Across the pond

Continuing my blog on Dean Smith, the paranoid schizophrenic who is not a knife wielding murderer, but a nurse trainer in the National Health Service teaching nurses how to help those who are labelled ‘mentally ill’. Dean Smith learnt how to deal with his condition, not from the doctors, but from a speaker at a mental health seminar he attended who put him in touch with the Hearing Voices Network.

If you google them you don’t find out much about what they are about. And their helpline is only available on Tuesdays from 1 til 4, so at any other time callers are urged to ring the Samaritans. Which is a great pity because the thinking behind the Hearing Voices Network is worth looking at, by ‘normals’ as well as by schiztsos and the other legions of the ‘mentally ill’.

You’ll do much better if you go in to Wikipedia and follow this link to the Hearing Voices Movement. Then you will discover that the thinking behind it comes from a husband and wife team in the Netherlands. Marius Romme is a professor of Social Psychiartry at the University of Limburg in Masstricht. His wife, Sandra Escher, is a science journalist, who was challenged a voice hearer to accept the reality of the voices she heard.

As you will see they have written lots of academic papers since they started this movement in 1987. Their research has led them to believe that hearing voices is not necessarily a symptom of mental illness. Many people hear voices who do not betray any of the other symtoms of mental illness. And even amongst mainstream psychiatrists there is huge disagreement about what paranoid schizophrenia is, what causes it, and whether the people who get landed with this diagnosis are more like each other than they are like people who are labelled ‘normal’.

Romme and Escher have found that quite often hearing voices begins following a severe traumatic life experience, such as divorce, bereavment, sexual or physical abuse, pregnancy or love affairs. This fits in with my own thinking which has been nurtured by a variety of academic disciplines as well as journalism.

What strikes you, if you are not a medical specialist, is that although many people are labelled mad, because they hear voices, there are others who are labelled saints, going right back to St Paul on the Road to Damascus. We lock ordinary folk who hear voicies in the loony bin. But, even the sceptics are quite happy for their children to read all those stories about Moses popping up the mountain to chat to God, and Jonah agonising about the contradictory messages he is getting, from the Voices he hears in his head.

The majority, who are neither saints, nor schiztsos, don’t usually hear voices in their heads when they are awake. But we all do in our dreaming lives. Which should surely give us pause as to whether the mad are quite as mad as they seem and whether the saints really do have a direct line to God, who talks to them but not to the rest of us.

(For those interested in learning more there is a long article published in the New York Times last year which can be read here. )

Occasionally you read an article in the newspapers that make you think that they are worth the money you pay for them. And that journalism is not such a despicable trade as it sometimes seems. Such a piece was buried on the Experience page of The Guardian Weekend magazine on 4 April. This page is contributed by readers who are asked to write in if they have an experience they would like to share with readers. But, of course, what we read there is mediated by the professional skills of the editor who chooses the article and the sub-editor who hones it down to precisely the right number of words to fill the space, after allowing for the picture.

It was the picture, accompanying this article, which first caught my attention. Most of the bottom half was black. The top half included the grim face of a big man who might have been a heavy weight boxer, or a prisoner on his way to jail. His face is lit by light from above in what looks like a lift with a no-smoking sign. The man was Dean Smith, and, as I discovered when I read the text, the picture illustrated one of the many times he had been sectioned and locked up in a mental health ward.

Even before I read the text, the picture reminded me of the solitary occasion that I was sectioned myself in December, 2004. The lift looks exactly like the lift at the Royal Free Hospital in which I was transported to a locked ward, where the ‘warders’ listened to everything that I had to say, but then explained to me that it was ‘delusions’ and that the only way I could get ‘better’ was to take the little pills they were thrusting on me.

It was not a nice experience. And I still, even now, have not written about it fully. But it was not nearly as bad as that of Dean Smith. I was diagnosed as a ‘manic depressive’, which carries a stigma, but less and less as years go by. The official label is now ‘bi-polar’, which does not sound at all frightening. And prime time television shows that some of us bi-polar folk, like Stephen Fry, are more witty than all you ‘normals’.

Dean Smith, by contrast, was finally diagnosed, aged 29, as a ‘paranoid schizophrenic’. As he writes himself in the Guardian article:

Friends – well, people I thought were friends – immediately associated the diagnosis with knife-wielding murderers. A lot of them stopped having anything to do with me. I realised I’d been given a label that comes with a huge stigma and a prescription of potent, but in my case useless, medication.

Dean Smith, now 39, first had problems, fifteen years ago, when he started hearing voices in his head, saying things like, ‘We’ll get you in the end.’ The doctors put him on heavy medication, which was no use, and then locked him up. But he persisted in trying to deal with his illness himself. Finally he happened upon a mental health seminar in which the speaker suggested that people like him should answer back the ‘voices in their head’. So when the voices harrassed him, he told them:

I’m watching TV now, I’ll talk to you later.

This did not produce a miracle cure. Dean Smith is still bothered by the voices. But he is no longer a charge on the public purse. He has been discharged from the mental health services. He has a place to live, a girl friend and a job, training nurses helping others to talk back to the voices in their heads, instead of taking the pills.

That’s Dean Smith’s story. But it caused me to look at who were the people he heard at that mental health seminar and what they have to say about mental health and about the thin dividing line between ‘normals’ and the mentally ill.

That is best left to Part Three of this blog.

The lawn is half-mowed. I gave up at lunch-time after reading an article in Guardian Technology. Apparently you can now get solar-powered robot mowers which cut the lawn with razor blades while you are doing something more interesting. And they send you a text message when it is done. They cost around £1000, but what the hell. I spent more than a hundred quid on the rotary electric I have been pushing up and down this morning. Only to have my wife ask, when she came out to inspect my progress: ‘Can you tell me which bits you have done and which bits you have still to do?’ I did not want to admit it, but I had had similar thoughts myself. The man at Homebase had said it would be fine for my not very big lawn. And it’s a Bosch, good make.

But the blades are as blunt as the razor blades that Gillette used to make when I started to shave. Blunter even than those blades when they were new. Blunter than they were when I had used the same blade for a week. Since then Gillette has spent a fortune on blade technology and the male chins of the developed world are as smooth as silk. But my high-tech Bosch electric does a worse job than the Qualcast I used for cuttting the lawn of the house of my boy-hood.

Ah, the paradoxes of capitalism. How come we put up with such miserable lawn mowers, when blade technology has advanced so much?

I don’t have an answer to that question. But perhaps it is less interesting than the subject I was going to address when I sat down to write this blog.

Hence, the headline.

So I end now. And deal with the original question in Part Two.

Woke up about 8 AM from a half-remembered dream. It was a good example of the kind of dream which is of immediate use in dealing with mundane reality. No need for an hour on the couch of one of the disciples of the Great Sigmund to interpret it. The message was immediately apparent.

In the dream I am one of a group crowding around a visiting celebrity, the journalist and author, George Orwell, who in my dream is alive and well, and available for interview. Orwell is so impressed by my profound wisdom that he invites me back to his house for a private conversation. We were all discussing another celebrity and I impressed Orwell, when I said solemnly, ‘He was above all self-deprecating’.

When I woke up I could not remember who this celebrity was, nor anything about what Orwell told me in my exclusive interview at his house.

No matter. The dream immediately started me thinking about my friend, Richard Keeble, who is a huge admirer of Orwell. Which reminded me that I have promised to deliver him a book chapter about James Cameron, the journalist, on 1 June, which is now just over a month away. In the last few weeks I have been so consumed with mundane domestic matters, such as repairing the garden shed, which is falling down, that I have only had time to write two or three blogs, and had entirely forgotten about this commitment.

So forget the oedipus complex and the royal road to the unconscious. Just remember that the sleeping mind is working on your behalf throughout the night.

Far more useful than those computer ‘To Do’ lists, which I occasionally fill in but never read until it is too late.

Now I’m off to mow the lawn, but at the same time I shall be starting to write the Cameron chapter in my head.

(The picture is scanned from a painting of James Cameron done by his second wife Elisabeth, probably in the late 1940s when he was establishing his reputation as an outstanding foreign correspondent.)

At last it has happened. The heroes of my boyhood in the Old Gold shirts have won a place in the Premiership next year with their 1-0 victory over Queens Park Rangers at Molyneux yesterday. It is sixty years to the month from the proudest day of my youth, when Wolverhampton Wanderers won the FA Cup on 30 April 1949 before a crowd of 98,920 at Wembley Stadium. I could not afford the price of a Wembley ticket but I was there the following Saturday, in my usual place on the first terrace bar behind the goal at the Molyneux end, to witness the triumphant parade of glittering trophy around the pitch. The captain was the bald-pated Stan Cullis, who went on to manage Wolves for the most successful decade of their history. My particular hero, the blonde cropped left half, Billy Wright, played a major part in those glorious ten years, and went on to captain the England team.

The splendid picture above of Sylvan Ebanks-Blake celebrating after scoring the goal that promoted Wolves to the Premier League is by Peter Ford/Action Images. The old black and white picture below of Billy Wright carrying the Cup in 1949 is from PA Photos.

But for nearly all the Saturday evenings of the last fifty years I have been plunged into depression as soon as I heard the football results. Even worse than the depressions which hit the whole town in my youth, whenever the Wolves lost. In those days, they lost sometimes, but there was still the hope that they might come back and win the Cup or the League. But since 1984 Wolverhampton Wanderers, one of the founder members of the Football League, have spent only one year in the top division.

Yesterday’s victory changes all that. Momentous though it was for all natives of Wolverhampton, it warranted only one sentence on the main BBC Television News. Next season it will be different, because Wolves will be in the Premiership, not even invented when I was following football.

But today it is the only league that matters to the national media.

To my astonishment Muffin, a springer spaniel hailing from south-west Scotland, has started to read my blog. This is a special edition welcome blog for him and any other doggy readers I may not have heard from. I include this picture, which is of Larkin, the only dog I have ever owned in my life. Muffin, in his doggy way, has been sniffing around the Blogosphere, with the determination of a terrier. So much so that he landed on a blog I wrote as long ago as 3 February, 2007. That blog, An attic with a view, happens to be the first blog I wrote in the house in which I now live in Charmouth on Lyme Bay.

Then, this house was a B&B, where we were staying for a long weekend. The blog waxed lyrical about the joys of the coastal walks up Stonebarrow Hill, which I can see as I type, and up to Golden Cap, a mile or two beyond. It obviously tickled Muffin’s fancy, probably because it mentioned a chat I had with a dog-walker.

Larkn died, aged 15, a few years before  I started blogging. He, like Muffin, would have loved the walks around here. But I doubt, if they had ever met on the hills, here, or in Scotland, they would have got on. Larkn, a border collie/spaniel cross, tended to regard most other male dogs as potential enemies. Particularly if they were bigger than him. So he mostly went for Rottweilers and Alsatians. Happily those he met were well-trained middle class dogs, who brushed him off as if he were an irritating flea. So he lived until old age deprived him of the use of his legs. And never made tabloid headlines of the dog eats dog kind.

This is a link to Muffin’s blog.

Bought some patio furniture,  for our London flat.

‘Deliver to your door, sir. We’ll send it rightaway.’

What he doesn’t tell me, til I’ve written out the cheque,

Is that it comes without assembly in one of those flat packs.

The day it comes to Hampstead, I had a date for lunch.

But he told me it was easy,  just a few screws,  nuts and bolts.

The instructions were all pictures, ’cause it is the global age.

So first I had to figure, which parts were A and D.

And how it went together, which was not so clear to me.

But then I had some luck.

My lunch rang up to cancel, leaving the whole day free.

Thank God for father’s training, I did not rush the job.

‘Cross thread is the danger, you must never force the screw.’

Started with the table, til the wind got bitter chill.

My fingers were so frozen,  I could not hold it still.

Indoors to try and tackle a chair that’s not so big.

It takes me me one whole hour, can you believe?

Before I even started, I had to wrestle hard

With yards and yards of bubble wrap,

Super stuck with super glue.

By then the night had fallen, and I had to stop to eat.

Worked on after dinner, now it looks a treat.

Eight hours I guess it took me, so set much time aside.

If you buy self assembly, and trust me as a guide.

The springtime sun is shining through the clouds so off to Kew we go. Board the London Overground at Hampstead Heath. Sunday Service. So the first train out leaves at 12.38 and the doors close 30 seconds before that. Into the long tunnel built years ago and soon at Willesden Junction.

Train terminates here the loudspeaker tells us. So over the bridge and across the road to the Rail Replacement Service bus. No room on top. Precious little below. But Dulcie falls asleep on my lap and Joe sits on the luggage rack.

As we crawl through Acton Town and Chiswick and Gunnersby. Crawling along except when we were stationary, which was often. Kew Bridge appears at last and soon we are negotiating with the man at the turnstile. £1 off for senior cits, but no further concession, though half the day is gone.

Joe runs ahead to lead us to the Tree Tops Walk. The lift is not working, but a notice informs us that the Kew Gardens brass is addressing the problem. They are ‘talking to the manufacturers’. Maybe next time I’ll go. But today I sat on a bench and amused myself taking photographs looking up at the feet tramping over the wire meshing.

None of which came out to my satisfaction.

Out just before closing time and back to the railway station. The rail replacement bus arrives packed almost as closely as the Tokyo tube. No-one wants to get off. And Janet certainly does not want to fight to get on.

The next bus homeward is not due for half an hour.  So we jump on a bus in the opposite direction to Richmond, from where we can take the tube home. Or so we thought, but on the bus we discover from a fellow citizen that the District Line from Richmond is not working.

But South West trains is. And we only have to wait a few minutes before we are speeding towards Waterloo. The children respond to the speed. Still more so when we get a Northern Line tube back to Belsize Park. They provide a caberet act for the other passengers as we race back, despite the quite un-necessary stop at Mornington Crescent, where no-one ever gets on, or gets off.

So it really is true, as the ads tell us, ‘Let the train take the strain’. So long as you remember, ‘Never on Sunday’.

And as you can see from my second pic, Joe enjoyed himself.

Awoke about 6 AM, irritated because I could only remember fragments of dreams which seemed to be telling me something.  This led to an attack of introspection. Seeking to understand how the human mind I have works in the belief that it is not that different from anyone else’s, despite my bi-polar temparament.

Thinking some more about the idea that the dreaming self is the model for works of fiction. That while asleep we are busy telling ouselves stories, painting pictures, directing films. Our bodies are resting but our minds, during the dreaming phases are very active. And these stories we tell ourselves do, I think, have a powerful influence on our behaviour.

Most of my own dreams, like the dreams studied by the scientists in the dream laboratories have these characteristics. The main characters in the dream stories are mostly family, friends and colleagues and less often famous people, like politicians and the Queen. The dreamer is also there, both as partipant and observer of the action.

Last night’s dreams were a bit different. The main characters were two students, not students I know, but stereotypes I had invented, rugby playing types in shorts , who had apparently taken over my room at City University.  And although I was in the dream myself, it not my usual self.

I was German not English.

This kind of speculation about the meaning of dreams and the workings of the mind has been fuelled by works of non-fiction as well as novels. One of the best of the non-fiction works is a book I read many years ago by the psycho-therapist, Charles Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams.

This kind of thinking underlies some of what I write in The Daily Novel. Alongside another  idea that has gained much wider acceptance; the theory that modern journalism, far from objectively reporting the facts, is using the facts to construct reality. The evidence for this can be found in the social science literature and in every newsroom in the land, where news editors ask when the reporters return to base;

What’s the story?

(In checking out the Amazon link I discovered that Rycroft published a new version of  The Innocence of Dreams in 1996, two years before he died. Have not yet found out how much different that was. Meanwhile, readers interested in Rycroft might like to read the obituary in The Independent, which gives a useful appraisal of his work.)

Gone to bed. Can’t sleep. Mind racing. Racing round the room in the stillness of the night. All are sleeping. Why not me?

Should be sleeping. Not in pain. Not unhappy. Don’t have problems. Pound is falling. Markets crashing. Jobless zooming, now two million. Worse to come, depression looming. All are worrying, why not me?

Raving loony, that’s the cause. Should be taking pills galore. Should be listening to the doctors and to my dear old mum and dad. ‘Time for bed now, Bobby, else you’ll be sleeping at your desk.’

Gone to bed. Can’t sleep. Mind racing. Racing round the room in the stillness of the night. All are sleeping.

But I’m not tired.