HOSPITAL STORY
By Earnest Long
Copyright Earnest Long 2012
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Chapter 1, Wonderful Parkland
I went for a change down another road in the ‘park’ to the one I usually chose. It was leafy, unlike the normal circuit that went around the hospital. However, in places, the road was deteriorating, to do with the meal delivery van no longer going there. Of the most interest I noted, was of how the flowers grew. They were in bloom, and I appreciated them in a personal manner, as if there were only there for me, and that I might be the only person to see them today. There were all kinds of flowers in the beds. I had watched these flowers growing from buds to be a flower. 
The day was bright and beautiful. If beauty was to be found anywhere in a mental hospital, then the grounds were splendid, though the patients getting better was the purpose of a mental hospital. The day rolled along at a slow pace, whilst elsewhere the world moved faster perhaps. I had time to take in the park on this summer’s day, and reflect on what possibilities existed for me that I might not have had a few years ago, as some of the nursing assistants were fond of telling me. 
A nurse told me when I worried, “To give to anyone or anything, you only have to take the treatment on offer to you.”
After walking back, I found as I walked in that they had made tea. And as I drank, I thought to myself that my life had improved, since the nurse had said I would not be here forever. And I did have a future, though I could not really imagine what. But I had annoyed the same nurse who had given me hope by talking about it again. Also on balance, I should be here because I could get better. 
Occasionally at teatime, I passed conversation. Sometimes I would visit friends on other wards, and when I had finished speaking or they had, I would come back to my ward. On the ward, there were occasionally new arrivals, including some quite attractive girls from time to time. I would see them in the evening in nightgowns, and try to make conversation here and at breakfast, but rarely found anything much to say. My mother told me that such women would not normally tolerate or have to tolerate someone speaking like that to them, which made me feel small indeed. ‘I’m not so bad looking’, I said, and my mother would say that that was not what girls were attracted to, and that eye-catching girls wanted something different, which confused me for I felt it not to be quite true.
They were not always on the ward, as they could be in bed or elsewhere in the hospital. 
There was a bookshelf unit and I saw that someone – I assumed a nurse or OT – had stocked it with books, though later I found a patient had done so. She told me she was not bothered particularly if anyone had read them. And laughed when I expressed surprise she had read all the books she put out.
Chapter 2, Is It Interesting? 
I always feel that whilst I may have liked to chat generally that nurses were not the right persons to whom to chat. They might have to treat you physically, even if you were not actually mentally ill, and they were supposed to be treating you for that also. I found when I needed to talk to them, because I was ill, I didn’t like it if I had talked before normally. Also, what you want is a chat as you feel this is a normal thing to do and a human need. And you have nobody else to whom you can talk. But you have nothing in common with nurses often, or you have actually done nothing in your life – as they can tell, even if your notes did not say how long you had been in hospital – and they have done things in their life, which always makes it unequal in some way. You don’t know them to start with and generally, too, after some long time of chatting to them you’ve found out nothing about their lives. They may not want to tell you, of course, for reasons such as not having to, when you cannot ask anything at all that will mean you could find out about them, as one nurse told me. 
Seeing them to discuss your mental illness, does not count. Indeed, I hardly talked about such directly. You talked generally about what you thought. A patient was distressed giving personal details or talking about their illness, even if sometimes nobody could understand it, unless they spoke about it generally. Also, the personal details don’t matter so much, as different persons express mental illness differently. This is because they know about different things. The illness is the same. Sometimes, when you spoke to the nurses, they said they were asking questions to find your mental state. When I talked perfectly sanely for a few days, the nurse told me that they were not here to chat about the newspapers. And she said that I would have to practice my newly acquired, and from talking to them, social skills on someone else. This, despite my telling them my social skills would probably go back to what they were before, if I could speak to nobody. 
There were female patients you could talk to – who were less aggressive than the male patients were or less likely to hit you – but the hospital did not allow physical relationships under dire threat of lengthening your stay for years, as punishment. You had to wait until you went into the community before you could start any real relationship. 
In such things as Art Therapy, you could also have a chat and draw a picture.
I did not talk about art directly, but discussed the feelings I had. Most of these I confined to the dust heap once I had discussed them. I did have an interest in art, but did not pursue it or learn much about it like a normal person would, if it was their hobby.
There is in all things some sort of a nexus and some sort of a nadir. In mental illness, the doctor discharging you from your stay is what you want, and you have to look forward to this.
Because I refused medication on the ward, I now had to settle in for a long stay. 
For refusing, the nurses injected you so that you would actually have the drug anyway, and they would now lock you up as well.
Refuse medication again, and the process was repeated for another few years. 
The nurse who is telling me to get out of bed says that there is breakfast in ten minutes. 
Next, he says that I will be ‘looking at the floor’ if I do not get out of bed before he comes back.
Grudgingly, just as he comes up the third time, I get up and make a play with my clothes, which I see, the nurses had put at the end of my bed. I appear my dapper self at breakfast – always cereal in any hospital that I stayed.
A TV is up on a rack high on the wall, but the nurses have not switched it on. 
A rather fat man in an old jacket is sitting on one side and thinking something for a moment. He gets up and walks off somewhere behind me changing his chair. 
“Do you want me to do that every time?” he said. “Or are you going to get up when they come behind you.” 
I get up aware that someone was just behind me as I did. In the months that the hospital locked me up on this ward, it occurred to me to develop a sixth sense about this sort of thing. And I would get up perhaps a dozen times a day or so. Until that is, I realized that some seats had walls behind them. Only those arriving last had the others chairs. A nurse would sit at times behind the patients when the room was full.
During the day, I was virtually the only patient on the ward. 
I drank the tea, which a domestic put out. 
When one patient came in for dinner, he asked me if I had ever been to or near a town, he mentioned. I said that I had never been there, but I could see his anger if I had said I had been anywhere near there. 
Patients had portable stereos, and music played most times of the day. 
The TV went on at the same time in the evening every day. 
Watching this was the only entertainment, of any kind. 
Everyone sat listening intently from the first moment. They were anxious to take everything in and then would think of it during the next day. 
I did not realize that this was also the only form of stimulus – and vital at that – for some time.
Instead, I had gone to the quiet room to listen to the radio – the same tunes the whole time I noticed but still listened. 
I began thinking I must have a sad life when I heard that old song played again. I became bored and wanted to stretch my legs, so paced up and down the ward. 
My mental health began to suffer as opposed to mental illness if they use the word differently.
The same persons would not always remain on the ward. 
Watching TV now would make me tired, so I would go to the dormitory to sleep.
Sometimes I would feel bad and almost physically sick by this lack of stimulation.
On the first night here, the buzzer went and the nurse let in my old mum.
She came to visit me often, until the day they gave permission to visit the family home. 
We went to the quiet room and talked about my stay so far. 
I said to mum on this first night and then after that I did not want to take my medication. I couldn’t think of anything else to say and I didn’t want to discuss anything else either. 
Other patients were around to hear every word. 
One time I complained repeatedly about the medication because I felt doped up and couldn’t concentrate. But the doctor had explained patiently to me that it was like medicine and I should take it, that it was doing me good, but did not offer or would not talk about any of the worries I expressed. When I moved to a new ward, the new doctor told me that I appeared to be on too much medication and I had it reduced. My ability to remember what had happened, even on the previous day returned. 
The principle of taking the medication at all was one I accepted, but when I thought of how things like this happened, I wanted to reject the whole thing including medication completely. 
Mum had asked about OT for me, but the workshop for this ward did not want me there for some reason. They had allowed me out to my old workshop I had attended on my previous open ward. Every day this meant a long walk through the hospital grounds, when I could easily have escaped. When I happened to mention my OT for some other reason, they expressed surprise. Some of the nurses felt this was taking the proverbial. They wanted to know why I hadn’t run away, to which I replied that the doctor had persuaded me not to – as I assumed they tried to persuade everyone. Also, that I was here only because I was ill and they could release me only when they decided I was better. As I had no way to judge my own mental health, as they said, as because I never spoke to anyone or had anything demanding to do, I should leave it to their experience to decide. They seemed unconvinced, but were more so, when I told them I had no money to go on the run. 
The nurse interrupted me in the bath, and told me to pack my stuff. 
On arrival at the new ward seeing a woman in her nightgown, because I found my new ward mixed, made me feel I had left some confines behind.
The nurse came up to find me as I unpacked my stuff and said that the doctor wanted to see me.
The doctor on my new ward asked me a few questions about what I thought of being in hospital and taking medication. 
I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I had mumbled something about it being possible that you could lack insight, and everyone told me I was ill, and probably medication was good. He had asked me what I thought of the possibility of going home for an evening and then maybe for longer periods. I said that I would very much like that and do everything to work towards it. 
Yes, I had said, I would take medication they gave to me, including when I went home. A cloud had lifted, and I would do what the doctor told me, if that was the first stage in being released from this nightmare. In future, I would keep taking the medication, or almost, to keep me well. But things didn’t work out as I might have hoped. 
I had some ‘bad thoughts’ now, as my pet name for my symptoms was.
I had had a different past I convinced myself. I was this famous person in the news or at least I wrote his speeches or spoke to the press on his behalf when he didn’t want to. My family reasoned with me. ‘Nobody speaks to the press on anyone’s behalf or writes speeches unless they’re paid. And you have not been paid for any job more than a pittance’. Or ‘you know your history don’t you…what was that job you had for a bit…you remember it then…how much do you think someone who works in PR earns…what, you agree now you weren’t in PR…why’s that…I explained it…all I said was…never mind we’ll visit you next week’. But although, someone had reasoned with me, I sometimes still liked to imagine it and at other times perhaps felt, I was these things though I knew I wasn’t. But I thought I had a psychological need to imagine I was. I don’t think I ever crossed the bridge of telling someone I was the things I imagined but only that I had some ‘thoughts’ I was. I was famous or had been in the papers or my parents had adopted me – although a nurse told me I wasn’t because she knew how to tell.
I was not adopted, I knew what school I had been to, as I did not think I had been to a different school, I had had the jobs I knew I had and I had been in hospital. I knew all this but still spoke about how I was famous. It is possible anyone will talk about how they would like to be famous. But I could not think to put it like this if this reflected what I thought. And if any direct comparison is possible, I did not think to say this was my thoughts. Although, I peppered my remarks with words such as, ‘feel’ or ‘imagine’. Someone told me, I had no right to feel people wouldn’t worry about me when I said this. Or that they should understand, I was only imagining it when they did not hear me say that. And the nurse said, she could tell because of how I said it that I was ill.
If I hadn’t wanted to go back to hospital, I shouldn’t have spoken like that – what made me think I could speak like that to my parents or anyone?
As the hospital admitted me again when I was ill, my father took me in his car. I half heard the sound of the countryside as we drove, although everything was so quiet.
Our headlights on full beam were the only light for miles around. Once I saw what looked like a light from a farmhouse with someone putting something outside. I did not know you could drive through the countryside for so long without coming to a town or village. 
The lights of the hospital spilled out – literally thousands of Watts. Here I went again and no different from before, because the hospital did not change, but my life could have been different if I was not here. Tons of bricks and bright lights in the middle of nowhere – the bricks taken there at the end of the nineteenth century and the lights added later. You could see nurses in their starched uniforms going around. And the bright lights of the ward were a contrast against the countryside darkness outside. 
We had to wait in a waiting room with a coffee machine and luxury fittings. My father was impressed and wanted to talk about how reassured he felt from what he had seen. But I was not interested in his viewpoint. He accused me of being rude, and nearly hit me.
I heard someone say ‘where is he’. A nurse who was waiting for his lift home intervened on my behalf and said that I had waited there the whole time, as much for my father’s sake as mine.
One of the nurses said that either, I could walk, or be put in arm locks. 
Anyway, where was I going? They had grabbed hold of me, when I didn’t know the way.
They pushed me down the corridor and out of reach of the normal world.
For more months until I could be released.
Nurses often held new patients down and injected them. However, you did not see all the times that this happened. And you could not stay if it started. When the patient woke up, he seemed completely calm and relaxed. And might on rising, merely be told to go to his room and lie down for half an hour more, if he was dizzy. 
I never talked to any of the nurses on this ward. If you wanted to say something about those things in your head, you spoke only to the doctor. If you had said something beforehand, you didn’t get to say it now when it mattered. 
There was a little tittle-tattle on the ward and patients did speak but you did not have to say anything if you felt ill.
Sometimes you needed reminding that you did not have to say a word ever if you wanted to speak to another patient. Someone would say something when he really didn’t want to say anything and then regret it. The nurses would tell him he didn’t have to. One must have thought something about the nurses and asked some question. They waited for him to say more and nothing came from him and he faced embarrassment, or so it looked, but it may not have been this at all.
There was on some wards nurses apparently available for conversation. 
This conversation was not always all one way, for what you talked about mattered, but I could not always see this. 
Also, to realize such things as keeping your room tidy could get you out of hospital – because any normal person did so. 
If they had not helped you clean your room then you would have been very ill. 
Not having the aggressive tag helped, and was hard to lose if you got it through talking aggressively about how much you hated it in here.
I did leave after some time and go to a Residential Home.
Chapter 3, Life and All That
 I suppose you want to know how I came into the world, whether my family owned a big house, had a summerhouse or a boathouse, or I should say something of some sort that if an old dear were reading nearby, such a sort or type of person would look up from her book and feign an interest. 
I existed and all in terms that seem expected to anyone unless you feel that they are strange. Then being told someone dropped me on my head as baby or my mother fell out a first story window or my father beat me when I was three years old will mean you pay no attention to anything I say from now on. However, you may attach some truth to such incidents on some day now, so very long ago to remember, as you would to any truth. But it is not clear this happened. Someone said it but then nobody said anything more about it again. These may, however, be certainties of a sort, or part of my illness, and sometimes someone puts them forward to me as such, whilst at other times they do not mention them. 
I might say how I came to such as my lot is now.
Really, my parents make me angry. They would tell me I had to stay because I was ill, even when I had no symptoms. But I had no family or friends I could go to, no job to pay my way, no benefits unless I stayed in hospital. My parents had the power to discharge; I could have stayed at home, read books and applied for jobs. 
Really, you did not let your emotions all hang out as on daytime TV. Perhaps nurses hadn’t heard of such TV, because nothing is more guaranteed to keep you in hospital for longer. 
So it does not serve much purpose to feel anger or complain about my awful parents, and I do not want to say something that serves no purpose whatsoever but to antagonize my thoughts, and make writing more difficult when I would propose to make it easier. 
When I was at school, I felt that I was at times being protected, whilst I would not say I was bullied in the physical or mental sense, there were always those who would stick up for me. However, I should tell you now that this is not true at all – I never was bullied at school and stuck up for myself. Now, I really can’t remember. But I let my mind wander onto what happened to others, and try to see my experiences for what they are. 
I remember having a conversation with a nurse saying something like, “At the time I took it all for granted. I did not feel embarrassed that they had done this for me, and then shamefacedly asked them about their own friends. I was hoping from this some sort of introduction, and also I was given this despite them, in effect, arguing with their friends about it.”
However, the nurse actually walked off as if to say I was talking rubbish, or as some of them put it, ‘a patient might say something because of their illness’. They knew what you said, because they had training. If you didn’t listen to your training, you could become involved, because you had some emotional involvement. Actually, when patients did speak like this if anyone listened, I thought it was only a bit of general knowledge, a lot of the time. Although, some patients might disguise what they said, when they had taken it from a newspaper, as though only they had read about it. Perhaps, they were ready to leave, but the staff often saw such things differently from the explanation given by the patient. All patients were different in how exactly they expressed their illness. Training for nurses is not something you can get out of a book. I was grateful that I never read any books on nursing as this would be a waste of time. Indeed nursing is a profession or you ‘need a qualification’.
   If you behave in an odd way, someone is likely to set upon you in the harsh world. In hospital, you can behave oddly. One woman dancing with ghosts, however, infuriated some male patients, and the nurses had to move her to another ward. 
In particular, if you wanted your stay to be a good one and end when you left, you didn’t speak to paranoid patients. Originally, the thing was a mystery as to who the paranoid patients were, but then I found that being a mental hospital you could ask them.
Any actual treatment you were receiving was in the hands of the doctors, who controlled your medication. The relationship was different with a nurse. 
Inpatient treatment has the reputation of them locking patients away in the countryside and forgetting about them. Indeed their family had put them there and did not want their release for reasons that they had wanted to get on with their lives, or because their relative was responsible for physical harm to their families. My parents still saw me, and I had done no harm so I was unusual. Although, being told they would not or could not release me merely because I was ‘ill’ did not make complete sense. And I sensed a measure of vindictiveness and control that they liked to have over each of their children in different ways.
Also, the mentally ill person is difficult if they are ill to talk to and you can’t get a proper conversation or genuine emotion out of them, or understand even what they are saying. Whilst the patients recognized their visitors and gave them their time and attention, they might make spiteful or untrue remarks during these visits. Also, the relatives might not live nearby or be able to give - or want to give time – if that was only what they were being asked to do. 
Of course, hospital is not as bleak now as it once was. 
I was able to visit my parents for the weekend, and whilst taking my tablets, I felt no or somewhat no signs of illness. That is, I did not have any hallucinations, and did not even feel that I was anything except normal. Nor was I in mental distress. 
Of course, I should say there is some doubt about this. 
I do not feel perfectly normal. Stirrings in the mind passed by like so many clouds on a summer’s day when waking late in the afternoon. As if on some other summer’s day such a long, long time ago. 
Medication is the medical treatment – without it, the hospital restrained you for up to 24 hours a day.
Nurses give you the meds and make your stay comfortable. You have art you can do and you can walk in the grounds and visit the hospital café. The library times are on the ward notice board. And you have time to read – more time than most to read.
Other things do go on in hospital – time does for one, though you don’t notice it.
I would as in some conversation as to the boy I once was feel I had nothing to do but apologize to him. 
I came in from school and ate a snack before homework, and started some sort of boyish conversation with my father about such matters that I had recently acquired. At weekends, I read propped up on one elbow on my bed in the afternoons. This was on glorious summer days now past. And years later I read propped up on my elbow on my bed in the hospital. Now, my hand and wrist bent and sore by this were older. And I could not remember what I read those years ago. Only that I had done.
Since childhood, I had had very few experiences of any sort.
 I saw no need to rush or go fast from one place to another now, despite my youthful enthusiasm – you lived but you did not learn to live very well. Learning, when you had all the time to do so, you did but infrequently.
The doctor told me on one occasion that learning might perhaps be stressful and the nurses would not allow me to go to the library. This was a decision taken in my case conference without me, and they told me it would be for life. I remarked that I wouldn’t be able to read a book from my age now at 18 until I was 60 years old. 
“Before that,” the nurse said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean,” she said, “you will be a cabbage by the time your 40 – literally a vegetable.”
“Why,” I stammered. “What are you telling me, why would I?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” she angrily remonstrated. “Listen! Your illness is one where you can’t take stress, learning is stressful and for your short-term good so you can have, yes, you, a decent life, you must not read anything, not books, not the paper, and of course this will affect you later on.”
“Sooner,” said the other nurse laughing.
“What’s the joke?”
“Don’t expect her to look at you again like that, you must know how anyone looks at a cabbage and nurses are taught how to tell.”
“I want to read and I am going to complain.”
In fact, they did allow me to use the library.
Actually, it was stressful to start with as I hid myself whilst reading behind the curtains of the bed, and once or twice, I felt like asking for a counseling session. I knew though the consequences of such an action – a quick answer that I could not read anymore.
Of course, what you say to the nurses like not wanting to be a cabbage may seem normal and rational to you, but you are told you are not understood, told you are not making sense, you do not know what is best for you. And the nurses have a skill set that they use and you do not understand. 
The nurses told you things to your advantage I’m sure, but the only one I can think of right now is ‘take your medication.’ 
The nurses also said, ‘The drug companies haven’t spent millions developing drugs that don’t work and patients do leave hospital’. And, ‘Read the newspapers and you know about Care in the Community and the opportunity you have’. 
This is really your big chance; nobody ever did anything in hospital, went out and got a job, had relationships of any value with another human being who wasn’t mentally ill and likely to turn on them, or literally did anything.
My father had been speaking to older patients. 
Quietly so they couldn’t hear he spoke: “Do you think these patients that they hold up as being all right after twenty or thirty years in hospital are really like they say. They do not know who their best friend of twenty years is, or who they would be, if they saw them outside of here. Take the medication. The only purpose you have in life for now is to get out of hospital,” he said. “And then when you do stay out,” he added.
But this was not or could not be. The nurses told you, that if you chose to ignore advice given to you about what treatments were available to you, then you would stay in hospital. And that if you accepted it, you could live your life normally. But if you didn’t, then you would be the ultimate failure – ‘nobody in literature has ever written of such a failure in the very novels that you are allowed to read’, my mum said.
“Taking the medication,” said my father “is all you need to be a success.” 
The tablets might work more or less, and you could hope they would. They even told you how they worked – dopamine re-uptake inhibitors. Dopamine controls the thoughts in the brain and too much dopamine gives you abnormal thoughts, or rather, they are the same as sane thoughts but too many of them and you can’t cope. So they stop you thinking so much, and let you think on a lower level of say, intellect. But you are actually able to follow reason and learn new things and unless you want to enter the professions or go to university then normally there are no problems. You can do most jobs, even quite interesting ones, where as a doctor told me once you use your mind and they pay well for it, because he said you have some skill. But that doesn’t make you a lawyer or a doctor.
Unfortunately, nobody explained these facts to me early on although as a seventeen year old I had sat outside the ward office, whilst the nurses told my parents. My parents did not tell me what the nurses said because they did not think, they later revealed, that the nurses were suggesting they tell me. And that the nurses were only telling them as parents, and did not mean them to repeat it to me.
Another fact that might have changed my mind about refusing to take medication was if I had known that if you did not take your medication you relapsed. And from this relapse then you were likely to become a cabbage. The medication stopped this – the opposite of what I actually thought.
In a sense, you do live in the same world as the one you always occupied and still occupy today. You go home for Tea, and read books like you have done since you were a child, do exercise as you did, live near where you parents live, and see the same things out the window of the bus or train. But somewhere, you are not in the same world, because much water has passed under the bridge you know absolutely nothing about. 
However, I feel I speak normally to my parents and my brother and sister. 
Some item in the paper is there to discuss or else some TV. 
I felt and could feel what the film was giving me and said what it was. However, others complained they saw the same thing, and said I was in the wrong somehow for not realizing that everybody felt the same, and had the same thing from the film. I had experienced something and I was grateful to experience anything – even a film. But to speak up, and feel that even as I won this small thing for myself I was losing more, hurt me.  
So, although I thought I spoke normally, in fact, I probably didn’t. 
However, I had come an awful long way even to be here.
A newly arrived patient had other things on her mind than talking to other patients, such as settling in for example. And thinking who her real friends were if they knew she had come into hospital. As well, she could use some time just to think.
In time, it would unroll. And a few days later, when she did take her meds she left. 
I had wanted to continue our conversation for a possible friendship. But she said it was not really like this. She said she had just lost her friends – real friends, actual friends, in the outside world. 
At school, when I was about 14 years old I decided I would like to do some hobbies I had not done until now. I missed joining societies on my return from the summer holidays because I was away the first day of term, and nobody would tell me how to join them. Someone did say you should look on the Year Notice Board. But I didn’t know where it was. Or to look on the Classroom Board for the timetable, as it would be there as well. But I forgot or did not see it stuck up somehow. Everyone else said, they had definitely seen it up, and I could have asked where the notice board was. Perhaps this was the beginning of my illness. 
I did not really like it at the time, or began not to like it.
My father would mock my version of events that I might relate to him or I would find something he said rattled me. I spoke to nobody about anything because I found my conversation a problem.
I wandered why nobody noticed, though not occurring to me to talk about it. 
I went to my room at times because I have since I was a young child. 
One time I had done this was when my relatives paid a visit and my uncle gave me a book. He told me much about this book and how pleased he would be if I read it. The adults were meeting downstairs over dinner and I had to leave and go to my room. I began to read and my mother came up and found me in my pajamas reading.
“You do that,” she said. 
“Don’t let the bad world get to you,” she said, peering over at me.
“Do you like the book?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“What is it about, who wrote it?”
I replied, and she said, “Tell me who it is by without looking at the cover. And describe to me what it is about in your own words and not on the back cover.”
I said I would, and did when she came in a few hours later.
“You read all that?”
“Yes, I’ve finished.”
“You can’t possibly have read that whole book so quickly at your age.”
She didn’t believe me, and tried to look for a review within the pages and not finding one, she put the book down abruptly by my bed, and left.
My father would also send me to my room, and when he saw me reading during my punishment took my books away from me, as to read in my room as I did anyway was not a punishment.
I supposed I had heard of mental homes before I was ever in one as a ‘large brick building’ way out in the countryside, and in ‘the middle of nowhere’.
Yes, what was it now – my mother thought that deep down something was wrong. She felt that I was possibly depressed, although she did not use this word to me at the time, but she did mention it later.
She was worried about all of us children, but decided to send me to a Doctor. 
I said to mother that there was nothing wrong but she would scream uncontrollably and say, “There is, can’t you see.” And when she had calmed down a bit I would say ‘no’ to this again and she said that ‘there is’ and then she went to the phone. 
“Tell me why, please, in your own words why you don’t want to go.” 
My words were, “They have a bad reputation. They’re locked inside, and you don’t leave where you are, even in or within the part of the hospital you’re in.” 
“That’s not true,” said mum, “you are allowed out – we’ll come to see you. You can go in the grounds, the doctor told me,” she said crying.
“But you might only see me once in six months. It may be miles away. We may not even be able to walk in the grounds on some wards.” 
“They’re a long way from anywhere, for a reason, and they’re the most wonderful grounds. We’ll ask them if you can come for a short walk. I’m sure we can. The rules are not rigid.” 
“Once I’m inside, if you’re going to answer this in your stupid manner so far,” I said, as she listened tight-lipped, “you are locked up and forgotten about, and…and…”
“It’s not true,” she said. “And we won’t forget about you,” she sobbed. 
Again, she went to the phone and came back happier.
 She said, “I spoke to him at length. He said that you weren’t a psychiatrist and he would tell you what you need to know when you get there, as you can’t possibly know a thing now.”
“You spoke to him?”
“Yes, I did. Someone had to. And let me tell you, if you don’t go now I don’t know what anyone will do. I don’t want the nurses disturbed by them coming here; I’ll tell you that.”
I started packing a few old suitcases.
My father reappeared surprised that my mother was in tears in front of me, on the phone to the hospital.
“Usually she only does that when you’re in bed.”
I remember seeing a social worker not long after I had been in hospital, or rather relatively so.
He talks about ‘we all’ and ‘sometimes we don’t’, etc. 
What was the word ‘Empowered’? ‘People in society that that society sees the need to put away, to lock up – who are not welcomed to the treasure chest and who cannot take their full share and more besides.’
I asked him as to how I was empowered as a mental patient, and that I actually felt I had no power whatsoever. 
“Right,” he said, “Why do you feel you have no power?” 
“Because,” I said, “I only have to take the meds which I’m forced to do. I feel they make me ill.” 
He looked absolutely gob smacked and said, “You don’t mean the medication makes you feel ill?”
“No. Not ill. But I can’t do what I want.”
He looked bewildered.
“Doesn’t the meds mean you can do anything like anyone else? I was told it did.”
“No, not really, it makes you stupid.”
“What about patients, who I’ve been told, have left and got good jobs?”
“I don’t know, I feel stupid on it, literally I can do nothing for myself, and I can’t hold a proper conversation, not really a conversation at all, it must be the medication, as what else can it be? That’s the only thing that’s changed.”
He looked sympathetic, and said he would see what he could do, but that something must be done.
Next, I heard of him he didn’t want to see me again, as he had felt humiliated when he had raised the issue with nurses, and been told he lacked some professionalism. 
“I don’t think it was just you,” said the nurse, “but something he said as well.”
Of course, as I have said, there are general rules to living, but you forget them after a while in hospital, and the nurses need to remind you. Long-term patients who are usually those or meant to be those, who were in hospital before care in the community, can go to rehab. 
“Very few places exist for section 3 patients now. If you want to go on one with Secure Hospital patients then you can,” the nurse said, “but you may not like it. You’ll have to go up to a Secure Hospital or you can stay here.” 
“Why can’t I have the treatment here?”
“You’ve already being treated, you need to leave but you won’t cope in the community.”
I asked the doctor about it and he said, “You might be in luck, because they are closing rehab in Secure Hospitals, and you will get on a place along with all the other section 3 patients just like you.”
On the ward I met a very large, well-built patient. But I did not think that, despite his size, he was violent, because in all my time in on the rehab unit, I had seen no violence at all. Nobody had even been aggressive.
I mentioned this to one of the patients.
“Unless you want to start something,” he said laconically.
I definitely did not want some things. I did not want to have a higher dose of medication than I needed to; I did not want my bad thoughts to disturb me – as my pet name for my symptoms was – or have to have them.
“Have you thought,” said my father, “you could not have them at all, if you took the medication, and did some activities they gave you, the doctor has said that, whatever they said in the past, someone with your illness should keep active.”
 Someone once said to me, that when I have bad thoughts, I should try to think of something pleasant, to which I replied, I could think of nothing that was. But this was because I had nothing at all of any kind to think about.
Later I was to find, that a few lines of a well-liked and memorable poem or reading novels helped. As someone said, when I described it to her, it might help me ‘probably with my isolation.’
To learn facts from a periodical over a few hours, and note on a pad how many I could recall, before my mother arrived to see me, improved how I felt no end – not a matter of just feeling a bit better about myself, but happiness itself.
I do not know if it is the same thing that affects my mental state as improves my conversation or makes me happier, but as my father said, that whatever the causes, the nurses had given me two things to do, which were to take my meds and do something with my day.
In my teens, I was all work and no play. I have happy recollections though of my schooldays and the evenings at home, though my homework didn’t sometimes finish ‘till late at night. My mother made me a cup of tea, and I said I would finish my homework soon, but it took longer than I intended. 
The other thing I did, from time to time, was exercise. I ran and went to the gym, did exercises in my room and improved my strength and fitness. At one point, I was one of the strongest patients in the hospital though I kept this to myself. Because the nurses saw it as aggressive to mention going to the gym, though you could discuss how you felt about exercise with the gym instructor.
There were such a thing as a gym in hospital, and I would use that or do sit ups and press ups when not in hospital.
But for some years in my late thirties, I did not do exercise and put on weight to some horrifying degree, and had a long struggle to get fit again – get fit or die young was the alternative. I put this lapse down to not being able to use the gym, or not having a floor area large enough in my room to do exercise, like when I did exercise on the dormitory floor quite well.
I needed to make a big personal effort for yet another time in my life – to get fit, to read more, to make friends, to look presentable, to have a good mind and body – in short fitness and health – to have these two things, and keep them, was my perennial problem, and it never really changed. Sometimes, I did get ‘better’ or near it, but the thing never lasted more than some several months.
What I would like to say here is things do change and you cannot live in the past, but time connects to your past by a thread. But such as your previous fitness is not always relevant after a while to your fitness now, such as if you were to go below a certain point. You do move on from one place to another and you don’t stand still because nobody does. 
 My work in the classroom suffered. At one point, I was in some distress, because the teacher had asked to see our notes and in the whole term, I had only written a few pages. Also, one day I didn’t know what lesson or classroom I was supposed to be in, and hence would hang around in the corridor looking at my diary, in which I had omitted to write the room number, for the next lesson. The school year went on, to which I was mostly oblivious, and some of my problems others might have noticed, but I stayed.
After being in hospital some time, I wanted to leave and go out and get a job, to date, and to take my own future into my hands. My wish was to have my own place to live, and not to be within the confines in any way of a mental hospital.
This is a normal thing to want but the doctor can renew my section, and as I said I wouldn’t take meds, I stayed.
I did try to prepare myself to leave by reading and by making conversation when I could.
The doctor took me off my section, which meant I was free to leave.
Asking my parents when they visited, they said that I couldn’t have my room at home back for some reason or another, and they would ‘look into where I might stay.’
“Will you look in the papers for my own home somewhere; I need you to pay the deposit as I’ve no money.”
“Yes, I’ll do that,” said my mother emphatically.
She came to visit, but had not found anywhere for me and said to my disappointment that ‘flats were very expensive and, that if I had no money, I would not be able to afford one.’
The doctor called me.
“I’m disappointed,” he said, “you had plans to leave, and you have not.”
I began explaining that my parents had said, that they could not afford the deposit, but he said he was putting me back on my section so that my stay in hospital could be more regulated – for example, if I spoke rudely to the nurses again, I could go to the locked ward if I was on a section.
When I told my mother, I criticized her for being poor quite angrily.
“We’re not poor,” she said sarcastically, “You’re the one who can’t afford a deposit, what made you think I was going to look in the papers for somewhere for you, you have to do that yourself, everybody does.”
I shouted at her, and asked her how she dare in all her years feel she could behave to anyone like that.
She looked around for the nurse. 
“Calm down,” she said, like a nurse holding me on the floor for an injection.
“You’re enjoying this, I can tell.”
“You can’t tell.”
“Yes, I can. What makes you think I can’t? Tell me why I wouldn’t know that you love this, every minute of this…”
I agreed to take the injection by going to the clinical room and having it. 
“You’re not on this ward,” said the night staff. “I suggest you go up to the locked ward,” said the other, “as you’re supposed to be there, that was what they said in hand over.”
However, although in a mental hospital I was off my section again, and decided I would go to look for somewhere normal to live and not take meds.
The nurse called me down from my room later saying that there was someone to see me. 
The nurse shook the pill bottle and said, “I’ll put it as a refusal, or are you going to take your medication.” 
“No.”
“I’ll have an injection drawn up,” he said. “When the other patients have had theirs and you’re the only one left, you can take it then.”
 I went to my room to try to work out how I could avoid this. A nurse came up and said, “Medication!”
I hardly responded but it was negative. She had gone out into the corridor and I could hear voices. On the landing were one or two male nurses but I felt I had a chance still of getting out of this. 
It should go without saying, that my plan to go to the social security office, and not tell them I was a former patient, would not have worked. Nor that they would somehow let it go, when I explained to them that I had nothing wrong with me. And all I wanted was somewhere to live, and that I planned looking for a job. And I didn’t know what training courses were available. But that if I was able to do one or two and the job market picked up and there was this, that and the other that I could do…but the medication was stopping me. 
“Everything would come to fruition,” I would tell them. 
But in my stupefied state I could not see that the social security would not pay for me if I discharged myself, but I did not and would not think of anything other than that I did not want this injection offered to me. And with no alternative as I could see, but I didn’t like just to give in. Even though this episode might mean I stay in hospital a few years before the hospital would discharge me again to the community. In my mind, I had some moral imperative to resist, because I felt my mind would be better finally off medication. 
The completely woeful thought of one lifetime took hold.
I retreated into my room and was sitting on one of the beds when they came into my room. A nurse sat down with me on the bed. He tried to reason with me but when I said I still didn’t want it, he grabbed hold of me. I tried to get up and to strike out. 
“Now, don’t be stupid,” said the nurse using my first name. “This is a hospital. You’re here to get better. You have to abide by the regulations...” Other nurses now grabbed hold of me and I was given the injection. This was largely how it was – how hospital affected you – if you didn’t want to take the injection. The injection was a small painless jab, but if you didn’t want it, then the nurses gave it to you anyway. And your whole life could change for years – for a good part of your life even. And you could regret your decision at leisure, however hasty it was to start with. 
“I’m not leaving this room.” 
I was adamant. 
“Come on” said the nurse – get up will you – we’ll allow you to walk, or if not we’ll put you down on the floor again and you don’t want that.” 
He seemed all to kind, but I realized that this was something that you had as a patient, because they could force you to have injections. Nurses said patients could not make up their own minds, because they were ill. 
The patients gave the nurses a lot of abuse. 
Some nurses said they worked only for the money. Their paycheck was what mattered and as long as they had that, they were happy. 
In any case, they took me on this walk to the medical room and then looked at me for cuts and bruises and the like. 
“I don’t know where you thought you were going to,” said the nurse. “Your parents certainly cannot have you back and you have no money to speak of.”
The nurse came back from the phone.
“It’s a locked ward – you will be allowed visitors…it won’t be forever…being locked up itself is not what’s bothering you…it’s clean…you’ll be looked after…get good meals…you’ll be able to go for walks in the grounds for fresh air, it’s been thought out…it’s in no way prison.” 
“I’ll go,” I said. “No trouble on the way of any kind.”
I thought I had made a mistake. 
On arrival at the hospital, we went inside and here was a receptionist and telephone switchboard. 
The receptionist told us to wait here. As I did, a man in his fifties went in this room and began adjusting walkie-talkie radios that was in boxes along the wall, to conduct some check on them for staff coming on shift. 
“Take him up,” he said to the nurses.
At this, I would say I had left the community and come to something else, which was not where I wanted to be.
At first on this ward, I should say that the other patients were all mentally ill. At least my parents saw no difference between them and me, although some of them the courts had sent there. Either this was for assessment or for a longer period, after their court case had finished. 
At one time, another patient said to me, that those persons were no different from the criminal classes and he was one. 
In any case, I found the ward quite safe as far as any violence went. There were times when the alarm went off but you rarely saw the incident. 
From his silly reason, for hitting someone, because of something in his head, that he may have had some control over, because he regretted it or could see it was wrong later, he had to start again. They could become quiet, reasoned, and practice good social skills when someone spoke to them. But rue that they are going nowhere.
The nurses expected you to queue up for medication, not to distract the nurse and to take your tablets quickly with water, which you poured out yourself, and not to spill a drop. 
There was tea in the cups brought out on a trolley ready milked and sometimes ready sugared.
There was a day room with TV, and a dining room and ward office. 
Sometimes staff welcomed residents talking to them. 
Some residents would start giving their news as such it was. This sort of desultory conversation went on, although I didn’t quite know the nurses replies or their interests, as I hadn’t heard them. Most of the nursing assistants were in their twenties and thirties. They wore impeccable silk shirts with new gold jewelry. And they were physically fit, without being over-muscled.
At one point, I ventured myself to speak to them. 
“What do I think of mental illness?” he had replied almost angrily, but as if a stupid question. 
“'What I say is anyone can become mentally ill, you could, I could, anyone could.” 
He then went on to give me his theory, said as if a well-practiced patter on the matter. I felt grateful that he worked there, but the last thing I wanted to do now was talk to him.
Afterward he had said all he did and I said nothing, he told me to get up and have a cup of tea. I was in the end barely to spend more than a few weeks on the ward. 
You could hear music at times blaring out from small tape decks that someone owned. 
After a while, they offered me OT in the OT room, mornings and afternoons. 
They brought tea out. But I did not initially seem to have a mug, and they allowed me to go into the kitchen to take one myself. When I found I had missed the toast, they offered some quite reasonably tasting biscuits from a cupboard in the kitchen. This sort of tea and toast informality seemed to go on for some time. The thing was a ‘nice’ or reasonably happy way to idle a day away. But they also expected you to work, which did not however amount to much. 
“We don’t like people in OT who do nothing like the nasty little pieces of smell they are,” said the OT, after I had not put forward any suggestions as to what I would like to do. I replied that I didn’t really regard myself as that, and that I was confused because I had just started here. 
They gave me one more chance. The OT assistant approached me and said that she had a wonderful book with some excellent photos. She went through a few pages and then gave me the book to read, which I did, but after a while stuck it back on the table, as I wasn’t following it.
Where I was before had no OT, and it seemed, as I thought, that I had suffered. 
Later a doctor would tell me that OT was a very carefully thought out and planned programme. Going to OT was all that would be necessary to keep my mind in shape – this was why they had OT, because the problem I had talked about in hospitals they had recognized long ago. At that, he walked out and shut the door, and he regarded the matter as closed. 
Dinner was straight after OT, and I ate it better for having been to OT. 
In OT, I discussed silkscreen printing with an OT assistant. She at times looked up oddly at me but as to what she could observe I don’t know.
I felt like I was a special pupil at this stage, at least until everything went wrong. And I found I couldn’t produce anything, because I changed my mind too often, about what I wanted to do. The reason was that my creative ideas were not any good in my opinion and I didn’t want to do something bad.
From this and from whatever good it did me, they put me back on an open ward. 
This was I found different from what I have described earlier. Although with its smoking room, lounge with TV and kitchen, introduced to me when I arrived, it was not a lot different. Except, that you did not sleep in a dormitory there, but you had your own room. Nobody but the staff was about, and they told me all the patients were in their rooms. 
Some rooms had been set aside for a few patients to live together in. This was the next stage to their discharge to the community. They had a phone to call the staff when they needed quickness. Otherwise, they would only see staff by appointment.
Tea was in the kitchen, and here I first glimpsed the majority of the residents. 
It was clear from their slow manner that these were some of the most backward. Later I found, that they had indeed come from a back ward in some mix up. 
After tea, I went to the TV room, which depressingly had the television on and turned up loud on a children’s cartoon with no one in there. If anyone was in the room, they weren’t watching the TV, or capable of it. 
The clients, who shared self-contained living rooms, looked better. And indeed were because the unit gave them these rooms, only if they were well. 
The criteria were that you were socially apt and not just symptom free.
These shared rooms would seem to keep up a discharge rate of at least one or two every six months. At this rate as a better patient, I could be out in a reasonable time as these things go.
The hospital offered me some OT. 
This OT was art and cooking. 
The art we did was supposed to be therapeutic, and the person taking the art supposed to be an art therapist. 
When I approached him, however, he told me he was not, and that I should call him by his first name or as he said ‘just call me the artist’ being who he was. 
If he found it flattering, I should call him this, I don’t know.
He had told me he had no training in Art Therapy, but if I would like to come along and draw a picture I was welcome. 
He spent the time before the session finding the patients to participate and persuading them to come. The session started and he gave us a piece of paper to paint on with some paints.
We began to paint.
When I had finished my picture, I reached for some more paper but he asked me what I was doing, saying that one picture was enough for one day.
He asked me if I would like to comment on my picture – say something about it to him and the group. He said that he would see what I did next week. And then went round the other residents to ask them about their pictures, telling anyone who had finished, that they should stay until the end of the group. 
The other thing I would do is cooking, with one of the nursing assistants. 
This was the meal for all of us and we started about an hour beforehand. We peeled or chopped vegetables and opened tins. The meals were not that lavish, but this sort of ‘work’ made me feel better about myself. 
The nursing assistant had approached me and spoken quite softly telling me something needed doing with the cooking. The idea of a woman speaking nicely to me, other than the nurses who were talking about illness, was something I had almost forgotten and how good it felt. 
We were supposed to help prepare the evening meal once a week. I did this to a certain extent grudgingly but in the end, I found that it was all right really if it kept the mind occupied. And you could see whether anyone enjoyed his or her food. And it was not really so hard, so seldom. 
One day I said that I was too tired to come and do it, and would prefer to stay in bed, and this small thing in the scheme of things finished. 
At night, everyone was supposed to be asleep in his or her room but I know that a lot of them were awake in their rooms the whole night. 
Sometimes, I would come out and make aimless conversation with the nurses and they told me to get back in my room. 
But I would feel I had some important thing I would want to say, and the nurse should listen in some way to what was really driveling. 
I would say I ‘just needed to pace’ because of things on my mind. Things that I could, I thought, only find out about by wandering up and down. Up and down the whole night. And perhaps, if I finally wanted my bed, then going to sleep as the dawn came up, to mock the bringing in of a new day. 
I was lying in my bed one morning, and I had woken up over a period of hours, for I did not have a clock but was merely aware of the sun and clouds changing across the sky outside. On waking, I was unable to move for an extended period because my body would not do so. Eventually, some sense of normality came back into my limbs and I could just get off my bed and pull myself up by such normal method known to all and done a million times. But I could doubt the most normal of things taken for granted. I wandered if this was not just a temporary trick my body was playing on me, or whether it was something permanent. Perhaps my body was trying to tell me something. I demanded to see them, to see them all, for them to come out and greet me and to tell me why for such a thing my parents had been brought together, had paid for me when I could not support myself, or any effort ever been made for me at all to so spend the morning thus. Whilst human life may be short, I would but care an answer. And what I wanted was finding a floor to exercise on or a companion to discuss the things of the day or to scan the pages of a book. Such things as this, means life cannot all be bad, and I have no wish to return to my feelings of that morning. 
I spoke to a nurse about it, who said that in those circumstances, she could get a doctor to give a fatal injection. And I had to persuade her that it was not my intention for her now to call one, if it ever had been.
The only thing that did happen was that I received a letter from another unit asking if I would like to go there. At the interview, a ward manager and a consultant psychiatrist spoke to me about how I saw my future. I told them I saw no future for me where I was, and they listened whilst I explained why I thought that. I said that for example, my parents were beginning to desert me and that I was sure our meeting would give them hope. They had to do the paper work and then I might go to the new unit. 
Chapter 4, Now and Then
My impression was that they were professional and relaxed and that I was talking to human beings.
They asked me what I saw in my behaviour that was wrong, and I said it was staying in the nurses’ office and not leaving. After this, they had said that they had asked all their questions, and received both my answers and those of the staff, and they were to leave and let me know. 
I was accepted. 
A nurse came to my room and told me to pack my stuff and we would head over in the unit minibus.
When we arrived, we parked outside. The nurse and I lifted my stuff that became increasingly hard to carry, as we couldn’t find the ward. Eventually after knocking on some doors, a nurse who answered directed us to a five or ten minute walk. We had to go back to the minibus and drive the rest of the way to the ward. 
A nurse was impatiently waiting inside, keen to see me. She was to be my Primary nurse, and initially I was her only patient. 
I brought all my stuff in and packed it in my room. 
The room was austere with a pale shade of paint on the walls. 
It was a reasonable sized room – but smaller than in a hostel. The regulations for hostels were that you had to have a certain amount of floor area per room but for a slightly larger room you could have two patients in it – hence you always had two patients in every room. But this did not apply to hospital.
The other patients seemed to have been having lunch during the time I readied my room, which I had thus missed. 
I had, however, been saved some by my Primary nurse. 
I would get to know and like her as such, as I was at this time – because as my mother says I was still ill – capable of liking anyone on a personal level. 
After lunch, the nurse asked me to go into a room off the main corridor to see the doctor. Also, at the conference were my Primary nurse and a few others who introduced themselves as psychologists or care managers and other medical persons.
 I tried at this meeting to create a good impression. For example, I adjusted my body language as being less confrontational.
My mother says that this is my chance to improve anything I might want and my father says that this is my future and my hope of getting anything.
The nurses had seemed to want to get to know me a bit when I was first there. 
Whilst the ward had accepted me, the nurse told me they had had found difficulty in filling the places on the ward, which now was still half-empty. 
My new unit had a business premise whilst still within the National Health Service of seeking ‘clients’ by marketing for them to be sent there, and being paid for it by other parts of the health service. The unit manager was a former nurse who the hospital had persuaded to go into being a ward manager. As a specialized unit, they could charge more. The ward manager had an office and a secretary on the unit with a desk, files and computer the patients could look in on – though they kept the shutters up sometimes and she did not seem to be there much after a while. 
They told me that their business plan was not to provide a rubbish bin for unwanted or unpopular patients, but that the ward would help you.
Now, I was on a new unit with whatever that was to bring. 
I felt my appearance was of someone who looked a bit odd or gruff. 
My Primary nurse on the new unit was, she felt, in a prestigious and desirable position. This unit was a new unit, with a new way of doing things, and her involvement would boost her nursing career. 
As my Primary nurse – not only was she my only nurse but also, I was her only patient. The next day I was to meet the doctor. And give myself a better impression by not appearing so ill, as I thought. Although my Primary nurse saw this, and said it was rubbish, as everyone knew I was a sick patient, there to get better, and the doctor would know if I were ill, anyway. 
I had been playing chess with one of the patients, and my nurse wanted a game with me. I had quietly talked about chess and the like as I played. After losing at chess, she suggested a game of draughts with her winning and looking chuffed. 
She regarded herself as a non-chess player, but good at drafts.
A few days later, she had come out, and asked me if I wanted another game of draughts, and for some time, we played games of drafts every afternoon. 
After a while, we would not play in silence but would exchange some banter although absorbed in all the possibilities open to us of the game. 
One of the things I talked about was chess but we talked about other things as well such as poetry.
During a game of Pool, I had told her of my poetry and after finishing our game had read it to her.
After our first meeting, when she wanted to talk to me just a little now we had some things about which we could talk. 
The improvement to my social skills gave me a lot of pleasure. As I was able to get pleasure, as such was possible from a small smattering of conversation I had learned to say. And this made possible in turn from a few books and a TV the hospital let me have in my room from home. Also, made possible from my willingness to sit in front of the television for a few hours, or read for even a few minutes. And be motivated by seeing my nurse.
The word ‘nurse’ does apply to your relationship. 
They were nurses, and though they developed a ‘rapport’ – a deliberate idea in nursing, they were not your mate ever. As I talked to them, I felt I could have some time with them, but I now I realize they were only interested in my illness.
They did not answer all my questions but I answered all of theirs and learned nothing about them. They were merely trying to find out what your mental condition was, which they would write down in your notes.
During some of these conversations, they would tell me to clean my room but I did not always want to.
 I found out years later that the state of your room, your own state of cleanliness and if you slept well were important to whether they discharged you or not. For an untidy room could mean you stayed in hospital.
The nurses did not always remind you of this. And that I could have stayed for a shorter time than necessary was a bugbear with me. Although, if I had taken my medication when I was first in hospital, they could have released me even then.
How had I spent most of my time before now? I had spent it in bed. I was tired from nightly awakenings and not seeing the day in, and wanted something other than a bed. Thus, I would say that I was plagued during my waking hours with sickness and boredom and not living actively or properly, and I would say that this was not a fault of the medication, which I had incorrectly blamed.
To go to bed at a reasonable time and turn out the light as my mother would say ‘normal people all do’ was completely right. 
It was not just that I was not asleep at the right times but that I was just not a nice person to know. 
I was immature; silly; unable to take a hint or to leave someone or the conversation alone, and was banal. 
Only from my perspective was the day gone.
The way I would speak, is as someone who cannot just say something without someone perhaps finding my manner offensive. 
This may be for a variety of reasons such as, mental, intellectual or moral shallowness or offensive physical manners of the way I spoke. 
No one is immune to anger and everyone was very tolerant. Probably, because they knew I had mental health problems. If they had some life to live, where they did not give time to me, then they almost certainly did, because I was the one who had problems and not them. But they had a job, a profession, and they came to work because they were nurses or had other jobs and not just to help me.
Initially to my dismay, they did not allow me out. But then they made the decision that the benefits of my going out outweighed any disadvantages. 
I would take my medication that they gave to me. And that was the extent of my ‘work’. I could not hope to have a job of any kind, as even if I could turn up at the right time, they would soon fire me for social inaptness. And this would be because nobody wants that sort of thing.
The day was gone most days by the time I woke up, and if it wasn’t I had usually been up all night and would be de-motivated as the day progressed. I would watch the day nurses come on to break up the day and then perhaps retreat to my unmade bed and then would try to sleep. My bed was not wanted but for sleep. And neither was my bed comfortable, having slept in it for so many hours. Nor did I sleep but for necessity. It was as the saying, ‘as you make your bed, so must you lie in it’. 
I did occasionally pick up a book from the shelf on the ward, and succeeded in reading one or two. Other than that, I did little other than some OT when I felt like going.
In any case, later that afternoon, my nurse came out of the ward office and wanted to speak to me.
She asked me about some things from my notes. 
On one occasion as I had been speaking, I had spoken about something I had seen on TV and she had listened tenuously and then left the room.
Later, I asked another nurse about this, and she said it was obvious what the TV show told you and had shown you and they intended to tell you what I had thought. 
So I started some sort of discussion I thought was better and less observational, and then as she seemed to lose interest or be thinking of something she was about to say, I suddenly said, “And another thing I was sort of thinking just as I sat here was ...” 
She listened, and then said that I was to come with her and she was going to give me a tablet, as the doctor had written me up for it and she would give it to me now. I did not want to take the PRN. But as I asked something as to whether this would work, she had opened my hand, put the tablet in it and given me a beaker of water to wash it down. I had tried to say something more, becoming upset. The nurse told me to go to my room and I reluctantly followed this suggestion. 
In my room after about half an hour the morose thoughts went. And I went to the ward to say that to her. Also, that as my thoughts were better, the medication must have cleared up some abnormal thought pattern. She ignored me and asked me to go to my room again. But I refused. The nurses gathered round me, as I seemed to shout. And then seeing the look of almost disgust on the nurses’ faces that I should lose my temper, had offered to go back in my room. 
As just behind me she said, “And don’t come out.”
When the Night Staff had come on for their shift, I had come sheepishly out and joined the queue for medication. The nurses treated anything like my outburst as very serious.
During a game of Pool some months later, I had told her of one of my new departures in poetry and after finishing our game had read it to her. 
After I had done this, she said, “You’ve got a good mind.”
And when I pressed her further, for what she thought of the poem, she had ended the conversation and then left the room. 
We developed from our first meeting, when she wanted to talk just a little ‘till now, when we had some things that we could talk about. 
In the end, I was to outstay her on the ward and got a new nurse. He would be male and very different. 
Chapter 5, You Have to Start Somewhere
First, I would wish to give more of the new unit here. 
There was no OT on the ward, and they did not allow me off it to go to the main OT. We were, however, to get some of our own. The new OT asked the patients what the patients wanted to do for OT. She joked with the nurses that patients had told her all the OT they had done in years in 15 minutes of chat. I therefore tried to avoid this mistake myself, but found I wanted to tell her so that I could improve my position. Most did the same, and I felt were very tolerant when the OT laughed at them, as someone had said she did.
Some said they had been to art groups. For a long time in hospital I never heard of any effort to teach art – nobody would elaborate as to why the OT put out paints and felt tip pens when no patients had even the smallest talent in art. Literally, all they could do was draw a house with squares for the windows and an oblong for the door.
I tried to tell the OT about the sort of OT I wanted. Something I said I liked was groups everyone could join in and as well, one to one sessions. When I gave my views about there being no art teaching, and almost all patients remarkably poor at art, she told me to shut up about anything to do with art. So this was the planet she was on – planet OT. Here appearances were important but anyone who complained they had learned nothing or showed themselves up talking about something new to them was ostracized. Or so I thought. And she said nothing different.
For the moment, an enclosed garden out of the back door of the ward had some chairs and tables so we could use the garden more. 
The grass beyond the large fence had the occasional fox and somebody picking blackberries – actually a relative allowed out with the patient who was a young girl in her twenties. She had blackcurrant juice dribbling over her chin and gulped down the blackberries like something out of a children’s novel. As she did this her old relative put a few in a basket almost tearful that these should be the circumstances. But the nurse told me, she had probably murdered someone to be here. The hospital planted blackberry bushes for such visits. They did not allow other patients to pick them, as the hospital had not planted enough blackberries for everyone to pick them. 
I would now as I was in the garden pass small conversations with the nurses. They also spent time in the garden relaxing, looking at the garden, and enjoying the sunshine.
Some of the nursing assistants had degrees and patients would ask them about their degrees. The nurses were soon to be qualified with nursing degrees as had the OT's a degree qualification already. The psychologist also had degrees or higher qualifications than degrees like masters. I suggested to the psychologist that the staff even doing menial jobs had higher level of qualifications than the patients did. He said that education levels did not mean much – not anything – as it did not affect social skills or conversations you had. You could know just as much to talk without a degree. 
“The only ones whose qualifications were important were anyone with a medical qualification,” he said, “because this is a hospital and your well-being is in their hands.” 
He declined to say why someone with a degree would work as a nursing assistant. Except that, it did not require any intelligence. And neither did they make any decisions. Nor could he see why they would otherwise want jobs that did need their qualifications and skills elsewhere.
I had met a few of these nursing assistants and they had welcomed questions on their subject. In the end, they decided amongst themselves that it was not appropriate to talk about their degrees. A nurse said the patients could talk to the new nursing assistants. They were not as educated but she said they were quite clever persons. 
The college educated nursing assistants found their decision had an unexpected effect. Some patients they had spoken to at length, now had nothing to say to them. The residents had no hobbies and did not read the paper or watch TV, but had been able to talk to them when they just had to ask questions. Many of these nursing assistants now left, for this and other reasons. And they replaced them by unemployed men. Some of whom went to the gym and read nursing magazines on the ward and were obviously pleased that they had a job. They were very sensitive about this for some time. 
As far as my treatment, I had my injection changed to a tablet, which the doctor said was better medication. 
To start with, said a nurse, ‘other than getting better’ there is little to do. There was no OT for some months but after that, they had a very helpful programme. 
Though they did not allow me home to visit my parents, my parents came to visit me – dear old mum and dad. 
I began having bad thoughts to do with my parents about things going back to when I first went into hospital. This was going right back to my earliest days in the psychiatric system and I had not had something like this for some years. 
At times, I thought my parents need not have called a doctor at first – perhaps they wouldn’t have if they knew where it would lead. What they did to start with was to make a slightly problem child, who was not in any distress, go to see a psychiatrist ‘who could help’. And they used threats and emotional blackmail. That is help with nothing – try helping with years away from anything for someone’s good intentions. Didn’t they think anyone had heard of a psychiatrist, and knew they didn’t want to see one? Nor did they listen when he said that nothing was wrong, nor did he want his father to threaten him, nor could he stand his mother crying enormous self-congratulatory tears for no good reason other than she wanted to. If you want to see someone driven by an obsessive idea, then look no further than my parents. Of course, I am not privy to know what they actually said, because they never thought to tell me anything other than their decisions. Nor would they have locked me up, for so long, if my parents had agreed to have me at home when I asked to leave hospital. Though they said only the doctor could keep me in hospital, I didn’t really believe them.
When I mentioned all this to mum, she told me that hospitals were not jails. When I said that I didn’t want to be in one anyway, she replied, “No one wants to be here – everyone is here for a reason just like you.” 
“No there not,” I said, “they’ve committed grave criminal offences to be here as long as me.” 
“So,” she had mockingly screamed, and added, “they are like you – they are ill – can’t you understand that – they have to go somewhere and who are you to complain – do you think anyone would look after you if it wasn’t for us or the system we can put you in.” She screwed her face up and almost spat from her lips but then she gave the impression of crying. Her behaviour had mentally exhausted me, so I asked her why she was upset as I always did. I could never see why. 
When I am ill, I think things more than once and sometimes for a few days and then not again.
Like my spaceships.
It is as if I am on Earth as a spaceman, and by applying slightly different methods and tools of thought and philosophy, I have seen things, which are so basic and obvious that I cannot take seriously, the things they say around me. 
When I tell of these facts, some do not believe me, but I only have to pay heed to get on and not talk about them, for society to accept me. 
Really, I know no one I meet really knows what he or she’s talking about but it will do to let him or her believe it, so long as I have his or her company. However, I am also as well as being a spaceman an Earth man, and cannot as such bring all I have discovered in space to bear on everyday life. And sometimes, I accept the mundane and other explanations that anyone gives me. But I demur from telling them what I can see is correct as it only gets me threatened or they become upset. Why does nobody else I think, such as scientists for instance, know this science? Now my mum has told me that I am not a scientist so I don’t know. Now, I doubt myself that I could ever have seen it. 
Why should this be? Perhaps I’ll just have to fit in. And speak to doctors because they are there to help you. And also being able to talk to whom you might meet normally is important to leaving hospital.
This is more important – the world can do without my discoveries. 
I also think things about other things to do with spaceships at times now. I am on my spaceship, another space ship is coming in to dock, and I am responsible that the docking is safe.
However, I got up early out of my space bed to look at the stars through a portal on the spaceship. And now I’m feeling tired, as the docking procedure is taking longer than I thought and I begin to lose concentration and make mistakes. Eventually, I let the thing come in without as much control as I would like and hope for the best. But there is a crash, and now I need to go through a whole load more things before the astronauts can come on board. This will take me most of the rest of the next week to think how they might be rescued. Except that it bothers me as, I do not know if I will be able to rescue them all, though eventually I do. 
Then some other thought comes into my head. Being trapped somewhere in some sort of a maze but with a story as to how I am in such a fix. 
Really, I am quite well in many ways, but they say I definitely need to be in hospital.
I take my medication regularly as they ask me; am able to shop for myself; clean my room, and perhaps look for a job if there were any. Really, what I need is a skill and then I would be employable but my mother thinks you don’t need to do a course. And there are still unskilled jobs that need doing.
I could obtain a skill, if I could pay for a course I told them. But I need the money to pay for the course. But my mother flatly refused to put me on one. 
If I could do a short course, I’m sure of passing I told them because they are not that difficult. And they actually need those skills, which they will not teach you if you start work without them. They teach you more on the job once you have the basics. 
My mother made out that I was somehow lying and that I ‘didn’t know’.
They sent me back to hospital and I have to stay for assessment for at least another six months. After that, I have another six months whilst the plan is for me to leave to go onto somewhere else other than my parents’ house. 
The nurse says that my parents have other things to do. 
“Plenty of other children who are 20 years old live with their parents,” I say but she looks at me blankly.
They say that I need to go somewhere where I can have the care that they say I deserve.
But I don’t want to now, I’ve had enough and I blame the system for taking so much time and not caring how much time it takes. 
Nobody understands what I’m saying. 
Also says my mother, hundreds of thousands of people are being treated like me and don’t object to being in hospital. 
Then, I would think as to the cost of all this. And wonder why I never hear about the total cost in the paper. Years later, I read the cost. It is a lot and more in lost taxes.
When I want to leave, they say that I do not have friends, cannot make friends, cannot hold a normal conversation or hold down but the simplest job. And I need support or supervision. Also, I could not run my own affairs, let alone anyone else’s and I have to accept this all as part of my illness. Despite what I’ve heard about schizophrenics in newspaper articles as being artists and highly talented this is not what I’m told now. 
To talk about it at all with the nurses feels like an imposition. Perhaps, some of the other things the articles say about doing nothing all day or poor social skills might make more sense. 
Some of the nurses say what I have is an illness like any other and I am here to be treated.
Years ago, they said they did not have the drugs to treat schizophrenia and that they find new drugs all the time – I have to hope. 
One nurse told me resignedly that I have to put up with all that goes on in hospital.
A male nurse said that some hospitals are an awful lot worse than this. So be grateful you are not there. 
“I do get pleasure from simple things,” I told my mother “such as a pleasant afternoon…”
“That sounds pathetic,” exclaimed my mother, “you used to do so much, go to the library and all sorts of things.”
“Yes, I haven’t been recently, I don’t know why I haven’t, perhaps I should go again.”
Mum nodded and said no more that day.
I began going to the library in the hospital. The librarian nodded and grinned at me as I came in, and over a time, I developed a sort of rapport with her. 
I read for the first time in a few years. 
During school, I had really worked too hard doing stuff that I feel is irrelevant to me now. 
What was the expression I could recall now as I had one of my chats with the librarian, ‘All work and no play make Jack a dull boy’?
I took a little delight in remembering something from the past so appropriate to me now.
When I got back to the ward, the nurse said matter-of-factly that I was not to go to the library anymore as the librarian objected to the way I spoke to her.
I was shocked, upset, and said the library meant everything to me. 
They actually took what I said into consideration though I did not expect them to. 
They told me I could go back, if I did not speak to the librarian.
About this time, I began complaining to nurses and nursing assistants that some older patients were vegetables.
To start with, they ignored me and then one exclaimed as to whether I had just noticed they were.
“Do you believe it won’t happen to you?” she said. “They were all like you once.”
Shocked I asked her how I could prevent it. 
“You need to leave here,” she said quietly.
“Care in the community?” I asked. 
But she did not reply.
 I would believe that it wouldn’t happen to me because now I feel good. And even from my trips to the gym physically strong. 
One older patient said the reason was that the medication made you stupid and others all said the same thing. For some reason, I believed them. A nurse told me not to say that medication made you stupid. But when I asked her why so many said it, she walked away.   
One nurse said, the reason they were as they were, was the first drugs for schizophrenia were not so good. 
“I’ve been on some of the first drugs,” I said, but she walked away without answering further.
When I said that I had had the same drugs for many years without being tried on the newest ones, I was told that I was well and they tried patients on the oldest drugs first as they were cheaper. One nurse said that I did not have the symptoms for the new drugs and when I asked him how mine were different for the same illness, he asked me to leave. Another nurse explained that what he meant was that I did not have the symptoms now because the medication controlled them in me but did not work so well for other patients who still had them. This was what he said he had meant exasperated.
At another time, I read that the medication came from a drug that they used to stop mental distress before an operation. 
“What is the difference in the brain between a mentally ill person and a normal person?” I asked the doctor.
“There is no difference. The medication works the same for both and in the same place, the same way and no different. 
“So the medication is actually a sedative.”
He did not answer immediately and looked somewhat annoyed.
“What did you think it was?” he said exasperated, but left when I asked for more explanation.
Why didn’t they tell me this before? If I had known that, it had just such an effect I would have avoided years of worrying about it. The explanations they gave me, perhaps, said no more than that, the medication helped you because you were ill, but something about it made me worry. I could have avoided years of concern. 
However, I have more. The tablets cause unwanted effects that are actually names of recognizable disabilities.
But this is because no drug is perfect, and you can live a long life before this affects you. How can there be any point to being in hospital in the meantime. Also, you may have your medication adjusted now so you only take a small dose. The above mainly affects those on higher doses who are older they told me. However, that did not stop me being on a high dose for years.
Medication may cause slight problems now such as stiffness; shaking hands or too much saliva but you can take side effect tablets.
Wanting to pace around and gradual deterioration of mental and motor control is caused by agitation generally and lack of exercise. But seeing the unwanted effects – the nurse allowed me to look at what the drug book said – also worried me. Some were, however, only after a long time on the drugs.
Now in the evening I will watch the TV and find it a perfectly pleasant thing to do and a way of spending my time. As a cooling wind gets up through the open doors to the garden and the scent of flowers in the grounds comes to me, I will perhaps feel that the world is all right for I am not in distress or pain. And getting the medical treatment I need.
Perhaps really, what I think is abnormal for anyone to think. 
Of course, what I had thought when I was ill had been worse for I was distressed and so on and definitely not sane I would say. 
A nurse says that it’s normal to have such an odd thought, as that you’re living in anarchy for example, quite common he had said. I wanted to ask more and said how bad what I thought was but he had said that that was not so bad – “nothing really” was his comment. He had thought my worries unfounded. And he was willing to hear no more as he had answered any question. He thought that either I went onto something else or didn’t. 
This aside, I had at the new unit screamed in my room – loud, hard, bad screams – I had screamed for all my worth.
On one occasion, the Sister asked me if there was anything that she could do…anything at all…would I like some medication…what else…I’m asking you to tell me…I don’t know what I can do for you.
I did not know what to suggest.
The door had shut and she was gone. 
I never spoke to her again, except once, when she had asked me when I was going. 
I had said I was waiting for this and that, but she didn’t seem to be able to understand that I could not leave although I would want to. 
However, this was not going to happen, as I had not the power in my own situation but something still seemed to be missing here. 
They locked the door and nothing would persuade anyone to open it. 
Afterward perhaps, I thought I had been able to leave all along but that someone had not told me I could do so. 
My mother perhaps cried over the phone, and said she didn’t want to see me again until I was well in her eyes. 
Well, in any case, if someone was going to listen to me, they would already have done so, but hadn’t. 
If I was well, I must be able to leave. 
Nor was this up to me.
The Sister said my ‘bad thoughts’ that I would have described as being my illness for most of the time weren’t – and she knew because she was trained – actually mental illness. 
I was, she said, angry with my parents and they would arrange ‘family therapy’.
We sat in a room with two OT's for a few weeks whilst the therapist read an article about schizophrenia. It had descriptions of twin studies, medication or a ‘wonder drug’ being available for the first time in the 50s. And she said how this had drastically improved patients’ lives. It had helped both for what was in their mind and the physical conditions they were in. 
For example, they were not now strapped to commodes for 24 hours a day as they had been in the past. Nor did they have straightjackets any more, nor padded cells. Some patients even, some who had not said a word for 20 years had spoken. And after a time, they realized that patients did not need to be in hospital at all, as they could function on their medication and hold down jobs. The therapist looked up and we all nodded. Really, my parents and I were all a bit tearful if anything. I no longer felt angry with my parents and stopped shouting in my room. An effect of this was that I did more activities than before. Probably this is because I was more relaxed. Or more relaxed, at least during periods, when previously I would have been working up a rage if not actually in one.
If you are insane, they can put you on a section, for you to receive the treatment you ‘deserve’ as the leaflet informing you about your section says. 
But if you are not ill because my symptoms are as they tell me now, not illnesses, then I don’t need to be here and I can leave. However, I was told to shut up about that as the nurses would become ‘suspicious’ if I said that – whatever that was supposed to mean, and the person who said so, wouldn’t tell me.
One doctor said the fact I was in front of her in a mental hospital showed that I should be here.
Here I was in a mental hospital with nothing wrong with me and my medical notes must explain that. I had not wanted to be here, had answered all their questions truthfully, explained what my bad thoughts were many times, and nobody had picked up that they weren’t mental illness. If they had done, they hadn’t told me. The other alternative is that they hadn’t understood what I said and merely added to my notes, whilst leaving the doctor or the nurses to decipher what I was saying to some other time.
But that was in the end all part of being in a mental hospital – nobody was interested in doing anything fast, but was interested for the most part in keeping your notes up to date. 
What now, then? 
“There’s your books,” said mum, “and not many sane persons read as much as you – you really are quite different and have perhaps something to offer.”
Whilst here you can do a few things like watch TV and the hospital feeds you and gives you a bed but now it is time to leave. 
Just perhaps sit back and take it all in. All what you could do is anything at all, and the world is open to you now you know you are not ill. 
But nurses I developed a rapport with, assured me I was ill and you have to believe them.
Why would they provide all this? It is only for you to get better. And your needs are catered for you and given to you. You have to make use of it whilst you can. Until you can go back into the normal world by proving you can actually do this. 
On the ward, I was oblivious to those around me and the fact they were ill because as they said I was ill also. 
Who would have put up with such behaviour as mine, but for the nurses seeing it as a sign of illness? 
Although I told them, for example, that I was not getting angry with anyone, my reactions could be misinterpreted and yet nothing in all that time happened to me.
Also, they would offer you medication. My outbursts would stop, as I would think, by the cause being taken away – namely if I was not having florid symptoms of mental illness. 
Sometimes when I refused oral medication, they had injected me. When I came to I would be perfectly calm and as I had seen other people, and not a bit resentful in any way. However, they used the seclusion room when the patient was a continuing threat. If a patient hit someone but was calm afterward, the nurses did not send him or her there. An exception was if you attacked a member of staff, when they would inject you and shove you in there.
If it was just an argument about finishing cigarettes or keeping lighters at bedtime, then the nurses still injected you and sent you to the seclusion room. They gave up to four injections for each person. Nobody bothered asking afterward what the injections were. 
Much later, I met a nurse who said that they explained the injection given to all the patients and he disbelieved this story. In fact, he was quite nasty about it.
Once, a psychiatrist told me a bit about my drugs. She said what the test dose was, the maximum safe dose was and what the medium dose was. The psychiatrist said that now I knew a lot about my drug, that they had discussed whether you should know more, and now we’ve told you. I did not feel I knew anything more when they said that but sometime after that, I felt it helpful to know if I was on a high dose or low dose. A high dose meant you probably didn’t need any more, a low dose that they might alleviate your symptoms easily by giving you a bit more if you became ill. To think this may have been wrong and does not understand the complexities but if you are told something you have to store it and do something with it.
The psychiatrists cringed when I said this was my understanding. And she held this ‘cringe’ to the desired dramatic effect and pleasure of the others present in my case conference. 
The doctor also said that I had been getting on much better lately and someone had said I could go to college.
“What was it?” she had about the course I wanted to do, which brought much laughter from the conference room. 
And more again when she said, “Do they still do basic number, oh dear, oh dear, how are we going to tell the college.”
A nurse suggested I should study by myself, with such books as might be available to me.
I could always change what I studied; I thought when I reasoned this affair. And I could change half way through or when I felt like it, or to have a rest. 
However, later the nurse said, I could do a course.
When we had started class, I felt ill at the start of the lesson, as I sensed some pressure combined with the dêjà vu of being in class again. But, as I looked through my notes in the break, and talked to the other students, the amount of learning did not seem so much.
The teacher was friendly enough, and told us about her plan for the year ahead. I attended regularly, and took notes in class, and the handouts they gave you, and listened in lessons. But I occasionally lost concentration though not too seriously, not so that too many noticed. However, some of this loss of concentration I had some strange thought. And some other students noticed me. I say this because that was how these lapses started – by thinking an odd thought. The teacher though, if she might have noticed didn’t mention it to me. Really, she knew mentally ill persons applied to class and trusted them not to show themselves up. Anyway, after nearly finishing the course I had stopped going. The playing up was in hand, but the class was a long way and I now didn’t have the lift I was promised. I might have been able to finish the class but didn’t stick with it. I couldn’t afford to buy the recommended books so I was caught out when asked questions. I had passed an odd test or two, but felt I had not read about it as in depth as I was supposed to for the exam. But in fact, I could probably have passed. 
I had gone back a few years later and had done or rather started a class in another subject.
In class, we would go to a lecture theater. There was a big window on one side of the lecture hall. And I had on my last one or two lessons looked out at the town, as I could see the lights through the window as I sat on the lecture bench. I could not believe that I was actually looking out of the window, as a child might look out the window at school. This was horrendous in a way. And I had to tell the teacher when he asked me why I was looking out of the window like that, about the medication. Or at least I thought I did – my memory runs a little cold at this – as it was his lesson; his other students, and everyone’s wish that they were doing a worthwhile course. Otherwise, it was nothing but entirely negative and not wanted – not by anyone. 
A girl at the back of the class had spoken to me, and I was able to have a long chat with her on many occasions. But then one day, I had felt that I must pay attention to the lesson – that this was suddenly important, and that I must concentrate on it and not on the girl. Thus, I lost a chance at some sorely lacking experience of the opposite sex. Such as attractive girls who had taken an interest in me when I had my youth. And this I would miss later – not to have had more relationships in my youth. 
However, something was not quite right as I could not again concentrate in class and was wasting my time. I would often be late for lessons and then would blithely apologize for being late as I entered the lesson. We would break at half time and I would not be able to think of anything to say. This was because I never spoke to anyone where I lived, as nobody lived there who could actually speak. 
My taste for life so jaded had become. 
One thing I did think was to go to a Pub I used to frequent when I was 18. It was barely 20 minutes’ walk away from the college. Here I might meet some of my old friends down for a midweek drink. 
I left the college building and went down to the Pub complete with my folder and loose paper. 
I told one girl that I was doing science at college but could tell her precisely nothing about it, as I had not revised my class work. 
In the end when she saw that I was going here, when my lessons were not completed she didn’t want to see me in the Pub until later. 
I had ignored her advice and lost her as anyone else I lost who was prepared to give me a chance.
Looking back, I would regard myself then as well, if for no other reason than I was reasonably physically fit – literally I felt I had a better heart and could be emotionally challenged and also mentally really. 
But I will take the reader back to my time now under treatment in the new unit. It was in this unit where I hoped to solve my problems. 
Now I liked the unit as the unit met my social needs. 
This was except on one or two occasions when they put me in an area, which was if you were violent. 
They put you here with or without being in the seclusion room beforehand. 
The violence on my part was no more than a push but it was enough for them to put me in an arm lock and take me to this area. And now this meant my life would not to be quite the same.
In this area, the furniture was plastic and foam. A music center could play CD's, etc. but was on a continuous loop for any CD you chose and they did not like changing it. You had to ask the nurses to switch on the TV, as well to ask them to change the channels. 
The nursing assistant pointed out something on the table. 
I went over and saw it was a mail order catalogue. 
I avidly read as I sensed that I was supposed to do, and although they must have known it was an act, it was expected. The man who had left some time before came back in taking a good look at my continued interest, which he had come back to see. 
He politely asked me what I wanted for dinner. When it came, they served it with a plastic knife and fork. 
It was pointed out to me it was bedtime; the TV and radio were turned off; and on my bed I slept until morning. 
After staying there a few days, they transferred me back to the main ward. 
The next time for a similar thing, they left me with two nurses, one male, and one female. And this time rather than going to a day room was left sitting on a plastic chair in the middle of the corridor. After a while, they had come out and asked me to make up my bed with two sheets on my bed only and no blanket. And then it was back to the chair again in the middle of the corridor. They went into the medical room and spoke quietly and intensely to each other for hours. 
Inside the medical room, I could just glimpse a table or shelf where the female of the two nurses had sat before the door shut and any view was gone for good. 
The male nurse was married as was the female nurse but she was not his wife. They seemed to be testing each other in some way. The conversation and such was very slow – slower than on the other part of the ward – even when they were on it. I was grateful they did not check on me.
Thus, they had stayed until five, which was it seemed when their day ended. These nurses did not work shifts, another nurse said, because they had asked not to. When the ward had phoned down to ask what I had wanted for dinner they had said that I didn’t get one. Fortunately, a kind night nurse, when I said I was hungry, had given me some bread and margarine.
The next morning, I went back onto the main ward. This was because they wanted the two nurses who would have to be with me in this area, to make up the numbers on the main ward. The nurse said this to me who was in charge that day. This was especially as she could find in my notes no mention of violence. If something else might have happened, then it doesn’t bare thinking about. 
I had come back in time for a cup of tea, so it all seemed right. 
To go out into the garden, or to sit in the sun on the ward, was quite pleasant and I idly watched time pass on the ward. 
Occasionally, a patient would sit near to another patient and a conversation would start up. 
It seemed to me that the patients – a lot of them repeated the same things – the same stories etc., word for word. 
I began to find this unsatisfactory and when it happened for the nth time, I wanted to decide what to do, as I hadn’t always had this. 
What was it I thought? My mind fancied, as the thought of it seemed to encourage, that I had emotional baggage that I had to dump before I could continue. I thought as to what it would be this baggage and determined that the nurses would notice and would speak to me about it one day but that never happened. 
Next time, I thought how spurred on by some second wind of finding some fact or thought interesting I would explain my thought to a nurse. In doing this, I would ask questions etc. of or about the topic concerned. 
It annoyed me now, when I got my questions given back to me for me to answer. I rather guessed the answer to my own question, when in fact I had wanted a more knowledgeable one or even a factual one. 
This upset me, but then it occurred to me that nurses perhaps didn’t know all the answers. This thought relieved ones that were more disagreeable. Having told someone my thought, I reasoned I could not continue to think it, or gain from it, by myself, because I had answered it already however badly.
There was a library in the hospital and the nurse said I should go. 
I had decided to get some books on what I was thinking. 
When I got to the library, the library did not have many recent books. Most were quite old. But I could also have other books from home as I could keep them safe. 
Sometimes, I worry I cannot justify spending money from the dole. Social security is keeping me alive in my view, as you can do nothing without money. 
But I do not like the attitude, or rather don’t find it useful, that I should not venture forth from my pit until such as good brown notes from a job have entered into my pockets, or that I have new clothes. 
Sometimes, I study and often I feel I could do more – ‘Use it or lose it’ they say.
I did think that a book could tell you more and better than a person, when I realized I had few to whom I could talk. But then, I thought that actually what I needed, was social contact as a human being – and for me to discuss something.
However, nurses who checked the rooms were reproachful when I did read my book. I decided that they had to work and couldn’t or didn’t have the time to read.
Otherwise, it might be that the nurses were checking to see if I was still alive. And not what page of the latest novel I was on. 
About this time, however, they introduced Occupational Therapy to the ward. And whilst I felt that, it was still inappropriate to read a book on the ward a daily paper had appeared. This was ‘all right’ and things generally began to improve. 
To start with, the new head of OT on the ward discussed what we wanted to do. 
She dealt with any qualms by the staff with their event-less shifts.
Our first session came and went well.
The nurse suggested that I go to the main OT department.
The art room over at the main OT was as usual a large room with tables and drawing materials. Patients were busy doing or preparing their art for the day. I asked what I should do and was shown some magazines to use as inspiration. The OT gave me a book on art, as I said that I did not know how to use the materials.
The art class teacher, if you can call her that, was a pretty young girl and I instantly liked her. 
As we cleared up I began talking to her and to my intentions, which she guessed, she said that she had a boyfriend. 
In other sessions, the idea occurred to me that most of the clients seemed better than on the wards but she said she did not know about what I was talking. 
The advantage of art sessions was that you could try to behave normally as far as was possible. Doing some art that was a reasonable standard for any art lesson, helped this no end.
One thing was art therapy, by an art therapist.
When I started, I must have seemed very angry but the therapist directed me away from these angry and hostile thoughts, or at least allowed me to get them off my chest.
Also about this time, I was beginning going out to lunch with one of either of the two OT assistants. 
They were female and good company. As I talked to them, my conversation improved tremendously and became pleasanter.
I started pottery. I went along on many bright mornings and made a pot. My work was quite good, she said, and she even gave me high quality clay to work with. I felt grateful for the opportunity to use the clay, but she said I deserved it. 
Chapter 6, The Next, Not the Last Part 
Someone had come to see me for a short time before and after my case conference, and offered me a place at their home. 
I said that I did not want to visit, as I would prefer to find out when I went there. 
They took me in the hospital minibus with the nurse.
The house was big, and in a leafy residential street and looked like any of the other houses. A table in the hall had a visitor’s book on it, and some forms for residents if they wanted to complain.
The residential home carer said, they would see us after lunch, as nurses were busy in the kitchen. 
I went with the nurse down to the shops and bought something to read, as I was bored. 
When I got back, the nurse went to find some staff, and left me at the chair and table in the hall.
I talked to some of the other residents. There is here a couple. They say that if they have sex the nurses just tell them off. There is another girl keen to speak to me, and it helps to pass the time. They mainly though talk about being ‘in prison’ and ‘not being ill’ and ‘suffering terribly’ and this ‘from injections’. I could not see anything much wrong with their situation myself, and took this as being a reaction against their situation being mental patients. Later, I was to find that all of them, if they didn’t feel well would accept medication, or indeed ask for it. They did however, have short memories. 
The nurse showed me my room.
I unpacked my stuff in the quite tastefully furnished room, with a bed and bedside cabinet, wardrobe and chest of drawers. 
And then, I had supper, which consisted of sandwiches and tea. 
I had my own room where I was able to have my things, keep them safe, and shut my door against being ill or in hospital. 
I imagined that I was actually outside in some home of my own, but probably the house was a bit different to live in than if it had been any usual type of abode.
You could say to a nurse or care assistant, something you were thinking about, but this could stress you more. Did something you said make normal sense, when for example, you talked about the disturbing images you had. Some of the imagery was frankly embarrassing, such as wanting to be some sort of a do-gooder, when I had been in hospital for so long. Or I was still talking about something that is not an issue for anyone normal. This is because nurses have other things in their lives. I felt peeved that I had said it and the nurses had written it all down in my notes. 
A relative said, “What you had was an illness, it’s tragic, nobody – not the doctors, not anyone you know, and never your parents could ever wish this on anyone, least of all you. Mental hospitals exist for people like you so that you have some chance in life. Now you can wish all you want that you are not ill, and your parents would give anything for you, to have and lead a normal happy life, and not be the person you are now. Because we can see how tragic it is, because we knew you before you were ill. But there is nothing anyone can do or could have ever done, except send you to hospital, and for you to be just as you are now.”
Do I believe this – perhaps? But sometimes I wished they could have just hurried it up a bit, so I left earlier. And there hadn’t been some suggestions of additional injections as punishment. As well as having some explanations, such as about the medication, sooner. It seems a bit much to have been in hospital 20 years when there was not so much wrong with you. There was not so much wrong with you that you couldn’t, if offered a hope of leaving hospital, start by doing things for yourself. Such as making an effort to clean your room, bath more regularly, and do OT. Or do your own OT, as the nurses called reading from the library or watching the matinee. And then, it is quite likely the hospital would discharge you.
It comes late and the nurses tell us that it is bedtime and we have to go to bed. 
At the shop, I had bought a notepad, and now wrote a poem or two before bed.
When I woke in the morning, I had slept so well, I woke an hour earlier than in hospital. 
It was all useless, I thought then however – my life to do with mental illness. 
I was thinking this, as I went up again to my room after breakfast. And I looked at my scribbling of the night before. Something, I now saw, as something that might not be worth the time I had spent on them for all they were any good. 
I was a bit bored. But I couldn’t help myself after doing so little. 
Yet short of time, short of a lifetime’s time, to do anything. 
***THE END***
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