This is one of those auto suggested queries from Google when you start typing, so I guess quite a few people ask it.
I have had five hospital admissions, including the last one, ten years ago, under the Mental Health Act, as a compulsory patient. In one earlier case, although I was very unwell and quite deluded I retained some insight. I believed the end of the world was coming, simply because one evening when leaving work, I had seen a double rainbow.
The next morning, a few essential errands at the office first:
- a clumsy hint to a romantic quarry – leaving a pile of favourite CDs on their desk
- a whistleblower note to my shop steward that would surely bring down the company and raise me to the status of global superstar?
and I took myself on the bus to hospital telling the psychiatric nurse on duty that I needed help. I was duly interviewed and taken on to the ward later that day.
Give me asylum
Fifty years earlier, I might have been taken to an asylum and I often think about the way the sense of that word has become distorted. Even now, some people think that those who are mentally ill are taken in and locked away to protect society from the danger they pose. In my experience it is the opposite – the ward protects me from the outside world until I am stable, robust and ready to face people again – in that sense it provides a safe place, an asylum.
Which is not to say that the ward cannot be a scary place at times. When you are experiencing delusions, anyone and everyone poses a threat. Your reflex is to protect yourself. During my first episode and admission to hospital, I had psychotic depression and thought I was being prosecuted for serious crimes, I believed the first psychiatrist I encountered was a lawyer. He arrived on the ward, unannounced, with an impressive, stylish and expensive-looking wooden briefcase and in a private side room, proceeded to question me to build my defence. This being my first admission I was very confused, so I devised a code to identify people I could trust:
- people with an old-fashioned first name
- people known by their middle name
- people whose forename could not be abbreviated.
I checked this code against every newcomer I encountered: doctor, nurse, patient or visitor and responded according to my filter, thus warding off any threat.
Grief and pain of depression
It’s my experience that when in hospital you don’t explicitly share your diagnosis, if you have one, with other patients and you rub along (or not) in an unacknowledged and liquorice all-sorts mixture of personalities and moods. On one ward a severely ill young woman, who had recently had a baby girl, from whom she was now separated, set fire to her glossy, shoulder length hair overnight and appeared the next morning with a sizeable bald patch over her forehead. I cried inwardly for her and the anguish of her depression. In a London hospital I was trying to befriend a solitary twenty-something man who was daubing with tired tempera paints in the art room when he stubbed his cigarette out on my forehead (it seems I let him do so before going to the nurses’ station to report it. I was not harmed and he was acknowledged to be very ill).
On another occasion when there was some concern for me, I was punched on the nose by another patient, in full view of other people. It was my own fault. When manic, a known characteristic is irritability and I had been so peeved by this man as to hector at him, “Are you deaf?” when he was not paying me the attention I thought he owed me. I had never been punched before (or since) and it was an odd, slightly out of body experience. A tingle in the middle of my face (not quite the stars of a Tom and Jerry cartoon) and a flock of staff descending on me like seagulls swooping on scraps. A doctor came to check me out, reports were filed, my family were informed. I breezed on.
People behind the diagnosis
More than these notable, isolated and short-lived incidents, I remember the meek, damaged people, struggling to regain equilibrium in the face of the internal turmoil of wonky brain chemistry, horrible life experiences and some subject to medication trial and error: the young guy with louche visitors, who wandered about in grey tracksuit bottoms and occasionally wet himself (what story lay behind that?). He scrawled his well-crafted poetry on any piece of paper he could find; the good-humoured 50-something Sri Lankan retired nurse, (with a bipolar diagnosis) who reminded me of my nana and with whom I spent weekday evenings putting the psychiatric world to rights and Saturdays in the art room; the sisters in one hospital, one of whom, when I first arrived was sitting catatonic in the dayroom only to emerge from her pharmaceutical chrysalis days later as a sociable and engaging woman; finally Idhan (I don’t have a name), a young man with a beautiful tattoo on his forearm in memory of his brother. I don’t know when or what happened, but even as we got to know each other, he remained quietly soaked in grief, a feeling I recognised from years before.
So in answer to the title of this post, my questions are:
- Being or becoming?
- What is normal?
Mental illness certainly occurs more than randomly, but I’m not sure current explanations tell the whole story.
Links to more thoughts on this topic
How common are mental health problems? Mind website