Haldol & Me — Getting To Grips With A Chemical Cosh

For as long as I can remember my head was filled with voices. Lots of them.

It meant for a noisy childhood.

Mostly, the voices were simply internal instructions, like a computer subroutine, grabbing pieces of memory, information; a sort of audible indexing. It was busy but it had an order to it and, actually, some advantages.

My memory was famously accurate, quick to recall and good with detail, and any school subject that was based on fact-recall, I excelled at. Maths, physics, chemistry and the languages were all well-served by this information superhighway.

If I wanted to know something, it would appear instantly as a picture and I would simply copy it out in the physical world.

Those voices not engaged with the above were deployed to planning and analysis, mostly conversations I had had or was likely to have. They were parsed and planned in meticulous detail leaving the Me in all of this free to think about other things.

This gave me speed in conversations making me quick-witted — or a gobshite — depending on your point of view. Usually the latter.

I could be buried in my deeper thoughts while this autonomous function interacted with the external world for long periods. An hour would not be unusual.

All this stopped when they gave me Haldol.

And they gave me Haldol because I’d been ‘sectioned’.

I’d been finally admitted to the Psychiatric Unit at Darlington Memorial Hospital under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act after the medical panel decided I was a risk to myself or others. I was drowning in a deep psychosis, an acute episode from a bad trip that was not looking too acute any more.

Descriptions of Haldol — or haloperidol — are chillingly bland.

It is prescribed as ‘an antipsychotic drug that decreases excitement in the brain’ and has been the drug of choice for psychiatric units for years when I was admitted. Its job is to stop the crazy — and fast.

And it did. Stop the crazy, I mean. And fast.

Too fast.

The initial dose was so high or so effective, I not only lost the voices, the cacophony of chaos, the moribund psychic landscape, I also lost the ability to think, speak, write, and move. I was frozen in time and space — literally.

Because motor function was frozen, I couldn’t move my jaw very well and I started to drool. Saliva leaked out down my face over my cardigan, the Haldol smear marking me out as a cream-faced loon. My muscles appeared to be made of wood, stiff, unyielding to attempts to move them. With sheer force of will, I was able to get some small shuffles together, my feet barely leaving the pristine hospital floor as I lurched between the ward toilet and my bed.

Mostly, I sat on the edge of my bed — because it was too much effort to do anything else. To all intents and purposes, I looked very much like a Bedlam inmate. If I looked up, I could see others, perched around the ward like me, all enduring their own purgatory.

Inside, in my head, it was not much different. I was aware, self-aware, but I had lost the power of language. I was trapped inside my head but had simply no power of speech. I didn’t know the words for anything and I had no way of expressing anything. I was half-built, functioning, like a smartphone on airplane mode. Useless.

My family came to visit to be confronted by, in effect, a zombie, in a meeting so traumatic, I can remember barely a single detail other than sadness.

On the contrary, the medical team was delighted. From their perspective I was no longer a threat to myself or others — they had fulfilled their brief.

Job done.

Next time: About That Time I Escaped From The Looney Bin, For Real