Why They Play Pink Floyd In The Psych Ward

They say smell is the most powerful of senses, but for me it has always been hearing. Or, more specifically, music.

Sure, a single molecule of scent can bypass our complex filters and push deep into our old brain to wrench out a childhood memory such as the smell of honey on pancakes when I was six or acrid mud on the rope of a homemade ‘tarzee’ in the woods of Preston Park.

But nothing fixes me in time and place as much as music. Songs, tunes, jingles of any description provide a soundtrack to pretty much everything I experience and seem to act like a whirring bank of 1970s NASA magnetic computer tapes storing memories to be recalled at the drop of a hat.

This has good and bad points.

As little as four seconds of the opening of S’Express will put me in the heart of the Mardi Gras club in Liverpool in 1989, 21 and invincible, dancing the night away like a maniac with no money, no job and no worries. However, Soft Cell’s Tainted Love cover puts me alone on the edge of a youth club disco dance floor having just been rejected by a girl I had spent months plucking up the courage to ask for a dance. Just a few bars of Marc Almond and I feel as miserable now as I did then. Mind you, a few bars of Marc Almond could have that effect on anyone, even if they weren’t at that disco in 1984.

And then there was Wish You Wish Here by Pink Floyd. It puts me firmly in student digs in Liverpool. Not the official version, but one hacked out by a housemate on their guitar — well, the easy first four chords — as we waited for magic mushrooms to kick in, nervous as hell. We’d harvested them in Sefton Park before being chased off the park by the police. I still have to be careful of Pink Floyd since it conjures all the cliched days of student drug experimentation.

On the psychiatric ward, music had its role, too. We didn’t have TV or radio blaring out all day but looking around the day room it soon became clear there were plenty of us plugged into our Walkmans, myself included. There was a lot of time to kill, particularly for me as I had not slept for weeks.

I was trapped in a cycle of non-sleep caused partly by amphetamines that had not been broken down by my body and by repetitive releases of adrenalin which kept me in a permanent state of alert. Fatigued beyond reckoning but alert. It’s a condition that afflicts soldiers under fire sometimes referred to as battle fatigue; the body knows that sleep in combat could mean death so it keeps pumping adrenaline to keep them alive.

It’s not terribly useful if you’re Sectioned. The absence of sleep was worse than the psychosis that brought me here. My head felt as if I was being fried and everything was lit with a 120W bulb instead of 60W. My eyes felt like they were scratching the inside of my eyelids and I had permanent toothache from grinding my teeth.

Even today, when I go to the dentist, they usually call over the nurse to gawp at my maw.

‘Your teeth are so flat, it’s like you’ve filed them,’ said one recently — and somewhat nervously.

My lack of sleep grew so bad — the sleeping pill Temazepam, dubbed ‘jellies’ by addicts north of the border, had no effect — that my psychiatrist wrote about my condition in The Lancet.

The only salve was a homemade C90 cassette given to me by an Irish nurse called Rose. Rose was straight from Hollywood casting: the palest skin, blue eyes, flaming red hair, soft voice, kind smile, optimistic. She treated each of us in there as individuals, spoke with us not at us, and seemed to be the only sane person on the ward. Technically she was. But her utter normalcy at treating us as people rather than conditions was as curative as any of the meds from the trolley.

The tape itself was simplicity itself. Tracks had been composed by a Dubliner living in London called Andrew Strong. The same Andrew Strong that sang soul hits as the lead singer in The Commitments. The music he composed was utterly different though. Just three or four track MIDI melodies of reed and wind-chimes or glocks put to simple beats with lots of space for silence. It was as far from screeching soul music as could be imagined and way ahead of its time.

But it worked.

Sleep began to return in the form of naps. Each nap a soothing luxury that bathed my aching brain in unctuous, delicious, rest. And with every nap, my brain calmed, my thoughts ceased to race and healing finally began.

I still spent the night staring at the ceiling counting roof tiles but now I didn’t worry.

More rest made me more lucid, and my condition improved until I finally got some good news at my weekly case conference.

I’d got dressed as usual when the smell of the burnt toast from the nurses’ station wafted in and unlike every other day since my escape attempt, there was no Kevin or Dave sitting on the plastic chair outside my room.

‘Where’s my minders?’

‘Oh, didn’t you hear?’ said Rose. ‘You’ve going to P2 today.’ She smiled, as usual.

‘What? Really?’

‘I guess I won’t be seeing much of you anymore. I only work on P1.’

P2. Finally. P2 was the promised land. Just 24 stairs away, one button on the lift. The staging post ward that acclimatises patients for release.

P2 was smaller than P1 in so far as there was a smaller common area, more single rooms, and the staff didn’t wear uniforms, just normal everyday clothes. We were treated differently than on P1 in so far as the regime was looser. There were fewer patients and it was more tranquil, Pinteresque. Occasionally, we would complete forms for DSS payments and welfare supports, preparing us for life outside.

And there in the corner of the room was an old Hitachi stereo record player with a pair of old headphones plugged in. They finally allowed music to be played.

I went over to check the record collection, left by patients and staff. On the case was an album cover and a record playing on the deck. I flipped the cover over to see a prism breaking a single ray of light into a rainbow. I felt cold.

One of my new nurses came over.

‘It’s okay, we can listen to music on P2.’ She unplugged the headphones and the last track of Dark Side of The Moon was still playing.

‘The patients like this album,’ she said. ‘It seems to calm them. I don’t know this one but I hear it a lot.’

I knew it though.

‘It’s Pink Floyd. It’s called Brain Damage,’ I said.

And that’s what I have now.

Next time: It’s Not The Height But The Drop Which Is Terrible