One Flew Into The Cuckoo’s Nest
I’ve only ever hugged my father twice.
The last time was when he told me had terminal cancer. The first was when I was about to be Sectioned.
The journey to the psychiatric unit at Darlington Memorial Hospital felt like a trip to the vet. Everyone was extremely upbeat, anxiously so, and the last time I had seen this level of enticement for a car trip was when my father had used a whole family bar of Galaxy chocolate to entice our ageing Irish Setter into the back of the car. Brandy was over the moon.
We never saw Brandy again.
When you’re Sectioned under the 1983 Mental Health Act two doctors have to sign off. Our village doctor, Dr Littlejohn, was astute enough to know that tea and biscuits was not enough to fix psychosis. And he knew full well that the moment the hospital panel sat to assess me, I would not be leaving the hospital.
By now, I was in the grip of psychosis. I could function normally — eat breakfast, get clothed and so forth — but every single thought appeared to be a metaphor with a hidden meaning. Memorial Hospital? Memorials are for dead people, right? Our local hospital’s nomenclature merely reinforced the belief that I was dead and pretty much everything that was happening was the last few seconds of a dying brain trying to make sense of it.
In other words, I didn’t believe a single thing to be true. Even if observable.
The psychiatric unit had its own entrance and two wards on two floors. P1 was for new resident patients and P2 was for those patients getting ready to leave the unit.
I was ushered in with my parents to a room where a panel of medical types were sitting, their backs to the south-facing window, faces barely distinguishable and resembling silhouetted simulacrums of people rather than anything real.
The halo effect of the sun merely reinforced my belief that this was, in effect, Judgement Day.
Hollywood likes crazy people. They make, as we used to say in newspapers, for good copy. They don’t need to abide by rules of character and their whacky world view is more-often-than-not used to drive a plot forward with a ‘crazy, but it might just work’ insight. They’re mostly harmless — if you ignore the serial killers.
In Darlington in 1989, it wasn’t quite like that.
‘Being mad’ involved a complex internal narrative which went like this: I was dead, everything that was happening was allegory, and I was now in the afterlife. Thanks to a Catholic upbringing, the afterlife was well mapped out. I had the option of Heaven, Hell or Purgatory. I’d dodged Limbo since I’d been baptised.
Since this clearly wasn’t Heaven, I was in Purgatory. And this was going to be where I was staying now for eternity — unless back on earth someone was lighting a lot of votive candles.
However, amidst all the delusion, there was a tiny fragment of my old self that had not succumbed to all of this. It felt like being trapped at the bottom of a swimming pool and shouting up for rescue. You could see reality at the pool edge, shimmering through the delusion, but you couldn’t get the people poolside to hear.
This was the terror. Knowing.
As the panel questioned and probed, I made one last push to the surface:
‘I’ve taken some acid, it’s not going away, I’m experiencing delusions. I love my mum and dad. Help.’
Immediately after I spoke, the pool liquid got thicker, heavier, darker and I couldn’t see the edge any more. I put my Self into a black box, tied it with chains. And then I sank.
The box sank for a long time — a lot longer than I thought it would— until there was no more sound. It was dark. And it was cold. Hellishly cold.
Something else was this cold, I remembered. Something so fiendishly cold it actually felt like burning.
And then I did remember. And I wish I wasn’t in this box anymore. Dante had written about it and I wish I hadn’t remembered: the Ninth Circle of Hell is not a fiery torment but a frozen lake for the worst of humankind — those who had betrayed.
I’d got it wrong. I wasn’t in Purgatory after all.
Next time: Haldol And Me — Getting To Grips With A Chemical Cosh
