Across the pond

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.