Recently two short stories have fallen into publication, which has been nice. Three more are now under consideration by magazines and I have another one to write for a particular submission call.
All are horror-speculative fiction. Interestingly, I was very into horror until I was 15. So interested that my primary school staged an intervention due to the frightening stories I was writing at 8:30am. I blame Christopher Pike and the Point Horror series.
Now I'm turning modern-day mental health and mental health care into something that perhaps others can relate to. Something that makes people nod in recognition, makes them recoil in horror, hopefully makes them laugh and then suddenly cry (or vomit).
Is this a soapbox novel? Am I screaming for change in the guise of fiction? No. I'm turning my misplaced decade into something that reflects horror, humour, fear, and surrealism. And I am sad that it is grounded in reality.
I've tried hard to explain what it means to be locked up on a psychiatric ward to many people. How the place of safety for the most acutely unwell has an invisible set of rules, consequences and punishments. How, if you are autistic and don't know, this is definitely not the best place unless you are a severe danger to yourself or others. Was I? Well, clearly I was deemed so, but on reflection, the multiple misdiagnoses are what kept me locked up and what kept me rotating back to the wards. A discreet red flag on my file that indicated that if this person is unreasonable, just order a Section.
I once said it was like prison. I know people who've been in prison. It's not like prison. It is a separate set-up. I said to staff once that I felt I was in prison. They laughed and said, 'Free food, laundry, TV. It's not prison.' I stated that you have that in prison and we all have locks on the doors.
But the distinction is pecking order. In prison there is a strong hierarchy of earning respect. Groups, gangs, organisations. On wards, some people are so snapped off from this reality, that they aren't interested in what is going on. The people you do speak to, you have to watch. Some people lie and manipulate as per their condition, some people are here and are from complete poverty and will steal your cigarettes, money, socks, soap (no lockable areas in the curtained off bedspaces). Some may become temporary friends. But there is no strong hierarchy because some people can barely take care of themselves. On the ward, you need to watch your back for violence or stealing because you can't be sure the staff will be there to watch your back. Friendships on wards, made in extremis, rarely survive on the outside. But in prison, where you aren't encouraged to get too friendly with the guards, here we were all playing the staff. Showing them our good sides so that we could get leave, not be checked when we brought in contraband.
Why did we do this? Probably rebelling. Most of us were on Sections. Staff could take our phones, our belts, our lighters if they deemed it in our interests. If someone died in front of us, we were not counselled or debriefed. If we found someone cutting patterns into their arms and we called for a nurse, we got no support. When we witnessed a late night seizure and the night nurse didn't know who the person was, but you were punished for dragging the nurse by the sleeve to the right bedspace. If there were no beds and we slept on mattresses on consulting room floors, that was thought to be okay. To be discharged after three months with no warning when you crave routine and planning...no, this did not sit well.
We hated the medications that made us wet the bed, lactate from our nipples and make us cry, wondering if we had breast cancer. We hated the predatory agency workers who seemed more interested in sex than our care. We kept trying to escape because that is the natural instinct when locked up. We hated that eight versus one, use of headlocks and locks that we warned would break our arms if we struggled, were considered okay. In the mornings, we would count our bruises and name them after the nurse who gave them to us.
A type of prison, then. Even down to the kangaroo courts of a MHA Tribunal. Reminiscent of Josef K's ordeal.
Now, I sometimes go to wards in a professional capacity to see my clients. I feel my stomach crunch when I go down the corridors, when I see people drifting around dayrooms, bored and angry.
These are the practical things of being on a ward. The physical stuff. It doesn't even cover the reasons that brought you there or what is inside people's head, struggling to come out. All you see are people walking around naked or putting spoons in their knickers and you do mental gymnastics to work out how this person got to this point. Why they have been left in the same clothes for three months.
So, now I am untangling it, flattening out crumpled mental notes into a story that will not show the healing side of mental health care, but the bare reality of what it is. No bias, truly, just factual research blended into a modern-day horror story.
Angry? Of course. Hung-up? No. It happened and it's fantastic story fodder.
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