The Post Bag: Letters To Squall

Who Qualifies To Care?

Squall 10, Summer 1995, pg. 50.

Dear Squall,

It’s nice to know you haven’t forgotten about us ‘mentally ill’ people (“Support or Coercion for the Mentally Ill” - SQUALL 9).

I’ve been in and out of the bin since 1977, when I finished at University. My problems have largely been caused by having a dysfunctional family, ie. having a widowed mother and brother who initiated a campaign of mental cruelty against me over 20 years ago. This culminated in my having an untreated physical condition whose complications nearly killed me in 1985 and 1987.

My physical health has been permanently undermined now, and has been the real reason for my more recent admissions to mental hospital.

This time I have been in the bin for fifteen months, thirteen of those detained under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act. I spent a year on the acute admissions ward when it was quite apparent that I was fit to be transferred to a lower security ward. Because I spoke and wrote of my mother ill-treating me in my adult life, my consultant psychiatrist thought I was “dangerous” and “deluded”. At one stage last year he was planning to send me to the Kneesworth House Hospital, a long-stay, private psychiatric hospital in Herts. I would have been there for years. This hospital had a record of four deaths in a five month period last year, according to a national newspaper. Also last year, my consultant put me on a particular drug with the aim of “curing” me of my so-called delusions. In the end he admitted defeat and took me off the drug.

One thing that really bugs me about the mental health system is the emphasis and stress placed upon the “family” and “carers” of the patient. The nearest relative of a patient is automatically deemed to be that person’s “carer” irrespective of the realities of the relationship and irrespective of whether the patient even lives with him or her. One is supposed to believe that the carer’s care for the patient is comparable to that of a person caring for a partner who has senile dementia or who is severely physically disabled. The whole thing is nonsense. Depicting my mother as a carer is a sick joke: she never even cared for my father or her mother in their final months.

I am now to be freed from hospital and will be going either to a halfway house or to a flat. I am lucky to be living in one of the few areas of the country with a case management service. I have been told that my name will be going down on a supervision register. I do not know what this will mean for me. Supervised discharge orders will only affect those who are so-called “depot” injections: I have just been taken off my Clopixol injection.

Throughout these long months of psychiatric imprisonment I have remembered what the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz says: “Involuntary mental hospitalisation is a crime against humanity.”

Love and liberation

Tim Thompson,

E. Sussex.