I was on a train in Northern Ireland with my loved one a couple of weekends ago, coming back from a delightful few days by the seaside at Portrush. We were watching the countryside go by when a six or seven year old girl next to us started to sing.
Annoying as it was, we tuned out until a lyric about “lunatics” made us both look up. We exchanged secret smiles – how amusing that she had no idea she was sitting next to two of them.
Sticking to her theme, she then segued into the next rhyme: “Make the loonies take their pills, take their pills, take their pills … Lock them up in Holywell, Holywell, Holywell”. No prizes for guessing that Holywell was a local asylum, now a psychiatric hospital.
There was no malice in her song – it could have been Ring-A-Ring-O-Roses (that other great illness-related nursery rhyme). It must be some sort of school playground number, and her parents were oblivious to the lyrics – until I walked over to speak to them.
“I have a mental health problem and I’m finding your daughter’s song offensive,” I said politely.
“What?” they said … so I raised my voice and repeated it.
The kid shut up and the parents looked at the floor. They got off at the next station, but I like to think they were going to anyway.
Two days later I had to debate with Health Minister Rosie Winterton at a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference. I was there to draw attention to the Mental Health Bill that we all abhor. The Bill is all about forcing people to take medication while living in the community, and indefinitely locking up people who, it is considered, MIGHT commit a crime.
I started scrawling pre-conference notes on the train down to Brighton, and thought how clever it would be to start with this story. And so I did, with great passion and to a spontaneous round of applause. It’s just a shame that the Minister wasn’t actually there to hear it; Gordon Brown had decided to launch his leadership bid at the same time as our meeting.
The Minister did arrive an hour and a half late (amazingly the audience endured), but by then my energy was spent and it was too late to use the other line I’d been saving up. The government keeps acknowledging that mental health is the ‘Cinderella’ of the NHS. I’ve had enough of that statement, I was prepared to rage, because this Bill ain’t Prince Charming’s glass slipper and there is no fairytale ending.
What we’ve got instead is the makings of a mental health system that is about coercion, not about care, and decent health staff won’t work in that environment.
At the moment it takes two doctors and an approved social worker to ‘section’ a person, i.e. detain them against their will. Under the new legislation, there is a marked difference. There will be what they call ‘approved clinicians’, who can be just about anyone who has worked in mental health – psychologists, occupational therapists, nurses as well as social workers and doctors. Herein lies the detail that is making many of us very anxious.
I went to a party on Saturday night to farewell the wonderful woman who was ward manager in the days when I was in and out of the loony bin. Marva has become a great friend – she’s retiring to Trinidad, so I think it’s safe to leak the fact that ‘boundaries’ were overstepped a little – and she invited me along with a few other former patients, old staff and dozens of friends.
I got there early and went up to talk to a beautiful young woman in gorgeous blue and gold African garments who was sitting on her own. “Hello Liz,” she said, and suddenly I realised that it was my favourite former consultant looking absolutely fantastic, but unrecognisable out of context. Which was how I must have appeared to many of the nurses who emerged a bit later.
I’d spent a lot of time with most of them, not least because they’d had the joy of guarding me one-on-one when I had been at my most unwell and consequently my most unglamorous. When the penny dropped it was hugs and kisses all round, because we were there on equal terms. I saw them as people not guards, and they saw me as a person, and I think were proud of their roles in helping me back to life. Also present were the Occupational Therapists who I’ve always had a special relationship with, because they really did play a huge role in my recovery.
Under the new Bill, they could all be playing a part in deciding whether to section people. So I asked them all – if they’d had to section me, would they have wanted to make the decision?
“No way,” they said. They don’t see their job as being about depriving people of their liberty. They consider themselves to have caring roles. They said that if it becomes part of their job description they would be forced to quit.
This is a scary prospect for me, because the Mental Health Bill is going to weed out the people who really care and leave us with the people who want to make the loonies take their pills and lock us up. Maybe that six year old girl on the train knows more than I do.
I was on a train in Northern Ireland with my loved one a couple of weekends ago, coming back from a delightful few days by the seaside at Portrush. We were watching the countryside go by when a six or seven year old girl next to us started to sing.
Annoying as it was, we tuned out until a lyric about “lunatics” made us both look up. We exchanged secret smiles – how amusing that she had no idea she was sitting next to two of them.
Sticking to her theme, she then segued into the next rhyme: “Make the loonies take their pills, take their pills, take their pills … Lock them up in Holywell, Holywell, Holywell”. No prizes for guessing that Holywell was a local asylum, now a psychiatric hospital.
There was no malice in her song – it could have been Ring-A-Ring-O-Roses (that other great illness-related nursery rhyme). It must be some sort of school playground number, and her parents were oblivious to the lyrics – until I walked over to speak to them.
“I have a mental health problem and I’m finding your daughter’s song offensive,” I said politely.
“What?” they said … so I raised my voice and repeated it.
The kid shut up and the parents looked at the floor. They got off at the next station, but I like to think they were going to anyway.
Two days later I had to debate with Health Minister Rosie Winterton at a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference. I was there to draw attention to the Mental Health Bill that we all abhor. The Bill is all about forcing people to take medication while living in the community, and indefinitely locking up people who, it is considered, MIGHT commit a crime.
I started scrawling pre-conference notes on the train down to Brighton, and thought how clever it would be to start with this story. And so I did, with great passion and to a spontaneous round of applause. It’s just a shame that the Minister wasn’t actually there to hear it; Gordon Brown had decided to launch his leadership bid at the same time as our meeting.
The Minister did arrive an hour and a half late (amazingly the audience endured), but by then my energy was spent and it was too late to use the other line I’d been saving up. The government keeps acknowledging that mental health is the ‘Cinderella’ of the NHS. I’ve had enough of that statement, I was prepared to rage, because this Bill ain’t Prince Charming’s glass slipper and there is no fairytale ending.
What we’ve got instead is the makings of a mental health system that is about coercion, not about care, and decent health staff won’t work in that environment.
At the moment it takes two doctors and an approved social worker to ‘section’ a person, i.e. detain them against their will. Under the new legislation, there is a marked difference. There will be what they call ‘approved clinicians’, who can be just about anyone who has worked in mental health – psychologists, occupational therapists, nurses as well as social workers and doctors. Herein lies the detail that is making many of us very anxious.
I went to a party on Saturday night to farewell the wonderful woman who was ward manager in the days when I was in and out of the loony bin. Marva has become a great friend – she’s retiring to Trinidad, so I think it’s safe to leak the fact that ‘boundaries’ were overstepped a little – and she invited me along with a few other former patients, old staff and dozens of friends.
I got there early and went up to talk to a beautiful young woman in gorgeous blue and gold African garments who was sitting on her own. “Hello Liz,” she said, and suddenly I realised that it was my favourite former consultant looking absolutely fantastic, but unrecognisable out of context. Which was how I must have appeared to many of the nurses who emerged a bit later.
I’d spent a lot of time with most of them, not least because they’d had the joy of guarding me one-on-one when I had been at my most unwell and consequently my most unglamorous. When the penny dropped it was hugs and kisses all round, because we were there on equal terms. I saw them as people not guards, and they saw me as a person, and I think were proud of their roles in helping me back to life. Also present were the Occupational Therapists who I’ve always had a special relationship with, because they really did play a huge role in my recovery.
Under the new Bill, they could all be playing a part in deciding whether to section people. So I asked them all – if they’d had to section me, would they have wanted to make the decision?
“No way,” they said. They don’t see their job as being about depriving people of their liberty. They consider themselves to have caring roles. They said that if it becomes part of their job description they would be forced to quit.
This is a scary prospect for me, because the Mental Health Bill is going to weed out the people who really care and leave us with the people who want to make the loonies take their pills and lock us up. Maybe that six year old girl on the train knows more than I do.