And, well, I was quite some weeks ill before I got taken to hospital, because, certainly in 1994, I think it’s still the case, it’s very difficult to get a hospital bed for quite severe mental illness. You’ve got to be suicidal.

And were you suicidal?

I was feeling suicidal. I was also quite violent at times. I mean in my own doctor’s surgery, I swept all the things off his desk you know. I mean I did realise I was really ill when they called for an ambulance to take me into mental hospital. The same time there was a part of me, kind of watching what I was doing’ saying, “Right, well make it really dramatic.” I wasn’t pretending exactly, but I knew I had to make a song and dance to get heard.

But in the last year or so, as well as the sort of the depression and anxiety yes, and I’ve been going to the [name] hospital, for about five years now, since 1998 in fact, after the doctors locally, and the psychiatrists as I say weren’t sort of up to much really. I somehow felt… I did think I had schizophrenia, but I saw a Professor [name], at the [hospital], and he said that I haven’t got that condition, or schizophrenia. And I thought, “Have I got manic depression or any other things?” I think he said well, I haven’t really.

It’s probably the public’s view of my Mum’s always been very ashamed and didn’t want to tell people that I was in a psychiatric hospital. Didn’t want anyone to know I was in there. Wouldn’t tell anyone. Always a big secret. And that in itself didn’t have a good effect on me [laugh]. Because it made me feel ashamed of myself and that I was in there.

It’s amazing that I’ve forgotten this. When I was in hospital, one of the doctors actually sexually abused me.

Really?

Yup. He didn’t rape me. And I have to say that I consented. And this was four days after I had thrown myself in the reservoir.

Right.

And he was an Indian doctor, I mean a properly qualified psychiatrist who was working at the hospital. I at the point where I was rescued from the reservoir, I was put into an emergency ward, and he was one of the doctors on that ward. And he approached me sexually and I kind of, half-agreed. And then, of course, was told not to tell anybody. And it was obvious from what he told me that hed had lots of encounters of this kind. So I didn’t tell anybody. But looking back, that was my first experience of sex.

At twenty, which in those days wasn’t as late as it might be in these days.

You weren’t well enough to’?

To know what I was doing. But of course I felt guilty, because I felt that I could have said no. But obviously my own, the own body’s own natural desires at twenty are quite strong. So that was my first, and to tell it to explain just how it affected me emotionally, it was a year before I could look an Indian man in the face. I am not a racist person at all, and I don’t feel that way now, but it took me a year, every time I saw a male Indian, I would recoil. That was the association with the attack.

They kept me for 5 days and that was appalling. It was like something out of Dickens. It was a big Victorian building, more like a lunatic asylum to be honest, [pause] than a mental hospital. There was, they put me on this seriously ill ward, which consisted of a row of beds, a lot of very strange women. It was completely a different experience I had here, you know, one came up to me and said, ‘How long are you here for?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’ve been told just a few days. ‘Oh, I was told that and that was 6 months ago. Which frightened me. Then there was this elderly lady who’d taken all her clothes off and nobody stopped her, and she was, you, I don’t know, shouting and carrying on whatever. It was awful.

When I went in ’85. The relief that all these people who were suffering I felt, I’m not odd, they’re all like this. And we were an amazing comfort to each other. Groups of people, again there weren’t people you would naturally, you know, what’s the word polarise to or whatever, you’d go to in the outside world. But in there, I remember one was a male prostitute, other people who just weren’t in my type of life, and it’s like a club for them that ward. And even years later, if you seem them on the street, you make a point of saying, ‘How are you, are you ok?. And we gave each other amazing comfort just though talking and understanding each other, and that was as much if not more help than the doctors. I mean the medication of course helps because it dulls everything, but that was an immense help, people like that.

We were being treated by the top, the top man at the mental hospital place at the [Hospital], the professor there, and that sort of gave a bit more cred. And he was able to change my medication onto what, onto what’s called sertraline. Now this has many, many less side effects than dothiepin and all the rest, for me. Whether it is for everybody else I don’t. I don’t know, but it got rid of my stomach aches, wind, indigestion and all that sort of thing, and diarrhoea which was kind of a nervous reaction. And of course, whilst you’re depressed I was thinking all those things were possibly cancer or something like that. And it’s easy to convince yourself that it might well be because you don’t reason straight. So cognitive therapy was, for me, the answer.

There were young psychiatrists on the ward who were prepared to listen to me for periods but it was just, I mean, it was just listening really, I don’t think any’ you know very practical thing came out of that. But then the, I was recommended for a thing called cognitive therapy. I was given ten-week course of cognitive therapy.

While you were in the hospital?

While I was in the hospital, I think that must’ve been towards the end of my six months. So that, and that was by the chap he was the best’ he was supposed to be the best one of the cognitive therapists I was told [papers rustling]. And I did find that, find that very useful.

So just things like that, a few things like that with cognitive therapy. You know I think they helped quite a bit. It was a sort of beginning of self, self-help, it was an experience that I could do something for myself. And I was also doing a lot of things like pottery and so forth, I was good at that. They gave me a few, some extra time to do that on my own because I was very keen on doing that. So I got back into painting which I hadn’t done for many years, and I had a box of paints in the hospital and stuff by my bed that I could, that I could use. I mean I did drawings of other patients, even one or two people paid me for drawing their children which was very, which helped quite a bit.

Being able to paint and do pottery, how, how did that help?

Well it was something I’ just something I loved doing, and being able to do something that I really loved doing, it made a huge difference I think.

You know, you’re, you’re in a place. It’s not a [pause] the nurses, I mean some of the nurses care, yes. They care. I’m not going to start slagging them off, but I think some of them become desensitised as to what and who they are dealing with. And they kind of put labels on people a lot of the time, and they kind of saw me as an overdose I think, and nothing else really, or not much else.I’m not completely anti them, and they have helped me.

They have been there when I’ve needed them. They have contained me. It’s like a kind of. I look at the psychiatric hospital as a kind of intensive care unit for mentally ill people because it’s only really quite. if you are in a crisis that you go in there.

You are having something really major going on. Otherwise you. there is no way you’d get in there. So it’s kind of an intensive it’s a kind of containment. It’s a place of safety. When I am in there I feel contained and I feel [pause] I suppose I feel safe.

As far as I was concerned I felt that the staff on the whole were too busy with their own affairs to want to pay any attention to someone like me. But a lot of that was probably me, rather than their attitude. I think the only thing I would say which I have said to a few nurses, I said, “The people who are in that very sensitive state need more reassurance of care than a normal person.”

Some, some nurses I believe, part of their training is to treat mental patients as being normal people. Well that’s alright looked at from the point of the view of say you are capable of doing things like shaving yourself so’ but on the other hand, they’re not like normal people in that they’ they’re mostly having a very strong experience of their own worthlessness, they need to be built up.

And I mean, there are one or two things like, for instance, the office on the ward, theres you often have nurses who are sitting in there. They may be sort of on duty at the time, but they’re sitting in there, and they’re not welcoming to you they’re sort of waiting for you to come in and draw yourself to their attention. Then it can make a huge difference, in fact to the whole atmosphere of the ward I think. If they are just sitting there, and theres a feeling, well I don’t really want to be bothered with any patients at the moment, which I mean that happens as well and that is, it’s, that isn’t very good I don’t think.

And why did you have to go into a NHS hospital?

Because my insurance [pause] cover hadn’t run out but because I was seeing a NHS psychiatrist and he was concerned about me and, ultimately, he sectioned me, they refused to transfer me to a private hospital because I was specifically under a NHS consultant, and they felt it was inappropriate to change that.

Who’s they, the insurance?

I think the combination of the insurance and the doctors. And I was furious [laughing], absolutely furious about that because it was a horrible place. I can’t remember the exact event that precipitated me going into hospital, I think it basically…it had got to the point where my husband felt he couldn’t cope with me. So I… I did go into hospital and I remember putting a plastic bag over my head in there, and I remember that the nurse just took it off my head, didn’t say a word to me and walked away. And it just really, sort of enforced the feelings that they just didn’t care at all.

It really symbolises what you’re saying about that system.

So, and then I didn’t eat for 3 weeks while I was in there, and they didn’t seem to notice.

I think I became in eight weeks, I very quickly became institutionalised myself. I was scared to come out because I was in this enclosed world where I knew what was going to happen.
There were routines, mealtimes, getting up times, medication times, OT times. There were routines and I had no responsibilities. I didn’t have, because I live, I’m single and I, you know, I pay a mortgage on this house. I have responsibilities, I have to work to pay the bills and things, and the bills need to be paid and the cat needs to be fed and, you know, I don’t have children but I have certain responsibilities and suddenly I had no responsibility. I was being cared for, or I was in a place where I didn’t have to think about anything, and nobody could touch me.

So I went in, and it was like a hotel. It wasn’t anything like I expected it to be. Walked in, really friendly receptionist, you know, ‘Hi, you must be [participant’s name]. and you know she knew my name, and I was just like, oh my God, you know. What have people been saying? And next thing you know this little lady runs over, and she must have been about five foot, and she was lovely, really friendly face, really welcoming made me feel you know, quite secure, made me feel quite happy. She came over, ‘Hi [name],’ you know, introduced herself, she said, ‘lovely to meet you, listen, go through to the music room, have a seat, help yourself to coffee, are you her boyfriend her husband or..?’ you know, [name] was like, ‘Yeah, hi, I’m [name], I’m her partner. And so and so.

She could see we were both very tense, very nervous you know, sort of looking round everywhere, trying to work things out. There were people everywhere. You’ve got nurses walking around in you know normal clothes. You’ve got people that are living there, you’ve got family and friends that have come to visit people living there, you’ve got therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, GPs everybody in this place. Just bobbing round, doing their own thing, completely uninterested in you.

I did take an overdose on one occasion, when things were quite desperate. Some of these well. quite a lot of antidepressants and paracetamol’ That was a pretty horrendous experience. And my wife helped me out of bed because she could see there was something wrong, and pulled me down the stairs and got me into the car. Took me to hospital where they pumped me out.

And. I can remember being almost unconscious, and with a doctor and nurses around the bed. And the doctor said to one of the nurses, “Go and get so and so’ weve got about 10 minutes or hell be gone”. And I could hear him, and I just thought, “I wish you’d leave me alone. I’m warm and comfortable. I don’t want this”. But they did their stuff and got me round [pause]. And that was. that was not nice because I’d frightened my wife, which wasn’t fair.

And I also had to run the gauntlet with the medical people who were something less than sympathetic. But they were looking at it from a medical point of view. So that’s not my place to judge what they were saying. But it was not any easy thing’ and I must have been in quite a deep state of depression to’ to contemplate that [pause]. Yeh I regret doing that.