01 Keith Shires

 
MENTAL HEALTH TESTIMONY ARCHIVE
 
 
 
 
 
KEITH SHIRES
 
 
C905/01/01-09/VHS 01-02
Original on DVC-Pro
Copy on VHS
 
Interviewed by Premila Trivedi
Camera by Faye
 
Transcribed by Julie Sharman
May 1999
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
[Start of DVCPro Tape 1 – Start of VHS Tape 1]
[01:00:38]
 
`God, you’ve got loads of CDs’
 
`See that’s the cheap ones ‘cause I can’t afford anything else’
 
`Are they all classical?’
 
`All class… there’s a bit of pop there and jazz on this, just at the end, but I usually get compendiums, ‘cause I mean I know about the sixties and the Beatles…’
 
`Yeah’
 
I remember all that… but I can’t really relate to modern pop..’
 
`Yeah, no, no… I can’t either, but… oh you’re a sixties person as well’
 
`Yeah’
 
`Yeah, ‘cause you’re not much older than me, so yeah… and they were good days’
 
`They were… the sixties..’ [Interviewer laughs] `Yes, yes… ok then’
 
`But... as you say there… there was a labour government then as well, most of the sixties’
 
`Mmm’
 
`But I’m rather surprised it took so long for them to get back’
 
`Yeah’
 
`But…’
 
`Right… OK then, well it’s, it’s really good to have this opportunity..’
 
[01:01:35]
 
`Yeah, yeah…’
 
`To talk to you more.  I mean I’ve talked to you a little bit already…
[both talking together]’
 
`That’s right, yeah’
 
`But its good to have the opportunity to talk to you’
 
`Yeah’
 
`I know you’ve had some really interesting experiences in the mental health system’
 
`Yeah’
 
`And also you’ve done lots of work around mental health issues, and… I’m looking forward to hearing some more about those things’
 
`Yeah, yeah’
 
`But also to hearing more about your life in general really’
 
`Yeah… yeah… yeah, yeah…’
 
`And… you know I’m sure that we’ll…’
 
`Yeah’
 
`We should have a good discussion, you know…’
 
`Yeah, yeah’
 
[01:02:15]
 
`Today…. OK, so I wonder Keith if we could start possibly with you telling me a little bit about your early life, you know…’
 
`Oh yeah..’
 
`Some of what you can remember’
 
`Have you started err…?  Yes?’
 
`Mmm, yes…’
 
`Oh sorry..’
 
`Yeah, if you could tell me a little bit about your early life, you know…’
 
`Well… I was born in 1944 when the war was still on and…. I… my father was in the force, in the Army and I was born on the third of June, which was three days before the Normandy landings, and… my mother had septicaemia, so she… I had to be brought… had a caesarian, because… no it wasn’t a caesarian, it was… they did something like… and I was a month premature, weighed about three and a half pound… and because of that she wasn’t very well after the, baby… after having me.  She was ill but fortunately I was ok, but they took me away from her and sent her to a hospital in Derby, ‘cause we were evacuated in the war because of the bombs in London, the V2’s particularly then, which were probably  more destructive individually than the old bombers Germans used to use, so we were evacuated from there, and, and… it probably saved my father’s life really when I was born, because he got compassionate leave for three days so he wasn’t on the initial landings, which was very fortunate for him, and he went to visit my mother in Derby hospital ‘cause she was very ill… and, he never saw me ‘cause I was in a little village called Cromford, near Bakewell in northern Derbyshire, in the Dales, so… then what happened after that… we were evacuated to Harpingdon after I was… several months after I was born, and the place we stayed at was, was the home of the director of Dr Bernardos and we stayed there for a few months till the bombing stopped and then we went back to London.  [01:04:25]  My father was de-mobbed in forty six, and we lived in a flat right opposite Victoria Park near where my grandmother and one of my aunt’s lived, so we were quite a close family.  I liked the park because I was there till I was thirteen, and I used to climb over the fence into the park most days and play football and things, and it was quite a happy environment, but it wasn’t so happy at school.  I was all right at primary and junior school, but ‘cause I failed the eleven plus I didn’t have the courage to go back to the local school so I went to a school in Dalston, which was a tragic mistake ‘cause it was very violent there, and you had to spend most of your time avoiding trouble and you were learning nothing, so I was put in the C stream.  Then when I was thirteen and we moved to Harrow, and I went to the local secondary modern school, I was still in the C stream but after a year I… went back into the A stream and though there were no exams I could take there, the headmaster asked my parents if I could stay on for two years because I was beginning to pick up things and they thought it would be very good for me, which it was.  But the problem was, after I left school which was quite a secure environment with friends who were there because you’d been with them all your life, more or less, that… and it was quite a stable atmosphere, so, but when I left school, my aunt… my grandmother died a couple of days after I left school, and I was starting a new job, so everything was new and I couldn’t cope.  After six weeks I just cracked up and I was taken… I went to see a psychiatrist at Edgeware General Hospital which is now a Community Hospital, and.. and I saw this psychiatrist and he… he said to my parents… I was very nervous, I couldn’t relate to him at all, or answer any of his questions, so he said to my parents that I was… a, a bit backward, so I saw a psychologist at Shenley and she said my IQ was 143 which was good enough to get to grammar school, which didn’t help at the time because I’d missed out on it all, and the fact I had a slight dyslexia as well which wasn’t recognised then, so when the psychiatrist heard about this, the IQ business, he said ‘oh, you must be schizophrenic’ so… I was taken in hospital and, and I… I… I went to the reception ward in Shenley and I was mixing with people who were quite a lot older than me and I didn’t feel very happy there, so I ran away, with my clothes, so I was transferred to the adolescents’ unit near… in the same hospital, villa twenty four, which is quite well known I think, and they were going to give me insulin treatment, which I was… and my parents agreed to have that for me, but I was so terrified about it that I ran away in my pyjamas from the unit, and… I, I got about a hundred yards and a nurse followed me… was chasing me… but what must have been fate, he dropped the keys to the ward when he was chasing me, so I got away, and I suppose I felt in a way
like a fugitive ..  [01:07:44]  …. I felt very strange because I was still in my dressing gown and… nightclothes and I felt like a fox.  I kept to one side, close the hedge, so I could only be seen from one side and it reminded me of Great Expectations with… Magwitch who bloody escapes from the wooden holts where he was a prisoner.  Unfortunately for me I got about five miles from the hospital and… I went… I went to this farm, and some farmer… farm… farm woman… farmer’s wife was there and she was a bit taken aback at first, naturally, as if she thought I was some candid camera or something, you know… but she was.. her husband had mental health problems so she was very understanding, so she rang my parents up and they took me back to Shenley, but while I was there with her, this woman, and she said… she made a cup of tea and said, you know, listen to a record, LP, which it was then, not CD then, and.. I listen to Mozart’s Park Symphony and that was very pleasant so… my parents came and picked me up and took me back to the hospital and I was put in a secure ward, but before I went back… this woman said she’d come and visit me, the farmer’s wife, and she did, and she gave me two books, which.. which she came in and saw… one was Ecu Ecu  by Phil Hydell about the civilisation of Easter Island, and the other one was Alan Paton’s Cry The Beloved Country.  So I read the book and I was very appreciative, though I’ve never seen her since. But, to the hospital’s credit, they never rang the Police when I ran away which I think was very good of them, but I did experience a harsh regime where you were shut in, you were locked in.  And… though they… though the psychiatrist who I transferred to, Dr Cooper, who was quite well known for his work with R D Laing in the sixties, I transferred to his care and I was in this… at this particular locked ward for about a month, and err… they were all a lot older than me, than me.. I was only seventeen, but some of the men were in their mid… mid fifties or even older, and… so I couldn’t relate to a lot of the people than I did to some, and… when I.. ran away from… the other villa… ‘cause of the insulin treatment, I’m digressing on now, but I think its important that they abandoned that treatment because one of the patients went into a coma and somebody rang the London Evening Standard, there was quite a hue and cry about it, so they abandoned the treatment, so after a month in this ward… villa 15A, and there were some homosexual practices going on there, which is… at the time a little bit disturbing, err.. and with older men and things, so they transferred me back to the original unit I was supposed to go in, but it was now the adolescent unit without the particular treatment which frightened me, and that… then I was with David Cooper who wrote the book ‘Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry’, and I was there for about six or seven months, and err… you went home and you got… you had to sign a form… but you could go on home leave, go Friday evening… and I would come back Sunday evening, you had to sign a form, and if they thought you weren’t well enough then they would err.. they would cancel your home visit, but most of the time it was OK.  [01:11:21]  After a period of several months I got quite friendly with everybody there, ‘cause many of the young people.. it.. it wasn’t mixed, it was an all male ward, at the time… many of them were university people that had broken up under pressures, and so it was quite an intellectual atmosphere there, and David Cooper encouraged us all because he allowed us into his consulting room every Saturday morning and we used to discuss things, a lot of different things, and it was very encouraging… for… he was quite open, there was no sort of professional status… you know… which was distancing… would distance a lot of professionals, ‘cause they feel they’ve got to be.. they’ve got to be detached to get the job… objective opinion of you, but some of them carry it too far and they often go into the field of prejudice and… negativism, but he was quite open and we used to discuss things with him and it was quite impressive really to be there with him and the other people, and often the chief male nurse would come in as well… join in, so it was quite a civilised atmosphere… and there was no problems of professional detachment, which I believe is necessary to a degree, but it was quite a friendly, open, equal environment and it helped me a great deal.  Well I was there for about six months, and then I decided… they decided that I could go home, so I came home, but I did after that… for two or three years, go and visit them on Saturdays sometimes to see Dr Cooper.. I wasn’t under him at the time, I was transferred to my GP, and I… I… I left, left him, but went on the Saturdays often to see him and the other people I knew there and that went on for two or three years, then I sort of grew away from it.  On the employment front, I had… I felt very bitter because after what the psychologist said, and I did a very menial work… I tried to work in an office but my dyslexia… overcome that… I did do some physical work which I didn’t mind doing, but nothing with any prospects.  I got very frustrated, so for four or five years I did voluntary work, but I couldn’t get a job which I felt could stretch my imagination sufficiently.  And then, going on to seventy one, when I had my second breakdown, I wrote a play as I told you earlier Premila, and it was rejected by the Unity Theatre in Camden…which no longer exists, but there was some other theatre who were interested, but I’d destroyed the manuscript after the… rejection by the Unity Theatre, and then several days later I had this letter saying another theatre was interested.  Well it broke me up because, I’m not being arrogant  [01:14:05]  …..I mean probably the play was no good, I’m not saying it was any good, but I do agree it’s like Bernard Shaw who said that ‘creativity from man is the nearest you get to child birth’ and I think that may be true, so I was so frustrated and angry with what I’d done and not given myself a chance that I had a breakdown.. I told… I went into Shenley and I went into the… one of the secure wards, though I wasn’t violent, and I was taken into hospital by a… a policeman, and he… in his panda car, so he took me to the police station outside… took me to a hospital… outside the ward, so I said to him ‘are you coming in?’, he says ‘no, I can’t stand these places’, so… I appreciated that ‘cause he could have been a bit bolshy [ph] if he’d wanted to, so I was back in there.  But the thing was… going in there… I felt a bit err… I felt that I was.. I wasn’t paranoid, but I… I… I was err… I was very err… tense… and I don’t think I’ve ever had voices or… persecution complex, but I think I do, to be honest with myself, I think I do have a slight persecution problem …….complex.  Now whether that’s due to my illness or the social factors I don’t know, its probably a bit of both, but certainly the social factors are important, because if you’re mentally ill, you’ve got to be… try to be hard skinned, because you know people find you… find… many, many mentally ill people a problem, so there is a prejudice there.  Now whether the prejudice will be judged as normal by a normal person, or whether its one’s paranoia which is handicapping one in the relationship with… allegedly all ordinary people, but the fact that one in ten people are mentally… have mental health problems anyway, prove it’s not a rare esoteric disease or not disease problem, so its not as uncommon as the professionals try to make out.  So what happened was… in my relationships with neighbours and other friends, I found it OK, but I must admit that as soon as I mention mental health some people, they… they, they clouded over or they lost a little bit of interest, so I think that the barrier… the sort of barrier between reality, to prejudice and the reality of one’s mental health condition, its fairly debatable where the truth lies, and I think many professionals use us all as shorthand, and automatically say ‘oh its due to the person’s illness, that’s why they feel antisocial, that’s why they feel alienated, or they feel… they feel rejected’, but I still think there’s an underlying problem of people living in the community who are mentally ill.   [01:16:50]  Its very difficult to get any safeguards like you can with racism, because… you find that many people have this prejudice and if a professional backs up their prejudices as you might do in… or he or she do inadvertently, it just makes the problem worse and its very sad that at the moment the government is being very popularist, and I’m a member of the labour party, are being very populist an are actually pandering to the prejudice of people who don’t think and the popular media which just sees a very good sensational story at the end of the road, so I think its very difficult.  As I say, I do get on fairly well with… my neighbours, and going back to my early years, as you said at the start Premila… I … we went down to Cornwall for.. when I was twelve, to… eleven to fourteen, and had summer holidays, and it was very pleasant there.  ‘Cause the East End… it was a very dreary place in the early… late fifties.  I liked living there it was quite pleasant.  I was near Victoria Park which is a major park in the East End, I was very pleased to be so near the park for sport and the activities… you know, the sort of physical… being near to a park, but when we went down Cornwall I found a completely different world with… animals and beautiful scenery and the… I… and my parents tried to move down there so we could all be happy in our lives, but my father knew nothing about farming, couldn’t buy a little… he couldn’t afford a small holding and he didn’t have the skills to do it so it fell through, so I spent another couple of years going to this fairly, err, tough school in Dalston in Hackney.  But fortunately we moved away when I was thirteen to here, and.. in Edgeware, and I got on very well at school.  I left when I was seventeen and… I… I didn’t take any exams because you couldn’t at the school, at the secondary school then, and I was very happy and I was sports captain the last year I was there, so it probably was the happiest time of my life, but when I faced the reality of going to work and the death of my grandmother, I found this was something I couldn’t cope with, and it was even worse the second time I had the breakdown in seventy three.. seventy one, was because what the doctor said when I told him he didn’t believe in the first place, which didn’t start off a very good relationship and I did feel that… err..  the.. the attitude was so negative, ‘cause Dr Cooper who I mentioned earlier, he had left, he’d gone to Paris and he died soon after that because… and he died, he was being looked after by one of his ex-patients so, I couldn’t go back to a sympathetic environment.   [01:19:40]  I did write some poetry when I was in Shenley in… both times, when I first went in and when I went back in seventy one, and the occupational therapy was developed to a very high degree there.  In fact I think it was better than what exists at Northwick Park now, it’s far more structured, and they wouldn’t allow as they do today, at the Day Centres, in hosp… people just sitting around smoking. I don’t think you should coerce people into doing what they don’t want, but I think there’s a need for some structure to overcome the chaos of mental health, and… I, I, I… was in a very structured environment, so one was encouraged to develop one’s skills, which I think was very good.  It was good for the occupational therapist as well, because they thought they were achieving something and they weren’t just custodians to keep an eye on people, and it’s the same with nurses.  The real problem is, are they carers or custodial?  And I think that this is a problem which still hasn’t been resolved satisfactorily, but the occupational therapy at Shenley was fairly good.  It was constructive and one could achieve things and its very similar to what it is today, which I’ve thought about for many years, and I know that it wasn’t my idea, but I did think about it independently, the… the… the new Stepping Stones development which encourages people to integrate and take educational opportunities.  I think it’s a wonderful thing and I think… think its… I’m very pleased its taken… its taken place.  I think where it falls down is that it doesn’t sufficiently contact the… the ordinary people in society because they still feel alienated or frightened.  It’s basically fear they fear.  Fear of the unknown, and the fear created by the popular media, and unfortunately like people like Marjorie Wallace … and Janet Zito … I’m not saying that Janet Zito does… doesn’t… err.. I feel very sorry what happened to her, it was a great tragedy, but unfortunately I think they are taking things to a degree where prejudice is into the equation and people are far more likely to come across violence outside a busy pub than outside a mental health hostel or a clinic, so there’s a lack of imbalance of the reality of the situation which is a basis for prejudice, and its rather like the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, that… we really need an inquiry into the mental health aspects of prejudice as well.  A proper inquiry where people of… who experience the prejudice are taken notice of, as the Stephen Lawrence family were, because its not just professionals who are involved in mental health, without people like us they’d all be unemployed, but there isn’t the respect of the product they… they just see you as a problem… many of them see you as a problem that’s got to be overcome, and see that you are not a threat to society physically, emotionally or politically, so that you… there’s something… there’s a containment problem there.  They’re dealing with the problems that politicians and society want to have nothing to do with, so that they actually are sort of like a dustcart, of, of people that are rejected by society or have problems of relating to society, and I do feel that this is a major problem and maybe in the long term the European court could resolve this problem, because I haven’t much faith in British justice… you see injustices that have taken place over the years and the, the… prejudice and the corruption among the police and the judiciary, that… and I’m not overstating it…   [01:23:21]  I don’t think I’m being paranoid saying that, but if your objective you can see with the.. the Bentley case, other cases… the cases with Irish terrorists, many who didn’t carry out the acts they’re alleged to have taken, that there is a real problem in British justice, and the real problem is that it’s class structures.  The people who decide policy and pass judgement cannot relate to the working or lower middle class, they don’t understand the situation and all they’re thinking about is containing people that are a problem…’
 
`Yeah..’
 
`And, sorry…’
 
`Yes… I think it’s really interesting how obviously your experiences have kind of
contributed to your political thinking..’
 
`Yeah..’
 
`And your political perspective as well, and..’
 
`Yeah..’
 
`And I think everything you’ve talked about I’d like to sort of come back to’
 
`Yeah, yeah’
 
`..in a way, maybe, so we can look at things in a bit more detail’
 
`Yeah’
 
`Because I’m.. I’m really quite intrigued as to how you’ve got to the aware position you’re in now’
 
`Yeah’
 
[01:24:20]
 
`You know.. I wonder, was your father a socialist?’
 
`Yes.’
 
`Your family background?’
 
`My father was, and my, my uncle, he was a strong socialist.  In fact he was a Bevin
boy in the war, he went down the coal mines in Durham, ‘cause he was a pacifist.  Though strangely enough he ended up in the police force in London, which isn’t actually a job for a pacifist, but he did it fairly well.  But he never got married and he had a frustrating life, but he had a very great influence on us.  My.. his brother, my father and me, ‘cause he had a very good book collection and he.. he used to bring books over, a Dickens, the early novelists like Richardson and Fielding , people like that, so it was quite… he had a great influence on all the family… particularly his brother, me and my mother, so he, he was quite influential in that direction and he was very political, but… I think other influences were the schools experience, where you could see people who had ability, who were wasted, and the eleven plus really was a form of… intellectual apartheid … and it was a matter of  chance whether one responded on the day to the tests or one didn’t.  And often the competitive nature of the… of the eleven plus could be very disruptive to people, particularly people who are a bit sensitive about taking the exam and a bit scared, and it was.. at.. at that age, it was… its too young to.. its too… its too young to, to have a competitive environment… it should… it should be more structured, more caring, and maybe at a later date when professional degrees are needed that’s fair enough, but at the moment the education system is in such a state that I don’t think anybody knows really which way its going.’
 
[01:26:08]
 
`I wonder if I can just take you back a little bit?’
 
`Yeah’
 
`Because you said that you found the eleven plus quite devisive [ph]’
 
`Yeah’
 
`But earlier you said that your primary school experience was quite positive’
 
`Well that was because I suppose you knew nothing else’
 
`All right’
 
`One was growing up and one was in an environment not by choice or design, but just the fact that you were a member of a family, you’re living in a community, where when you take the eleven plus, you’re taking a step into the unknown really’
 
`Right’
 
`You’re moving away from friends, possibly, so that… and it was far more competitive than primary school, in a way though I suspect now that there’s a lot more competitiveness in all schooling, whether its infant, primary or senior schooling, and whether it’s a good thing or not is debatable, I think.  I suspect that there will be increases in mental health problems statistically over the next few years due to the competitive nature of society from the cradle to the grave, and I think one of the problems here is having a labour government, it should be more compassionate and more rooted, and whether one calls it a Judeo-Christian tradition of caring or whatever, but just because the Tories were there for eighteen years doesn’t mean that what they believe is a justification of getting power at any price.’
 
[01:27:21]
 
`Yes.  So when you grew up, did you feel that you were growing up in quite a caring… [both talking together]’
 
`Yes, I was’
 
`… family environment?’
 
`But I think the war had united everybody.  Although Thatcher to a great deal destroyed the war time spirit, also among the elderly as well as the young, the elderly used to be committed to community care in the sense of the general community, but Thatcherism has destroyed all that and you find now that, that people.. that even the people who were traditionally sympathetic to each other are not because they feel that pensions aren’t high enough, they feel the hospitals don’t take the old seriously, they’re just a problem that’s got to be dealt with, so the many elderly people are alienated from society, and in that alienation they condemn people who might be a little different’
 
`Mmm’
 
`So if that is true throughout the whole of society, this.. this sort of hyper competitiveness..’
 
`Yes.. ‘cause its interesting what you say about the elderly have always been compassionate..’
 
`Yeah’
 
`..towards the community.  It seems like you were growing up with your grandparents quite near by you’
 
`That’s right’
 
`And I presume your uncle wasn’t too far away either’ [both talking together]
 
`Yes… yes…’
 
`Was that common… at that time?’ [both talking together]
 
`I think it was a few years ago.  The war brought families together..’
 
`Right’ [both talking together]
 
`And could you tell me a bit more about your family?’
 
[01.28.40]
`Well… my father… won a scholarship to the Regent Street polytechnic when he was fourteen.  He won a science scholarship and also an arts scholarship, but he couldn’t take it up because he had St Vitus dance which I don’t think is known today, they call it something else.  But he had some nerve problems, shaking… he got over it, but unfortunately he couldn’t take the, the educational advantages that were offered, which were quite rare then.  He must have been quite… well he must have been very able because there weren’t many opportunities in the… in the early twenties, thirties, so he must have been very able, but unfortunately he couldn’t… he couldn’t err… couldn’t take part in the education process.  So his father, my great grandfather, were sign writers so my father went into the sign writing business with his father, and then he went in on his own.  But… he was frustrated because of these… educational opportunities he’d missed, but… and it… then he was in the army for six years which he felt was a waste of time really though he agree with it in principal that Hitler had to be checked, but it took a… he was only in his early thirties, just married, and he was away from his wife for six years, and… so he found it a very negative environment, though he was… he was only a private but he was offered promotion, but he sooner said… ‘I’d sooner be with the boys than be a… anything else’
 
`Right’ [both talking together]
 
`But… sort of sense of community with the ordinary soldiers’
 
`All right’
 
`He didn’t want to… he felt safe in that environment as well, where as if he’d gone higher up he would have had more responsibilities and probably greater risks as well.’
 
[01:30:24]
 
`OK, thanks Keith, we’re going to have to break for a bit…’ [both talking together]
 
`To change the tape, but maybe we can come…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
[end of DVCPro tape 1]
[start of DVCPro tape 2– VHS Tape 1 continues]
[02:00:36]
 
`So, what… you were saying your father was in the army, what happened after the war, did he go back to sign writing?’
 
`Oh… are, are you on now...? Sorry, yeah.  Yes he did go back to sign writing after the war, and he worked for other people, which he resented a bit because he felt that, as a skilled tradesman they should really get the rewards they deserved, because he did a seven year apprenticeship with his father.  Fortunately, later on in life he had his own business… which was quite successful, although it was a one man organisation, you know, didn’t employ anybody, but… he… that was quite…. and then when we moved here from the East End from Hackney, he was still working for somebody, but towards the end of his life he had the dignity of working for himself, so that was better but he was still very frustrated about the scholarships that he missed out on… and my uncle also, who was his brother, he was quite able and he never really fulfilled himself.  In fact all he was doing towards the end of his life was… was rolling tyres at… Dunlop’s tyre factory’
`Right’
 
`So that he never really… like these are often fulfilled themselves [???], and nor did I really so I’m a sort of second generation who have gone through this problem of lack of fulfilment and things’
 
[02:02:01]
 
`But its interesting that you were saying your uncle did used to bring books…’
 
`Yeah’
 
 `So obviously, even though they were frustrated in terms of their jobs, they were actually going out and buying books…’ [both talking together]
 
`That’s right… and… the sort of children’s books I read were often Edwardian and the early part of the century because I… we used to go to a second hand book stall in, in Roman Road, which is in Bow, London, and its still there, its quite a famous market, so I was reading the sort of literature that the, the generation of empire were reading, and… I later caught up with modern literature, like Narn… Adventures of Narnia and things like that… but in my early days I was reading literature from the sort of Kipling period, and it didn’t colour my opinion of the world at all, fortunately, but… I, I felt that…  I fulfilled… I… well when I… when I went to secondary school, the… one of the teachers, because I had problems with punctuation and dyslexia, suggested I wrote a diary in the school holidays, which I did, but I… I, I don’t know if its laziness or being a bit mercurial, but I found that I couldn’t really concentrate too well, whereas today I can’t concentrate, not because I don’t want to but because of the medication, and… strangely enough, going back to Dr Cooper I was on no medication with him, but as soon as I went back into… in seventy one, they put me on medication, I’ve been on medication ever since.  And I do feel really, I… I’m sort of addicted to the drug, I can’t really live without them.  I take three… hundred and fifty milligrams of largactil in the evening, which helps me sleep, because if I didn’t take them I wouldn’t sleep.  I wouldn’t be violent but I just wouldn’t sleep, I’d get very stressed out, so I continue to take them, and I take one Largactil fifty milligrams in the morning… also five milligrams of Artane and five of Stelazine that’s in the morning.  So, I do feel in a way that they’ve helped me, the drugs, but at the same time they’ve probably ruined my life because… and I don’t think you’ll live as long on these sort of medications, because they do have a destructive quality, and maybe in years to come they will be able to balance the chemicals if necessary to achieve good health, though really I still believe that the social factors are the main reasons for mental health… and the politicians like the idea of medication because it means they don’t have to change society to a degree, and mentally ill people are a litmus test for the problems and the realities of a harsh society, and I think if you start running to psychiatrists and ask them to produce more drugs, you’re not solving the initial problem, all you’re doing is just masking it, and not… and they’re not facing the realities, nor are the patients, because of the medication.’
 
`Do you… do you… find that at the moment with your medication…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
[02:05:12]
 
`Are you able to read, are you able to… obviously you had a love of reading as a child’
 
`Yes.  Well… I do find it quite difficult… I forget.  And that’s why I write poetry because it… it helps you intellectualise and… but you do pay a price.  If you think quite profoundly, or deeply, or for a long period, then the medication catches up on one and you feel very depressed and down, and that is one of the side effects I think of all psycho medication.  That it has a… supposed to be a calming effect, but also it destroys the natural impulses and the natural intellectual processes.’
 
`Do you think that you’ve always been quite a profound thinker..’
 
`Well I think…’ [both talking together]
 
`Even as a child?’
 
`…due to my uncle really, more than anybody, and my father and mother.  I don’t know really.  I think probably the realities one had to face when… when I was at school I was bullied for a time because I was the only one that was answering all the questions, and I’d put myself on a pedestal in a way, unintentionally, and I paid for it… but when I left school in Hackney and went to… went to Edgware, I… came to Edgware, I found the first two years were quite difficult but the last two years were quite successful, and I think bullying does zap one’s conf… confidence over a long period.  Though I was in the school football team and sports captain when I left… but I can understand how the pupils in a way resent… someone who answers most of the questions, ‘cause they either think you’re showing off or they feel that ‘why couldn’t I sort of get as involved as that person is, in the educational process’, and many of them probably didn’t have the opportunities in the home environment, to either… to study or to take an interest in things.  So I don’t blame… blame the people who did bully me, it’s just that they felt so alienated from society themselves that they couldn’t relate in any other way.’
 
[02:07:01]
 
`Could… could you explain a bit more about the bullying?  I mean what form did that take?’
 
`Oh yeah… hitting you and things like that and… ostracizing you and things like that.. it was… it wasn’t that much of a problem… it was a problem… and sometimes I came home from school and didn’t want to go back again in the morning, you know…’
 
`And was there anyone you could tell about the bullying?’
 
`No, there was no one.  I didn’t tell my parents ‘cause I didn’t see… not because they couldn’t understand, I felt I couldn’t just talk to… there was prefects at the school but I couldn’t talk to them, but I think the staff were aware of it because the last two years I spent there… I left when I was seventeen… I was more mature as well, could react better to it, and it, it disappeared towards the end of my school life.’
 
`Do you think that’s because the boys learned to accept you or..’
 
`[both talking together] Oh yes… during school…’
 
`Do you think you adapted?’
 
`I adapted, and also, doing more sport, I integrated myself in the school community better’
 
`Did that feel ok to you?’
 
`Yeah, it was the happiest time of my life those last two years at school, yes’
[pause in dialogue]
 
[02:08:06]
 
`Just to go back to the environment where you’d felt quite intimidated by people bullying you…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`Can you remember how that actually made you feel?’
 
`It makes me feel worthless in a way… and it makes one feel detached from the school community when… when everybody wants… not being accepted as one would like.  But I think if you do put yourself on a pedestal, unintentionally, or intentionally, you are actually inviting yourself to that sort of treatment.  ‘Cause I was quite political at school as well, and that didn’t go down too well with some of the teachers, and I was political because of my experience, not because I… I was being empirical and talking about things.. just intellectualising much of it was based on personal experience in the East End and seeing the poverty, and the degradation which still existed there, and unfortunately still does on the streets of London with the homeless.’
 
`Could we perhaps talk a little bit about that, like, what kind of place did you live in?  You said you lived in Hackney?’
 
`Yeah, it was right opposite the park…actually Victoria Park, so it was quite a pleasant environment, though not going to the local school and going to Dalston was the mistake I made really, because I should have kept with my peers… some of them who would have gone on to the same school, and probably I could have integrated better.’
[02:09:29]
 
`And what kind of house did you have?’
 
`Well we just had a top floor flat in a tenement, you know, so it wasn’t big… and I had
my own bedroom but there was only another bedroom and a kitchen so there wasn’t much you could have there you know, it was upstairs… and the landlady used to open my mother’s letters and things like that… wasn’t a very pleasant atmosphere.’
 
`Ok, and did you have access..? You had the park across the road?’
 
`And went and used the library as well, went to the library… and… I used to enjoy that.  I used to go the one… the central library in Hackney opposite the town hall.  They used to do films as well, educational… films about the world and I used to go to that often in the evening, you know, it was quite pleasant, and though I didn’t then… later on in life I started going to the proms.’
 
`Right’
 
`’Cause you know, I’ve got quite a large record collection over the years..’ [both talking together]
 
`Yes’
 
`I’m very fond of classical music, because I find now that I can relate easily to music than the word… and music seems to overcome the negative effects of medication, whereas to try and read and study, it’s very difficult because one’s brain is being, sort of like having a pressure put on it and it’s not intellectualising [ph] as much as it would like to.’
 
`Right.  Ok, thanks.’
 
`We’ve just got a… (camera op)… Ok’
[02:10:56]
 
`Ok… you were saying… telling me a little bit about what entertainments…’
 
`Yes’
 
 `..you used to have as a child… what else was there in the area you were living.  You talked about the park, what about in terms of shops, things like that…?’
 
`The old corner shop… we had a traditional old fashioned corner shop, and… the football, I used to play a lot of football.  I used to go to football as well… watch West Ham and Leyton Orient and teams like that, and my uncle who lived in… West Ham, he was very keen on football… when I used to go to visit to see West Ham I used to pop in and see him at his house.  I got on very well with that uncle, on my mother’s side.  My father’s side… his brother, my uncle, other uncle was more influential, but from the point of view of… of sort of getting on with people, I found my uncle on my mother’s side a nice chap, got on very well with him.  I used to often visit them when I’d gone to West Ham to watch them.  That was a good time for West Ham because they had the England captain, Bobby Moore, there was Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters, all played in the World Cup winning team, and I liked the atmosphere as well there, you feel there’s a sense of feeling part of something and the team was very successful at the time so it was a good period, and also in the sixties, were… a time of experiment and also new thinking in a sense, in the music and generally in cultural… in culture and sociology generally it was a time of radical change, so it was a good period to be young.  And there wasn’t the hyper competitiveness then we have, have now…so it was quite a good period.  As you said yourself Premila, your experiences as well..’
 
`Yes’
 
`It was a very good time to be young.’
 
[02:12:44]
`Yes, I think it was.  Who did you used to go to football with?’
 
`I used to go on my own.  I used to go… I used to… I liked going on my own because… I… as well as being independent, you could always find one’s friends there, ‘cause some of the other children used to go but I’d prefer to go on my own ‘cause I went to visit my uncle, so I didn’t really want to take anybody else along, you know, so… other than that I did go with people later on, but it… after my uncle died I… I used to go with other people, but I didn’t mind going on my own, not ‘cause I was being antisocial, it’s just that I felt that I couldn’t take other people to see my uncle ‘cause you know, it might have been out of place [laughs].’
 
`Yes.  Can you tell me a bit about the sort of… what sort of friends you had, were they…?’
 
`Well, I did have some friends through natural upbringing in the East End, but what really caused the rift between them was the… was the… several of them won the eleven plus so we got detached in a way because the very nature of education was then very divisive and that today affected friendships as well, which was… when I moved here, in… when I was thirteen, I used to go to the Boys Club and play for the Boys Club’s football team, and I got re-integrated, but that was quite a difficult period after the eleven plus in Hackney, because half my friends went to this grammar school and the other half went to secondary school and I was so ashamed of failing the eleven plus that I cut off from my friends who would have gone to the same secondary school, and my other friends who went to grammar school say… I’d still associate with them, but there was a bit of a rift, an intellectual snobbery entered into it, so I, I really had to change my whole lifestyle.’
 
`It sounds very difficult if you’re actually living in the same area?’
 
`Yes, being brought up in the same area, that’s it…’
 
`Mmm, mmm…’
`And… though it’s a very happy community feeling in the family and people were very helpful to each other in the street, so there… they… they used to help each other and you could walk in peoples’ house… the door wasn’t locked, and maybe this is a classic thing that people talk about in the thirties, but it even… was around even into the mid fifties and then things altered with the increasing crime and drugs and things like that.  People couldn’t be as open as they’d like to be any more, and losing that openness, some people got cynical and antisocial…’
 
`Mmmm’
 
`Which is something that… is not really taken into account, the different sociological differences from the war… that… there was as period of great change in the war, necessarily so… but the actual spirit from way back of the working class, the sense of community survived, but it doesn’t really exist now.  It may do in some small places but… at the same time things have changed radically, the working class no longer consider themselves working class, and the middle class are so busy being competitive they don’t know where they stand.’
 
[02:15:48]
 
`When, when you moved here to Queensbury, did you find there was a difference in the kind of community atmosphere?’
 
`Well actually no… no there wasn’t really.  There was a slight feel… people weren’t quite so open with each other, but at school after the bullying ended, I found it just as pleasant as the better times at primary school in the East End.  And with the new ethnic people coming in, that was also… which has happened in… since, the… the expulsion from Uganda and Kenya… there’s a new society developing.  There are some negative elements in that side… side… because mental illness prejudice and racial prejudice are very similar, and there’s certain current themes in both of them and that’s why people with mental health who are Asian… Afro Caribbean or Asian can relate to the white people in the same way because they’re both victims of prejudice, so people can relate very easily…’
 
`Yes’
 
`But other than that… society’s changed a little, but… unfortunately as some racialists would say, its due to the Afro Caribbeans and the Asians comes.. coming in that have changed society.  That isn’t true.  What has changed is that society’s got more com… competitive and the fact that Asian people are very ambitious in the sense that they wish to advance financially, economically and socially, and culturally, that’s the good thing, but the people who can’t experience those things get resentful and they go… they start getting racialist in their reaction to it, and the fact that everything is so competitive, many white people feel that this competitiveness is due the Asians and the Caribbean… it’s not, it’s a political and sociological factor which would have existed whether we had changes in the community or not.’
 
[02:17:39]
 
`And when you first moved here was it a predominantly white area?’
 
`It was, yes, it was thoroughly white.  In fact, another thing was, people that originally came in the thirties when the houses were built, the children had just left home, and it was that generation, and I was a bit younger than most of them then, but there was that little community that had naturally grown up from the start, and now its all different because new generations moved in… and we were part of the new generation… now we’re getting now the sort of grandchildren of that generation are living here.  I like living here.  The only thing is… I don’t like is there’s all the cars blocking up the streets [laughs].’
 
`I don’t know whether you said, could you remind me of, why did your parents move here from Hackney?’
 
`Well for my sake as much as theirs.  We… didn’t have a garden at all.  Now, my dad liked the area because it was quiet, you know, so we all agreed to it, but… it would have been nice to live in the country at Cornwall but it wasn’t… wasn’t practical.’
 
`So as a child growing up here in Queensbury…’
`Yeah’
 
`You said things settled quite a bit for you…’
 
`Yeah, yeah…’
 
[02:18:47]
 
`Can you remember what kind of hopes and dreams did you have at that stage, for yourself?’
 
`Well I fancied getting married and having a family, which… unfortunately mental health problems destroy.  I think it makes one slightly abnormal because one’s not experienced in the normalities of life, and I don’t think some professionals take that into account often.  They assume it’s a symptom of the illness, that it’s not a social… social isolation which has developed, they don’t see them independent of each other, so one has missed out on a lot of things, but… on employment as well, because I’ve never had a job I really found… taxing… though I did run an Oxfam shop for two years in the mid eighties, quite successfully, but they decided to get professional managers in nationally, so I… I… I, I had to leave.’
 
`And as a youngster can you remember kind of what kind of job you thought, ‘oh, I’d really like to do that?’
 
`Well, at the time I would have liked to go into advertising… I think really there’s many creative people are ruining their talent by just worrying about commercials when they could write novels and do things, for much more worth… but also I would have liked working in an office where one was being stretched a little, and I did work in a shop several times which I enjoyed a great deal, but the pay was bad and the prospects weren’t there… though I did… I did… though it may sound strange, but I did like relating to people and meeting different people, and that’s… shop work actually gives you that, but there’s no career prospects unless one’s studying to be a manager or something like that, and one hasn’t had… through the school… one hasn’t had that climate of study, for discipline which is necessary to achieve even in later life, so I’ve never gone to the open university or enrolled with them or things like that, because I haven’t got that discipline which is necessary, and that’s part of what grammar school’s do, they instil a sense of discipline and they probably still do in the best comprehensive schools, but I, I feel… and its even worse today, its even more competitive than it was then, but I couldn’t even survive with the competitive then, about now, you know…’
 
`And at that time were you still reading all the time, had you still…?’
 
`Yes I did… still reading quite a bit, yes, and I did like reading, you know…’
 
[02:21:14]
 
`Did your parents have any particular ambitions for you?’
 
`Well they probably did…’ [both talking together]
 
`… that you were aware of?’
 
`Now that is an interesting point, because they probably feel frustrated that I’ve achieved very little and not had any family or grandchildren, I think that is a major problem with them… and also there’s a feeling of guilt of where have they gone wrong, which I don’t believe… it’s not their fault I’ve had problems, it’s the fact that… I feel that I’ve never really fulfilled myself due to my own, either laziness or apprehension, but I don’t blame them in any respect for my mental health condition, and I expect… I hope they don’t blame themselves either, because in some cases it may be true… it’s never been a violent home or anything, so… being the only child I would have liked a brother or sister which would have helped… later support in life when your parents go, that would have been nice, but it didn’t happen, so, ‘cause my mother couldn’t have any more, but I don’t blame them in any respect for what’s happened to me…’
 
`Can I…?’
 
`And I don’t really feel that resentful about society, I just feel I was unlucky and that was it… it just happened.’
 
`Did you have cousins, because you’ve talked about your uncle?’
 
`Yeah… I didn’t really mix with them much, they were all a bit older than me, the cousins, yeah.’
 
[02:22:30]
 
`Could you tell me a bit more about your grandparents, because obviously your grandmother’s death had a big effect on you?’
 
`Yeah… well she… on my mother’s side, she… we used to… as you say, we lived with them… very near them in the East End, and my, my grandmother was quite like my father, she was quite academic, but that days, in the late 1890s, early, Edwardian times, schooling was very basic and she was very good at mathematics, my grandmother, but my father took her out of school when she was thirteen because he needed someone to do the books ‘cause he was a wheelwright so she was doing an accountant’s job really.  We’re not… so she, she never… like women today, that generation, even my mother’s generation never had the opportunities they deserved.  I didn’t really get on well with my father’s mother, ‘cause I don’t think he got on well with her that much to be honest.  But my mother’s side, now I did get on very… and my auntie Vi, who was her… my mother’s sister, I got on very well with her.’
 
`And how often would you see them if you went…?’
 
`Well when we came here we always used… once a fortnight we used to go back to the East End so my mother could see her mother and, and sister, we used to go back every fortnight.’
 
`Right, and what about when you were living close by?’
 
`Yes, I was actually living down with my… used to in the day time… used to go down to my grandmother, my ‘nanna’ I called her and her sister, we used to go down there… yeah…’
 
`Right, so quite a close knit family?’
 
`A close… close knit family, yeah…’
 
[02:24:00]
 
`Right.  Could you tell me a little bit about when she died then, because it was obviously difficult…?’
 
`Well… what happened was… it wasn’t so much that she died, that was a… that’s what… that would upset anybody, but it’s the way she died, yeah… she was shouting and she had… peritonitis…’
 
`Oh dear…’
 
`So she sort of… blood poisoning and it’s… quite an unpleasant death, you know, so… that’s what made it all the worse.’
 
`And presumably, the… facilities, the hospitals and things were…?’
 
`Well it’s rather strange… if she’d been alive now, she had a perforated appendix.  She was eighty three and they decided they couldn’t operate at that age, whereas modern medicine they do operate quite… people who are even older than that, and quite successfully, but that time, medical knowledge wasn’t advanced enough to do it successfully, so many elderly people died then because they felt they couldn’t survive the anaesthetic or the stress to their body, whereas today, many elderly people have major operations like hip replacements, or anything like that, and many of them do survive today, to a good old age.’
 
`How old were you when she died?’
 
`Thirteen.’
 
`So that was just before you moved here?’
 
`Yeah, yeah…’
 
[02:25:25]
 
`Right.  Could you remember how you felt then, how you coped with… it must have been very traumatic for your whole family…?’
 
`Yes it was really, but… what I… I did cope by getting involved with the Boys Club and things like that, but, but… my major, major tragedy was that when I went in Shenley, the first time, in sixty one, I felt subconsciously I couldn’t associate with my former friends, in case they found out about it, so I had to get new friends and I did that through the Labour Party, but really I should have cultivated my original friends as well, because the Labour party though…. I support most of the values… well former values… and I got on fairly well with local people in the party, I felt that I should have kept my roots alive from my youth as well, and that was a major mistake I made.  Because even in the Labour party, there’s some people are very competitive, and aggressive, and… politics isn’t a pleasant profession anyway, and I never really got on in it, ‘cause I didn’t have a job and also I don’t think I’m being paranoid, but because of my mental health record, and… there’s always a degree of suspicion.  However… one wants to put it… you know.  Not among all my friends in the party, but there is an element of doubt.  It’s like a… when you get a barrel of apples and one goes off, the whole barrel’s suspected.’
 
`Yes.  It’s interesting because you’re obviously deeply political in your thinking and your feeling’
 
`Yes’
 
`And it’s interesting for you to talk in terms of party politics, maybe not always being..’
 
`No, no…’ [both talking together]
 
`You know, aspiring to what you believe in…’
 
`No…’
 
[02:27:18]
 
`And that’s quite an interesting mix I think.  You said you were interested in politics from school, so how… what age did you actually start getting involved with…?’
 
`When I was about sixteen I… and…’
 
`Was that because of someone at school or was that because of…?’
[pause in conversation]
 
`…you said earlier something about it was because of the poverty you’d seen in the East End?’
 
`Yes, and also I, I was beginning to write essays, several of which were read in front of the school, and, and I began to intellectualise more in those two years when I stayed on, and the headmaster was quite right in.. in… in letting… telling… asking my parents if I could stay on because I think that although I hadn’t got any qualifications… it did actually do me a lot of good those two years, and… but… with the eleven plus I don’t talk about that now, but when I first went in Shenley and I had the IQ test, that did frustrate me ‘cause I felt at the back of my mind I could have achieved something, which I didn’t.  I haven’t achieved much really, but with mental health, its, its, its… the success is to survive anyway.  Of course with the medication, society… it’s not an ideal healthy environment, so that if one survives to old age, one is very lucky.’
 
`Yes.  That sounds a philosophical view’ [laughs]
 
`[laughs] Yeah…’
`Yes, yes… could you tell me about that first experience then of mental distress? You,
know, a little bit?’
 
`Well… particularly when I was in the male ward… the… where I was locked in…’
[both talking together] `Can we go back even…’
 
`Sorry… earlier than that?’
 
[02:28:53]
 
`Yes, sort of like when you first became aware that things were starting to go a bit wrong for you.’
 
`Well… I think it was when I left school, my grandmother died just after I left school… I had this decent job in Boreham Wood which was a printing job… a printer… compositor, which they don’t exist now, its all done on computers, and I did go to the London College of Printing day release for three years with that, and… I did find that… I got on quite well with the… with the staff and everybody there, but when after I had my breakdown I didn’t have the courage to go back… I didn’t feel I could face them, and that is a problem that one’s worried about how people will receive you because you know that in them receiving you, one’s at the risk of prejudice if one reveals one’s background, so that… it’s like having something on your shoulder, and its… it… it, it’s something that you’re aware of, which un… which fortunately a lot of people don’t have to have.  And this may create problems which would have been created among allegedly normal people anyway.  That’s why I was always thinking over one’s shoulder.’
 
`That ‘s right, that’s right.  OK……… [inaudible]’
 
[end of DVCPro tape 2]
[start of DVCPro tape 3– VHS Tape 1 continues]
[03:00:36]
 
`OK, so you were saying that you’d… you’d been working in the printing place..?’
 
`Yes’
 
`And you’d been attending the London School of Printing?’
 
`Yes’
 
`And then things started going a bit wrong for you?… [pause] Did they?’
 
`Yes, well what happened was… I, I was… I’d got… I wasn’t… I packed up politics and
for a period of ten years I did voluntary work but I did very little academically or socially… I felt for several years I hardly went out the house.  Not because I was afraid, but I just felt that with that label on one, even though one may be… visually it wasn’t visually aware that one was mentally ill but I had this feeling of isolation which was partly self imposed but also I felt that it was… I even found that with relatives, they… I wouldn’t say that they were against me or anything, but there was… a little bit of distancing, you know… and that’s why I feel so strongly about terms like schizophrenia, which is a very similar status to leprosy in the Bible, it has a very great deal of prejudice exercised upon it… and I think, you know, there’s a need for radical thought on diagnosis generally because no psychiatrist can agree with another, or very rarely, which actually gives the implication that the problems are broader than just a medical problem, though if you don’t take the social factors into account, then you’re really not curing societies ills or the patients’ ills.’
 
[03.02.11]
 
`Yes, yes.  So this was… this was after your first admission to Shenley was it?’
 
`Yes, I was there for nearly a year…’
 
`Right’
 
`Not intentionally, but I wouldn’t say I felt happy there, but I was with young people and the intellectualising every Saturday I found stimulating.  I used to come home every week because I liked to come home as well…’
`Right, right’
 
`And, and I found that it was very receptive….’ [both talking together]
 
`Right’
 
`But I’d just like to say about the large country mental hospital which Shenley was… a few years ago people were condemning the isolation there because one was in the country and generally the isolation was the fact that society didn’t want to face the mentally ill on their neighbourhood streets so they were tucked away in the country, but the old concept of asylum, in… in early mental illnessess… has a valid place.  The… it takes one from the stress of socie… urban society, and one is calmed down by the environment itself without medication, so that it did have a valuable role, and we weren’t that isolated because the occupational therapy department arranged trips to concerts and we visited football.. we saw some of the international football matches at Wembley, and there was a person employed in the hospital who arranged trips for the patients to other… to other locations, so it wasn’t as isolated as they thought, and I think that to abandon the concept completely is a radical mistake, and though I had seen people abused by nurses and… though I hadn’t fortunately myself… I still felt that though the problems were like in Broadmoor and places like that where it’s a very isolated integrated community, in the sense that its not integrated with patients and staff, but its integrated in the sense that its physically one… one or two buildings, its… its quite remote from the normal interaction of society which causes a great problem, and a lot of people in the future, may think that that’s what happened in the country mental hospitals but it didn’t.  I used to go to parish council meetings, we used to go down to the pubs in the village, so it wasn’t as isolated as some people might imagine, because I think hospitals like Northwick Park in Harrow, you’re in an environment that is very competitive because it’s a general hospital, you’re part of that general hospital, there’s two major railway lines and major roads near the hospital so if people feel very stressed its easy for them to commit suicide, so I feel in the early stages of mental health, the country or the semi-rural environment has a practical purpose.
`OK.  Before you ever went into the hospital…’
 
`Yes…’
 
`Did you… how did you as a sort of teenager or young child…’
 
`Yes…’
 
[03:05:10]
 
`What was your, did you have any images of what a mental hospital would be like?  I mean…’
 
`Well I remember my mother saying, I’m… she said once, and it was quite hurtful though she didn’t mean it, ‘I’m glad your grandmother’s not alive’ because the old concept of the mental hospital, particularly in the East End, where the local hospitals probably Friern Barnet, the old Colney Hatch, which ironically they are turning into luxury flats… people like Charlie Chaplin’s mother went there and a lot of the destitute people that couldn’t cope went there from the East End, and there’s other people as well, they reckon that Jack the Ripper ended up in there as a patient… but… those, those sort of attitudes to hospitals like that where there was a great deal of physical abuse years ago, not openly, but there was… there was… it was less sort of restrained than it did later on, but there was sort of a very… sort of… not nasty, but people… they regarded themselves as prison warders rather than nurses, and unfortunately some nurses still think that today.  But, but the thing was that people felt the workhouse was bad enough, but going into a hospital like that was even worse, it was a final degradation so that the prejudice was based on real fears that one might either end up in the workhouse or, or the local state mental hospital.’
 
`Right.  And, when you talked about the staff attitudes to patients, but… would a local community also think that patients had done something wrong… to go in there?’
[both talking together]
 
`Well… each day you can get some people, patients as well, who say ‘oh well, you know, the, the staff… the medical profession is right’.  I’m not saying they’re wrong but sometimes they’re wrong, and, and… when I lived in the East End, there was a lady there who went in to Claybury very occasionally, and though she was an object of mild derision, not aggressively so, but in.. really she was accepted in the community when she was at home, but I suspect in Edwardian times there was really gross poverty, that people were so… only surviving by the skin of their teeth, so that if one economic.. reality was taken away like a relative going into hospital, the income of the family went down, so it had a chain reaction which affected the whole family in a negative way.’
 
[03:07:39]
 
`Right.  So as you were growing up, you were growing up with the kind of idea that psychiatric hospital was not necessarily a good place to go for care?’
 
`No… it, it, it was something… I wouldn’t say to be ashamed of, but it was something to be fearful of.’
`Right.  So how, how did you actually get involved in going into Shenley, can you tell me about that?’
 
`Well, what happened was… I couldn’t sleep and this went on, so… I did see the psychiatrist, but after the… seeing the psychologist he gave me the schizophrenic and he talked my parents into… ‘cause I was playing music loud at night and all this…’
 
`So this…?’
 
`…disruptive… so they… I… I went up there and… err… my parents couldn’t cope really so I… and I couldn’t cope, so I wasn’t… as soon as I got there I felt cured, because the shock of going there made me come back to reality of what I was going into and I… that’s why I ran away the first time, but when I ran away the second time that was because I was afraid of the medical procedure I’d be going through.’
 
`Right.  Could we just go back to that first time…?’
 
`Yes.’
 
`So, did you… your parents couldn’t cope… you were obviously having problems…’
 
`Yes’
 
`Did you go to the GP… did your parents call?’
 
`Yeah we did see the GP, but I wouldn’t take his medication so I was very exhausted so when I went in there they put me to sleep for a couple of days, you know, and that overcame… [both talking together]… the tiredness…’
 
`Right’
 
`But the medication was Bromide and things like that and it… then it was… attitude to sex and things then was… no one was… that was just before the sexual revolution in the sixties when things were sort of Victorian attitudes and… the doctor… even the doctors had this… these Victorian attitudes, and… it was… I’m not saying was political it was only when there was major changes in society in the early sixties with the Beatles and culture from America and places like that, that the whole attitude to sex and mental health had changed to a degree, more in relation to sex than mental health, because mental health hasn’t caught up with the revolution in other… other… in the racial attitudes and, and sexual attitudes… mental health needs to grow up a bit more to be… to be beneficial, in the sense of helping people that need help.’
 
[03:10:08]
 
`Yes.  So, so you were sent by the GP presumably up to Shenley to see a psychiatrist?’
 
`Yes, that’s right, yes…?’ [both talking together]
 
`And…?’
 
`I saw the psychol… psychiatrist at the local general hospital and I went up to Shenley to see the psychologist but it was really lack of sleep more than anything.  I don’t know whether… I don’t think I hallucinated, but my present GP, he says that if one’s tired anyway, if you’re exhausted you hallucinate anyway, but the psychiatrist assumed it was a pathological problem and not a sleep problem.’
 
`And so did they almost immediately decide to admit you?’
 
`Yes they did, yeah’
`And can you remember how you felt…?’ [both talking together]
 
`Yes, well I… I felt, I felt, sitting in bed that first day, I felt, err…what have I come to,
you know, I thought… I thought of going out, looking out the window seeing the birds and the sunlight, and I thought well what am I doing here?  But once one gets enmeshed in the mental health industry you’re lost, because its very difficult… like sticky glue, you’re… it’s very difficult to withdraw from it because not only does one’s parents and society judge you on what’s happened to you, so does the profession, and one of the problems in the profession… you always find a psychiatrist reads your notes before he sees you, so there’s a pre-judgement situation, which is there whether they wish to be objective or not, so that… you’re not going in blind, they’re not risking the chance of making their own independent assessment, they’re pre-judging you by the very fact of referring back to the records.  I’m not saying they don’t have a place but in the initial judgement it should be entered into freely and unambiguously, which it’s not.’
 
[03:11:49]
 
`Did you feel like… when you first saw either the psychiatrist at the local hospital…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`… or the psychologist, that they were actually listening to what you were saying?’
 
`No… I felt the psychologist was, but the psychiatrist wasn’t.  He was just… just looking for the intellectual functions that… and he… he’d ask you a few trick questions which I couldn’t answer because I was so… so scared and apprehensive, which he didn’t take into account.’
 
`And at that stage did they do any sort of tests, any written tests or anything?’
 
`Only… only the psychology tests which, it was partly written as well.’
 
`And is that… that when you had the IQ test?’
 
`Yes, that’s right, yeah…’
 
`Right, right.  And then they decided to admit you…?’
 
`Yeah, yeah’
 
[03:12:30]
 
`Did they give you a diagnosis at that stage?’
 
`Well yes… personality disorder, because he said I can’t really… that was Dr Cooper gave me that, but it… the original psychiatrist I saw, the one who had this insulin treatment, said it was schizophrenia.’
 
`Right.  And did they talk to your parents as well at that stage?’
 
`They did, and they said to my parents that I was… errr… not subnormal, but I was.. intellectually impaired because of the way I behaved with the psychiatrist initially, and I even found that at school, that if I was faced with tensions and a competitive environment I had difficulty.. to cope… that’s why I’ve never done well in exams, I was marginal with the eleven plus, but I do find… politics is a… that’s one of the reasons I went into politics in a small way was because I thought it might help me come out my shell a bit, you know… in a… sort of the rough and tumble of politics and debating and things it would help my personality to develop, and I think it did a bit, but it had an adverse side because… because I was getting too one directional, you know… and I sort of abandoned all my friends from school, you know, so… that…. I should say it’s a major mistake I made.  If I kept with them, both of…both sexes, then I would have probably been able to cope, but the fact through being in hospital made me feel isolated anyway, I felt I couldn’t go back to those people because if they found out, you know, the…’
 
`So did… at the time when, just before you… just before you were admitted, did any of your friends… were they aware of what was going on for you?’
 
`No, no… oh no, I just cut myself off completely.’
 
[03:14:19]
 
`Right.  Right.  And can you remember how you felt when they said to you, ‘well I’m sorry Keith you’re going to have to come into hospital?’
 
`Well I was so dazed and tired I didn’t really react, you know…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`…at the time, but the next day when I woke up, I felt ‘what am I doing here?’ and that lady, the farmer’s wife who… who helped me when I ran away the second time, she said to my parents and my doctor ‘what’s he doing in here?’’.
 
`Oh right.  Right.  And… did your parents have to sign anything, ‘cause you were very young?’
 
`I think they did.  Yes they did sign something I think, yeah.  I was put on section I think for running away, the second time.’
 
`Right.  So when you were admitted you were pretty dazed.  Can you remember anything about, like your first impressions of the hospital, at all?’ [both talking together]
 
`Yes… yes it was that… it wasn’t as one suspected, it was quite… relatively speaking Shenley is a modern hospital because it was built in the thirties, and in fact it was built for 500 patients, but in the end it ended up with 1500, but it was still… the villas were quite… not cottagy but it wasn’t the cold Victorian high windows and… horrible paint schemes and general sort of grubby brick work type of thing, it was more modern.  It wasn’t modernist, but it was sort of more modern than the general Victorian psychiatric hospital was, so that the environment wasn’t quite as bleak as the environments that existed in some hospitals, so I’m not condemning the staff because they had to work in this negative environment as well as the patients, so the old Victorian hospital had a lot not to recommend it, whereas Shenley was fairly modern, so, so I found it, not pleasant, but it.. it wasn’t quite so stressful as it would it been, had it been somewhere like Springfield or somewhere like that.  So it wasn’t… the environment wasn’t negative, but emotionally it was very destructive, ‘cause the walls were all white and the… at that time the nurses had long white coats and the doctors wore coats, so it was… it was a bit intimidating that first day, so I tried to sleep all the time, but you… one couldn’t… and that’s when I ran away after a couple of days ‘cause I thought well I can’t put up with this any more.  But unfortunately once one’s enmeshed in the structure it’s very difficult to de-structure ones self.’
 
[03:16:40]
 
`Yes.  You mentioned villas, could you tell us… could you tell me a little bit more about sort of the actual structure of the hospital?’ [both talking together]
 
`Yes. The bot… [ph] the bot…[ph] two storey buildings, the bottom floor is the nurses’ charge room then there’s the doctors office, and then on the other side of the building there’s the rest room, dining room and also a general room for the patients, upstairs is the bedding in a long corridor.  And…’
 
`And did they tend to be single sexed or mixed sex?’
 
`Single sex… single sex, which I think is a good thing really, ‘cause my experience… though one wants to be radical… I think that mixed sex wards are very risky at the best of times, although it would be nice to have them as mixed sex wards, it was bad enough with some homosexual people.  I’m not condemning homosexuals, but… it, it, it wasn’t a very pleasant thing, you know… the… at the best… I’m not saying… what they do now according to what I’ve heard they… they do… at the Marlborough Hosp… at the Roxbourne Hospital in Harrow, they do have a room where people can have sex, of whatever kind, whereas at that time it was… the nurses were always looking out for it among people that were that way inclined… so that made them more suspicious generally and the fact that some people were not going on occupational therapy, they were just in the ward, occasional ones that might be a bit violent or something, so that one was creating tensions among the staff and among the patients, so if it had been mixed sex the tension would have been even greater.’
 
`So what… what were the sleeping arrangements like…?’ [both talking together]
`Well we just had a bed and about eighteen inches to two feet was the next bed.’
 
`And did you have a locker?’
 
`You had a locker yes… and right at the end of the ward was little rooms there for the long stay patients.’
 
So they would have an individual room.
 
`So they would have an individual room, which they, they went to, right at the end… and the long corridor… where the beds were, the… they were about eighteen inches apart with a locker, and at night, at the end of the ward was the desk with the two nurses there, night nurses, and they had a lamp on… and, and… anything went wrong they reacted to it.  But nothing did go wrong fortunately much… in fact though, there was less sort of violence than… than they would find in the pub, you know.  Not only due to the medication but I think many mentally ill people, despite what psychiatrists say that they can’t relate to people or each other, can relate to each other very well and it’s a very quite… not established, but it’s a community that has many of the… less of the stresses than allegedly normal society… and among the better nurses they actually got into the process as well, and I think mentally ill people generally, if they’re violent they’re violent because they react the only way they can react, they can’t intellectualise their problem, whereas at the same time I find that most mentally ill people, violent or not, are hypersensitive any way and they’re like a litmus test for the whole of society, and I found in the ward apart from the homosexual aspect, I found it quite a… a, a stress free environment which may sound very strange, which to a degree doesn’t exist in the modern hospital because you’ve got the… the other hospital, and, and… I think, the country environment does have something of value in the early stages.  Obviously you want to come back in to the normal environment you’ve been in after a time, but… I found I’ve never been in Northwick Park fortunately, but people I’ve visited often say they feel stressed by the very environment they’re in.’
 
[03:20:31]
 
`How many patients, how many beds are we talking about then?’
 
`Well, I should think, maybe thirty, possibly, fifteen each side.’
`Right’
 
`So… it was actually built for less which was quite right . ‘Cause there were tensions with the beds, you know, people waking up and shouting and, things like that… so it, it was… like a normal hospital with a lot of beds, but at the same time there were the added problems that which would exist in it, you know… people waking up or shouting.  Some of the patients there, several were epileptic, which weren’t very pleasant and they shouldn’t have been there, there should have been in a colony where they could have got more specialised help.  There was one particular chap there who… who I had a problem with, who was right next to me, he was… he was hoarding his tablets in his belt of his pyjamas… he said he was going to commit suicide and unfortunately he was an epileptic as well… so I told the staff about it and he was very angry… and… the, the tragedy was that… it might have been better, it sounds cruel… if he had committed suicide because, I heard later, two years later, he killed his mother and now he’s in Broadmoor, so it might have been a blessing if he’d taken those tablets, ‘cause the frustration of this epilepsy, he’d be walking along and suddenly he’d fall to the floor… it, it, it destroyed him really, and maybe, it sounds cruel and callous, but I think if he had taken that… they… his life wouldn’t have been a misery, like it is now, being so confined.’
 
`Yes.  Yes.  In terms of privacy then at night, were there curtains…’
 
`No.’
`…between the beds at all?’
 
`No.  There were no curtains.  [both talking together] I don’t believe… I can’t remember.  I don’t think there was, no.’
 
`Right.’
 
`Because they wanted to have the view from the… night staff to see everybody.  And every so often there was somebody went round the hospital generally.  I don’t know what this status was, but he used to visit every ward and come in and walk through, with a torch and then go out again.’
 
[03:22:31]
 
`So sometimes the nights could be quite noisy?’
 
`Yes, occasionally, yes.  But they weren’t that noisy because the staff reacted.  If anybody was a big aggressive or noisy, they’d give them an injection and that was the end of it, so…’
 
`So was that… was that the main means of reaction?’
 
`Yes.  And I feel that’s when problems arise, ‘cause if somebody… I’ve never had the injection fortunately, but some who had, if they got a bit aggressive and violent, there… that’s when the problems could arise of… over reactive staff.’
 
`Right.’
 
`And the fact that people visited regularly was a good thing, but places like Broadmoor and Rampton where I don’t believe probably the visiting arrangements are the same as the general psychiatric hospital, these sort of abuses take place and the family’s not there regularly to listen to what their… their, their relatives are saying, so that there’s problems probably… created by the general isolation of the environment, but in the general mental hospital these problems do exist.  In fact there was a character at Northwick Park who’s known as ‘pin down Pete’ because… he suppressed people to the floor so he could give them an injection, and that sort of macho… people like that should never be employed in the mental health service, nor the police, because they’re… they’re really not far removed from psychopaths, some of those people, and one of the nurses at Shenley I got on very well with said that many of the nurses are more emotionally unstable and… social deprived than many of the patients because they can only survive in an environment where they’re dominating and in a situation which is structured, and… in the hospital have their meals provided, and they don’t have to treat people as equals because they’re only patients and you feel that bit superior, which you justify by saying its professional detachment, but my experience was that a minority of nurses are sicker than some of the patients… because they need this environment where they’re dom… are in control all the time, over people.  It’s not like being in an office and factory where you’ve got to treat people with dignity and equal self respect, they’re in an environment where they’re custodial and in an environment where they feel they’re controlling people to a degree, which ordinary people wouldn’t accept, or even their wives wouldn’t accept.’
 
[03:25:57]
 
`Right.  You talked about being custodial, were the villas actually locked… [both talking together]… at Shenley?’
 
`They were locked at night, yes.  They were… most of them were locked, yes.’
 
`And during the day?’
 
`No.  Often not, because they had to leave the doors open for the food and for the… going to the occupational therapy, but at night the wards were locked, yes.’
 
`Right.  And, sorry, just to go back to the villas…’ [both talking together]
 
 `The interesting thing about the villas, all the places, they had a very novel way of keeping you in, ‘cause they were lattice windows, they weren’t bars as people might suspect, as you see in the old Victorian mental hospitals.  What they did was put a bit of wood in by… by the side of the window so that you could only open them about six inches which was a very practical way and didn’t look quite so intimidating as the… as the old bars and things like that.  It also had a positive thing because on several occasions myself and others… kept a knife from the canteen, took a knife from the canteen and took the screws out, so we could get out, and then when we came in again you could put the screws back.  But in the… but it was a very civilised little measure and the other thing we found not very pleasant, they always used toilet paper which was very harsh, and I think that was a form of punishment to be quite honest… they… and you used to laugh about it, and one of the funniest occasions, we were playing poker for matchsticks and one of the charge nurses who was a Methodist, thought it was a form of gambling and got very upset, so we… we had to pack that in, but it was just a sort of a [inaudible word]… but some of the people who went in it, the staff… I got on well myself, but the real problems arise when the system is being ‘bucked’ when people are not taking their medication, that’s when gratuitous violence can enter… so most people like myself like my dad said about the army…. About the army, keep your head down and don’t get noticed and just survive.  And I think if you can survive in an environment like that you can survive anywhere, I bet you probably feel the same, Premila, that you just toughen… though, though some people it does destroy, it tragically does destroy some people, but other people it can give them a greater inner strength.’
 
`Yes.  I mean I certainly identify with that.’
 
`Yes.’
 
[03:27:19]
 
`Very much.  And, did you sort of make the conscious decision then that you were going to keep a low profile, that you were going to…?’
 
`I think so, yes.  I think I did, because… If one was too hyperactive, the answer was the injection.’
 
`Mmm’
 
`And some of my friends now have to have injections, but… hyperactivity is looked on as a threat, really… and to be honest, some people were potentially violent to other patients as well as the staff and they had to go to a building called ‘the block’ which was a big… about five or six story block just a little way from the main wards, where people that were very distressed or aggressive had to be put, and then they had… more nurses in the premises to try and cope with them.  But it wasn’t sort of being anti-staff, because they had problems as well, and some people were very manipulative as well.’
 
`Mmm.  So people who were sent to the block, would they be sent there just for a short time, or..?’
`Oh some of them went on to Broadmoor and Rampton because they needed that intense care… I wouldn’t say it was always care, but it was very stressful for them and for the staff because the violence was… all, all… just some on the surface… and some of them came back to the general ward, but often they had to go back to the block or somewhere else, and it was… it was… it was, it was actually quite… frightening, sometimes, when people were in severe paranoia… it was frightening to us as well as the staff as well…’
 
`Mmmm’
 
`And with knives, they used to use plastic knives because of self harm or the fact that they could go… there could be violence between patients or staff and patients, inter-patient disputes and things, and that’s why I think the segregated ward is better because as soon as you introduce a sexual element in an abnormal environment you’re… you’re inviting problems.’
 
`And so you had experience of seeing patients being violent to each other as well as to staff?’
`Yes.’
[interviewer inaudible]
 
`But they used to break it up but… the fact that people were on medication, the violence wasn’t as extreme as say normal people coming out of a pub drunk, two youths fighting each other.  It wasn’t quite as bad as that because the people… the medication made people a little bit more controlled, but there was still violence, yes.’
 
`Ok, thanks.’
 
`Yeah.’
 
[03:29:55]
 
[end of DVCPro tape 3]]
[Start of DVCPro tape 4– VHS Tape 1 continues]
 
`Ok’
[04:00:38]
 
`Right Keith… can you tell me a little bit more about the villas? Where there different villas for different categories of patients.  How did they work?’
 
`Yes.  As I mentioned earlier, there was ‘the block’ which was for the severely ill, which,
`cause mainly… it was a male block, and I’m not sure whether there was a similar block for females, I expect there probably was, but they had… they were quite specialised, they had the.. villa 24, which is quite famous through Dr… Dr David Cooper, he’s quite well known for that particular ward, that was isolated a little from the general hospital, not much, but it was in a little recess, then there was the mother and baby unit which was another in… its quite a large independent unit.  There was ones for age… you know the adolescent ward and the general ward which were for people that had general ‘run of the mill’ things, not violent, too violent… the women… were separate… they had their own structures… there was a ward for the women that were a bit violent or distressed, then there was the mother and baby unit, usually keeping the mother and baby together if possible, and then there was the elderly womens’ wards, ‘cause as you know, women live longer than men so, with old age sometimes their problems magnify with age, both sexes, particularly women as they live longer, you know, they’re… there must be provision for their, for… their problems in older age, so there was that sort of unit as well.  Then there was quite, two large blocks which were for the staff, a larger block for… there was more… women… there was more women I think involved in the womens side, naturally, but I think there probably were more female nurses in the hospital than men, and they both had their separate residences for them.  And then there was a place called the… the mansion, where the doctors lived, naturally, which reminds me of that joke if I may say it, about… a… a psychotic is somebody who lives in castles in the air, and the psychiatrist is the person who pays the rent… who they pay the rent to…’
[interviewer laughs]
 
`So, there was that… even there, there was this mansions where the doctors went’
 
`Mmmm’
 
[04:02:56]
 
`But generally, we had our place called the ‘Alpha Club’ which is quite famous, where we used to go in the evenings from the wards, and we weren’t escorted, we just walked from the wards to the… to the Alpha Club where there was darts, and… pool and bridge and snooker.  There was a television there, and on occasions we had visiting musicians in the hall of the Alpha Club, playing music mostly classical, which unfortunately wasn’t appreciated by a lot of people, but I found it very stimulating, and they had films as well there, the old fashioned reel films, not… before video… the old fashioned film thing… and we used to visit that.  Then we went to several football matches and pop concerts with the chap who organised the Alpha Club outings, and that was quite successful and that had a building of its own which was quite large.  Then, immediately attached, not physically, but very near, was the occupational therapy block which was quite good for helping one.  And I think their philosophy, their philosophy of pushing people into some of structure which is looked on a bit of a miss nowadays, had a practical value, and it wasn’t bullying people, it was just gently urging them back into some form of routine, because if you didn’t have the routine then the problems in the mind could take place, whereas if ones active, ones brain is not functioning in a slightly different way if… which I think happens to anybody.  I think if anybody’s living on their own or feels isolated, or they’ve got problems, their reactions are just the same as the mentally ill person, except the mentally ill person’s problems might be more visible and they might seen greater than they are, but I think from a general human point of view, if people have stress in their environments, their reactions are… very similar whether they’re mentally ill or not.  But this Alpha Club was run by the patients, for the patients, with the person who ran it, who was a nurse, who arranged the trips to the football matches, pop concerts and the visiting artist who played there, mostly pianists and people like that, so its quite a structured environment.  Now whether that exists at Northwick Park now, something similar, I don’t know.  They will probably say that the Stepping Stones.. project does that, which it does to a degree, but I still have at the back of my mind that the… occupational therapy isn’t quite as sophisticated as it was all those years ago as it was in the early sixties.’
 
`So at the Alpha Club, would patients from all the wards come there?’
[both talking together]
 
`Yes.  All the wards would come.’
 
`Men and women?’
 
`Men and women, yes, yes.’
 
`Right. Right.  And was that encouraged, for patients to mix?’
 
`Yes it was encouraged yes.  It was encouraged… and… then… if… then we also visited the village pubs, and one was accepted there.  I personally went to a couple of parish council meetings ‘cause I thought it was quite interesting, see what was going on in the village and what was happening… and… you know, it wasn’t quite as a detached environment as people might imagine.  Historically, probably in future generations they will think it was a very isolated environment, but in reality it wasn’t and you had the bus service there, you could go into the local town, sometimes, and so…’
 
`So was the hospital actually situated within… near to a village then?’
 
[04:06:27]
 
`Yeah, Shenley village, yes.  It was about five miles from St Albans and about three miles from Boreham Wood.’
 
`Right.’
 
`So it was in between… and then Radlett was fairly near, which we didn’t like much because some… some of our friends committed suicide on the railway line at Radlett, so… that, that was a place we wouldn’t… didn’t exactly fear, but we were a bit apprehensive about you know, because it brought back so many bad memories… ‘cause the main railway used to run through on its way to St Albans and the north.  But saying that, you get the same problems at Northwick Park in inner London because… you’ve got the metropolitan line, you’ve got the main line from Euston, so that…that the temptations are there for people who feel so stressed, and I don’t think people should be condemned for committing suicide as they used to be, and its often still regarded as a… stigma.  Ok, it’s a tragedy for the person and their relatives, but I still think one should still have dignity in death whether one takes one’s life or not, and this isn’t given to people often, who are mentally ill, and the coroner just raps out the phrases ‘paranoid schizophrenia’, depression, manic depression or whatever.  And that judgement, it uses everything, but there's not the dignity there that people in death, whether they’re shot on the battlefield or have a normal death or commit suicide, they have a right to dignity whoever they are, they don’t… mentally ill people don’t always get it.’
 
`Right.’
 
`And the press can be very negative in their descriptions of people who have committed suicide as well.’
 
[04:08:05]
 
`So when you were in Shenley, did you have that experience of somebody on your ward…?’
 
`Yes I did.  And one… another experience I had… one of our men…one of our patients… one of our fellow patients was… had some of his poetry read on the old Radio Three, you know, what was it called, the third programme as it was then… so there was quite a cultural atmosphere there as well, which was developed.  And I don’t think that could have… can be so well developed in an innner London situation, because there’s too many distractions…’
 
`Mmm’
`And… its like… it’s a bit like… George Orwell, who wrote 1984, on a Scottish island, with very few people that… that sort of environment can be condusive to… to worthwhile things.’
 
`Yes’
 
`For a little while.’
 
`Yes.  So you… you could walk to the village of Shenley?’
 
`Yes… could walk to the village, going… and there was no problems in the pub.  You were accepted by the landlord ‘cause one was spending money [laughs] and one was accepted by the villagers’
 
`Yes, I was going to ask you that.  How did the villagers feel about…?’
 
`Well, I think familiarity breeds contempt… they probably would oppose the concept of having a hospital there in the first place, but over the years things settled down and… ‘
 
`And the staff used to live within the hospital?’
 
`Some did, and some lived in the village, which was very good really, because they were part of the community as well.’
 
`Right.’
 
`So it was a balanced community from the point of view of understanding.  The fact that quite a lot of nurses lived in the village with their families, made it a lot easier for us as well, in the village.’
 
`And what kind of restrictions did you have placed on you in terms of whether you were allowed out of the ward, [both talking together] or whether you were ….?’
 
`Well, in these things… one must… should be back in the ward by nine o’clock, but if one was in a little better health you could come back when you liked, as long as it wasn’t twelve o’clock, you know, it was.. it was reasonably late.  One just knocked on.. rang the bell and one was in, you know… but initially one was… rightly so, I think, that if… you had to be back before it got too dark in case you were disorientated or something you know, but in the long term one had quite a degree of freedom, but when I was first there in sixty one, when I was restricted, I even complained of toothache to get out of the ward, the tension was so great… I needed to get out, even though it was to another ward to have a filling which I didn’t need… because the pressure of being confined… it felt… those old… the old lion house at the London Zoo, where you see the lion and the tiger pacing backwards and forwards, complete dejection and humiliation, one felt like that a bit, when one was locked in, so… you could relate to the way primates are… you know, where animals are kept, you can relate… the detachment and the isolation that exists despite there’s a lot of other people there, you felt that one was in prison you know, more than in a hospital.’
[04:11:05]
 
`Right.  Was that in the early days of your admission?’
 
`Yes.  The early days, yeah’
 
`When you were restricted?’
 
`And, so you were restricted to the ward?’
 
`To the ward, yes’
 
`Which means that you couldn’t go to occupational therapy?’
 
`Oh you could, yes… it… at first you couldn’t but very soon afterwards you could go with the nurses, they escorted you to the… they didn’t have to with everybody, but initially they escorted you to the occupational therapy building.’
 
`And while you were restricted to the ward, what, what… what could you do on the ward?’
 
`Well, you could read books, and… play cards and things like that, but… most of the time when you’re on early medication, all one wants to do is sleep, because one’s system is adjusting to the medication, it takes quite a time, and for… for the first few weeks I was just sleeping most of the time because of the medication.’
`And would that be actually sleeping in your bed or was it… did they get you up?’
 
`They got you up, yes… you went to the rest… well, the television room, and, and…’
 
[04:12:13]
 
`And was that quite a rigorous routine, that they would actually make sure that everybody was out of bed?’
 
`Yes, they didn’t… they did… I don’t know about now, but then they didn’t like you… I don’t think… well its not really a good thing ‘cause.. if one’s in a chair one isn’t quite so… sleepy, as if one’s in bed.  But that was a rigorous… as you say, it was very rigorous to keep you out of bed in the day time.’
 
`Yes, yes.  And were there… because you’ve described the dormitory to me quite well…’
 
`Yes’
 
`What kind of washing facilities did you have?’
 
`Well, there was a laundry there for patients.  Most patients’ relatives took their laundry home every week, but those who didn’t have a family, the hospital provided laundry services.’
 
`And you wore your own clothes?’
 
`Well that was a big event.  Once… first one was in your pyjamas and… nightdress…
nightgown… but the fact of when you… one gets one’s clothes is quite… you feel quite an achievement that you’ve got them, you feel a little freer…’
 
`So…’
 
`Not so restrictive’
 
`Initially they would keep you in your pyjamas then?’
 
`Keep you in your pyjamas, yes.’
 
`Right.’
 
`Yes.’
 
`So even if you were up in the day room…?’
 
`Yes, one was… even if one went to the occupational therapy, you could still be in your pyjamas.’
 
[04:13:29]
 
`Right.  Right.  So as you say, it was a significant step…?’
 
`Yes, yeah…’
 
`To be allowed…?’
 
`To be allowed to put one’s clothes on.’
 
`Right.’
 
`They were locked away initially so one couldn’t get them, or taken home by one’s relatives.’
 
`Right.’
 
`That was a blow actually when one’s clothing was taken away… because it was the ultimate degradation that one wasn’t allowed to dress in a manner which makes you a member of society.’
 
[04:13:59]
 
`Yes, ‘cause that’s interesting, about when you were first admitted, what happened to your personal belongings… [both talking together] ..that you had?’
 
`Well they were locked up in a special room, one’s belongings… shoes, and things like that, and my parents used to bring… took them home at first, you know, but…’
 
`And, and at that stage, when you were, when you were admitted, can you remember, you had your belongings taken away from you…’
 
`Yes’
 
`…What other kind of things… did they make you have a bath, did they…?’
 
`Yes, you had a bath… and when I ran away that time, the second time in the early sixties, I had all… prickles in my feet, you know… had to get them out, and the… yes,  you bath regularly.  Initially… well I didn’t bath with them… you know, one bathed one’s self, there… it wasn’t like with physical illness that people might need help bathing, one was allowed that dignity, to have a bath on your own, that was accepted and quite rightly so.  But I do wonder often, about… in hospital, the regime is… if one goes into a hospital, a general hospital, with something like diabetes, and there’s a… medical… not solution but there’s something they can give you to help you, I’m sure the judgemental values are different to… in relation to that… the one… if one has mental health problems, because there was one chap in the hospital, had physical problems, and he was treated a little differently, and they discovered in the end that he had no mental health problems, it was a physical problem… but the judgmental value developed away from the general mental health aspect, and I think it’s the same with GPs as well.  Many of them see mental health as a problem, not as a medical condition that deserves compassion and understanding, they see it as a problem then, and now, and in the future, and its not quite so pleasant for society generally.  Mothers and babies are ok, the old are a bit ‘iffy’ and the mentally ill are completely out of power [ph], and I’m sure that if they did find some of the causes of mental illness, which I still believe are mostly social and environmental, that maybe the judgements will be different, once the… further they learn what’s going on, and hopefully so… there will be major adjustments in relation to one’s treatment in hospital and in the community generally.’
 
`Yes.  You’ve talked… you’ve talked about a patient who had a physical illness as well..?’
 
`Yes’
 
`If you did have any physical problems, were they addressed?’
 
[04:16:39]
 
`Yes, because most psychiatrists there, I don’t know about today, but they were… they had degrees in general medicine as well, and most of the nurses thought… knew something about physical medicine as well.’
 
`Right’
 
`In fact on one occasion, myself and another person escorted a patient to… I think, I think it was… the… general hospital in St Albans, he had a… a bad finger, you know, it was inflamed and festering, so they said… the staff said ‘would you like to go with him to the general hospital in St Albans?’, which we took on as a privilege that they trusted us to do that so… but whether today there’s that amount of trust, I don’t know.  I hope there is, but just because things are old, it doesn’t make them wrong, and I wonder whether the modern training and some of the attitudes of some of the staff, even in a hospital that is part of a general hospital, are as compassionate and radical as some… some of the nurses were in Shenley those thirty years ago.  ‘Cause I suspect, like the police, there’s people trying to climb the ladder, and they don’t want any problems, and if they can make it easy for themselves and hard for the patient then they’re happy, and it’s far more competitive generally than anywhere else in society, as it was years ago, and I do wonder, quite honestly, whether some of the compassionate acts which some of those nurses did, would be… I’m not saying they don’t exist today, but… I do wonder whether that sense of… lack of… less stressful times does affect everybody, even… even medical profession… and maybe that’s a general… a general, not condemnation, but it’s a general reality that society today is more stressful for everybody, the mentally ill and the allegedly normal as well.’
 
[04:18:36]
 
`Yes.  I’m sure that’s right… I’m sure that is right.  Let’s talk about staff relationships then.’
 
`Yeah.’
 
`Staff relationships with patients.  I mean, how did you find that, when you first went in? Was that a shock to you and did it change over time?’
 
`Well, it was a shock.  First of all to see men.  I mean… you don’t expect men to be a nurse, generally… you know, not being prejudiced, but that’s… one expects a nurse to be a woman, so we had these men walking about in white coats… one… just wondered what it was all about, and… when you… like we… my father said, ‘if you keep your head down you don’t get many problems’, but if one needs… I have been restrained several times in the early days, but as soon as once there’s a need for control, whether its emotional or physical, towards the patient, that’s when the problems arise, and observing them is just as distressing as the people that’s having that treatment.’
 
`Right’
 
`I found particularly… an unpleasant experience, watching somebody have ECT.’
 
`Right’
 
`To see their body shaking, and I thought, this is barbaric, even if it does have a positive influence, it’s so barbaric, which… something that wouldn’t be tolerated in physical medicine was being practised on people who are defenceless, and even though there might be fringe benefits in a way, it was so destructive for the people that were suffering it, and the people that were exercising it, that it should be abandoned.  I think its… and if you look at the history of mental illness, there’s… there’s quite a lot of terrible things have been done to mentally ill patients over the years…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`And its all been justified at that time that its medically necessary, and often it wasn’t… its like hanging was acceptable, for some… years ago, and I don’t think physical intervention on patients like ECT is acceptable any more.’
 
[04:20:36]
 
`Right.  Could you tell me a bit more about experiences of witnessing ECT being delivered… was that on your ward or…?’
 
`It was on the ward, yes…’
 
`Right. And I’m wondering how come you, as a patient, could see that procedure happening to somebody else?’
 
`Well, as you said earlier, Premila, there… there wasn’t the, you know… the, the… like in a general hospital where you have the blinds and the curtains.  As far as I can remember there wasn’t any there, because they wanted to keep their eye on everybody so that as soon as you start introducing barriers of any kind, there’s suspicions arise…’
 
`Right.  And can you tell me what you saw when you saw the ECT being administered?’
 
`Well you see the person shake.  They go pale…’
 
`Right.’
 
`And fortunately I never saw the insulin treatment being carried out, which is where you were strapped to a… as far as I can remember you were strapped to a bench of some kind… but it was very distressing… I mean, I’m glad that they did abandon that treatment because they said that the shock of the glucose or whatever it was, cured schizophrenia, which it didn’t really.  The shock was so great that… one’s… emotional… personality did change, but that was nothing to do with being positive, it was the fact that the body had been violently changed, even temporarily, hopefully, that the changes took place anyway whether they were medically justified or a… I’m sure that if you gave that sort of treatment to anybody, mentally ill or not, you will see personality changes, but that doesn’t mean that they are… positive mental personality changes.’
 
`With treatments like ECT, did you… what were your views at the time… I know now you might know more…’
 
`Yeah’
 
[04:23:34]
 
`…but at the time, why did you think something like ECT was being given to patients?’
 
`Well they said it was for severe depression I believe…’
 
`Right’
 
`And… it supposed to have cured that unhappiness, like years ago they used to call it ‘melancholia’, didn’t they… depression… and it is very distressing to see a person’s personality so deflated that they’re just surviving, and… that was the justification, that one was sparing misery and personal, personal unhappiness by doing this, but its such a barbaric treatment that I… I think if I had a choice I think I’d sooner be depressed than be… to be… I mean even on young people have had it, which is a disaster.  I knew a girl, locally, who had it about twenty times, and she was only nineteen, and at that age, to give people radical treatment like that I think’s unforgiveable.  But anyway, deperssion… everybody has depression, the way to solve it is to understand it and take radical physical and emotional and social actions to change it, but just sort of giving the physical treatment doesn’t cure anything, and if it does its only very temporarily anyway.  The fact that they have to do it so often when they do do it…’
 
`And in your experience at Shenley did you see anybody after ECT show an
improvement?’
 
`Yes… yeah… not, not really.  I saw them in a dazed state and their memory was ruined for a few days, and they might speak to you OK, but really… I can’t see it really… it was often to placate the relatives that something physically was being done.  It wasn’t just tablets it was… they thought oh well, if something physical’s being done they’ll be all right.  I’m not saying it didn’t help some people temporarily, but in the long term, I don’t think it made much difference to be honest.’`
 
[04:24:20]
 
`And were there many people being treated with ECT?’
 
`Quite a few.  Mostly women at the time… maybe… I don’t know whether that is true generally, but there’s a lot of middle aged women with the menopause and other things were having that sort of treatment.’
 
`Right.’
 
`I mean with the menopause and things like that, I mean that’s nothing to do with mental health, it’s a… it’s the same with men when they’re getting older, they get a similar, less aggressive… effect, you know… but whether… to automatically assume that…. Physical and mental crisises in one life, in one’s life, can be solved by physical intervention, I don’t… I don’t really think its valid to a great degree, and even with medication, if they accepted the social realities of the situation and the interactions of people which might go
wrong, giving people a tablet doesn’t solve the problem, it just postpones it.’
 
`Yes. Yes.  Would people talk with each other when you went to the Alpha Club?’
`Oh yeah… we’d sit and talk…’
 
[04:25:23]
 
`Would you discuss sort of treatments or would you discuss things like, [both talking together] ECT and things like that?’
 
`Oh yeah, we’d talk, yeah… some people were playing… if they were playing… playing snooker, that’s…. [inaudible ???]… no, we talked about women, all normal things, you know, and err…’
 
`Mmmm.  But would you specifically discuss like… what was happening to you in terms of kind of treatments [both talking together], you know, like ECT or whatever?’
 
`Oh yes, we did say what tablets we were on, and what effects… other people would say,
‘I’m on this… I have this effect’, and the… it was quite a comradely atmosphere, and I… I know its hard to believe, but I think its true, that… with allegedly normal people where you have disputes… ego disputes and things like that… I found with mentally ill people even in hospital and out of hospital, the environment isn’t so competitive.  It’s more friendly to each other, there’s less barriers of whatever… that normal people have got… whether its marriage status or whatever, you don’t have those problems, so the relationship is an honest relationship.  Maybe its like the rural poor in the centuries by, there was a sense of community through a commonality of experience, whereas if one goes to… a normal environment there’s that… a heavy competitive element, and I… my experience is that most mentally ill people aren’t violent anyway, in fact they’re the reverse of the two, and they’re too sort of… not depressed, but they’re too… their personalities have been held down, not exposed.’
 
`In that first admission, did you make any particular friends?’
 
`Yes, I…I… there was Alan, who was in the same ward.  I used to go to the proms with him over the last twenty years or so.  Unfortunately he committed suicide a couple of years ago… and… that was very sad, and, and… there was Jayohree an Indian lady I used to go with, she committed suicide the day after her father died, with lung cancer… so that I have experienced through other people… I’ve never been suicidal, but I… I have felt very severely depressed at times, and like my mother… what… I was very pleased what you said… she thinks I’m lazy, my mother, but I don’t think I’m lazy, it’s just the effect of the medication, I… I do a little gardening and things, but… even physically its difficult to do a lot.’
`Mmm’
 
`But people don’t realise that… and its also with neighbours, and I don’t think I’m being paranoid, they say ‘why aren’t you working?’ and all this.  ‘Cause I ‘m quite… affable with people, ‘cause they come from the East End where one related easily with people, and I think it’s the same with Asian people, they relate very well to each other generally… but they say ‘well why aren’t you working?’ and all this sort of thing, but… and next year we’re all going to be reviewed, but if you keep on the medication you can’t do a prolonged working act at all.’
 
[04:28:03]
 
`No, no… no.  So, in… in Shenley you had these particular friends…?’
 
`Yeah..’
 
`Like Alan was on the ward with you?’
 
`Yeah.’
`And you kept that friendship up afterwards?’
 
`Yes, there’s another chap called… called Robert who I go around with sometimes, then
there was Jayohree of course, she was in Northwick Park though, and… you, you do have a very good relationship with people.  It’s not generally a physical relationship, but its an emotional relationship.’
 
`Mmm.  And where… maybe not for your own self…’
 
`No…’
 
`…but where people were mixing on… in the Alpha Club, did people… did men and women kind of get into relationships as well?’
 
`I think some did.  I think some did.’
`Yes.’
 
`It was frowned upon, but that’s not because they were mentally ill, it was a general… the
cultural climate of the early sixties, before the sexual and… political revolution that took place’
 
[04:28:57]
 
`But would people find opportunities do you think?… you know…’
 
`Yeah, oh they did.  In fact there were several pregnancies there, and the baby was taken away immediately… I… they wouldn’t let them keep the babies, which I thought was very barbaric.  I don’t know what they do now, I mean there’s a need to look into it, but… from the point of view of civil liberties as well.’
 
`Mmm’
 
`I mean the child might be at risk for a time, but to take a mother away from a child just because of a diagnosis, is very debatable at the best of times.’
 
`Yes, yes.  Could you tell me a bit more about the Alpha Club then, ‘cause it sounds really… it sounds quite… interesting?’
 
`I don’t know whether it still exists, because most of the buildings have been pulled down for a housing estate, but it was called the Alpha Club because its supposed to represent the top two or three per cent, which I don’t agree with, but it’s a bit of a joke really, calling it the Alpha Club, because people were so heavily medicated, there’d more likely be some other club… [laughs].  But it was.. it, it was quite a large building, and it was very similar to… the nurses had a club of their own in the hospital, which they went to, and naturally, fair enough, they had their own club, we’d say, fine.. I don’t think they provided booze at the Alpha Club, they did at the nurses’ club, naturally, but, if one wanted a drink, it wasn’t always advisable to have one with the medication.  One went into the village.  But the Alpha Club was very well structured, there was somebody in charge of it, to run it, you see and this chap who took us… went to football matches and the women went to maybe a musical somewhere, or… men and women… there was a various… what people really wanted.  I suppose it’s a primitive form of… in a way, of… of Stepping Stones, you know, a bit more institutional setting.  But I don’t think they do that much at Northwick Park, arrange trips for patients…’
 
`Right’
 
`Of course they’ve got that idea that things would go wrong.  In the past they were prepared to take risks, but in a climate that’s very negative, despite the trumpeting of community care, the last few years have actually had a restrictive influence on patients, I’m sure it has, and some re… research is being done into what, what has changed.’
 
`Ok. Thanks. [inaudible]
 
[04:31:26]
 
`Thanks Keith, you’re getting horse!’
`Yes.’ [both laugh]
 
`It sounds… it’s very interesting actually, it’s really interesting, you’re experience, you know, ‘cause it’s sort of… it almost does seem, as you’re talking, you know, that there were actually some good things...’
 
`Yes, its not all negative, no, no…’
 
`…which went on then, you know.’
 
`I mean some people would actually condemn me for saying them, wouldn’t they?’
 
`But this is… you know, I mean… everybody’s got a right to their own… you know, and it doesn’t mean because some things were wrong that you… that every single thing has to be wrong, you know.’
`To be honest, if I was an Afro-Caribbean in hospital, I’d probably think completely differently…’
`Yeah..’
 
`Because… I think that I have to say that, ‘cause I think the general sort of prejudices of society… I was very lucky really, I suppose, but even among white patients, I know of some of them that, their personality wasn’t as malleable or… it maybe cruel… I don’t know to be honest, but not quite as malleable, and less… less, maybe less violent in expression and, that’s due to the medication most of it, but… less emotional sometimes, that some people who are naturally ebulient will suffer.’
 
`Yeah, yeah.  Well that’s right, because people don’t understand it, and therefore they like to say, ‘oh it’s part of your pathology’..’
 
`That’s… yeah..’
 
`Rather than saying ‘well it’s part of you…, this, this is perfectly… this is your way of expressing yourself.’
 
`Yeah, yeah.’
 
`Yeah.’
 
`I feel a bit tired actually [both laugh].
 
[04:32:46]
 
`Yeah… I know [laughs].  It is actually really exhausting this, I think.  It is, it is quite tiring.’
 
[end of DVCPro tape 4]
[start of DVCPro tape 5– VHS Tape 1 continues]
 
[05:00:36]
 
`Ok Keith’
 
`Yeah.’
 
`So… we’ve talked so far about you having your first admission to hospital when you were seventeen…’
 
`Yes’
 
`And about some of the things that went on there.  You talked about having witnessed ECT…’
 
`Yes’
 
[05:00:54]
 
`About the fact you were very sleepy for the first few days..’
 
`Yes’
 
`About the Alpha Club…’
 
`Yes, yeah…’
 
`And I’m just hoping to fill in a few gaps…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`I mean I wonder if you could tell me a bit more… you talked about the OT building, can you tell me a bit more about OT?’

`Well…’
 
`…in hospital?’
 
`Occupational Therapy…?’
 
`Yes’
 
`The building itself wasn’t very impressive, all it was, was a sort of… not like the villas  who were well built by Lang, the builders, who are known for good building, the actual OT places were just thrown up with breeze blocks and a roof.  So they weren’t very impressive to look at, but the work inside was impressive.  It was structured enough to be… to give one a sense of routine, which I think’s often lacking in modern psychiatric care, people are just like a drifting ship.  They’re afraid to apply too much discipline which is quite right, but at the same time the lack of structure can be very destructive and disorientating, to the staff as well as the patient, so… there was an element of structure there, although it wasn’t too heavy, and as I said earlier, you actually went to it in your pyjamas as well, so it was… it was considered very important as a therapeutic… at the early stages of treatment as well, and, and… most of them were women doing the work, it was mostly young women… in the hierarchy, the people at the top of it was well, they were women.  It was mostly a women orientated profession, and they did say to us, just that it’s the lowest form of human life in the profession because… many psychiatrist don’t value OT very highly, ‘cause they’re drug orientated, and some of the nurses feel that what they do is more important than what the OT does, so that professionally they’re not really recognised as much as they should be.  In fact, our senior social worker, who was at Shenley, she went to work at John Hopkins in Baltimore, because she had a better status and income, so it’s a profession which hasn’t been fully recognised.  Its seen as an easy option from being a doctor or a charge nurse, so they could actually understand what we were going through because their own structures weren’t completely satisfactory.’
 
`Right.’
`I don’t know what it’s like now, but its always been regarded as the sort of… the bottom of the rung, just above a porter, in the snobbery, you know, and evaluation they give to each other.’
 
[05:03:11]
 
`Were the patients… how did the patients regard the OTs?’
 
`Oh very favourably, yes.  More so than the nurses even, and they were less custodial than the nurses, and most of them were… used to go to the theatre, and ballet and different… all cultural things, the full spectrum… because their interests were in social development.’
 
`Right’
`Like the… in a similar way that… the… the Stepping Stone project is developing social skills in the community, the OTs were trying to do this in the hospital structure, and maybe, I don’t know whether OTs are involved in… the project… they’re just… the… sorry, could you just remind me Premila, the… Stepping Stones..’
 
`Yes.’
 
`Maybe that it is a transfer from the hospital environment to the… to society, but where it
fails, I think, in, in society… the development of Stepping Stones is very important, it has a very good effect on the patient, it, it doesn’t go far enough… it doesn’t try to integrate you with existing organisations… it does educationally, but even then you’re isolated, you’re not going at the same time, or the same periods as the normal student, so there’s problems of prejudice there to a very small degree, and you’re not getting integrated with the sort of social activities of the community in general, like, what particular interests you have… could be photography, debating… any interest in whatever culture one is operating in, there’s not a sufficient development to get you integrated into the general cultural scene…’
 
`Yes.’
 
[05:04:50]
 
`And also there’s the fact that what makes it more different… there’s not an educational development in towards that… the normal community because they feel isolated, the general community are suspicious and so does the client and the patient, they feel isolated and a bit apprehensive, so Stepping Stones have got to be more radical and go into education of children and… from the age of when they’re aware of things, thirteen to fourteen, which isn’t too young, because as I say, I mention now, because I’ve done some work, several years ago, which doesn’t… we hope to develop it further with the Director of local MIND, visiting schools and talking to pupils when they’re about thirteen or fourteen, about mental health.  They had a little giggle at first, but they soon became interested when you tell them what happens when you’re getting the early symptoms and… how to get help early is very important, and relationships with your parents, your girlfriend and whatever is very important.  They’re more important today, as I mentioned earlier, the highly competitive society we live in… they’ve got to recognise the tensions… in the exam structure as well, competitiveness in exams, and the learning process before one takes the exam, the stress and the worries which must be contained within one’s self and generally within the school community and the home community.  These stresses… and they related to this.  The children could understand that… they got away from this idea of the mad axe man, and the people from Broadmoor coming out and chopping people up, and the general, very… which does happen.  We’re not denying things like this though… like the Yorkshire Ripper and people like this, there are these unfortunate people about that do a great deal of damage to us because we’re all assumed to be in the same position of them, but generally children could understand this… you talk about pop stars that were on drugs and… had breakdowns, and they could relate to this…’
 
`Mmm.  Do you think that when you were that young child at Dalston…’
`Yes.’
 
`…who was being bullied, do you think it would have been useful for you to have had some… [both talking together]’
 
`It would have done.’
 
`…kind of education?’
 
`Yes it would have done.  I think it would have done.  And I think the teacher’s need the education.  It is a big thing now, bullying, since Esther Rantzen really did her programme about it.  I think its… its beginning… its beginning to be valued more highly, the emotional bruising can be damaging for life.’
 
[05:07:07]
 
`Yes.  I was wondering if some of your own experience has sort of contributing to you being…[both talking together]’
 
`I think…’
 
`…particularly…?’
 
`…because I couldn’t talk to my parents about it.  Not because they weren’t sympathetic,
but it wasn’t the sort of thing you did then.’
 
`No.’
 
`You just sort of kept things to yourself.’
 
`Mmm’
 
`Like sex and things like that… you… there’s was certain subjects you never spoke to your parents, or even… you might talk to a close friend about the bullying or the sex and all that, but… really… even today, I don’t think there’s enough talked about bullying, and really, they should get the culprit and the victim and the general school community, particularly the pupils together, to solve it among themselves.’
 
`Mmm’
 
`Without having… a… a, say a psychologist or somebody involved who’s fairly remote from the scene.  It’s got to be done within the school community, in a way that everybody understands, because the bully is as much a victim, as the person they, they exercise their prejudice and bullying on.’
 
`Yes.  I wonder… just, just to stay on that point…’
 
`Yes’
`..of bullying for a moment, and then we’ll go back to OT…’
 
`Yeah, yeah, yeah…’
 
[05:08:07]
 
`…did you ever sort of see any parallels in the hospital, in any… you know, incidences of staff bullying patients?’
 
`Yes.  Some of the staff particularly… I’ve been fairly lucky with the staff, but there were several members of staff, who if they didn’t get their way would push you and were quite bullying verbally, because they were losing their self control and they exercised it on the patients because they knew that they could get away with it, where if they had the same sort of attitude to fellow members of staff and the psychiatrists, they wouldn’t have been tolerated, so it’s a dishonesty really.  They knew they could exercise their frustrations on the patients because they weren’t valued sufficiently highly, and, and as you said earlier Premila, about, about intellect, they felt that that the people were sub-normal in the sense that they couldn’t relate as allegedly normal people, so they took advantage of that, so often.’
 
`Yes.  How did that make you feel when you saw people bullying other people?’
 
`Well it made one feel very angry, but you had to be very careful how you expressed that anger because you’d get the injection if you were too… if you were too expressive about what was going on.’
 
[05:09:11]
 
`So what did you do with that anger?’
 
`Well… you… you just… try and contain it… just..’
 
`Mmm, mmm…’
 
`..’cause there’s not much you could do.  Maybe go in a corner and have a fag or something… ‘cause fags were very important then.  Its quite strange, its maybe different now, and quite rightly.  I gave up smoking myself fortunately, but in those times, fags was a form of currency.  You’d exchange fags with one another, and as you probably know yourself Premila, they were very important then, and it was a form of trading in a way, and it was a form of… sort of socialising as well.  You’d offer somebody a cigarette and they would respond the same, so it was establishing relationships in a way, and it was a form of status as well, who… who was the person who had the most fags [laughs] and things like that…’
 
`OK.’
 
`And the staff was bad.  They smoked like troopers as well.’
 
`Where did you get the cigarettes?’
 
`Well… there was..’
 
`Did you buy them?
`At the Alpha Club, it was a shop.’
 
`Right.’
 
`As well, you could buy… you could buy cigarettes, sweets and… pork pies and things like that… that was part of the structure as well.  The shop, there was a shop there, in the hospital.’
 
[05:10:18]
 
`Right.  And what about money?  Where did you get…?’
 
`Well, you got an allowance.  I don’t know how… I can’t remember how much it was.  It wasn’t very much, but you might get say, thirty… well not thirty… two pound or something like that a week from the social security… and, and when housing came in, that’s where I think the advances today are better.  In housing its been rationalised and helped because in those days there were people leaving hospital with nowhere to go and there was insufficient structure to get them back into accommodation, so that was a bad part... time of the past… and there was a lack of coordination in housing and re-integration which is better today.’
 
`OK’
 
`I think.  To… particularly with the hostels and the half-way houses, which then they were few and far between.  And housing was a major problem, because if marriages had failed or anything, or with children or adolescents, it was often a difficulty which nobody wanted to face.  It was alright being in hospital, but that step back into the community, there was a lack of structure, in that sense as there is today, with the development of community care.  It wasn’t around so much then…’
 
`Right’
 
`…and its encouraging to see that many housing authorities are making a special effort to re-integrate the mentally ill in the community.’
 
`Right.  Maybe we’ll come back to that in a while..’
 
`Yeah.  Yeah.’
 
`…about re-integration.’
 
`Yeah.’
 
[05:11:41]
 
`Just going back to the… every patient would have like a couple of quid a week and that was their spending money…?’
 
`That was the spending money, yeah’
 
`And was there any possibility of earning any money?’
 
`Yes there was.  There was a farm there which many of them did… you could earn money on the farm and there was a garden, which you weren’t paid for… I did the gardening ‘cause I didn’t like the farming much.  But the people who worked on the farm, they got paid… but they… I’m glad you brought that up, Premila, because when I was in there, or when I just came out, I noticed that many middle aged and elderly women, whether they were widows, had been married… but were left on their own in hospital with few visitors, and were very depressed naturally through lack of, lack of socialising, many of those women were doing repetitive work in some of the OT buildings, like stapling paper together, or folding, or something like this, and… I did actually speak to one of the OTs, ‘cause it was under their remit, you know, why you were giving this repetitive work to people who are worth a lot more than just behaving like a machine, and she was quite honest, she said, ‘after many years of medication, some people are not capable of doing anything different, but it does fill their time’, not in a satisfactory way, but they’d be so either burned out by their illness, or by aggressive drug regime, that they’re very incapable of doing anything else.  So what I did, when I came out of hospital, I contacted Jack Jones, who’s quite an old man now, but then he was, he was, he was… through the Labour party I contacted him, but he was then General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, and I said to him, though it was a delicate area, and the Labour government didn’t agree at the time, they… he took my idea to them, ‘cause he was then min… he was also involved in government to a degree, that people like that should be unionised, who were doing work in hospitals, patients, and its… it was too radical for… the government to accept.  This was in the early, when the Labour government was just finishing up in seventy, it was too radical for them.  They thought it would interfere with professional status and it was irrelevant, which it may have been to a degree, but what I suggested to him, that they… people who… and it’s even today, probably to less… much less a degree, that even people working in the community for… at… like], there’s a wise… a rehabilitation places which have replaced the hospitalised workshops, that these people should be unionised, or if not, should have a contract and a status and dignity which they deserve, and they’re not getting it.  It’s looked upon as a luxury in a way, that you don’t have to medicate them so much because they’re working, but they should have the same status as a normal worker, and some of the money they earn should be put away for them in later life, they should have pension rights as well.  But in the early seventies, that argument was unacceptable, and I still think its unacceptable today, which is very sad, because whatever one’s mental condition, as soon as you start sub-dividing status, you’re at the grave risk of introducing prejudice.
 
[05:14:56]
 
`Yes. Yes.  So those women who were working in the OT?’
 
`Yes.  They were paid a little.’
 
`They were paid a little.’
 
`But they had no sort of pension rights or… or status, which they… maybe some of them couldn’t have coped with it being too structured, but never the less they were working, and there was a company making money out of them.  They weren’t doing this out of love, there was a firm actually employing them and paying them very little to do work which nobody else wanted to do, and the hospital was making a profit out of it as well.  But the poor people that were doing the work, they got very little out of it, and if one complained… what… I asked some of them, if you complained you were taken off it as a punishment you were, and you, you, you were considered to be aggressive and antisocial.’
 
[05:15:42]
 
`And did some people… so some people did complain?’
 
`Yes.  Some people did complain, that’s how I found out about it.  Some complained, and they were denied the work, and, and they lost their income.’
 
`Right.  What about… were there a similar things going on for men, where men could work?’
 
`Well I think there was.  Men did laundering and gardening, and… men did.. they did… some of them did like repairing garden instruments, you know, garden forks and things.  They still do that here, in Harrow, they repair forks and garden implements.  Some do typing.  Today women and men are on the computers which is very good as well, but whether they have the dignity and status they deserve I wouldn’t know, because I’m not aware of what’s going on in that sector today, but I suspect there could be room for major improvement.’
 
`Yeah.  What about the farm.  I’m interested in the farm.’
 
`Yes.  The farm.  They used to keep pigs and used to grow vegetables and things like that.  But they… they, they were very… they were very… you know, they were… in a low position, they didn’t have the status of … of the workers they employed to work on the farm full time, who were sort of people from the community.  But the atmosphere between the workers and the patients that worked wasn’t always satisfactory.  I’d… I’d like to go back,  you’ve reminded me Premila… that… relation to the mother and baby unit… they’re… at that time in the early sixties before the changes, one couldn’t… nobody, men or women from other parts of the hospital, weren’t encouraged to encouraged to associate with these women that had… that had the babies, because they were frightened relationships would develop and have an impingement on their… previous relationship they had before the baby was born, and, and it was… I remember one time a group of us went into the… went into the womens baby unit for a record… old fashioned record player, because we were having a social, and as soon as we went into the ward, there was quite a lot of aggression from the staff, saying you had no place to be there and things like that…’
 
`So was that…?’
 
`That was an attitude which was… I don’t know whether its like it today, but there was quite a lot of aggression on the part of the staff in relation to that… it was quite an innocent visit, we were asking for the… to borrow the equipment, but there was quite an aggressive attitude from the staff about it.  It’s probably changed now.’
 
[05:18:10]
 
`So that was more so than just to the women who were on womens ward?’
 
`Yes.  Even on womens ward they didn’t like them associating with other women, particularly much…’
 
`And so, did those mothers… those mother and baby, people… they didn’t come to the Alpha Club much?’
 
`No they didn’t, no, no… they didn’t’
 
`Its interesting, I wonder what that was about then?’
`I don’t know… some hang ups I should think… sexual or something… frightened that the family relationships might disappear… the women were sort of vulnerable and things like that, but at the same time they did have a right to socialise and they weren’t getting that right.’
`Yes.’
 
`But, talking about socials… they did have parties and socials at the Alpha Club and blancmange and the sort of usual things… no alcohol, which was fair enough, but… they, there was social events and most of the women from the wards came.  Some of the women from the baby unit came, but… but, but with the babies, they’re… they didn’t always have their babies with them, it depended on their mental state, so there was this conflict about how much access should the mother have? I don’t know, its probably a little different now, I mean there’s always risks isn’t there, on both sides, but I don’t think they’re quite as draconian towards that sort of thing now as they were then.’
 
`Could you… I’m intrigued by the… this idea of the socials.  Can you describe sort of, you know,  maybe just think back…’
 
`Yeah.’
 
`…and can you describe a bit, just one, one example… of a social?’
 
`Well… it’s a little difficult, ‘cause I did find… with many of the ladies, they found it themselves… I think drugs have a… a… more of an adverse effect on females than men I think.  And some of them were shaking slightly due to the side effects of medication, men did as well, and this made people feel isolated, the very fact that they were shaking, and also many women had aged more than they should due to heavy medication, so that the relationships were very shallow in most cases.  Not always, but they were usually shallow because both parties felt that they were… weren’t particularly normal in this relationship because of the side effects of the… and some of the elderly women in their late fifties and early sixties weren’t zombies, but they were emotionally drained to the core because the ravenous effect of medication, and the fact that they hadn’t socialised sufficiently when they were younger… so there was a lot of victims, sort of things… normally people danced together and things but there was always a hardcore of people who felt they couldn’t socialise.’
 
[05:20:50]
 
`Right.  And would you have music?’
 
`Yes, music… pop music and things.  General.. usual things… and a sort of buffet, that sort of thing you know…’
 
`And would the staff…?’
 
`The staff would help on that as well, and at Christmas, every patient got a bottle of Guinness [laughs]’
 
`Oh, that sounds good [both laugh]… and if, if.. a nurse saw a man and a woman patient getting a bit too friendly, would they…?’
 
`They’d break it up.’
 
`Right.’
 
`And even more so in the homosexual sense, they’d do the same I believe.’
 
`Right.’
 
`But that often took place in the ward.  On several occasions I’d see a nurse rushing into the toilet facilities and… drag people out there, you know… it was most humiliating for them and the people involved, and it…it… that’s why I was transferred back to David Cooper’s ward, because they felt it was unsuitable that I was in that environment, so… that, that was a God send… not that I… had any relationships with anybody in that way, its just…they felt it was… it wasn’t right, you know… which was the right attitude… at the same it was wrong, because people should… their sexuality shouldn’t be seen as a penalty, whatever one’s sexuality is… and I feel it should have been done in a more humane way, of giving people facilities to express themselves.  And that is I think what’s happening today.’
 
[05:22:17]
 
`Mmm.  That’s good.  OK, so do you think… I’m just going back to the socials, do you think the socials were quite useful?’
 
`I think they were, and particularly the trips outside.  Like, to the football, to the pop concerts, and… various… in the village… the village was of our own volition… we chose to go into the village provided the nurses and doctors agreed, but the, the… Alpha Club was structured whereby the person in charge of the Alpha Club, who was an ex-nurse, he would arrange everything for you.  It was structured in that sense, but for the actual village itself, we...we went in there by our own choice, we weren’t coerced into it, that was a natural choice on our part, and that was encouraged as well.’
 
`Right.’
 
`Which I think would be difficult to operate in an urban… urban environment, because there’d be too many people in the pub anyway, and there’d also be no relationships established beforehand, so that that couldn’t be the same of community if one tried to do the similar sort of thing in an urban environment, I think.’
 
`Yes.  You said you socialised with each other…’
 
`Yeah.’
 
`What about with people from outside?  Did visitors… were you allowed visitors?’
 
`Yes, but it was only a couple of hours a… you know, it was two to four… my mother… mother used to come and see me every Wednesday which was quite a journey from here, its about fifteen miles away, Shenley from here… took two buses to get there, and I came home at weekends most of the time… and one had to sign a form and… another thing they did, which they still do, is they had a record book, a sort of… a diary, which they used every day and at weekends to… to, to tell the psychiatrist what had been happening with the patients while they… in the day time, and at night while the psychiatrist wasn’t there, and they used to make notes on people… if something stood out from the day… they’d put it down in the diary, and that was… every morning the psychiatrist would, would read and see what had happened, but one had no access to those records, of what they were saying about you, which is not being paranoid, but I think one does have a right to know what people are saying about you, whether you’re mentally ill or not.  That’s a basic right everybody has.’
 
[05:24:34]
 
`Would you get any feedback in a ward round or in a…?’
 
`No, you wouldn’t.  That was completely detached from you.  These comments from the staff and doctors were completely kept away from you, and even in employment… they would… there was no way of… checking what they’d told the employer, that what they said was that, and it was… there was no access to what they were saying, which is wrong.’
 
`And did you feel that your voice was heard in all of this, or did you…?’
 
`Well I think, others as well… both… the other people, we did… on the Saturday we’d… getting on to David Cooper, who was an interesting psychiatrist because he came from a privileged society in South Africa, and he became a Marxist and studied psychology in Moscow, so… and he was a Marxist, which… sort of separated from the general psychiatric scene, and he had quite radical ideas about the family and… being a Marxist… I’m not saying I agree with everything he thought, but he could actually see the malfunctions in the structure of society, and he was very strong on the belief that social factors were the major cause of the mentally ill, and not clinical or pathological reasons, he was very strong on the social aspect, which in fact alienated him from a lot of his fellow psychiatrists and politicians, and he suffered for it, because the unit was closed ten years later because… because there was a little bit of neglect and things, and it went wrong.  It wasn’t his fault alone, but its just that things got too de-structured and his enemies took advantage of him, got him dismissed from the hospital.  But in the early days, his ideas were quite acceptable to many people, and, this… another thing where he did actually have problems, which I think psychiatrists try to avoid and are trained to avoid, he would often criticise the parents and say that a lot of the problems were caused by them, which most psychiatrists don’t like to say, because their relationship could be in jeopardy with the carers or parents, but he did say, Dr Cooper, openly, that in some cases it was the… it was the attitude of the parents that were causing… partly causing the mental illness in the child, and this wasn’t popular with the relatives or the carers, and it wasn’t popular with the medical, the general medical community in the hospital.’
 
[05:26:56]
 
`Did you find… did he sort of do things like calling parents in?’
 
`Yes he did.  He called them in, and… in many ways he was pioneering because as you know with cognitive therapy they do involve carers now, and he was doing this in the late, the late… late thirty… late fifties and early… early sixties… he was doing it already.’
 
`So he was specifically attached to your ward?’
 
`Yes, to… his… its quite famous, villa 24, because that was his adolescent ward which he ran for about ten years, till things got out of control, partly through the stimulation of his enemies, and the fact that was he was doing was leaked to the Evening Standard, the whole thing collapsed.  It was due to a member of NSF who went to the hospital and had a relative there, and stirred up all the dirt.  Things were going wrong but the fact that he was getting no professional support from his nurses or, or the general management of the hospital, made it worse than it really was.’
`But the patients liked him?’
 
`They were happy.  Yes, the patients were happy.’
 
`Could we just.. go back a bit about him? So he was your doctor..?’
`Doctor.  [both talking together] Yes.’
 
`…from the beginning?’
 
`From... no… from… yes, from the beginning, till the one I mentioned.  I was taken off the doctor when I ran away that time.’
 
`Right.’
 
`And I was transferred to him, from this other doctor.’
 
[05:28:19]
 
`Right. Right.  And so his method of working, was very different from the other doctors?’
 
`Yes, and there wasn’t the sense of status between you.  It was a relationship of equality, which obviously, professional detachment is important to be objective, but in his general attitude he, he’d accept anybody, black, green or yellow, whatever emotional state they were in, he’d accept them as an equal, which is rare today, even… ‘cause I don’t think psychiatrists are taught that… they’re taught to be a little bit superior so they are always in control of the situation, whereas he was prepared to de, de-control the situation a little, and every Saturday we used to meet, a group of patients and… charge nurses and others… we used to meet in his office and discuss philosophical things and… the general sort of conversation you get anywhere, and he… there was no sort of ‘I am the psychiatrist, I’m the big man’, there was none of that.  He was a completely… and another thing is that many of the staff… feel resentful towards psychiatrists, because they think ‘I’m with the patient all the time, I know what’s going on more than the psychiatrist does’, and in many relationships between psychiatrists and, and nurses, there is this… this problem of, not integration, but a mutual understanding of their positions, and even today I think many nurses think they know a lot more about what’s going on than the psychiatrist.’
 
`Do you think that relationship was better in Dr Cooper’s team?’
 
`Yes, because he, he would integrate everybody.’`
`Right.’
 
`Yes.  He would get everybody… there was equal status throughout… out his regime, and I think the other psychiatrists began to accept his… his attitude as well.’
 
`Right, OK, thanks.  We’re going to stop for a minute and then…’.
 
[end of DVCPro tape 5]
[start of DVCPro tape 6 – VHS Tape 1 continues]
 
[06:00:34]
 
`So, in terms of the meetings that you used to have on Saturday…’
 
`Yeah’
 
`Were they… sort of…you said they were about, you talked about philosphical issues…?’
 
`Oh, we talked about sex and other things as well, you know [laughs]’
 
`Would… would you say that they were sort of like… therapy sessions…?’
 
`Yes.  In fact, one of the people there, this Dave Allen I mentioned, committed suicide a couple of years ago, a particularly close friend in there, he.. he, he said it was more like a tutorial than a… than a… than err occ… than err, therapy… we did have occupational therapy… we did have… therapy, you know, general err…we did have a therapy day, but I wasn’t too happy with it because people like me, who naturally verbally dominate things, often kept the other people from taking part.  But more importantly, with the lack of structure, people could be.. patients could be very aggressive to each other, and you could actually see personalities being destroyed in the process, and sort of like dogs get together and fight physically, you could see without any controls you’d find that some people have been emotionally destroyed by the situation.’
 
`Would the therapist not…?’
`They would… in the end they would do something, but the damage had already been done.’
 
`So those sessions weren’t with, Dr Cooper?’
 
`Some were, but they changed the structure… after they’d seen that without structure it’s chaos, and it’s the weak and the meek who fall by the wayside… and this often happened in people’s eyes before they went in hospital, and it certainly shouldn’t happen when they’re in hospital because everybody, whatever their emotion or personality state, has a right to dignity, and some people weren’t being given that dignity.’
 
`But they did adjust this…?’
 
`They did in the end, yes, after people complaining on other peoples’ behalf as well as people themselves complaining, that the whole thing was just very destructive.’
 
`And how often would those sessions happen?’
 
`Once a week that would be, in the main… in the main dining room, you know… it would be… you’d be sitting there and they would have this therapy.  But going back Premila, to what you said before the interview about the way one was judged, this open-mindedness of Dr Cooper was.. was very pleasant because what… however one behaves to most psychiatrists, as we mentioned earlier, if you’re too verbal or aggressive you’re either sort of barrack room lawyer, who they find in the army, or somebody who’s on an ego trip, and if you say noth… nothing at all, you’re withdrawn and you’re, you’re… whatever way you do it, you were suffering from some antisocial condition, so however one behaved, one was being judged by a psychiatrist and sometimes by charge nurses and nurses generally, so you didn’t… you weren’t given the benefit of the doubt which normal people had, than… if you go into a pub and strike up a conversation with somebody, its usually a relationship of equality… you’re socialising, but one never has that luxury in hospital.  One was being judged all the time, and if you exercise the same sort of attitude to a normal person, you’d probably get a punch in the face or… a bottle of drink thrown over you… but there’s always this judgmental attitude, all the time, and sometimes this attitude impinged on one’s carers.   [06:03:51]   They were sort of taught to react in this way.  Like my mother, I find sometimes when I go out, ‘where are you going?’, or ‘what’s this…?’, if you want to go to bed early, ‘why are you going to bed early?’… there’s often this judge… which makes you feel very resentful at times, ‘cause if one’s on one’s own, you want to do what one wants all the time, it’s not this judgement situation, and this is instilled into carers by the professionals… even one’s GP, which I think primary care taking control, of mental health, is a disaster because they have so many other things to deal with, they have more than enough work administratively and medically… but to give them more work, which many of them do… don’t particularly want to do because they so easily pass off… passing off to the professionals in the mental health field, and they haven’t got the time to really understand and their training isn’t up to… dealing with… so what will happen is, you might have the occasional therapy session at a, a… surgery, but generally there wouldn’t be that specialisation that’s needed… it does have a good point, because its keeping you… in the community,
and one’s integrated in the practice, but at the same time I think there’s still a… a need for specialisation.  It could take place in a general surgery, which might be a good thing, but every patient’s got to be prepared for it… people that go there, ‘oh we don’t want these people here, why do them at general medicine… in general medicine, they should be specialised’… which is a way… a good attitude that its not too specialised, but at the same time I think you do need more professional input in the practice to make it work.’
 
`Right.  Thanks.  Yeah, I mean I think it is very important this issue about being judged…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`And people being very judgmental…’
 
`Yes.’
 
[06:05:38]
 
`I wonder if you came across, in that first hospital admission of yours, any staff who…
who you felt weren’t being judgmental… who were actually seeing you, in your true light without putting their own... ?'
 
`I did find that with several people… but unfortunately, nurses and doctors who had that attitude were often victimised by their colleagues for having that attitude… you know, you’re being too soft, you’re… you… there’s a lack of detachment and this sort of thing, that if you… they… well I think everybody has the right to friendship, and if one is in an environment which is alien and unnatural anyway, without friendship one doesn’t survive, and one has the right to friendship from the psychiatrist as well as the medical staff and the nurses because one’s in an environment, not by choice but by design of society, and if it’s an environment which is cold and austere, it doesn’t do anybody any good.’
 
`Right.  Are you talking about friendship there between different members of staff, or between staff and patients…?’
 
`Well, it did have a friendly… a relationship with the staff, it was the same with the OT, because one couldn’t really establish a relationship, but never the less, the relationship was as near as equal as possible, but with the, with the patients one did have relationships… more closely possibly… but at the same time there were sort of friendships between staff and patients, which in a busy, urban environment probably couldn’t take place.’
 
`Right.  I mean did you have somebody… that you were particularly friendly with?’
[both talking together]
 
`Well I did have one particular… one, one charge nurse, who, when I had my accident, came to the hospital, to see me, which I valued very highly, and he also gave me a reference for a job… and Dr Cooper gave me a reference to go to university, but they wouldn’t  accept his reference.  Not to actually go to university, to go to the… Dalkeith… College, which is a preparatory college to the university, and though I had no qualifications, Dr Cooper gave me a good reference but they wouldn’t accept it… and when I went to the Institute of Education in London to be interviewed, they said that… despite the psychologists’ and David Cooper’s report, they said I was too much of a risk.’
 
[06:07:52]
 
`Right. I’d just like to go back to this particular charge nurse that you…’
 
`Yes.’
 
`… said that… you know… was… he seemed a bit different…’
[both talking together]  
 
`He did, yes…’
 
`…from the other staff.  I mean could you pinpoint at all in what way…?’
 
`Well I think he was different because he’d crack a joke with you and he’d even buy you a drink… and more importantly, he was a man of broad experience because he served in Burma in the war, and he was… he was an Officer in the army out there, so he’d come across all different types of people and he’d been through all the gamut of emotions that one’s had when one’s under stress or one’s life is at risk, so he had a very broad sort of Catholic personality due to his experiences, whereas some of the other nurses were just purely people that have had very little experience of life but have studied well, and know all… all, all the technical terms of… of diagnosis, but from an emotional and a personality point of view, they were just as inadequate as some of the patients.`
 
`Right.’
 
`And that’s why… this chap knew my father… not in the army, but they’d both served in the war, so he got… my parents got on very well with him as well.’
 
`Right.’
`And he got on very well with David Cooper, because coming from South Africa he had a very vivid impression of what prejudice could do to a society.’
 
[06:09:08]
 
`And, with David Cooper, did you see him… you saw him in the groups on a Saturday…?’
 
`On a Saturday…’
 
`Did you see him in a one to one…?’
 
`Yes.  In the… you did, yes.  There’d also be one to one with the parents, with one’s carers or parents.’
 
`Right.  Right.  I want to… Keith… if you could just run through for me…’
 
`Yes.’
 
`What a typical day might be… like on that villa 24…?  You know, sort of like from the [both talking together] time you got up…?’
 
`One was woken up at seven o’clock, and… one wasn’t allowed to stay in bed.  It’s rather like the army I think, or a public school… they had you all out of bed so you couldn’t get up to any mischief or whatever, and you were turfed out until eight o’clock until the meals were provided, you’d get ready, have a wash, clean your teeth, toilet and everything, then at eight o’clock, the meals… the breakfast came… which was sort of cereals and things like that… then, nine o’clock… you had an hour to waste, so you listened to the radio possibly, there was a radio in the ward, then nine thirty was the occupational therapy to twelve thirty or twelve, so one was at the… got out of the ward and went to… everybody as possible, even people with… you know, nightclothes on went to the occupational therapy.  One was there ‘till twelve or twelve thirty.  Occasionally one’s psychiatrist, or one psychiatrist would come in and discuss things with you, but generally it was more of a work ethic than actual diagnosis, but the psychiatrist did pay a visit and one spoke to therapists and… some of them, if you were doing printing, or basket work, or whatever, they would talk to you about what you were doing, and general conversation… then they’d… you’d go back to dinner… at… in, in the ward… in the refectory there, and, and then… afternoon, at two o’clock you’d go back for therapy ‘till four, and then four onwards the time was your own.  You’d go in the TV room and watch TV until you had your medication… and, its ironical with the medication, ‘cause when I first went in there, though I only had medication for a very short period first time, I used to put the tablets in my… like this chap I mentioned earlier… I didn’t do it to take them, I just did it not to take them.  Anyway, they found this out so they put me on syrup instead… but… they were very strong on medication, as I think they are today too much as well.  And there’s always been a school of psychiatry that see that the solution is medication alone, and NSF… both nationally, professionally, and the carers who associate with it are often very strong on this medication, custodial attitude, ‘cause its seen as the salvation from… you don’t have to make social changes in society if you can club somebody with a medical… with a chemical kosh, you don’t need to make any changes.’
 
[01:12:08]
 
`And what medication were you on at that stage?’
 
`Well I was still on Largactil, Stelazine and Artane.  I was on Largactil, quite heavy doses… but the first… my first period in hospital I was off it very quickly and I was on no medication, ‘cause Dr Cooper took me off medication, but when I went back in seventy three… or seventy one… I think it was seventy three… I was heavily medicated then, and I’ve been on medication ever since.  But probably, if David Cooper had been there I would have followed the same regime as previously happened.’
 
`And when he took you off the medication, was that… something that you wanted, something that he decided…?’
 
[06:12:45]
 
`No it’s something he decided… with agreement with me… and, and I was quite happy with it, and I was… I… wasn’t on medication for ten years.  But the next period in hospital, the psychiatrist was a medication man, and he sort of drugged me up to they eyeballs, and I’ve never been off since, though I’m on a lesser dosage now, and my, my GP does adjust the dosage, though I’ve been fairly stable for the last five years, with, with the low medication, but unfortunately I came across a psychiatrist who was purely medication, and if one said anything which… you tried to help him in diagnosing, he’d resent it… he’d feel you were talking out of status, that… its not your job to decide what you do, it’s my job, that attitude, which is cultural as well, because in English society, I don’t know about Indian society, but in English society its very structured, and the class element, although I’m not a Marxist, the class element is very important… this idea of status, and the mentally ill black person is the lowest status possible.  Then it’s the white mentally ill person, then it’s the elderly, and then it’s the physically disabled… there’s these structures in society which one has to try and combat.’
 
`Yes.  Yes, I think its very interesting as well that David Cooper took you off your medication…’
 
`Yes.
 
‘…because earlier you were talking about… there was an element of people being allowed to take a few risks…’
 
`Yes, yes. [both talking together]’
 
`…you know, in terms of going out to the village and things…’
 
`Yes, yes…’
 
`It seems like David Cooper was…’ [both talking together]
 
`He encouraged that sort of… he encouraged that… yes, yes…’
 
`…prepared to take that risk, let’s see how you go without medication, so you weren’t put
back on it…?’
 
`No, no…’
 
`Right.’
 
[06:14:20]
 
`But… I can understand this… this, this sense of risk… and with Marjorie Wallace and Janet Zito this risk does exist, but I think it’s a risk that society’s got to accept to be blunt.  Its no good pussyfooting and saying oh well, you know, just keep them heavily medicated, and that’s it, but… risk is a fact of life.  One’s more likely to be killed outside a pub or a road accident, than by somebody who’s mentally ill, and if society can’t accept these risks, it’s unacceptable.  I’m not saying its desirable, its an unfortunate tragedy for the person involved, but I think to be mature minded, I think you’ve got to accept that with mental illness there’s always a risk, and if one can’t accept it, one’s being very prejudiced towards the general mental health community.  And David Cooper did agree with this, that you should… people who have mental illness have a right to status and stature, which applies to normal people, and this was totally alien to what psychiatry today, as it was then among the traditionalists, that the mentally ill are people to be contained, and the primary function is to save society from the embarrassment and the physical risks from the mentally ill.  And this is the paramount attitude of most psychiatrists.’
 
`So when… you… was it David Cooper who decided that you were well enough to be discharged…?’
 
`Yes, yes..’
 
`And you were discharged?’
`He did, yes.’
 
[06:15:46]
 
`And do you know on what basis he was sort of working… you know…?’
`Well when he said personality disorder, perhaps my personality was under developed or I’d been spoiled as a child, being the only child, so maybe I was a bit self centred, but when I came out, he said I was sufficiently integrated to come out… and though I always talk too much and say too much, I know I do, but, I feel I say it because there’s so many.. there’s not enough voices in the mental health community to put our point of view… so you do appear a little aggressive and selfish at first, because, you’ve got to speak up for yourself because nobody else will do it for you in the same way.’
 
`So when you were discharged, how long had you actually been in Shenley?’
 
`About a year.  A year, yes…’
 
`And how did you feel about being discharged?’
 
`Well, its… it’s a bit strange… you’re master of your own fate, and… I had a job getting a job because when my… they found that my, my stamps weren’t… there was no stamps in my… my, my… you know, national insurance stamps, they naturally assumed you’d been in prison, so… its no good… its all right psychiatrists… many psychiatrists are a little unreal because they assume once you leave hospital its easy to get a job, but its not that easy, because if your book’s empty, they want to know, the employer, where it is.  They… automatically assume you’ve been in prison, but it seems to be a simple thing like that seems to be… beyond the understanding of some psychiatrists, and they all say, most of them say, even David Cooper until he realised that he was wrong with people, with patients, that its not easy to re-integrate because, its all right saying be honest, if you’re honest with people it don’t always pay and you’ve got to sometimes tell a lie to get a job… and it rebounds on one if a friend at work says, betrays one’s confidence and one loses the job because they’ve revealed that you have had problems, mental health problems, if you’re honest you lose the job, if you’re dishonest you lose the job, because you try and tell people… you’ve nothing to be ashamed of, but the way society acts towards you, it does make you feel a bit ashamed and like… the leper in the Bible, the people that are detached from normal society…’
 
[06:15:54]
 
`Were you worried about that before you came out…?’
 
`Yes a bit, yes…’ [both talking together]
 
`…or was it only after…?’
 
`I think all people worry… all patients worry about that because, its all right being honest and candid, but… most people who are not mentally ill live in a dream world often, where the realities are cushioned, because… maybe that is a problem, mental illness is a sort of a clarity and understanding which is harmful to one’s self, because one is more aware than say, one… the normal community to the problems you’re having in relationships won’t… honest that one’s relationships aren’t going well… whereas some people do the normal clouding over, by going to the pub or establishing a new relationship, so that… the clarity’s not there and I think this clarity is, is very valuable if one’s an artist and can write about it, in books or poems, its, its, its a creative process, which everybody can appreciate.  But I think the clarity and sense of honesty that most mental people have… mentally ill people have, and which psychiatrists are aware of as well, doesn’t suit one well for a normal society, because one’s honesty can be one’s destruction.’
 
`Right. And do you feel that at that stage the hospital helped you at all?
[both talking together]
 
`No… I don’t think they did’
 
`…in terms of…?’
 
`There was… not like today where we have more… integration, like Stepping Stones and… there were social workers about then, but they were more involved with child abuse and things like that, or in the hospital environment.’
 
`So you came back to your parents…?’
 
`Yes.’
 
`Came back to live with your parents?’
 
`Yes.’
 
[06:19:27]
 
`And then what happened?’
 
`Well I got a job… at the British Museum Newspaper Library, just carrying books about for the students, but I only lasted six months because I spent most of my time talking to the students [laughs] and that… I got the sack... [laughs].  I did do voluntary work, but my lack of honesty, or… I didn’t like being dishonest with people because, it’s a right to be honest and if people can’t accept one’s honesty it’s their problem and not yours.  And I found this, that I couldn’t get work, so I, I went into voluntary work… I managed an Oxfam shop for two years as a volunteer, and… I did other work.  I’ve had… on Friday I’m taking a lady to Northampton to visit a relative ‘cause she can’t get out the house on her own, I do things like that… and I done work for the Labour party, unofficially in a… some research, and things like that… but I’ve never… I do feel a bit… my father particularly was a bit angry that I wasn’t working, ‘cause the work culture is very strong isn’t it, among, particularly men… he… they don’t really realise the problems that there are in society and the fact that one’s being judged, and I was losing jobs because of one’s presumed… condition… so he couldn’t really understand that, so the relationship was a bit frayed at times, and also… being in the war… when… it happened so much with this chap, who… befriended, you know, I was talking about… I’ve forgotten his name now, what was… Frank Lee [ph], that was his name… the charge nurse who helped me a great deal, but I think the war for both of them, actually desensitised them with death and the sort of things that were going on and the religious hypocrisy that’s involved in war, so they were a little cynical and they lacked that… both of them may have lacked that little bit of humanity which had been destroyed by the war.’
 
[06:21:23]
 
`Right.  Do you feel that your parents were aware of kind of suffering any stigma because of… what had happened to you?’ [both talking together]
 
`Well as I said, my mother said, ‘I’m glad you’re grandmother’s not alive’, which really sums the whole thing up in a way….’
 
`Mmm’
 
`That… err… there is a stigma, and that generation from the… post First World War, Edwardian times, mental health was… it was something which was beyond discussion.  It’s one of those things swept under the carpet.’
 
`Did that… did that make it difficult for you to come home?’
[both talking together]
`It did at first, not with my grandmother, ‘cause she was dead, but with my parents, they’re… on a several occasions said you know, ‘we’ve got no grandchildren, you’re not married’ and all this, and that is a particular sort of… field where NSF are very negative.  The carers in NSF are… they see they have a problem, that they’re not always as compassionate as they should be, because they feel they’re being denied certain things which society demands they should have… and NSF is often…is, that is… with working closely with carers, this is a thing, there’s a sense of guilt exercised on the child, and its not really fair to say it openly because they are as much victims, they are being judged as well as you are by the neighbours of society in general, so they’re suffering as well, in a way.’
 
`So after you came home you worked for six months and then you did some voluntary
work…?’
 
`Yes.’
 
`And then what happened over the next few years?’
 
[06:22:49]
 
`Well I decided to… to study, but… I’ve done since… I did a correspondence course with the National Extension College, but I never took… I never took the… I was doing GCSE English Language A Level which I enjoyed, but… and the tutor said I would pass the exam, but… the fact that I… my school experience had been so chequered, I didn’t have the confidence to take the exam, but he did say that it was a valuable thing that I did it, and then… seventy one, I wrote this play about the media, sort of satire, and, and... that took me about six months to research as well… and it… it was rejected by the Unity Theatre, which is quite a famous left wing theatre in… in Camden, and as I told you I destroyed it because I felt a bit sad about it, that it wasn’t any good, and then there was another offer came forward and it was destroyed so I lost it, and I don’t think I’m being arrogant but it was like Bernard Shaw saying that from man’s point of view, creativity is the nearest they get to having a baby, its sort of something that possesses them, and… when I told all this to the psychiatrist at Shenley, he said I was making it all up, so that wasn’t a very good start anyway… as soon as I got in there I was on heavily medicated… put to sleep for three days and then heavily medicated… and, and this… oh, about Christmas time, so it wasn’t a happy time to be in there.  I did appreciate the occupational therapy, ‘cause one psychiatrist particularly, not my psychiatrist, but there was a… a Brazilian psychiatrist over here studying, and he encouraged me to write poetry in the OT sessions, and fortunately from my point of view, it did have one positive aspect, which maybe David Cooper wasn’t aware of, but the fact that I submitted to the medication, I was out a lot quicker.  I was only in hospital six weeks, and… but I had the… the bonus was being out earlier, but the side effect was that one was on heavy medication, so one cancelled the other out, so in a way, it… and the tragedy with that really was that I would never have been in hospital the second time because… my GP put me in touch with the senior social worker in Harrow and he came down to see me, and he told my parents off a bit, ‘cause I had the radio on loud, and this is a normal thing for a teenager and all this… and they couldn’t really accept it, but he said ‘come down and visit me tomorrow at my office and we’ll have a discussion’ and the tragedy was, I thought his office was in a particular part of Harrow, I got on the bus and went to the wrong place, so I couldn’t see him that day, and when the next day came, my parents were complaining again, and he… he did give me… he didn’t believe that I hadn’t gone… so it was, sort of like a… a bit like a… Thomas Hardy novel where events of fate twin together and decide one’s future, particularly in books like The Return of the Native… fate is… I wouldn’t say I believe in fate in a religious sense, but there are some times in ones life where things happen co… co… coalesce and one finds that one’s long term future is being decided by a few events on a particular day.’
 
[06:26:09]
 
`Did you feel you were in need of help at that stage?’
 
`No I didn’t.  I felt I was all right then, because I’d got over the play business and I was… I was… I went to… I was on my way to the… that day when he came again, to see me, the social worker from Harrow, my parents rang him up and said you know… well he said, he didn’t… Keith didn’t come… so I walked out the house and went down to go to the RAF museum in Hendon, and as I got down the bottom of the street, this police car turned up, and they bundled me in there, and that’s how the whole second process started.’
 
`Gosh, so quite an aggressive re-admission then?’
 
`Yes, yes.’
 
`Mmm.  And what do you remember of that… that admission, can you remember, were you angry, were you confused?’
[both talking together]
 
`I was very angry.  I felt that I wasn’t being given the leeway which I should have had.  The fact that I wasn’t violent, though verbally aggressive maybe to a degree, that’s not sufficient to be hospitalised.  Of course its normal for anybody, who should be married and have children and a life of their own who are still living at home, which isn’t natural, there’s bound to be tensions created, so that I wasn’t given the benefit of the doubt really.’
 
[06:27:20]
 
`Right. And you were about late twenties by this time?’
 
`Late twenties, early thirties, yeah, yeah..’
 
`Right.  And so when you were admitted, you… had you seen a psychiatrist at that stage or…?’
 
`Yes, I, I saw him… then…’
 
`Right… right… and did… what…?’
 
`But fortunately the same nurse I mentioned, Nurse Lee, he was on the ward as well, which made the situation a bit easier for me.’
`And you were re-admitted to the same ward?’
 
`Re-admitted… but I never had Dr Cooper again.’
 
`Right’.
 
`And this nurse… particular nurse took me under his wing again, and there was another nurse called Frank Atkins who was very supportive as well, and… I survived, but if I hadn’t been in that privileged position of knowing the medical… knowing the nurses from last time, it could have been a very barren experience if they’d taken the advice of doctors, completely, and be… heavily medicated and observed… over observed… so the fact that I… they knew me from twelve years before, eleven years before, the atmosphere wasn’t too stressful.  But one could see people that were being admitted for the first time, they weren’t being given enough leeway to adjust to an abnormal environment, but I was lucky ‘cause I’d experienced it before, had sympathetic staff, though not a sympathetic psychiatrist, so I survived, and I was lucky to be out in six weeks.’
 
[06:28:41]
 
`That must have been very frustrating for you, after having somebody like David Cooper.’
 
`It was.  It was very… and one didn’t meet the psychiatrist on the Saturdays any more, it was just every so often you would go in their office, and you’d see them sitting behind the table there with the notes, and the… flicking over the pages and the rest of it… and it was a very formalised thing and… it, it, it… it wasn’t helpful at all.  It was very negative really, because he assumed that I was making things up and I was… paranoid in the sense… ego… egotistic and paranoid, and… I wasn’t given any dignity, so I was very glad to leave the hospital… if it hadn’t have been for the medical staff, I probably would have been quite violent I suspect.’
 
`Right.  And… so you were put on medication from the beginning?’
[both talking together]
`Yes, medication… heavily, yes, that’s right, yes.  And… and… I never went back to the hospital again because I didn’t feel that I had anything to thank them for.’
 
`Mmm.  You said earlier on, right at the beginning, you talked about them… suggesting insulin therapy for you…?’
[both talking together]
 
`Yes.. that was… I don’t think… I think its completely been abandoned in… its supposed to be like ECT, the shock to the brain does something positive, but I think that is debatable, and the fact that I missed it, I was very pleased.  I was very annoyed with my parents agreeing to it, but I don’t blame them, because they knew… knew nothing else.  They assumed that what was being said was to help you.’
 
`So the doctor…?’
 
`But it was abandoned, that treatment, fairly soon after I went in there.  Not ‘cause of me, but ‘cause somebody had been unconscious for a week and the… the Evening Standard found out about it, and there was quite a heat… quite a debate about it and it was abandoned several weeks later.’
 
`Right. Right. OK thanks very much.  I want to…’
 
[06:30:30]
 
[end of DVCPro tape 6]
[start of DVCPro tape 7– VHS Tape 1 continues]
 
[:07:00:34]
 
`So Keith, if you just want to go back to the insulin coma therapy…’
 
`Yeah..’
 
`So you were put on the… the second time you went in you were put on medication…’
`Yes, and the first time I was... ‘cause I’d ran away in my pyjamas for… no, I was dressed the first time, when I first went in… the second time I was in my pyjamas, because I was supposed to receive this insulin treatment…’
 
`What, why did they…?’
 
`And… I don’t know much about… well, I think it got back to… the original time I went in… went to my GP and he was a good doctor, he was a German Jew, and he’d… he’d come out of Austria in thirty eight, so he knew… but he was a bit old fashioned and he referred me to the local psychiatrist at Edgware General Hospital, and I had this disastrous interview with him, which I told you about earlier, and when he got the… when he got the… the… psychologist report his reaction was that I was schizophrenic and so… that wasn’t a good start… so… he started… his, his, his way of dealing with that was to have lu… glucose treatment, and… my parents agreed to it and I knew nothing about it, but my, sort of emotional feelings towards it was terror, you know, that I’d have to go through this.  Because even before this accident happened with this particular individual, it, it, it was quite a risky process… it wasn’t… even like having an all day operation, it was radically… upset one’s body, and if… they had to test your heart before you even had the treatment.  Whether they do that with ECT as well, I suspect they do, but they don’t… they probably deny…’
 
[07:02:20]
 
`Did anybody explain to you what the glucose treatment… ?’
 
`Yes.  Well its supposed to shake one’s brain up and re-adjust the chemicals in the desired way, but whether it did any good I don’t know, because it wasn’t practised at all hospitals.  There are some pioneers who have actually… like with other treatments have seen the faults of the treatment.  Early on they’ve been victimised for disagreeing with the treatment… the treatment, these professionals, and then often years later, they’re vindicated but its too late then.  The same with David Cooper’s attitudes on… relationships and… equality of relationships.  These were things which, even today are unacceptable, though in fifty years time will probably be judged as completely normal.  Because as soon as you don’t start… as soon as you start people… treating people in an unequal way, you’re actually creating a problem of superiority against inferiority, and if you’re not very careful, both actually become…to a major misunderstanding, which creates… creates problems and prejudice, and often leads politically to fascism.’
 
`Yes. Yes.  With the insulin therapy, did you actually see people having that…?’
 
`Yes.’
 
`Is that why you didn’t want it…?’
[07:03:30]
`No… I never saw it, but I imagined it.  I went to the… visit the ward the day before I was supposed to go there and there were these people like zombedies… zombies… wide eyed, incoherent… completely unrelating themselves to people around them, and it reminded me of that book and film by… by John Wyndham called the Mid Witch Cuckoos, where there’s these people who are more or less zomb… young zombies… and as soon as I saw these people I realised that something was very wrong, and that’s why, when the first morning after I’d gone into the ward, I ran away.  And fortunately the charge nurse who chased me… was an ex… military policeman, so I thought he was a very tough man, but in all honesty he treated me very well because he got told off for me getting away, so it didn’t do him any good, but in all honesty, he was very kind to me after, because, as soon as this person had experienced… been in a coma for seven or ten days, they realised that something was very wrong, and maybe it was the influence of David Cooper that stopped the whole process, and the psychiatrist that was practising this method of treatment, who was my first psychiatrist, was soon dismissed from the hospital.’
 
`Right.  So this case happened on your ward, did it? That this guy…?’
 
`Yeah well, yes.  I expect its on the archives of the Evening Standard about it as well, what actually happened.  There must be some record somewhere of it.’
`And somebody told the press?’
 
`I don’t know who it was, but somebody told the press.  It might have been relatives of the person that was affected, but they never found out who the person… it could have been David Cooper, I don’t know… and perhaps that’s where resentment arose, but somebody influential had a word with the press about it.’
 
`So between the time that it was suggested to you that you should have insulin
therapy…?’
 
`Yes… yes..’
`And then you ran away..?’
 
`Yes…’
 
`And then when you came back…?’
 
`Yes.’
 
[07:05:27]
 
`What was the response when you came back, then… to you…?’
 
`Umm… well… umm… I would… from one of the staff there was initial resentment, from the chap who lost his keys chasing me… but the other staff were… some… never said anything and were naturally antisocial towards the patients anyway… but some of the others were quite amused by it quite honestly, they thought it was rather funny.  And… they… in general I got a very good response.  Not so much from the doctors, but when I was transferred to Dr Cooper it was OK, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘it proves you’re not a zombie, that you do have a mind of your own’, and many of the staff felt that way as well, that there was something wrong here, and maybe what I’d done, had take… taken a small part in changing something that was wrong.’
`So you came back and they didn’t force you to have the treatment then?’
 
`No… I didn’t… then I was put on Largactil and… that sort of thing, you know.’
 
`And were you still under the same doctor?’
 
`No. I… as soon as I came back I was transferred to another doctor.  Straight away.’
 
`Right.  And then you were put on… just on medication?’
 
`Medication, yes.’
 
`Right.’
 
`And… the occupational therapy helped as well, because… I couldn’t see how these people on insulin treatment… were sufficiently aware of things to appreciate… or even benefit from occupational therapy.  ‘Cause the initial status after the treatment, one was like a zombie, these people, and… I think well… how can people socialise if they’re on the treatment which is radically negative, or even on heavy medication… how can you teach somebody social skills when they’re heavily medicated, or on drastic physical treatment.  The two don’t relate, and… ‘
 
[07:07:25]
 
`What proportion of the ward would you say was kind of in that zombie state, either from insulin or… [both talking together] … medication?’
 
`Oh, I’d say as many as a third at a particular time…’
 
`Right.’
 
`…probably a third.’
 
`That’s quite a large number.’
 
`Cause they had to have quite a gap between the treatments, so there was some people coming… coming off it gradually, in a sense, and others that was waiting it… waiting for it, or had just been… but the general result was apprehension for those waiting for it, and also… to the zombies… and for those who had just experienced it.’
 
`So quite standard treatment for people to have then… it was quite…?’
 
`It was then, yes… and… it, it was quite controversial from the start, just as ECT is, but they did abandon it very quickly, and I don’t know the name of the doctor, but there was one particular doctor who’s probably been recognised, who has actually… for years, campaigned to stop it, and he was successful in the end.  And for this particular hospital, Shenley, this person had… the way they’d reacted, the patient to… going in a coma, that really finished the thing, and the doctor who was in favour of it was dismissed.’
 
`Right.’
 
`And did the patient… was the patient ok in the end?’
 
`He was all… yes… he was all right after that.  He was still ill, but you… you didn’t have… he did get over that episode.’
 
[07:08:45]
 
`And what effect did that have on the ward then… that… that the… that treatment was stopped?’
 
`Well I think… there was a great deal of fear when this person was in the coma, they were doing no more treatments while this person was in the coma, and in fact… in the end it was relief I think, that people felt liberated in a way, that they weren’t having to go through it any more.’
 
`And were they mentally worse… because they didn’t have this treatment?’
 
`Oh, I’m not saying… well.. some may have been, to be honest… but, they were medicated and… some people didn’t… this particular chap that had the coma, he, he wasn’t very well after, but he wasn’t very well before the treatment, so whether one can say he was denied treatment which would have helped him is debatable, because he never really recovered anyway.  He was very ill before he had the treatment, and even with medication, I don’t think… he’s still in hospital… and its just unfortunate, but whether one can say that, if he continued with this insulin treatment, he would have been better, I don’t know.  I mean its not all negative, but certainly… either way… what he’d really adjust emotionally to… to any… to whatever treatment he had… he was just too… alienated and too dysfunctional to benefit from any treatment, you know.’
`So, earlier on, you were saying in your previous admission…?’
 
`Yes.’
 
`…there’d been some therapy groups, as well…’
 
`Yes.’
 
[06:10:06]
 
`…I mean, would they… would those same patients who were having the insulin treatment also be having some sort of therapy?’
 
`Well they would if… not… immediately after the treatment, but a couple of days later, or next day… they might have therapy, but… I don’t think many of the staff were in favour of the treatment ‘cause it took away them developing social skills for the patients, and I remember one particular example, this particular nurse who chased me across the fields… I was a bit apprehensive, him being an ex-military policeman, though it was groundless really ‘cause he became a friend in the end, but one of the things which was interesting was, that… he… he… this sort of macho environment which the military police have, and I think all police have to a degree, which in many ways is very negative towards the general community, particularly people that are vulnerable, racially or whatever, he managed to overcome this background and was quite supportive in the end.   But in relation to what sort of… what was happening to this treatment, I think they all felt at the end that it was a treatment which was too… which was unsatisfactory to continue with.’
 
`Right.  Could you… what other kinds of treatments did you see going on at Shenley, while you were there?’
 
`One of them was… where they put a person to sleep.  I think… I think the drug they used was Sodium Amytal, which… is a profound… narcotic drug which puts you to sleep for two or three days, that was practised.  I don’t think it was practised in the very negative way it was in Australia, where there was a scandal about putting people to sleep, for days on end… and I don’t think it was as radical or disastrous as that, but… they did use… they used it on me the second time I was in, I was put to sleep for three days, it helped me really just… calmed the brain down and… rest… but it had been done in a very negative way, particularly in Australia, where its been done for weeks and had a very bad effect on the patient, but I did experience that when I first went in.  There were several people unconscious in the ward who had been on this sleep treatment.’
 
[07:12:17]
 
`Mmm.  And you had it yourself?’
 
`The second time, but only briefly.  But… it was… the first time I went in it was a recognised treatment that… people were put to sleep for a few days or a week or so, you know…’
 
`And we’ve talked about ECT?’
 
`Yeah’
 
`And… was there anything like psycho-surgery going on?’
 
`No, well… David Cooper was campaigning to have it ended.  The last place I think it has actually taken place in South East England, was the Brook Hospital, which has now closed, and one of the patients from Shenley, actually went to the Brook Hospital, and had this… had psycho… psycho… psycho-surgery… and David Cooper was against it because he said you were destroying something which had validity… you were destroying an element of life, that was his attitude towards it.  But this person who had.. had this… became very quiet and docile, but it doesn’t always work in that direction, but… going back to this person, who was one of the friends who committed suicide a couple of years ago… Alan, who I mentioned, Alan Hall, he did have this psycho-surgery and he, he was very calm after it, but before he had it he was quite violent, and… I’ll give you an example of his violence… there was one particular afternoon when we were in the gen… in the adolescent unit, and David Cooper was… he was, he was the doctor then… and the staff… the staff were having their tea in, in their… room… their canteen, well it was like a canteen, just where they had their dinner which was separate from the patients, which is fair enough… though in some hospital they eat together, in some of the more radical hospitals today, but… anyway, he opened the door to this particular… canteen room, and threw a chair leg at one of the… one of the staff, as they were sitting there, and it rebounded off his shoulder, the staff… the staff member’s shoulder, and went through the window at the end of the room… ended up on the lawn.  Well the person who this happened to was actually, was a bit aggressive, wondered what had happened… and the other staff restrained him, but… as this person Alan, who was extremely violent at times, mainly due to frustration because he went to Liverpool University and was very skilled in languages, in fact he learned Norwegian so he could understand Ibsen and he was very talented, he could speak four or five languages, and the fact that he was being denied the fruits of this know… of this skill he had, had been [???] very frustrated, and unfortunately the only way he could express this frustration was in violence, so Dr Cooper was over ruled on this, and he was sent and had psycho-surgery, and then I don’t know what happened to him after that for several years.  I met him several years later, but I don’t really know the… what is the post, sort of situation, when he had it…’
[07:15:15]
`Right.  He didn’t come back to Shenley?’
 
`He did in the end, but he was still heavily medicated despite the… despite the psycho-surgery, so it didn’t really cure anything it just… was a process which failed and he was put back on the original medication, so it didn’t do any good… in… even if they try and make it positive… make it a positive point, it didn’t help him.’
 
`Probably they weren’t actually doing the surgery at Shenley itself?’
 
`No, no… and it was… it was… I don’t know who sanctioned this surgery, it wasn’t David Cooper, but somebody sanctioned it, and err… that was it… and he… he… he tried to commit suicide on several occasions, but… as I said earlier, the… suicide’s a strange thing because… what annoys me with coroners is that they always… come out with the classic phrases, the classic terms of psychiatry, and really they don’t know what they’re talking about… whatever one does one has… even if one’s a serial kill… killer, whatever, you can be the most beastial person in the world, in death everybody has dignity, whatever… even Hitler… people like Hitler, because in death one is equal with everybody, despite, in life being the biggest rogue in creation… see in death everybody has that basic right of dignity whoever they are.  It may sound extreme when you’re talking of people like Hitler, but as soon as you start saying certain people don’t have that right, where do you draw the line, so you may as well include everybody. But everybody has that basic right to dignity in death.’
 
[07:16:50]
 
`Yes.  I’m interested in… what… what happened in your ward, in your villa…?’
 
`Yeah.’
 
`…if somebody had committed suicide?  How was that dealt with?’
 
`Well, it, it, it was a blow to the staff as well as the patients.  You… one felt… the first thing one thought was a selfish thought, that it could happen to you.  That’s the first emotion I think if you’re honest all patients have, that a fellow patient’s succumbed to the… problems they’re having, so the initial reaction is could it happen to me? That’s the first thing.  The second thing is that you’ve lost the friendship and you haven’t been able to stabilise that person enough to survive.  And I think many of the more conscientious staff feel that way as well.’
 
`Mmm.  Would… would the staff support the patients, like in their grief?’
 
`I think they would yes, they would.  They would support them.  And they’d support the relatives as well, because they have a strong… with suicide there’s a strong sense of guilt in all parties.  I’m not being cynical but there’s no guilt in the person who’s done it because they’re dead, and I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I do believe that there are people who are left behind, whether… whoever they are, relatives, psychiatrists, fellow patients, friends, or whoever, there is a real sense of loss there.  And with that loss sometimes unfortunately, there’s a… there’s a feeling of guilt.’
 
[07:18:09]
 
`Yes.  Yes.  I mean, thinking of it round about, that the person who’s died is kind of part of that ward community…’
 
`That’s right.  Part of a community, a very close knit community, because the mutual support of the patients for each other, gives a sort of cohesive strength to the whole community, in… in, in… in a sense, resisting the more negative aspects of the radical community and giving one a sense of solidarity.’
 
`Can you say a bit more about that, about how that might show itself?’
 
`Well… the sort of way it would show itself with David Cooper, but not so much with other psychiatrists, we actually said about fellow patients what medication they should have, or what medication they shouldn’t have, which today… its supposed to be the second millenium, but in some respects we’re not even up to the first, and that’s so radical to most psychiatrists, its ‘poo-pood [ph], but David Cooper was prepared to listen to fellow friends of the patient and listen to their advice as much as the… what he’s getting from the… his nursing staff.  So this was quite radical, and I’m not saying it was laughed at by other psychiatrists, but even today the psychiatrist wouldn’t take into consideration the feelings of fellow friends, user friends, who might have important… an important part to play in that person’s treatment.  Certainly today that wouldn’t be accepted, even today.`
 
`Yeah, and do you think that those friendships that formed within the ward were quite solid friendships?’
 
`Oh they lasted, yes.  They were strong… because one was in a… it was a situation where there was an element of adversity and strangeness, and like the Tolpuddle martyrs, the early trade unionists, the solidarity of the group was often stronger than the individual.'
 
`Right.’
 
[07:19:50]
 
`And that’s why I got involved in User movement when I came out of hospital.  It didn’t start till the early eighties, the User movement, and it was started by an ex-nurse from Rampton, he started the group, Connections, which unfortunately doesn’t survive now because there were internal problems and we weren’t getting the support from the… either the health authority or the council, because we wanted to employ a professional worker to give a stability.  Because one of the things you would find in the User movement, is that… you can’t accept discipline from each other, because one feels that one’s not in a position to give it… and at the same time one is resentful of it being applied, whereas if you employ somebody, providing you give them dignity of employment and treat them well, you are prepared to take advice from them, though you wouldn’t from a fellow User, and that is an inherent problem of the User Movement, that if one tries to pressurise too much, there’s a well of resentment rises and it can be very destructive, whereas if one employs somebody, you either listen to them or get rid of them, but you… you can’t do that among ourselves because we’ve been so often victims of pressure on us that we won’t accept it from each other.’
 
`Do you think that was happening in the ward as well, when you were there?
 
`I think it was, yes.  There was one  particular occasion when… there’s was one particular patient who was married and his children… he had young children, and.. he lost his temper… we were actually breaking up an old spitfire engine, the Merlin engine… it was an ex-nurse who had gone into the scrap metal business and made a great deal of money, and he… he gave us this engine to break up and break down, and he gave us the proceeds of the profits to get a video… not a video camera, the old fashioned camera so we could take some films of the hospital, and we all enjoyed doing it, but this particular chap who was more technically minded than the rest of us, cut his hand on the.. on, on the engine, and he got a bit violent about it and lost control, and they were going to transfer him to the block, which I told you about, with… you know, I’ve mentioned that earlier, but as a group of patients we stood up for him and he wasn’t sent.  So it did work.  But I doubt if it would work today.’
 
`Yeah.’
 
[07:22:18]
 
`One would be… it would be the nearest thing to a riot for them I think.  Complete… they would assume that any… in that position where fellow patients were consulted, they would feel the situation had got out of control, and I think that is a symptom of British society, whereas America is more open in relation to corruption and ideas, and France is the same to a degree and other European countries, more so and lesser, in Britain we live in a very structured society, despite the freedoms we do have, allegedly a democracy… we’re not a complete democracy because of the class system which still exists, but in relation to control there is an element in society in the establishment that has to have these controls.  You see that in the relationship, even with the government today, where there still isn’t a Freedom of Information Act, and we don’t have a char… universal charter, like the European community exercises, so I’m in favour of the European community because I think that there are… the collective will of Europe is very powerful, and one can benefit from the various personal traits of each country.’
 
`Yes.  Yes.  It strikes me as quite interesting that at Shenley, there was some opportunity for users to actually have a little bit of input…’
[both talking together]
 
`…that’s right, yeah…’
 
`…and have a little bit of say…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`…like it seems in that situation with that.. that man, and with the insulin coma therapy, it seems that you know, you, by running away, might have had a slight impact..?’
 
`Yeah, slight impact maybe, yeah…’
 
[07:23:47]
 
`You know, so it seems like there were the beginnings there of a sort of User voice…?’
 
`And sadly… it was… it was destroyed ten years later by… a lack of… things getting out of control in the sense that people weren’t washing, they weren’t cleaning themselves, the beds weren’t made… that it went too far, in the sense that if people are sort of degrading themselves due to their illness… in a physically, and… general health point… hygiene… it doesn’t only reflect badly on them it reflects badly on the group, and I’m… I’m not some… I’m not a disciplinarian as you know, I wouldn’t talk like I do if I was, but I think there’s a need for a little structure, very carefully applied, but if one has no structure one has chaos and anarchy, and I think it was… I… it…. the… the doctor… the Cooper unit 
toward the end of it, it’s existence… was a little bit too chaotic.’
 
`What happened then, to make it that way?’
`Well… certain… I mentioned this person who is now chairman of NSF in Harrow, he had a relative in there and he said that the conditions were very bad, and whereas the Evening Standard ten years before had supported Cooper, now they had… they went for him because he was now a media personality… he was… on chat shows with Malcolm Muggeridge, who was a bit of a guru of the sixties, he was on shows with him and Dr Christian Barnard, the general medical scene… he was part of it… and this other chap, William Sargent was his main antagonist, a traditional psychiatrist, and… I’m not being paranoid, but the fact that they could get Cooper on this, it was a lever which could finish his unit, which was quite famous, the villa 24, even today I think its known, though nothing much is known about Cooper, but I think villa 24 is quite well known due to the books he wrote about it, and also… also the fact that what happened to the unit over the years, and it’s a tragedy that it got completely out of control and it destroyed it all… and then when I went back of course I was in the new regime, which was the traditional regime in most hospitals, and all that Cooper had achieved, despite the fact that there were problems and… there was some, real problems… all that liberalisation and… and its happening today with the Zito and Marjorie Wallace, this anti-liberalisation process, and the drug companies in research… where… they’re more interested in making millions out of the drugs than…socially… solving the problems socially, and its not a matter of money, because basic human interactions, they had nothing to do with money, it’s a matter of attitude, not pounds, shillings and pence, and I, I feel that, Cooper had achieved a great deal, but in the end it, it… it sort of destroyed itself, in a way.’
 
[07:26:46]
 
`Yeah.  I mean I’m curious about how that happened, because you said the Evening Standard picked up on things were going a bit chaotic…’
 
`Yeah, yeah.’
 
`And I’m wondering what was making things go chaotic.  Was it Cooper himself who maybe..?’
 
`Maybe… and maybe the staff as well.  ‘Cause he did have some devoted staff with him, and then when he left the unit, he… he went to the East End and ran… ran a mental health unit in.. in Bow, or was it Bethnal Green?  Somewhere… he went to the poorest community and helped schizophrenics in the community.  That was after he left… but he found that… he’d be so alienated, in a sense that he became a victim of his own success… success… and there’s even today.. some people have some psychiatrists in training are psychiatrists, are very aggressive towards him because… he’s… he’s actually exposed things which they are aware of and they don’t like to admit they actually practice themselves.’
 
`So he was really hounded out of this…?’
 
`Hounded out.  That’s why he went to France, because he felt that there was no place for him here.’
`Right.  So he went to the East end… ‘
 
`Yeah… for a time…’
 
`… and then he went…?’
 
[07:27:50]
 
`And then he went to France.  And then I was actually reading a copy of the MIND
magazine and it said he’d died… so I wrote a letter to them which they published about him, saying that he was probably the most… the most humane person I’ve ever come across, and though he wasn’t a Christian, or could be said to be a Buddhist or whatever, he probably was the most… most practically Christ like man I’ve ever come across.  And it wasn’t done out of a sense of style, it was a sense of sincerity and equality, which he really learned in South Africa.  It was from probably his experience in South Africa, gave him that sense of liberalise… liberalisation.’
 
`Right.  And for you personally, do you feel he had an important effect?’
`I did… I think he helped… he said to me once that, ‘always value one’s own views’ because, not from an arrogant point of view, but the fact that… however one is mentally one has a right to dignity and a right to express one’s views.  Maybe I do it too openly, but he did say that one has that right… to always… always give ones self a sense of dignity in the way one approached life… that’s what he more or less taught me, you know…’
 
`And do you think that after he left Shenley…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`That… a more traditional approach was adopted?’
 
`Yes… traditional… the traditional approach came back, yeah.’
 
`Right, right, right… and then… so you were just in there that next time for six weeks?’
 
`For six weeks, yeah.’
 
`Right… and… what happened during that time to make… [07:29:23]  I mean why did they decide that you were better enough to be discharged?’
 
`Well I think I got on better with my parents… I was older and more mature in that sense that when one’s young, one is what, more rebellious, so I’d aged physically as well as mentally, so… I… I… I… and with the medication I wasn’t particularly aggressive, and…was quite placid, relating to what I was in my teens, so I found that it… things weren’t quite so tense or… immediate as one would… through one’s ageing anyway… and I think in many mental illnesses, the older a person gets, the more easier it gets for them to survive… without medication, because the body’s natural processes are slowing down and one… this does… one… affects one’s mental chemistry as much as anything else, and I think many people in their fifties and sixties who are on medication don’t really need it.  Medication’s either destroyed the… the… their personality or the ageing process adjusts the… they’ve calmed down anyway, and I don’t think they give people enough dignity in that sense, that the slowing down of soc… of their lifestyle anyway, helps overcome the mental health problems.’
 
`Yes.  OK.  Thanks, Keith.  Thank you.’
[pause]
 
[07:30:45]
 
`That’s interesting actually, isn’t it?…’
 
[end of DVCPro tape 7]
[start of DVCPro tape 8– VHS Tape 1 continues]
 
[08:00:35]
 
`Keith, I wanted to go… I wanted to go back and ask you… was there any difference between your second admission and your first admission, which was much longer? [pause] …either in the way you…’
[08:00:48]
`Well, from the point of view of the psychiatric reception from the psychiatrist, was different, but the fact as I mentioned earlier, I knew the staff in the ward anyway, made the reception process quite acceptable and it was quite… helpful that I realised I was with people I’d known before, patients as well as staff.  ‘Cause the block was the psychiatrists, the initial contact was flawed, and the… it wasn’t a relationship of mutual respect, so… I… that was a problem, but… after I got in the ward I changed because I knew the staff and some of the patients well, so that’s why I got out in six weeks, because I adapted fairly well, but there’s some people who go into… who… are not naturally warm in their pers… I wouldn’t say I’ve got a warm personality, but, coming from the East End and places, I’ve… I could relate to people easily.  It’s even worse for patients who can’t relate… God knows what experiences they go through in an alien environment and a situation where they have difficulty in relating anyway.  They must go through purgatory… and unless the professionals extend a helpful and a friendly hand, these people don’t change, they… still remain socially deprived, emotionally deprived more than… I suppose may be socially deprived.’
`The second time you were in, were the same… were you doing the same socialising that you were doing before?’
 
`Yes. As I mentioned, we did have sport as well, which… being in the countryside was a bonus… we had a cricket pitch which was reckoned to be one of the best in the country, because the estate used to belong to Sir Raphael Tuck [ph], who was a publisher in the Edwardian times, that’s originally… was part of the estate… where we talked about the mansion where the doctors were, that was the original, sort of manor…of the.. of the estate… so that’s where they were naturally, and… but the actual, physical, the cricket field and the football field were originally part of that estate and they kept it… whereas at Northwick Park, though there’s fields round the hospital, they’re not used, and also there’s a… facilities at the local university which could be used by patients, and when students aren’t using it, that’s never… never… just the suggestion that that should happen has not been accepted, but at Shenley, despite those thirty years… no twenty years ago this time, one played football, there was a league competition between all the hospitals around St Albans, for the patients… even for the staff… had their own competition as well between the hospitals… there was cricket matches, football matches, and things like that, and that was very satisfactory, and which happened on my first… it reminded me… that’s… I did that on my first visit to Shenley as a patient… because at the second time  I was only there six weeks, and I did play football a couple of times, within those six weeks, but most of the sporting activity took place on my first visit, and the staff generally… they employed a particular nurse who specialised in that and it was valued as keeping one physically fit which was very important… and it was a valued part of the healing process… and like the situation in Surrey where there’s a cluster… there used to be a cluster of, of mental hospitals, which you’ll probably be interviewing people from them as well, like Henderson and places like that… which had a very high reputation… as you know, the Henderson… David Cooper actually lectured there for a time as well… and Shenley was… was recognised… the history unit was recognised as some radical development, and… and we played football with about five other hospitals, including hospitals for the mentally sub normal, which was a good thing really, because you realised that the…there were problems… people worse off than you… imagine you were, and this… interaction was good for everybody really, and that was valued, but whether modern hospitals in cities can do that I very much doubt.  I don’t suppose there’s as many visits away from the hospital as there were… now…’
 
[08:04:50]
 
`No… I was… Yes… I was going to say that… that… your games involved other people coming to you and then you going…’
 
`That’s right… like…even at schools… in the general community, there’s not… in many places there’s not this sports interaction between schools, that sport… they’d be so greedy in developing the land for housing or whatever, that the sort of interaction of physical sports in places don’t happen like they used to.’
 
`Was there any sport for women at all?’
 
`Yes, hockey and… that’… netball, things like that for them.  They had that as well, but it wasn’t… to be honest it wasn’t as well developed as the male sports.’
`Right.  It’s quite interesting, because earlier on, when we were talking about your childhood…’
 
`Yes’
 
`…you said that was one of the things that you’d become a sports captain…’
 
`Yeah, yeah…’
 
`…at school?’
 
`yeah, yeah…’
 
`…and now you were here…’
`Yeah, yeah…’
 
`…so many years later, playing…’
 
`Yes.’
 
[08:05:44]
 
`…in the Shenley team, which was…you know, which you enjoyed presumably…’
 
`I enjoyed, yes, and it also… also helped overcome the effects of the medication, physical activity, and the irony was that when one played cricket or football, one had the same sort of meal as the pat… as the staff got, whereas if there was a sort of evening feeding… the… the staff got better food than we did, like the potatoes didn’t have eyes in them, didn’t have sort of sloppy soup or… horrible custard, they were treated very well, but it didn’t extend to the patients, they were just… you just churned out… I’m not saying it was bad food… nutritionally it was probably good, but, but it wasn’t presented with the same sort of finesse as the staff had.’
 
[08:06:34]
 
`Actually that was something I was going to ask you and I forgot about the food… what was that like generally?’
 
`It wasn’t very good really, no.  A bit… but one eat it ‘cause one had nothing else, but… it wasn’t that bad, I mean… but I think when you’re in hospital anyway, physically or psychiatric, that… its not like eating at home or restaurant, there is a reluctance I think which affects one in regards to the food, that you… you know, you don’t like it as much as when you’re at home anyway, but… saying that, I still think the food wasn’t that good any way.’
 
`And you used to eat in the dining room…?’ [both talking together]
 
`Yes.  The dining room would smell of cabbage, like… they say… takes the place of public schools… [laughs]’
`And were meal times a special time?’
 
`Yes.  Very structured, twelve o’clock and four… and one had a snack in the evening, like a piece of cheese and tomato, which wasn’t bad because they couldn’t… they couldn’t… present that badly…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`But the food… perhaps I’m over complaining because… it, it, it did keep one’s body and soul together you know, so… and…’
 
`And did you sit around tables together?’
 
`Yes… sit around tables.  Sat next to who you wanted to… there was no regimentation, and everybody had their own particular chair, which was very important to some patients, ‘cause it gave, sort of located… that that’s my chair, you know… even when sitting in therapy, in, in, in… psychotherapy… the… the… you know, people had their own seat, which they recognised as their own seat, and towards the end of the time, I left, they were doing drama therapy as well, which was beginning to start then… and its much highly… more highly developed now.  Sort of role play as well, you know, that, that… that was just beginning to start on my second time.’
 
[08:08:15]
 
`What, what contact do people… do patients have with the… I know you said they used to go to the villages and things, to the village…’
 
`Yeah’
 
`What other contacts do people have… they had the television… did you have newspapers?’
 
`Oh yes… news… but unfortunately, I don’t think they’re supplied now at Northwick Park newspapers, I mean, always the Sun’s available, but… the sort of Guardian and that sort of thing… aren’t provided any more.  One can go out if one’s allowed to in Northwick Park and buy a paper, but those times, you… all the papers were presented on the ward in the morning, and quite a period of time between eight and nine thirty, people would be seen reading the newspapers, but now it’s a luxury they can’t afford…’
 
`And people would… would use them?’
 
`You’d read them… Oh yes… a lot of people that were academic would do the crossword or chess… and, and Alan, who I mentioned earlier, was very good at the crossword, he could do it in five minutes, and that sort of thing, but today, its… its seen as a peripheral luxury, which after all its part of life, you know, what… you want to know what’s going on outside, because that is one of the problems which the critics of the large country mental hospitals, saying that they’re isolated, and they were dysfunctional, but it wasn’t true, because one had the television news, and that wasn’t taken into account sufficiently… it had an influence on the mentally ill as well as anybody else, seeing other places, how other people exist… not… not in the mental sense, but seeing the ward, as it is, often, or nearly as it is… and… that took place, and one was aware of things, and having the daily newspapers made one more aware of things, and after all, you’re not supposed to live in a vacuum because the vacuum is often a symptom of the illness, if one is in a vacuum, and unless one has the stimulus… stimuli to get out of that vacuum, it does one no good.’
 
[08:10:07]
 
`Yes.  What else did you have in terms of kind of keeping yourself busy on the ward, like you said from four o’clock..’
 
`Yes.’
 
`…the time was your own?’
 
`Well, probably… there was a library there that one could go to… and there was art therapy, which some people were very good at.  I wasn’t particularly good at it, though my dad was a sign writer, but… some people, they did a lot of art therapy and they did mosaics as well.'
 
`Was that on the ward or was that…?’
 
`Well, the art sometimes was done on the ward, but most of it was done at the… at the… at the occupational therapy places, the centres… and one could do art and certain things like that at the Alpha Club as well.’
 
`Right.  You mentioned that you were… you’d done some writing in between your two admissions, written a play…’
 
`Yeah.’
 
`I wonder if you did any writing when you were in hospital? Either time?’
[both talking together] 
[08:10:58]
`I did do one… I did the second time… I wrote a… there was the time of the miner’s strike, the first one, with Joe Gormley [ph], which was successful, and I read in the Guardian that the general secretary, he was the president, Joe Gormley, he was the sort of thick head position, but the real influence was the general secretary, a chap called Lawrence Daley[ph], and he was very fond of poetry, and I particularly… on one day, when I was there, I… I felt I’d try and show solidarity with the miners, I wrote a poem to this Lawrence Daley, and sent it to miners’ head office in London, and had a reply from him, and that was very… I was very pleased about that… so were the staff as well, ‘cause most of them were of a radical bent in that situation, when the tragedy with Thatcher… she destroyed the miners’ union, partly due to the ineptitude of Arthur Scargill, but never the less it was her main motivation, but… I think the establishing done… with David Cooper, in many ways they never forgave a victory by the opposition, and that was the same in colonial times, if the natives rebelled, there was always that retribution at the end of the day, and it doesn’t play even in a…small society like us… small country like us.  There is that sort of degree of vengeance and it happens in the law, with… you see these mis-trials that… the latest example was that when Joe… Jack Straw… gave a pardon to Bentley for being hung for the murder of… which he didn’t do… they… the reaction was that they wouldn’t make any financial recompense to his family, there’s a sense of guilt and sort of… resentment, about it which… he was a great radical in his youth, but even so, that when they get older and a bit bigger in the belly and… a… he had the meals outside and the praise, they change… and I’ve got no illusions about British justice.  It might be better than the old Soviet system, I’m not saying its not, but there’s much to be desired in many respects in the British legal scene.’
 
`Mmm.  When you came out of hospital, between your two admissions, did you carry on your political activities, then?’
 
`Yes.  I did too… I… well I was so disillusioned with the Labour Party, with Wilson… I’m not saying… he did a lot of good, Wilson, but I didn’t practice politics… in a minor degree anyway, for four years, and they got me involved again in the 1970 election, which we lost, so the fact that we were opposition fighting to get back… though Heath wasn’t… well he was… Heath was quite Draconian, though they don’t realise that… he’s mainly remembered for getting us into Europe, but in many ways the man was Thatcheristic, though he wasn’t quite as aggressive and nasty as Thatcher as a personality, but he was quite aggressively right wing in his way, and when he was defeated it sort of… by the election when Wilson got back for a small period… Thatcher carried on this resentment that Wilson had got back due to the miners, so there was that internal resentment with Heath and Thatcher to get their own back.  More so in Thatcher particularly, more than Heath, but so I was quite involved, quite heavily in politics again, but from about… ’66 to ’70 I wasn’t involved at all.  But then I got re-involved and I’ve been involved ever since, in a very minor role.’
 
[08:14:30]
 
`Right.  And does that couple up with your interest in mental health issues, or is it….?’
[both talking together]`
 
`Yes I think so, because I think the… it’s all right, academics and sociologists and psychiatrists talking about the need for reform, but unless you have the political backing you don’t achieve anything.  So the politicians have got to be educated as much as the medical establishment.  I’m not saying… and I think the medical establishment realise that… that… to divorce yourself from politics as R D Laing did, I’m going into mysticism, its an easier lifestyle to practice, because one’s a threat to nobody.  But if you, like Cooper, you go into a political sphere, you’re at risk… and… most politicians like an easy life, not a difficult life.’
 
`Can you remind me what happened to David Cooper in the end?’
 
 `Yes, he… he… in the end he died in Paris, in a… on the… on the West Bank… on the left Bank.  I don’t know much about his death, I only heard about it reading the MIND magazine and… it… in his death, the patient who helped… he’d more or less had a breakdown himself… his heart had died… that old… the left wing tradition of the… left bank was beginning to erode, the right was showing its head again, so… he felt isolated and he just wasted away more… I don’t think he committed suicide, but he was in very bad health and he just died.  The French appreciated him… you know, they say that his views will probably be current practice in a hundred years’ time… but… the general establishment in England were glad to get rid of him when he went to France… and of course you couldn’t go back to South Africa, because at that time, the apartheid regime was still in power.  Probably if he was alive today, he’d probably be welcomed back by Nelson Mandela and would be a leading… leading figure in government, but the tragedy was his age and… the fact that circumstances were wrong for him, he just… just… he died.  It’s very sad because there was very little mentioned about him in the press.  Maybe a little in the medical press which I didn’t read ‘cause I… I had no access to that… but in the general press… the Guardian had a feature on him, but most of the papers it wasn’t written… or on the television, it wasn’t even there… yet he was a big… big… big player in the scene, with Malcolm Muggeridge in the sixties, and he started… at the end of the sixties he started a… what he called a free university, where tuition would be completely free, and he started this university in East London, but unfortunately some of the students were making international telephone calls from the centre… and it went bankrupt, so the very people it was designed for, to liberalise, were abusing the situation, and maybe in the hospital sense… why he failed… was that he was giving people, not too much freedom, but people were abusing his… his natural liberal attitudes and taking advantage of him.’
 
[08:17:27]
 
`Mmm.  Yes, yes.  Yes, it’s interesting.  I wonder what you felt.  You’d had quite a long period in, in one of the old asylums…’
 
`Yeah’
 
`How did you feel when moves started, about closing them down, what were your feelings about that?’
 
`Well initially I was in favour of it… but the more I looked at it, and talking to fellow patients who had been in Shenley, I thought that in the early stages of mental illness it was practically worthwhile to put people in a less stressful environment, and then to re-integrate them back into the community.  I think many psychiatrists and sociologists on the radical wing made the mistake that if one is physically isolated, then one is… also emotionally isolated, but as I’ve said earlier, we weren’t really isolated at all, providing one had the freedom of movement… obviously you’ve got to go back to an urban environment if that’s your lifestyle, I’m not saying that’s not true, but I think this idea that people are sort of isolated, wasn’t completely true.  Some people are isolated whether in an urban or rural environment, due to their condition, but you can’t really blame one thing particularly over… you know, over ruling everything else, you know… things were… I’m not saying they were completely satisfactory, because I think people have got to survive in their natural community, of course they have, and encouraged to do so, and I do agree with home treatment, but I think the idea that people are sort of really isolated, in some cases it was true, for some people it was isolated… but its an isolation they chose, because they felt threatened in a stressful environment, and this sense of sanctuary in a way helped them… and I mean religious sanctuary is just as important with Buddhism, and think this sanctuary is a right that people have when they’re distressed.’
 
[08:19:16]
 
`Yes.  Yes.  We talked earlier about being re-integrated…’
 
`Yes… yeah… yeah…’
 
`…into the community from that sanctuary…’
 
`Yeah’
 
`What have you done over the last few years, the kind of… re-integrate yourself into the community, or, or.. .be helped, or…?’
[both talking together]
 
`Well, joining the Community Health Council, where one came across other medical issues as well as psychiatry was encouraging… for a year I was… constituency secretary, which I could have continued to do, but I felt with my… dys… dyslexia it was a bit risky, though I was asked to continue, so I was encouraged that they asked me to continue, but I thought it was a bit too much of a strain, then there was the Oxfam job for two years, and ‘till recently I’ve been on various committees, locally, with the Health Authority, and… Social Services, and other things… though… as I say, unfortunately Connections no longer exist because of internal problems, though I wasn’t that active in the last year,
‘cause with my mother getting older I’d had to… think about her, to a degree…’
 
[08:20:19]
 
`Can I just interrupt you for a second?’
 
`Yeah’
 
`Were you… were you quite instrumental in setting that group up?’
`Yes.  One of the original members, yes.’
 
`Right.  Could you just tell me a little bit about how that came about?’
[both talking together]
 
`There’s somebody called Cathy Pelikan, who… if you know her, she was involved quite heavily with good practices for mental health, which unfortunately is now defunct… She and I… she came to the house about eleven years ago and we discussed it, and then other people got involved and it started up, and it’s been… it had been going for about ten years, but she was really the driving force behind it, yeah…’
 
`What was… I wonder what the philosophy was behind…?’
 
`Well really it was representation, like the early trade unionists tried to achieve, self respect, mutual dignity among all, all people on the committees, and things like that.  Example the way the professionals saw it… whatever we were suggesting was always the last item on the agenda, and often the psychiatrist or the JP would have their say and say… ‘oh sorry, I’ve got another appointment’, and they were off… so it wasn’t… it wasn’t equal… it was just serving the liberal attitudes of the government at the time, that they were totally… as you mentioned, it was tokenism often… not complete, but it was really, they were just fulfilling a… making themselves feel good because they were doing something that was liberal, but had not substance.’
 
[08:21:43]
 
`Right.  So you’re still pretty involved with certain aspects of mental health?’
 
`Yes, with the labour party.’
 
`Mmm.’
 
`I might get more involved with the sort of new Connections type thing, but I feel there’s got to be professional support really to survive, because we… mental illness is… often is a sort of chaos, and when you get a lot of chaotic people together, one doesn’t have the structure that one should have, in some ways…’
 
`Yes… I mean…’
 
`Though I’d like to say that if we did employ a worker, I… we would preferred for somebody who was an ex-user or a user.’
 
`Right.  I’m curious to know how you’ve managed to stay out of hospital for so long’
 
`Well I am.  I… I’m wondering that as well, because I’ve felt very down at times, but... to be honest, its arrogance, that one feels one has the right to survive in the community, and though one might have problems, never the less, one is born, one is alive and one has the right to exist… it may be an arrogant thing to say, but that’s the way I feel and maybe its… it is a bit arrogant, but… I just feel I have a right to survive like anybody else.’
 
`Definitely.  Can you just tell us, for the video, a little bit about your circumstances now?’
`Well, with my mother, she’s getting older and I feel I’ve got to devote my time to her, though really… she looks… to be honest, she looks… she cooks the dinners still, and does that… so I’m probably more dependent on her than I… I… then I’d honestly like to believe… but I feel that she’s getting older and she’ll need my support more and more, and… I also feel I’ll be sixty in a few years time, so one slows down anyway.  What I’d like to do is to… write poetry that is recognised.  Whether its any good or not is debatable, but it would be nice to have some recognition in a literary sense, but whether it will come or not, I don’t know…or whether its worthy of coming, I don’t know.’
 
[08:23:38]
 
`Is that something you’ve continued then… you said that you’d written poems, when you were in hospital… have you carried on writing poems?’
 
`Yes… yes. I, I… I had one which was read at the opening of the Bridge, which is the modern Day Centre in Harrow, and I wrote one… I had one published… I’ve had several published in a local paper, but I’ve never had the courage to go on the national scene, but I do feel that there is a need for a User voice… people like… Peter…’
 
`Campbell…?’
 
`…Campbell… I’ve read some of their poetry and I quite… I value it a great deal, but I think the problem with User  poetry, its often too introspective… we can relate to it, but the general community can’t… and what I really hope to achieve is to bridge that gap between, legitimate poetry and poetry that comes from some emotional crisis, or a situation which the general community isn’t aware of… that’s why I aim to try and cross that bridge.  It might be impossible, but my hope is to not only have something to say for the User Movement, but have something to say in a general sense.  That’s through, ‘cause a lot of my poems are political… most User poetries are political in a personal sense, but I’m trying to politicise it like Tony Harrison, that User poetry is a political weapon as well as a literary talent or a literary use.’
 
`Mmm. What about for you personally, as… as the person you are…?’
[08:27:07]  `Well I do feel very sad I’m not married or have any children, that is very… a source of great sadness, and… when my mother goes, it probably will be difficult for me.  I’m not saying its not… it probably will be, but I do feel in a way, like when my uncle died, who had been a bachelor all his life, he said I’ve had a wasted life… he said that… that was his dying last words, and that had a great effect on me… and I do feel that in many ways due to circumstances which I might be responsible for myself, and other circum… that really I’ve had a wasted life, you know… I do feel that really… perhaps that’s where depression comes in, I don’t know… ‘cause I am on anti-depressants as well.’
 
`What contact do you have with mental health services now?’
`Well the only contact I do have in a non-representational role is with the GP.’
 
`Right. So you have no cont… [both talking together].. no psychiatrist’
 
`No psychiatrist.  No, I did see one… up to about five years ago, and I just said to her I couldn’t see the point of coming and she agreed in the end, so I didn’t go any more.’
 
`Mmm.  ‘Cause you were talking earlier about primary care, maybe not being the most appropriate…’
 
`No… in a sense its…’
[both talking together]
 
`…so there is help, but for you….?’
 
`Strangely enough, it has helped me.  That’s only because the doctor has had some personal experience of mental health problems, but the… if, if I had to go to a normal GP in the sense… somebody…. even a modern one… I probably would choose to go and see a psychiatrist again.’
 
`Right.  And if you felt you were getting into difficulties now… what do you think you would do?’ [both talking together]
 
`Oh, I might ring up a local councillor friend or somebody and talk to them.  Or, the ex-chairman of… MIND… I was very close to… I might ring her up…’
 
[08:26:48]
 
`Right.’
 
`So I do have people I can get back to… and… earlier in my life… he’s dead now, the chap I mentioned, Frank Lee, the Nurse, I used to ring him up occasionally, and I… in the early days I rang David Cooper up and he’d listen to me… and then there was the nurse, several nurses I used to ring up, but now I… I will probably… probably ring up a councillor or somebody I knew, because I’ve always kept my political interests in tact because… I do feel… I know it sounds a bit strange, but… I’m sure if a child was murdered round here or something like that, that one would be in the frame whether one deserves it or not, so that’s why I’m very strong at keeping my political contacts and things like that, because it might be of practical use, and I don’t think its being paranoid talking about things like that, but I think when major crises develop in the community, one is vulnerable, and if one can have something which will help the stability, its worthwhile.’
 
`What about on a day to day… sense..’
 
`Yes… yes…’
 
`…of living in this community, around here…?’
 
`Well I don’t… as you both said, it’s quiet, it’s fairly quiet, and I like it because of that… I do get on well with the people next door, really, though… I have nothing to do with the people there… I, I… do have words with them, quite pleasantly… but I… I don’t feel paranoid about living in the community because I’m accepted by most people, over the years… and they realise I haven’t been in hospital since ’71, so I’m accepted now, and people talk to you.  There are still some people, with young children, are a bit wary, I must admit that, but generally I’m not paranoid about anybody locally at all.  But that’s only because… I’ve.. I’ve made overtures to people, but if I was withdrawn they’d probably be more suspicious than they are.  If one just walks about in a sort of daze, it arises… it does arise feelings… attitudes… so that I’m lucky in that sense, that I come from a background of the East End, where people are very communicative as well, you know, like the Asian community are communicative so it was a… but I don’t know what would happen if I wasn’t.  Say I was a… in a… same age, and a… black Caribbean, lack of work satisfaction… prejudice, racialism [ph], it would be very… I think it would be… in that position it would be very difficult to survive, extremely difficult.’
 
[08:28:52]
 
`Yes.  Yes.  I was… interested in… sorry, my mind’s gone blank.’ [laughs]
 
`Yeah, yeah.’
 
`I was going to ask you about your medication now, or whatever treatment you have now.’
 
`Well as I mentioned I take Largactil, Stelazine and Artane.  I don’t think I take a large dose, but I think… some people say well don’t take it any more, but… I’m not that radical, because I think it does perform a function which I don’t particularly like, but I do accept that I’ve got to take it for the time being.’
 
`And are you OK with that?’
 
`Yes, I am.  Not really, but I am OK, because, I… if I didn’t sleep or… I’d get… probably get… hallucinations… which my GP says one would get anyway if one has… a lack of sleep.  He doesn’t accept that that’s a symptom, it’s a fact of body function, that if you don’t sleep for two or three nights, one has hallucinations.  But I’ve never had them without the… I’ve had… when I was… see this is a tragedy… if David Cooper had been alive on my sec… second visit, to Shenley, I probably wouldn’t be on medication now, but the fact that I was pushed into it, against my will which made it worse, because if one reacts against it, it often creates a harsher climate, if one reacts in what they consider a negative, or unhelpful way, and they often coerce the relatives into saying, well we think so and so should have this because they will benefit from it, when in fact all they’re saying is that, my power attitude is that I want this and I’m going have it… and if I can get an ally from the parents or whatever… from the carers, I’m happy, it makes my position stronger… stronger.’
 
[08:30:59]
 
`Yes… So do you…[08:31:02]  [VHS Tape 2 starts] would you say that at this moment in time you’ve integrated your mental health problems into your life and… accepted them?’
[both talking together]
 
`I think I have, yes.  I think I do accept it now.  Grudgingly, really.’
 
`Yeah’
 
`Cause like they say, a young… a young… a young mind in an old body… that the older one gets, initially one gets more… more sort of… philosophical, which one does, but everybody would love to be young forever, wouldn’t they?’
 
`Yes, I think that’s very true.’
 
`I really want to thank you Keith, it’s been fascinating talking to you.’
 
`Thanks very much Premila…’
 
`It’s been really interesting, it’s been very interesting, hearing the political perspective…’
 
`Yeah..’
`…on what has obviously been some very profound experiences for you…’
 
[08:31:45]
 
`Yeah… well I do appreciate from you and … you Premila and Faye coming, because I think its given an opportunity to voice things which one could usually only do in a private environment with one’s friends or doctor, and I think there… a lot of what I said people wouldn’t agree with… I think the fact that one… through your skill, through both yourself and Fay, that it gives not me… only me… but the whole mental health  [08:32:09]  [VHS Tape 1 ends]   community from the consumer’s prospect… which is important, we are consumers, and consumers have rights… and this is a recognition of their rights, and I hope that all the videos that take place will have a positive effect as well as now as in the future.’
 
`Yeah..’
 
And as you said like with your poetry you’d like to reach a wider audience and I really hope that your experiences will reach that.
 
I hope so. I’d like to thank you for being so skilled in what you’ve done – both of you
 
[08:32:44]
 
[end of DVCPro tape 8
[start of DVCPro tape 9– –VHS Tape 2 continues]
 
[09:00:39]
 
`Keith, we’ve just come back for a couple of minutes…’
 
`Yeah… yeah…’
 
`Because I don’t know whether there were a few other things that we haven’t discussed… I mean I was quite curious to know… you talked about having links with the local users…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`Do you go to any forums where you can have links with, you know, users from other areas at all?’
 
[09:01:04]
`Oh yes, there is BUG in Brent… the Brent User Group, and I’ve been to that part of Camden town with ‘Survivors Speak Out poetry’, and I still occasionally go, and I’ve got great respect for people like Peter Campbell and that… and I saw Peter Campbell at a MIND conference about four years ago and I was very impressed with him, and I also was impressed by… a guest speaker who was a… Dutch psychiatrist who was saying that hearing voices could be the fact of the… internal mechanism of… memory and understanding and the process of thinking was in some ways, amplified into the conscious playing when it shouldn’t be… and that the real basis of this was some form of social malfunction, and it, and it was fairly true in lonely people whose subconscious became their consciousness because they had no… nobody to relate to, and I think that was very interesting, and also in the last few years I’ve had contact with our local MEP, you know, the European Parliament representative for this area, and he’s sent me some interesting User and other materials from parts of Europe, like… the more radical parts like Holland and Denmark.  Even in Italy, though they’re very sort of religious orientated, there’s quite some radical things going on in Italy in the mental health community.  But one of my things over the years, which has interested me greatly, is the… is the Janet Zito, Marjorie Wallace phenomena’s, because… I think this… as soon as you start sub-dividing the issue of violence, and mental health, you’re in great danger of introducing prejudice because I think violence should be seen as a whole, whether it’s a soldier killing a soldier, a drunk coming out of a pub ‘cause they’re drunk, or somebody killing their girlfriend because there’s problems in the relationship, violence should be viewed as a whole, and unfortunately with Jane Zito and Majorie Wallace, what they’ve done is to sub-categorise violence and some people can’t adjust to that, and have created a prejudicial attitude, and I think its very sad that people that intended to do a lot of good have done a great deal of harm, and despite having an allegedly liberal minded government, which I generally support, I think that what its done actually is cater the popular [inaudible word]… of the general public in particular and particularly the uneducated general public, and its very sad that this att… attitude of violence is developing because… I think it’s a risk you’ve got to take with the mentally ill that if you do react quite aggressively to mental ill violence, one’s having to apply restrictions to the whole mental health community and is it fair?’
[09:03:52]
`Mmm.  Do you see any way we could redress that kind of stigma, especially I’m particularly concerned about young people growing up…’
 
`Yes, yes.’
 
`… with those attitudes…?’
 
`Well as I say, with… with, with the director… the local director of MIND in Harrow, we… over several years we have visited two secondary schools, mostly children of thirteen or fourteen.  Initially we felt the children might be too young to talk about mental health, that they might go through their giggling phase, and it did happen in one case, slightly, but actually they were very receptive, because we live in a very competitive society and really there’s a need to do some research between competitiveness and mental illness and stress, and these people… young people are getting stressed for their exams in a couple of years, so they know what stress is, they know what making relationships… the difficulties that can develop, so they’re quite aware of what’s going on, and they’re aware of stress, and we… we… this particular lady, Janet Smith, who’s still the Director of Harrow MIND, we felt that we should actually go the community in schools and relate to them, so that the prejudices that develop in later life don’t happen to quite a severe degree, or not at all, and what we really wanted to do, unsuccessfully, is to approach the education department and have… not only myself and her, but other people as well… other, other people in MIND and the mental health community as well as carers and… even professionals saying that… not reluctantly, but more so carers and users, and the voluntary sector, to go into all schools in Harrow, all secondary schools, and put our point of view, because without doing that… its no good just having mental health day every year, it… it gets publicity, but it really… I’m not being nasty, but it achieves very little and on the day it makes people aware, but they’ve forgotten it the next day, whereas if you can instill into children to understand things which… like with race relations as well, that could be done in the same way, and particularly with the Lawrence case and the injustices that develop, I was very interested in the Lawrence case, because with the police, the sort of prejudice and unhelpful attitude they experience, often applies to the mentally ill, whether they’re black, green or yellow.  I… I’ll give you an example.  I was at a friend’s house when he was going to be sectioned and taken away, and I tried to get into the ambulance to go with him to the hospital, and I was pushed aside by a policeman, and I feel that the police need education… not only into the problems of racialism [ph] but the problems of prejudice towards the mentally ill, and its very difficult for someone who’s mentally ill to express these feelings, because the automatic response from the professional is that one’s paranoid, and so it makes you…as I mentioned earlier and you agreed, whatever one does when one’s mentally ill, one’s being judged in a possibly prejudicial way.’
 
[09:04:47]
 
`Yes, yes I think there’s a lot of work… a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of public education…’
 
`Yes…’
 
`…and I think that…’
 
`I think… it, it, it’s beneficial to both parties because it relieves the tensions of society.’
 
`Yes.’
 
`We have enough tensions anyway without unnecessarily creating them, and what we always ended up by saying, Janet and I at these meetings, that one in six people have mental health problems, so its not something that’s exotic, it’s something that happens to every family or… a friend of the family, you know, its not something that’s remote or distant, mental health is on the agenda and it always will be, and the way to solve problems of mental health, some are insoluble, one must admit that… one’s own personal problems and others, but at the same time, one can ease the situation for everybody if one is frank, and its not a matter of finance or money, it’s a matter of attitude more than anything among everybody who comes into contact with the mental health scene.’
 
[09:07:47]
 
`Yes.  I mean I couldn’t agree more, and I think we as mental health service users, have a really valuable contribution…’
 
`Yes.’
 
 `…to make to that, if we can find the courage to stand up and speak out about issues…’
 
`Yeah, yeah… yeah… yeah…’
 
`… which affect us very deeply, and our families…’
 
`Yeah, yeah…’.
 
[pause] ‘I’m recording’
 
`Keith, I know, I notice you’ve got some really… interesting photographs on your mantle piece, can you perhaps tell us who they are and a little bit about them.’
 
`Yeah, well that’s my father, who died at eighty three, and who I spoke about earlier.  That was taken when I think on his twenty first birthday… the next person is myself when I was young.  That little cat figure is a… is a Belgian Flanders… ummm.. lace work…’
 
`Right’
 
`…which I came across and  I like very much… then there’s me, and as you pan along, there’s another little lace work Flemish lace, laced… animal.  Next is my aunt, who looks very much like my mother at the end, my aunt, that unfortunately died of cancer at sixty seven, and so she didn’t have a very long life… right at the end is my mother, her sister.  I don’t have any photographs from my father’s side, but that… with my sister… she, my mother and sister were very much alike, though there was quite an age difference between them… umm… they were married for about fifty three years before my father died of a stroke, which was very distressing, not only physically but emotionally, and… you know, I do owe them a great deal, though probably looking at my life span, its probably been a failure, my life… but its no… not due to them… but… I do feel that I’ve had something of value to contribute, not arrogantly, but I do feel that I had something to contribute and still have… hopefully and its probably due to my parents that I’ve had the courage to express the views I do.’
[09:10:01]
`I think that’s a real, moving tribute to your parents.  Who’s, who’s this lady?’
 
`That… this is Pippa… another… little…’
 
`Oh sorry… this…’ [both talking together]
 
`Oh, sorry, that’s one… the photograph my mother gave to my father when he went to war in forty four on the D-Day landings, he… she gave him that photograph.  And fortunately he survived the war, though he did cover a lot of… lot of… mens’ experiences were bad, I don’t know, he never talked about it, so perhaps the experiences weren’t all pleasant, but certainly that generation we owe a great deal to them and the young really, are a little in… in gratitude to their fore-bearers who probably saved democracy in Europe from a catastrophe, though, and hopefully we’ll never need to use the citizen’s army again, to save Europe or the world, but its just an example of the… personal sacrifices that many made to civilian and military… to our salvation, and we only hope that the politicians are sufficiently mature not to cause any more wars in the world… wars that once they get out of control we now have the mechanism to destroy the whole of the planet.’
 
`Great.  Thank you very much.’ (to the cat! `God, you are such a baby…’)
 
`He doesn’t like you going out in the day… doesn’t like to be alone, no…’
 
`Oh really… (cat purring)… you’re funny, aren’t you?’
`He’s often waiting behind the…’
 
`Maybe he’s a bit insecure because of what’s happened before…’
 
`We don’t know what his early life was…’
 
`Yeah’
 
`Maybe he was a bit aggressive when we first had him…’
[both talking together]
 
`I should send you to a psychologist to get you psycho-analysed, about your early, early life...'’ [both laugh]
 
[pause]
 
`Recording’
 
[09:11:58]
 
`Keith.  Really fascinating collection of CDs and records here.  You don’t… can you tell us a bit about this marvellous collection?’
 
`Yes.  Its taken me twenty years or more to build up the collection, and before that I used to buy LPs… and I’ve always particularly liked classical music because I think its music that lasts, where much pop is very ephemeral, and they’re sort of… the interests of the moment, and I was particularly… influenced by a friend called Alan, who I’ve mentioned in the video… who introduced me to Mozart, and I have more Mozart CDs than any other composer, though I think Beethoven and Bach become a close second.  But I do find that music is ageless, and the intellectual achievements of the past, particularly in music, people like Beethoven and Bach, and Mozart, their achievements rank with the most audacious space trips that we now take, to our scientists and technologists of various planets and remote… remote bodies of the solar system, and I think that these achievements are equalled by the musicians of the past who had this sense of symmetry [ph] and understanding of the humanity, which maybe the sciences don’t have to such a high degree… but I think the   [09:13:09]   achievements are both… are very great.  I’d also like to say in relation to the Cathedrals of the past as well, but… the architects were achievements of the past, they’re not so much for the hovels the peasants lived in, but the achievements of the past who have some relationship of some importance to the future, and I found classical music particularly, a very comfort at times of stress and… problems.’
 
`Thank you.’
 
[pause]
 
`Oh that… that is a… I used… I don’t know if that’s of any relevance… Veron… Premila, but I was awarded a little certificate by the local hospital for helping to run some car boot sales.  We raised £17000 pound over a four year period for them…’
 
`Goodness me’
 
`Unfortunately the hospital is no longer a general hospital, but just a community hospital… we fought for many years to try and save the accident and emergency but was unsuccessful.’
 
`Great.  Gosh, that’s quite a lot of money, £17000..’
 
`Yeah’
 
[09:14:34]
 
`That’s an amazing amount…’
 
[end of DVCPro tape 9 – end of VHS tape 2]