me into resuming the full medication, I vaguely remember Dad waking me to tell me I was missing the moon landing. Did he think I gave a toss that a man was walking on the surface of the moon? I turned over and went straight back to sleep.

I could drift along for a while feeling too tired to think, too sick to care, but every so often I did wonder how and when this was going to end. Before hospital, getting a bed-sit and a more interesting job had been important to me, but now just getting
any
job seemed out of reach. And jobless, drowsy and depressed, how could I get somewhere suitable to live? How could I begin to carve out some kind of a life for myself? I knew I must fight harder against this weariness, these feelings of despair; this strange and terrible sickness that had laid me low.

‘Jean, you
have
to get well,' I mumbled, tensing up my body and gripping my pillow tightly. But knowing no way I could achieve this elusive state of being ‘well', and feeling achingly empty and low, I reached for my pills and escaped again in sleep.

So how was this happening? How could I be up on the stage at the Mecca telling hundreds of people which outfits I thought would suit Twiggy? No, it wasn't a dream. I really was reading into a microphone the words I'd scribbled earlier on to a slip of paper. Words written when, on arriving at the dance hall, Mandy and I found everyone entering a competition. Simple. All we had to do was look at the clothes being showcased in the foyer from a local boutique and ‘choose the two items you think will look great on Twiggy'.

Out of all the entry slips that could have been picked out, I was the ‘unlucky' winner. When they called my name, I wanted to run out of the door instead of walking up on stage. If it hadn't been for Mandy I wouldn't have admitted the name belonged to me. But Mandy waved her arms about excitedly. ‘Go on, Jean. You've won.'

It was just a raffle really. I hadn't won because of the wisdom of my words, that was for sure.

‘I think outfits numbers two and four will best suit Twiggy …' The microphone crackled. ‘… best suit Twiggy because she's slim and these will look good on someone as slim as her.'

Oh, God, did I really write this crap?

After reading out my piece, I still wasn't off the hook yet.

‘And what do you think of Twiggy?'

Twiggy. ‘The Face' of the sixties. What did I think of her? What did I think of
anything
with my mind shot to pieces? I stood, self-consciously in the spotlight, and prayed I would pass for normal.

‘She's … er, she's nice.'

‘Well, let's give a big round of applause for the lucky winner of our competition who'll be coming to Bo's Boutique to choose one of these gorgeous outfits.'

Everyone clapped me back to my seat. I just wanted to fade away into insignificance again.

One of the ironies of being on drugs is that the treatment for side effects involves prescriptions for yet more drugs. In hospital many of us suffered from constipation as a result of drug treatment, for which we were given regular doses of laxatives. I was also prescribed, later, a drug to help alleviate the side effects of neuroleptic drugs, such as the Parkinson-like tremors. For the ugly, big lumps that kept erupting on my face and neck, Dr Prior referred me to a dermatologist who diagnosed ‘adolescent acne', prescribed a course of x-ray treatment and yet more drugs.

It seems, however, that I was now on a different drug from that which caused the enormous weight gain in hospital, or else my body must have made some adjustment to it, because I was much less bloated. Although my face without make-up remained extremely pale with a yellowish tinge and my eyelids still drooped heavily over dull, tired eyes, I must have looked at least presentable because boys started taking an interest in me again. In fact, I was never short of boyfriends despite, or perhaps because of, my lack of interest in them. Mandy said it must be that I presented a kind of challenge to them because most other girls were keen to have boyfriends and then to get married, but I was different.

‘No, it's not that I don't want to get married,' I tried to explain to Mandy. ‘If I fell in love, then I probably would want to get married, but the lads I meet just don't interest me.'

‘Well, who would?' Mandy asked. ‘Do you think you're somehow special, different, from us lower mortals?'

‘Heck, no!' I said, feeling uncomfortable. ‘It's just that I don't want the kind of life that … that most people settle for.'

‘Well, what sort of fella do you want to meet? What kind of life do you want? What else is there?'

I smiled wryly. How often had I asked myself these same questions. Ironically, it seemed that in wanting more out of life than most girls, especially working-class girls like myself appeared to want, I was in great danger of ending up with much less.

Coming home from a pub with Mandy one night, we watched a woman lurching along the pavement in front of us. She was a pathetic creature, shabbily dressed, hair matted with dirt, and she stank to high heaven of whisky mingled with the diarrhoea that stained the back of her dress, the urine that trickled down her legs and the vomit that dribbled from her chin. Who was she? Perhaps somebody's mother? Somebody's wife? Somebody's daughter, certainly. She had been a child once. What had brought her to this? Where did she live? Had she anywhere to sleep tonight? Did anyone care?

Mandy nudged me and pulled a face. ‘Now, isn't that the most disgusting apology for a person you ever did see in your life?'

But I was thinking of one of my favourite songs on my Joan Baez LP, and never before had the words ‘There but for fortune…' seemed more hauntingly, poignantly, frighteningly true.

I wished I could reach out to her, help her in some way. But what could I do? Then my thoughts took a more selfish turn.

‘I hope I won't end up like that,' I whispered.

‘What?' Mandy turned to me in astonishment. ‘Jean, how can you even think of saying such a thing?'

This pulled me up sharply. I hadn't realised it would seem to Mandy such an odd thing to say. Not long ago, I would have observed from a safe distance, unaware of the slightest possibility that I might one day end up without pride or decency like this wretched woman. But it didn't seem impossible when viewed from the tunnel.