04 MIKE LAWSON

 
 
 
 
MENTAL HEALTH TESTIMONY ARCHIVE
 
 
 
MIKE LAWSON
 
 
C905/04/01-04/VHS 01-01
Original on DVCPro
Copy on VHS
 
Interviewed by Giles Martin
Camera by Ken Langdown
 
Transcribed by Julie Sharman
May 1999
 
 
[Start of DVCPro Tape 1 of 4 – Start of VHS Tape 1 of 1]
 
`This is an interview with Mike Lawson for Mental Health Media on the 14th May.  The interviewer is Giles Martin.’
 
`Mike, I guess... we should start really with where you were born?’
 
`I was born in an internment camp in… what was then a village, called Timatowal [ph], outside Karaganda, in Kazakhstan… and… the conditions were very, very difficult, to the extent that every morning at roll call, the camp commandant would give the names of the folks who had died the night before… and this got too much emotionally for, I… I… my mother told me that… she said, that after a while, the folks who were hearing this in the camp… that, I don’t know what the word would be… its always a difficulty with… with description… but the internees… the prisoners… the slave labourers, they… they… would say, you know… `we can’t handle the names, just tell us how many folks died... last night’, and this was the combination of cold, and… but mainly malnutrition, so I, I was born… in Stalin’s labour camps, one of Stalin’s labour camps, and the transportation was… cattle trucks, from camp to camp, so I was born into an institution and a nomadic existence, because… no one knew how long we would stay in one camp and some of the camps would have up to two thousand individuals, as slave labourers on, on the camps.  One of the .. one of the works that… one of the jobs that my mother did was to cut tobacco from sun up to sun down.  An enormous raven has just… flown by, which is very good… the guardian raven… so… I was born in these extreme conditions of deprivation, which later on was… in a paradoxical way, was to serve me well to survive the psychiatric system…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`…because, it seemed to me that… there were some horrible… similarities… between the slave labour camp where I was born…’
 
`Yes’
 
`…and, the so-called mental hospital where I was allegedly treated.  I… I’m seventeen and I’m taking my first journey after seeing the GP, into Napsbury.  Its 1965, its November, and… I hadn’t slept for a long time.  I started my first job… which was import/export clerk, I was an import/export clerk… and… I don’t know whether I’m awake or asleep.’
 
`Could we just sort of re-track a bit, and just look at how long you spent at Kazakhstan and in the camps, how long you did that for, and then how, eventually you… you came to England?’
 
`The… I was born in… on 25th May 1948, two days after the full moon…and… for the first four years of my life, we moved from camp to camp…’
 
`Right’
 
`…irregularly and intermittently, and… so… my father was released from the camp before I was born.  Ironically, the papers came through for the release of my mother, which meant… would have meant she would have just done eight… eight years hard labour, but as it was, because she was so pregnant, it was considered unsafe for her to travel, so it took another four years, and I was four years old, when mother was allowed to leave the… the camps… by which time… I mean, previously, to my birth, my father’s papers had come through and he was kicked out of the camp, so it was my mother and I and my grandfather… who… who… who, we were together in the camps for the first four years of my life.  Then… mother journeyed back to Berlin where she was born, a Jewish woman… but… because of the effects of twelve years’ hard labour, and the trauma she’d experienced, as a Jewess, she hadn’t… she couldn’t settle in… in Germany, in Berlin, so she got a work permit to come to England, but the Home Office weren’t satisfied about letting me join my mother, so I was in Berlin for three years.  So the first four years in… through the camps, the next three years I spent being looked after by my grandfather and his third wife, in Berlin… my mother had got a domestic work permit and… got a job as a cook in an old age home, a Jewish old age home, in… in London, but had to wait three years, by which time she had got… married, to a naturalised… umm… err… British person, so… that prompted the Home Office to allow me to join my mother.’
 
`Do you have vivid memories of your life in Berlin?’
 
`I… I’ve got vivid memories all the way back.  I remember the camps, and I remember Berlin where I was very happy as a street boy… with my own street gang, and being able to speak the Lainguage, which was a distinct advantage.  The first Lainguage that I… I used to use, was a strange combination of Russian and German through the camps, and of course in Berlin it was German, and that wasn’t too difficult, so… I had a good… a good life with my grandfather, although I was… I was shorter than my peers and I was very, very skinny… because of the malnutrition… from… from the camps, and… but I was… I was doing nicely as a lad.  First year school in Berlin, and then I was allowed to join my mother but I wasn’t… I was very wary of another change in my life.  My whole life had been nomadic until the age of four, and then Berlin… the first settled… settled existence with my grandfather and his third wife for three years in Berlin… and then the next move at the age of seven, to come to what I… what I… I learned was `Angel Land’… see in German, `Innaland’ [ph] `Angel Land’… and I was very upset to arrive at Heathrow Airport feeling that I had probably seen my grandfather for the last time, because I can usually tell when a person is going to pass… and… feeling betrayed, because the buses were red, in Berlin they’re yellow… and I couldn’t see the angels yet… I couldn’t see the angels… so… I felt very torn up, and part of me hated my mother, and part of me hated myself.    How come I had no father… my grandfather was beautiful, but where was my father, and secondly, how come… my mother had left me for three years, and now I was pushed against her, again… so I felt very strange to come to London at the age of seven, and, found myself in the middle… it was August, 1955, I’m in Finsbury Park, I’m in the middle of Ambler [ph] Junior School playground, and I’m about to see what seems like a million children milling round me.  I’ve got a German coat on, I look like ET… they’re all dressed in uniform.  I’ve got this German coat, which must be so strange for them, and all of a sudden I’m being surrounded like… like… I’m being looked at by this aliens to me… and they’re looking at me as if I’m ET, and they’re saying things, and shouting things, and jostling me and spitting at me.’
 
`That must have been terrible?’
 
`It was terrifying… absolutely terrifying… because I don’t know where they came from.  You see I walked into an empty playground and all of a sudden all these children are around me and this was a big junior school… and I don’t understand a word that they’re shouting at me, and so… I mean, I realise this… this is an English school.  I don’t speak the Lainguage, and my practice is that at every break time I will find the biggest boy, and I’m very short and I’m very skinny, and I will hit him with all my might, that’s the best I can come up with at the moment because I’m so angry to be here… how could anyone do this to me… I don’t know what the fuck’s going on… and I don’t speak the Lainguage, and they’re abusing me and I can’t get back… so my resort is to find the biggest boy that I can see and I hit him, and I invariably get beaten up as a process… because the big boys don’t like being hit by little boys.  But, slowly, slowly… ummm… an Italian boy kind of adopts me… you know, he’s that kind of… he’s the head of my class, and he says, `right’, you know, `I’m going to teach you English’… I became his second in command.  I’m seven years old… its London, its Finsbury Park, and… the Italian boy is teaching me English… that’s a great honour for me… and very quickly… I mean it took me a few months, and I got into this Lainguage… and without knowing it, I’m now part of the majority group… I’m now part of the group that comes down and if there’s someone who looks different or, is… you know, obviously foreign, then… you know, in order to fit in with the big group, I’m gobbing at them, I’m hitting them and saying you know, `you are an alien’… sadly, I was so unconscious… it took me a while.  One day I’m walking back from school and a stone hits the back of my head, and its one of the boys who is new from another country, and his sister, and they’re actually singling me out to get back at me for being a bully… I bullied them.  I didn’t even know I was bullying them.  I was so keen to fit in, that you know… as soon as I could get in with the majority group, with the big boys, and of course the Italian has taught me English, and he kind of has a lot of power, everywhere has a pecking order.’
`Yes’
 
 `And… you know… and I’m now his second in command, so its good to have that power.  But I still feel very uncomfortable.  I don’t feel… I do not feel happy in this country at all.’
 
`No…?’
 
`I want to go back to Berlin with my grandad.  I had a whale of a time there, I was the leader of the gang, and I had a lot of power as a street boy, and I knew all the ropes.  Now, the culture over here is so different… I… you know… its different.  But its not… its not too bad.  So… I go through junior school…’
 
`Uh huh…’
 
`…then I move to… again these are all catastrophes…I moved to Havistock, which is the biggest comprehensive school in London.  Now there’s two thousand pupils, and I’m one who doesn’t know any of the nineteen hundred and ninety nine other ones, because… my… my parents, for all good reason, wanted me to get to the best place.  Now, you know, it was either Barnesbury Boys’ School, or it was Havistock Comprehensive.  Havistock looks like the better option.  So here I am, an alien again, at the age of twelve, and I’m in the playground, and its happening all over again, but its not as bad as last time… but there are all these groups of other boys and girls, from… you know, they know  each other… I don’t know anyone in this place, ‘cause its out of… its out of… its in Chalk Farm… I’m in Finsbury Park.  I’m living in Finsbury Park.  So, again… dreadful feeling of alienation… and you know…’
 
`Seeming like an outsider, always…?’ [both talking together]
 
`Always.  Always... I’ve always felt that anyway.  It’s got its advantages… it can make you very useful, because you can see what happens.   But it can also be very, very lonely… if… if one… if one isn’t harmonious.  So… I… I get up to… I’m not bad, I’m in… in sort of the B form, which is the second from the top.  I failed my eleven plus… but I’m borderline eleven plus style failure… so I get into the… the… they had these streams, A, B and C, according to their ideas of aptitude in the comprehensive school, and I’m in the… the second from the top class… given the benefit of the doubt, because I’m considered to be quite intelligent.  I picked up English very quickly, and with the things that I need to know, I’m very adept at learning quickly, but the… I’m… I’m already quite… I’m… I’m not compliant.  I mean, the French teacher calls me `Mike Lawson and Company Limited’, because… you know, I… every scam… I’m into every scam… [laughs] so… so, yeah… I had a paradoxical attitude with my teachers, which is they can’t… and they respect me for my intelligence, but they’re wary of me because of my… my shady side perhaps.’
 
`What did you get up to?’
 
`I mean, nothing too untoward… it was just that… I was already able to kind of… its… its difficult to put into words.  I had a lot of power because I could see through people, so that I knew their weak points, but at the time… I was also being bullied, so you know… but its something to do with the camps… it makes you very sharp, because if you… if you are dependent upon your wits, for your next crumb… there’s something inside you that becomes… you know, some people would consider it psychic… I don’t know about that, you become very intuitive, very incisive about the next move… it… its something to do with the camps… its something to do with having a ghetto mentality, that if you’ve really been like… at two… I… I… I nearly died of double pneumonia, malnutrition and the whole shit, but I was too angry to allow myself to die… and I do remember that… and so it was assumed by the camp doctors, or the make… from the makeshift hospital etc., that… that I would die, because you couldn’t survive double pneumonia, malnutrition, the whole shit… but… but I survived because of my anger, ‘cause I was very, very angry… and sometimes anger can make you quite wise, too… it makes you canny.  I don’t know… I don’t know what the English equivalent of canny is, but canny, yes…’
`Yes…can we just…?’
 
`But we haven’t left comprehensive school…’
 
`Right’
 
`Now, my… my… I have two nicknames in Havistock.  The one that stuck is `Killer’… an the reason I got called Killer was because I was a foot shorter than everyone else, and I was absolutely… you know, if I turned sideways I would disappear… so… it was… a… a sarcasm on… my feeble frame… but I was also known as prof, ‘cause I thought about things’ [pause]
 
`Did people come to you with problems to sort out?’
 
`I was very messed up at this time… and almost… it seemed like by default… the misfits and I had something which we were… we were sharing empathy with each other about.  The misfits and I.  There were some… a… a boy from Iraq.  Again, there was a lot of… overt and under… you know, and, and more subtle… racism… everything, you know… this, this was 1959 when I hit the, the school… in… in Chalk Farm… away from… [pause] Now the thing about my life as a Shaman [ph] is that you work your area.  If you’re out of your area you’re in great danger… and the nomadic Shaman from Kazakhstan… you have to spend your time in your area.  If for some reason you’re removed, that’s the most dangerous thing spiritually, because you have got no protection.  You know, this works on different levels.  Havistock did me in because it was out of my area.  I had no chance to work that area but… the compensating factor was that it was the beginning of the sixties, so… The Beatles were at number one, with… `I want to hold your hand’, and we had our… we had our spots and we had our hormones… and so you had two camps in class.  You had the Rolling Stones lot, which I was part of, and you had The Beatles lot, which I was also a part of, but they were the softer lot.  I was socially isolate, apart from the misfits.  The misfits and I had a great relationship as pupils in… in class, everywhere else.  I was, you know, the misfit person.  But I was very, very… removed.  What was happening was that I was in the playground and I was getting this thing about everything’s a dream.  I wasn’t in accord with my life… I hadn’t been able to work my magic in… in… so that I could be harmonious.  I was displaced.  I was born in a displaced person’s camp and I was displaced.  So… I was in a lot of agony.  I didn’t really… I didn’t really fit in.  I felt very lonely, I felt very isolated.  I felt incredibly shy, yet this was the guy that at the age of two had got to the tannoys in camp, as… and was making out, you know… was… was speaking on the camp radio, so I wasn’t naturally shy, but I was very, very… repressed by the circumstances.  I wasn’t living the life that I wanted to and… then it was time for a holiday…. Went to Spain… Torremolinos, 1963, something like that… got my first job as a page boy.  You see I wanted to buy this thing, it’s the crown clockwork cine camera, and I asked my parents if I could get the holiday job, page boy, right… and… I… what I’d got to do was go into the main lobby, and page folks for the telephone, and do what page boys do… serve at the shop, the sort of gift shop, in the Russell Hotel, and then came that momentous Wednesday, when… the hall porter said `right’, you know, `page these people’… and I had to page Mr and Mrs Fuckit, from Saudi Arabia… at the top of my voice, which I did, and I got half a crown.  That meant ten gold leaf and change… in those days… so I was getting, was it… five pounds a week as a page boy in the school holidays.  Now, I’d done very badly in the exams, ‘cause I couldn’t concentrate on every… anything at all… and, and my… my…  my… adoptive granny called me scatterbrain, because… this is the thing about dispossession and insecurity.  I wasn’t myself.  It took me years to become myself… and… it was… the rot was beginning to set in with regards to… that I couldn’t cope with this situation.  So… I got three O levels and a hundred yard swimming certificate… but that was well below what they thought I could do, ‘cause they realised, here’s a bloke who’s got brains, but he doesn’t actually want to do… he doesn’t want to do the O level trip.  I did the hundred yard swimming thing, that was cool… but the… the O level trip, Biology, English and Chemistry… but I only got… I only got one… so, second sitting… so anyway, went on holiday to Spain and… decided that I wasn’t going to do my second… second year of the sixth form… I was going to do Botany and Zoology A level, but… but I lost interest really.  The beginning of the sixties was an enormous thing, and you don’t want to be stuck doing your revision when you could be out wearing the beads and meeting people in Trafalgar Square, and… you know, being part of this incredible revolution which was the beginning of the acknowledgement of adolescence.  Paint it black.’
 
`Yes’
 
`Half a pound of bananas and tu’penny [ph] rice.’
 
`One thing I’ve been meaning to ask you… is did you have any brothers or sisters?’
 
`Well… errr… [pause]… sets moustache on fire… ummm.. yes.  My father… my, my real father, my blood father, married… when he was… married another woman, so I have a half brother called Peter.  But I’ve never met with him.  He’s about maybe five or six years younger than me.’
 
`Right’
 
`At the moment I don’t know whether my blood father is alive or dead, and part of me can’t handle the idea of finding out anyway.  The last time I spoke with my father, I was twenty one, and it was the salutary sort of happy birthday, thing… that was the last time… and I got an ashtray, which you know, I don’t want to go into that.  Right.  I don’t want to get… yes… no… yes…’
 
`OK’
 
`So… yes.’
 
`So… looking through your kind of like school life and so on, when do you think you first became aware that you know, I really can’t cope, there’s something up…?’
 
`At the age of six I was in Switzerland for my lungs… you see, I’d nearly died at the age of two…’
 
`Yes…’
 
`And so… the idea at that time was… for the children… we… in German, we were called `speitheinkerron’ [ph]… late homecomers… and I took six months… I was allowed… I went to this wonderful place in Switzerland for my lungs, and, there I started thinking about my life, and I started tantruming about the idea of conformity… the idea… you know, I had this idea… I was very sensitive to what happens to adults… people don’t realise that a six year old sees the world… it isn’t as if somehow you have to be mature in conventional eyes, to see the world.  I saw the world at six… and I saw that… if I follow my role, I will have a nine to five job, in some sort of middle management capacity and I was tantruming at the age of six, that I’m… I’m not going to do this…’
 
`Its quite unusual to think like that at the age of six, you know… about your life…?’
 
`Well, it was firstly about school.  I mean, I knew something about what school meant, and the thing that I equated with death, was any kind of timetable.  Now it took me fifty years to work out what this was about, and again… that anarchic shaman of Kazakhstan works on stream consciousness, and no rules.  The moment you confine this person, who has a spiritual life to lead… that’s our convenance… that person has to escape or become an advocate.  This was to happen later in the loony bins… that I was precisely where I was supposed to be, but that was also that my life is rebellion, you know… I come from the Brechtian family… you know, I come from the family where the women did the work, and my great aunt, she did the work, and… she was politicised very early on… its almost genetic.  You know, I come from a set of anarchic Jews, and this is from generations… generations of protesters.  We imprison ourselves to open the gates.  Yes.’
 
`Mmm’
`It’s a family affair.’
 
`And when was the first time you were aware of… of feeling… not so much reacting to your past… but… living like day to day life, and finding that you really couldn’t cope with the stresses and strains, and maybe suspected something wasn’t quite right?’
 
`Well, right early on.’
 
`Right.’
 
`I mean, at the age of two… because I was very tiny, I got under the barbed wire to leave the camp.  I used to toddle off by myself and that’s when I had what would be called `spiritual’ experiences.  I trepanned myself… I’ve got a hole in my head.  I achieved that at the age of two, that’s a tradition a well… is to open the skull… and you know, I have the scar, all-be-it its quite discreet now, but you know, I was fully active from the word go.  I was born three months after the assassination of Gandhi… very near to a town, which… it… depending on which Lainguage you speak, is called `Karagandhi’… now, you know… my… my teacher, if I can put it this way, is Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi is the example for my life of how I should live, all-be-it as a frail human being.  So… and I had the hallmarks there, you know.  I’m also as old as Israel.  I’m the same age as Israel, and I can’t bear the hypocrisy of Zionism, but I love the people who are… for Palestine.  That’s why I took up Islam.  Not… you know, not for my own spiritual salvation, but I also believe that there is life before death, and as a Shaman you have to do something about it.  You know, that, that can either mean that… you refuse to wear your school uniform, or you become vice chair of National MIND.  Same deal.  Different colours.  So… but I didn’t know the Lainguage.  I didn’t know what I was about.  I was on auto pilot all my life until I understood… you know, it’s a… its been a very bizarre life.  My mother said that if I told someone, as I’m telling you now, the real story, you could never believe it, and my mother knows my story.  So, I’m one of these human beings, and I suspect so many of us who go through the psychiatric system, who are misunderstood, and the consequences that we affect the insecurity of other people, so that they have to damn us otherwise they are in trouble… that’s the name of the game.’
 
`OK… well let’s look at that then.  Let’s look at Napsbury and how you got there first of all?’
 
`Now.  It is natural to want to go back to one’s origins… I had an instinct, but I had no knowledge, that going to a mental hospital… that’s the nearest emulation to the camps where I was king.  If you’re a baby in an internment camp, everyone has something for you, because they feel a certain compassion that you shouldn’t be there… so for the first four years, although I was starving to death and dying, I was so elevated.  Imagine that you are the baby, in… in hell.  Everyone’s going to want to give you a sweet, and say that you shouldn’t be here.  It makes you king for that time.  But God help you if they ever release you from hell, because then you’re in competition, and it isn’t an equal playing field… with those who are a foot taller than you and those who haven’t been starved, and they’re going to `bop’ you, because you look different… and it never leaves you… so… what was the question?’
 
`What were the circumstances that led up to you being admitted to Napsbury?’
 
`Right.  Umm… I had felt this thing about feeling very uncomfortable and unreal, and I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t actually learn my work.  I got a job through… my grandmother arranged it, as a… as a… a junior import/export clerk, in Winsley [ph] Street, in Oxford… just off Oxford Circus…’
 
`And this was ’65?’
 
`This was 1965, after three months in Spain with my granny and her friend, and them… them… systematically doing my head in… umm… because they have a very peculiar life themselves and err… my grandmother comes from the Germanic Victorian tradition, which is all clicking of heels, bowing and protocol, you know… this… this… paradoxically, you know, to be Jewish and German… you get the worst of both worlds, and maybe some of the best, so… err… I had had my head done in with this three months’ holiday in Torremolinos with my granny, who basically wanted me to be someone else.  My granny had said to my mother, at one time, that, you know, before she came to England, `can’t you throw the baby in the dustbin?’, and I kind of knew her enmity towards me.  She was jealous of me.  My grandmother had spent twelve years in Shanghai, and is a very spiritual woman, but you can’t have two in the same family… one’s got to give way… err… so umm… what happened was that, I got myself more and more isolated in the last year of school.  I had two good friends, but I couldn’t do the dance… in other words, you know, over the weekend they’d go to the Witches’ Cauldron in the Finchley Road, which is a sort of Folk Club, but I was too… I couldn’t handle the overwhelm of being there with those people, so… I spent a lot of time sitting in the cold, like… I used to get very frightened of meeting people, in the sense that... I... I would feel that I’m somehow not up to the job, and I felt very… err.. shy isn’t the right word… overwhelmed if I met other people, that I couldn’t behave in the way that I was supposed to so I wasn’t going to bother, umm… which meant going to see `North to Alaska’ three times, rather than face someone at home who was visiting my family.  Its something to do with this Victorian Germanic thing about order.  It isn’t my line… as you can see.  And… I couldn’t cope socially, and I couldn’t go to the parties, the school parties… that again… I felt too… too exposed… I felt too inadequate to do that, so I was getting more and more withdrawn in the conventional sense, and becoming, you know, more and more locked inside myself.  In Shamanic terms this would be initiatory, in… in… in… Western terms, it’s the beginning of schizophrenia, if there is such a thing.’
 
`Yes’
 
`So… I’m… I’m seventeen and I’m basically fucked… in the sense that… I’m so socially withdrawn, and I’m so… sad, in the old fashioned sense, umm… because I feel that I’m in the wrong country with the wrong people, in the wrong way.  So completely dispossessed, and the way that this shows is that I’m in the school playground, and I’m sharing with the other misfits.  They also feel it is a dream.  They don’t want to be here either… and that eventually leads to me… its… its Monday morning and its time for work, and I’m not moving.  I can’t move.  I feel completely frozen… kind of enforced hibernation, and maybe I could speak, but in a way, I’m not going to.  So mother says, `its time for work, what’s the matter, you’re not moving, I’ll ‘phone the GP’.  What can she do?  And… get the taxi, off to the GP, I’m…. you know, it would be called catatonic… frozen.  Years later I was to learn, Siberian Shaman freezes.  That’s part of the change of realms… part of the initiation, but of course, the GP then says, you know, `what’s happening Michael?’, and I give him some sort of… some sort of metaphorical answer, which prompts him to suggest `yes… psychiatrist…’ straight away.  Psychiatrist said, `do you hear voices?’, I want to please, `yes, yes’… `right, you’re in’.  Next thing, Napsbury… these incredible counter panes with trees on them, and a doctor taking my blood pressure and looking at me in this wonderful, err… you know… Indian sub-continent way, saying [in accent] `memories hurt, don’t they?’… Oh, God… you know.  Here is the great swami and of course they hurt… you know, this hurts as well.  What’s he doing?  Umm… and the Irish charge nurse coming down, and [in accent] `OK Michael…?’, and you’re in. [laughs]… [in Irish accent] `Smiler, we’ve got you now’, like that, and then you know, the traditional dance therapies and the whole shit, right.  Melleril, you never knew you had a dick until you didn’t have a dick with Melleril… can you imagine this?  You know… [laughs]
 
`But what… [laughs]…the first moment though, when you were actually rolling up the drive to this place and you see this huge great building in front of you, I mean what goes through your head, what are you thinking?’
 
[pause]
 
`When I was lying in bed, I was assuming that I would have to be killed…. because… because somewhere along the line I am saying, no, I’m cutting out, stop the world I want to get off… and I assume… I have no idea what is going to happen to me, and I’m terrified and I’m excited… its Monday morning, nowhere to go, but oh, that magic feeling.  So what I’ve done, without knowing it, without having the words for it, that I have cut out.  I’ve taken my fuses out and I’ve said, right, enough of this dance, I’m cutting out.  You take over.  I’m giving it all up…’
 
`I’m giving it to you?’
 
`Yes. Mother, you gave me life, I don’t want it… here’s the fuse box.  Mother phones the GP, the GP says see the shrink, the shrink says I’ve got a spare bed, you’re in.  The charge nurse says `hey, I’ve got someone new to abuse’ and I say, I love you… because even if you abuse me, I need the contact, and the staff nurse follows on.  And so the feeling is, umm… it’s 1761 and we are going in a carriage up a drive.  The gardeners are angry… these… err… I was to learn later, these were gardening parties, a mixture of professional gardeners and the… and the so called patients… umm… you know, clearing leaves… it’s November.  Now, what set this off was bonfire night.  I get a very strange feeling that I’ve got to be in the right place at the right time, and its taken me three hours to get from work to home, because what has happened is that I thought I was still in Finsbury Park, but we were in fact now in Cricklewood… and so, you know… this… and so… already stuff is happening, and mum’s getting pretty worried.. mum and dad are getting pretty worried about that I’m seeming to be more and more not here… and… you know, is that just growing up… we don’t know.  So… going up the drive of the… incredible long drive, so its like you’re going to… a… it’s the Hammer House of Horrors, its Buckingham Palace, but it’s… it’s Gothic.  Its umm… these buildings are incredible.  It’s a red brick building, Napsbury looks a lot like Friern Barnet.  You’ve got a half a mile drive up and you know, you’re going right into a Hammer House of Horror films… and… these… it’s a Brueghel scene, ‘cause you’ve got the gardening parties and they’ve got their pitch forks up, and some of them can’t move too easily because they’re on the drugs, so you know… its all… it’s a very weird landscape… err… Bosch… you know, this sort of Medieval shit…’
 
`Do you remember the first patient you spoke to there?’
 
`Well this was the standard, [in an accent] `Excuse me, have you got a cigarette?’… which… someone straight out of the Hammer House of Horrors thing, because… when you can walk… first of all you don’t have any clothes for a long time because… for… when you’re under observation, when you first get admitted at this time, 1965, you’re in pyjamas and dressing gown, or, if you’re naughty, you’re in pyjamas, when if you’re even naughtier you’re in nothing… so you’ve got to stay in bed otherwise you’re exposing yourself.  And I… I did make this journey into the grounds… umm… and I was very… I was very `blitzed’ out in… in the way that… I… by saying no, I had changed the whole circumstance.  What… what I mean is that… it wasn’t… it didn’t appear to be volitional… I mean I was frozen in bed with fear, I didn’t know what the fuck to do, so… then a week later, to have these beautiful grounds in Hertfordshire, around Lilliput Land, you know, Blackthorn [ph] ward, and this incredible architecture, was an… incredible buzz.  What was I doing in the middle of one of these films?  You know the guy who made Mahler and Tchaikovsky , you know, over the top, what’s his name… err… [pause]… you see this is what Largactil does… I can’t remember anything.  The… the film maker, he’s still around… Tchaikovsky… err… Mahler… what is his name?  Anyway, its surrealism, `a la mode’… Napsbury Hospital, November, the beauty of a crisp, winter morning, and you’re seeing everything in triple vision, because they’re giving you the Haloperidol, but you still have your life, so… umm… it felt as if I was going into the 360 degree movie, and… you would find some… someone who would share this with you.  Hey, it’s all a film isn’t it?  Yeah, wow… wicked, or what… so one got into the… into the highs, because we had actually managed to dislodge ourselves off the hook… now it might not be nice to get kicked in the guts by the charge nurse when no one’s looking, but we… but in a way, you know… one feels… one feels guilty for having made the grade off the hook.  Umm… so rapidly I decided to take full advantage and become a mega loony.  I’m on the ward, I’m going to perform…’
 
`Enjoy yourself?’
 
`Yes. Yes.’
 
`Mmm’
 
`Now. After three months of filling in forms where I was the equivalent of extremely dyslexic, because I… you know… but bills of lading do not give me a hard on… right… and the idea of seven pound ten wasn’t that exciting either, but most of all, my covenant was that, you know… I am not going to fit in… I can’t fit in… my tantrums at the age of six in Switzerland were about the normal life, I can’t do it… I’m either not up to it or I’ve got another purpose… so arriving in Planet Napsbury actually… actually was part… the first initiation.  I might now be garbage in the eyes of everyone by being called a paranoid schizophrenic, which was my first label apparently… umm… but I’m also off the hook… millionaires and loonies are off the hook.’
 
`Now how did your doctors react to you running the halls and enjoying being in this place?’
 
`Bad move on my part, right… [laughs]… extra Largactil… I mean… and the other thing was if I was freezing up on the ward, I got the… how can I put this… I… I don’t know how to euphemise this one.  What they used to do… when I first came in I was so terrified I was still frozen, and I wasn’t eating, so Royston Phillips, my good friend, he spoon fed me, at the table… such kindness.  You don’t need to use an ash tray Mike, just flick it on the floor… great.  And everyone’s smoking two to the dozen because… we… we don’t know this, but it… it kicks back against the Largactil… it neutralises some of the Largactil downer effect, is nicotine… that’s why a lot of us are going to die of lung cancer… ‘cause we can’t stop over compensating for the body stuff… anyway, umm… Dr Leyland hates me, because he sees a revolutionary, and they don’t like them, so he’s going to take me to town, and also the staff hate me as well, because… they, you know… here’s a wideboy coming in, and what we do is we break their will… we break their will… umm… and… and they make it very difficult for me.  I’m beaten regularly, I get the wet towels, you know, whipped with wet towels, and… and I get the punch… this is the horrible one… and one time my parents were actually coming to visit me on a Wednesday, and the staff nurse who’s particularly nasty… he says, punch my fist with your stomach, Mike…. `uugh…’ [simulates sound of punch].  We get all this shit… well I got all this shit.  It’s also because I was seventeen and so I was… you know, I was… I was the spring chicken for those who like that sort of thing.’
 
`Did they give you a reason for this?’
 
`For…?’
 
`Did they tell you why they… they were punishing you, or just came and did it?’
 
`It seemed… I mean there was a double agenda going on.  It’s like the nurses knew it was all bollocks anyway, the whole psychiatric shit was all bollocks, and what it was really about was that we were the bad boys, and we had to be reformed or done in.  That seemed to be the tacit understanding, between us and them, but in between there were lots of floral dances… err… so… umm… you got this… this very strange juxtapositioning, whereby, you know… I had just received one in the guts from the staff nurse, as my mum and dad were coming with the grapes, you know… [laughs]… and… and just… you know, in the nick of time he withdrew his fist from my gut, you know, `hello mum and dad, how are you?’… [laughs].  Now, the guy at the front is… is doing his song of welcome [laughs] for Wednesday visitors, which is… umm… which I won’t repeat right, but there’s… there’s an incredible sense of, I mean this is a Brechtian play… absolutely…’
 
`You weren’t tempted to do with mum you’d… I’ve just been punched in the guts…?’
 
`Ah… its very difficult because part of what I’m trying to do with mum is point out to her, I’m not actually beyond the pale, I’m still here… in other words, I’m getting the funny look from mum, because in order to save herself, she has to kind of put the funny look on with regards to that… you know… my son is ill… now this really makes me pissed off… because it isn’t anything to do with illness, and its everything to do with… revolution… we say, look, I’m not going to play the game any more.  But you see the punishment we get is we get patronised and demonised in the sense that well, poor Michael, yeah…?  Tap on the head and does he take two sugars?… when I’m the bloke who invented tea.  So its horrible, because I get more and more frustrated, trying to put through to mum, that look, I’m actually ok, but I don’t want to play the conventional game… and mum’s doing `yes, dear…’.  And so… and there’s an incredible fight between mum and me, because mum in a way, doesn’t want to believe that I’m that clever, that I can do this, and on the other hand she’s doing the Jewish mum routine, which is `Oh my God, what have I done to my son?’… why isn’t he a lawyer, a barrister or a banana… and I’m not playing that game and part of her doesn’t want to believe I’m clever enough not to play that game.  And poor dad is the mediator, who kind of knows the score, but is… is very kind.  Meanwhile, the nurses are abusing me and beating me up, but I'm doing the same to them as well… in my way.  Unbeknown to me, the fact that I’m drinking… you see, there’s all… always bottles in the grounds… I find this vodka bottle, and at nine o’clock in the morning, I’m drinking… because of the Largactil you want to drink water all the time… I’m drinking water out of a vodka bottle and I’m kind of doing a great act as a piss artist, which means that the staff nurse who sexually abused me, eventually gets sacked on the spot for coming into work drunk, because he’s got this constant vision of me drinking out of a vodka bottle… I didn’t know that, but I know it now… do you see what I mean?  Strange defence systems, like putting loads of salt on your food when you’re on Lithium, and not knowing that that’s the antidote for the fucking Lithium.  Something tells you…’
 
`Were you pleased that he was sacked?’
 
`I’m not actually a person who believes in vengeance, because I’ve never seen it work, and in a way I’m quite sad that we were so de-humanised, I would like to have much more civilised relationships with people… I’m not that kind of person who believes in any kind of comebacks… you know… I… I… I do like the… I do like the idea of wisdom and compassion, and if I’m not being compassionate I’m out of order… its never served me to see someone else suffer.  It always hurts me, so that hurt me too.  No, no… I’m not that way inclined.’
`And was there… was it everybody was getting beatings doled out to them, or were you…?’
 
`Its very… its very individual, what goes on…’
 
`But you were just particularly unpopular?’
 
`No… its that… you see, I was very young, so it was easier.  I mean you had forty men on the ward, so it… again, as I say, it was very much like… it was like the internment camp on drugs.  Umm… it was the internment camp on drugs, so part of me knew this game very well, because I was born into it… and there’s an instinct for it.  I wasn’t particularly unpopular or popular… I was kind of interesting… ‘cause I wasn’t… a… a burnt out person… and… I… I… I have an alternative way of looking at the world, so that in a way has been my saving grace… that people are interested in different ways… and so I’m kind of… umm… weird and interesting… mystical perhaps… that meant I got the best and the worst, because I was also the staff nurse’s pet… he paid me more attention than anyone else, but that also meant that you know, if he was upset, I got more of the shit… goes with… goes with the grounds… and then I mean… I… I played the system, and then I ran away.  I ran away… umm… I was very high… and, and… the punishment for that… that… that then meant it was going to get heavy, which was Section 26 at the time, a year’s section…’
 
`So how long were you in there before you ran away?’
 
`Umm…’
 
`Roughly…?’
 
`I can’t remember too well, I’ve had too many ECTs… but it was probably one and a half years, or two years and there was… there was a discharge and… and a… an admission in between…’
`So just starting at the beginning… you… you were there voluntarily?’
 
`Yes… but I was underage anyway, so my parents had the con… control… of anything that hospital might not have…’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`…at that time…’
 
`And then how long were you there the first time… spread to like six months or…?’
 
`I think it was about eleven months to… to one and a half years, I’m not sure…’
 
`Yeah’
 
`And then… you get the… the interview with the psychiatrist, Dr Leyland, and it was… umm.. you know, if… if I’m discharging you, you have to go to work… you have to find a job and go to work, otherwise I’m going to re-admit you, so that was the deal.  And… and of course you’re on… either Melleril or Largactil or one of the other shits, and umm… and… you can’t function anyway, so you were slobber your way up to the… you know, if you could make it to sign on would be a miracle, because… you know, the effect of the Largactil is completely… you know, its bad… its two bottles of bad vodka… it just fucks you completely… so you know, you can’t really do anything at all.  I had friends who were re-admitted ‘cause they fell asleep in the middle of their work… and that was the result of the drugs that were… you know, supposed to stabilise us… you know… what they do is they create more artificial hibernation… and so I was never any good at keeping… I had loads of jobs, you know, for two days or three days, and then I blew it one way or the other… umm… because you can’t function on Largactil, but… but it makes us very quiet and withdrawn so we’re not so much of a nuisance.  So I was in and out like a yo-yo for… for ages, but one time I was in, I ran away… umm… and that then meant that I was… the… the psychiatrist put me on Section 26, and that meant eleven months on Elder ward, and that, you know, there were forty men there… but, but this was a very tough regime… in the sense that if you confine people, you know, for twenty three hours every day, most of the time, you know, we were locked in and there were four or five nurses, and it was such an electric atmosphere, that the nurses would allow fights to happen, because if they kept stopping the fights, the whole sit… the whole… atmosphere was so electric… you know, you almost believed that people would spontaneously combust… so there was a lot of violence there, and… and of course I got the bad end of the thing because I’m… I’m puny… I’m not puny now… actually, I’ve built out like a balloon, because the Largactil has made me… more… you know, longer… has made me square.  For the first time in my life, you know… I, I’m now twelve stone ten, from something like seven stone… I’ve ballooned up because of the Largactil and Melleril… and I look like one of the Krays, you know… in the early days… ‘
 
`But going back to this first time you were in… you were in there for maybe like a year and half, up to a year and a half…’
 
`Yes.’
 
`So… once you’d sort of been in there and settled in as it were…’
 
`Yes…’
 
`Then, kind of what did you get up to during the day, or what… what… what was there to do if you wanted to?’
 
`Right.  Right.   The… at first you got the kind of soft, so-called therapies, which was the country dancing, and this… this is like… you know, you’ve got… you’ve got… err… twenty to thirty people who don’t want to be in the main hall, who are having difficulty walking about the place, and they put on these high speed Scottish reels, right… and you’re supposed to take your partners and do this elaborate dancing… and… [laughs]… and you kind of corkscrew into the floor with your partner, if you’re lucky… otherwise you just fall on each other and think, where the fuck am I? Umm… and, and this was… by… the green coated occupational therapists… that was the gentle touch.  Now, the… the industrial touch was the farm factory… where you… they had dipping bars of iron into acid and shit, umm… and doing industrial stuff…’
 
`Did you do any of that?’
 
`Yeah… I did some of that but I never like it very much…’
 
`No…?’
 
`…so I did actually… I’d avoid it by going to a place called The Pines, which was the sort of… tea shop, where we made our dangerous liaisons… umm… ‘
 
`Did you have any dangerous liaisons?’
 
`I… I lost my virginity in… in Dr Scott’s consulting room… its almost a book, isn’t it?  That’s right… you know… this… of course consultants never do any work, so… [laughs]… we found the consultant’s suite is the place to shag, right?… ‘cause its got to be good for something… [laughs]… so… [laughs]…’
 
[camera]`…sorry to interrupt you there, we’ve actually…’
 
[End of DVCPro Tape 1 of 4 – VHS Tape 1 of 1 continues]
 
 


[Start of DVCPro Tape 2 of 4]
 
`[in an accent]… jolly good show… I just want all of you people out there to know that there’s a war on… smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em… and meet you round the back of the bicycle shed for a quite Anchor cigarette, at six hundred hours…’
 
`Well more to the point… meet in the consulting room?’
 
`Yes.  Life goes in… in the institution, and you know… a seventeen year old lad, with his hormones reeling round, all-be-it heavily suppressed by Largactil… life goes on… and… err.. I mean all institutions have their pecking orders, and their nibbling orders… [laughs]… and sometimes its time for totty [laughs].’
 
`Did you plan it or was it spontaneous?’
 
`I… look… women are a million miles up the road from us, right… men don’t know anything, and so… here was the delicious young woman, who shall be nameless… [in accent] `Hi Baby..’… umm… who made a man of me in Dr Scott’s… umm.. actually in Dr Scott’s toilet.  Its an amazing thing when you’re actually on the case and you’re watching cockroaches dancing just by the bowl of the lav… but it was a select lav, it was the consulting room… you know, it was the consultant’s toilet… the famous Dr Scott… and… I thought let’s be discreet about this… we’ll leave separately, so… you know, being a gentleman, I said I’ll leave first… and you come out five minutes afterwards.  So I leave the… these are three rooms, which are downstairs from Cedar ward, where I’m now… on the `male [in American accent] adolescent ward… watch out…’ and I come out of there, and my charge nurse is outside saying `have you had a good jump, Mike?’, and I… `I don’t know what you’re talking about’, and then the fresh faced woman comes out five minutes afterwards, with that wonderful glow of satisfaction on her face, and the hall porter says, `what have you been doing in there?’… that was just part of our lives.  So I emerged from Dr Scott’s consulting room, a man… ready to face my next adventure…’
It was really horrible…’
 
`It was really horrible…?’
 
`No… it was great in the consulting room…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`But not with Dr Scott…’
 
`No…’
 
`I’m not that way inclined.  No…’
 
`No, I was wondering whether this is the beginning of a great affair, or…?’
 
`Not particularly, I mean… I think I was the nearest she could get to Paul McCartney, under those circumstances.  I am left handed… and… it didn’t last terribly long.  A fresh faced girl from Watford, and the boy from Kazakhstan… I think we were kind of doomed to failure, but it taught me a lot about life and love [pause].  After the eleven months on the locked ward, which was really the worst time of all, because you got forty guys, and we’re getting the syrups now, instead of getting…’
 
`That’s after you ran away?’
 
`That’s right.  This is the punishment… was Section 26… and… and I stopped talking.  You know, my protest was not… not to talk to anyone… and then the … the… redoubtable Dr Shinawi [ph], an Egyptian doctor, err… asks for an interview with… with my folks, and says, `we’ve got to give him the electro shock… it’s the last resort’.
 
`The first time… the first time?’
 
`Yeah.  Yeah.’
 
`Yes… right.’
 
`I’m nineteen, I’ve got no choice over the matter… my parents sign… man in the white coats, very reassuring… umm… and, and the deal is that I… the diagnosis is that I’m so ill that I’m… its unlikely that I’m ever going to be well enough to leave, ever… but because I’m deteriorating, in their words, ‘cause I’m not talking, ‘cause I don’t see the point… umm…’
 
`Could you talk?’
 
`Yeah.  Yeah.  But I was so angry… it was one of my protests, or if I did talk, you know, I would kind of make up my own Lainguage, ‘cause I was so pissed off with learning new… new Lainguages all the time… err… and so… err… ECT… umm… 1969… so I’d had four years in and out of Napsbury and… and the outs were on the basis that I’d get a job which was impossible in view of the chemicals I was supposed to take… err… and you know, I had two days in a biro factory and then getting pissed off with that, and then lying in bed at home listening to Radio London or… or Caroline… I used to love those… and take the next Largactil and just sort of, you know, trance out to that… but mum and dad didn’t like me doing that, and the doctor certainly didn’t accept that… so that meant either, you know… umm… that meant I would get kicked… that I would… get re-admitted for lying in bed…’
 
`Did you ever find that you missed the hospital?’
 
`Oh, absolutely… I wanted to get back there, but as soon as I got back there I couldn’t stand it, so I wanted to get back home… so I always felt, you know, the cat on the hot tin roof thing… that I wanted to be in the other place, it was slightly less bad than this place, but… umm… you know, I didn’t have the wherewithal to leave my parents in… on… on the trail to Katmandu… as… as stronger folks would do… and so the best I could do was hop off to the looney bin… and when I was at home I felt very, very… umm… errr… out of place really, I… I didn’t feel good there, and I… I mean to a certain extent I missed the bin because the bin was my… was as near as I could get back to the camps, and the camps was where I was king, and to a certain extent, the bin was where I was king as well.  But if it got nasty in the bin, which it often would, because you’d get someone who’d bully you and they’d never leave you alone and it got very frightening and you’d get beaten up and all the rest of the shit, and then of course it would seem much safer to be at home with mum and dad, but I never really got on there either… so I… I didn’t have a place I could go to that I really wanted to be in…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`And I didn’t have the wherewithal to live by myself…’
 
`Mmm’
 
[pause]
 
`You know… standard co-dependency gear… it… it meant that what… you know, I was going to do the romantic falling in love with the patient on… on the ward, which I did… and then… years later, 1970 ish… I’ve had some escapade outside, and I’m brought back, you know, because I’m not talking and I’m… I’m living with someone else who’s got a stall in an undercover market in Aylesbury… and its… you know… he’ sort of looking after me and I’m working with him, but I can’t stand that either, so I stopped talking, so he takes me back to the bin… and there is my first wife, to be…’
 
`Ahhh…’
 
`Ah ha…’
 
`Ah ha…’
`The beautiful one… I have a weakness for the Colleen…’
 
`Right.  Let’s just… we’re going to just… you were about to tell me about your first ECT treatment…’
 
`Yes…’
 
`…a year before…?’
 
`Yes… yes…’
 
`So we could go through that…and then move on to Colleen…’
 
`Right.  First ECT is going to be Monday morning.  It’s… it’s the first of twelve, and I have no choice in the matter and I don’t sign for it, my parents signed because… what… what, what can they do… and ummm…?’
 
`How old are you?’
 
`I’m nineteen.  Nineteen for the first ECT… and the nurse who accompanies me over, ‘cause its always under escort ‘cause I’m locked up on Elder ward, upstairs, with the big boys… ummm… bath night was always great.’
 
`Are you sectioned at this stage?’
 
`Yeah, I’m sectioned, and umm… its Monday morning and.. no breakfast… and that wonderful night you have before… you know, the… it… hard to describe what it feels like… the night before the morning that you have ECT.  You need an awful lot of shit to get to sleep because you… you’re… I mean I certainly felt I would never come out of it alive… I’m going to be electrocuted tomorrow, and there’s nothing I can do about it… and, I’m almost certain I’m going to die… you know, all I know is I’m going to have this thing that everyone hushes up about which is the ECT and everyone talks about, which is the ECT.’
 
`And nobody told you what it was going to be like… like a doctor or anything…?’
 
`No… no, no… because the reason I’m getting the ECT is because I’m apparently not communicating any more… ‘cause I’m so pissed off really… I mean I can comm… but I  choose not to, and so my punishment is that they’re going to blow my brains out… yeah?  So, you know, there is a slightly nervous oriental nurse, taking me over to this place which looks like something out of `Death in Venice’, you know the… the Dirk Bogarde film, Death in Ven… it’s got that sort of Fellini shit to it.  It’s a beautiful November’s day, and the virgin snow is broken by our footfalls, yeah… and beautiful birds, beautiful trees… umm… the grounds of Napsbury were by the same person who designed Kew Gardens… the most beautiful landscape… you know, this incredible thing, that they kill people inside the building, and they landscape the outside to make it look like Heaven.  Umm… and I’m walking towards my first ECT, and… err… you get this thing about, you know… the nurse would carry an umbrella to protect your head against snow, and you’re about to have your head stowed in, down the road.’
 
`Yeah… what did the building look like?’
 
`It’s a tiny, little… its called the ECT suite, and the name on the door… it, it says, ECT… Sister Shadbolt [ph]… and you can smell the… the anaesthetics that… the ether… you can smell it, and there’s a little electric sub-station on the way which makes this noise, right… it actually is emanating mains 50 hertz… so… on the way… doing… through the snow, beautiful poetry, and you hear this [makes buzzing sound], and you’re about to have your head blown off with the ECT, and then you see… I’ve got very small hands, and the… and, and they’re very delicate.  I’m a touch healer, right… and so the anaesthetist comes over… `bang, bang, bang…’ and that… I can’t tell you how much that hurts… to get your vein up, to stick one needle into there and you’ve got a tourniquet here, and at the time, one needle into… and then they release it, and then you do the… the counting back from a hundred, and you never get passed ninety six… because that’s when you get the bitter almond taste… and you hear the ultimate timpani roll in your head and the next thing is [makes explosion sound]… and then… `urgh… fuck…’… when am I going to have the ECT?  You jolt… `oh you’ve already had it chuck… drink your tea while its hot, love…’.  The most expensive way to get a cup of tea, in the world.  You get a biscuit too, sometimes, but what’s happened is, they fucked your head.  They’ve kicked your head in and you know it, and you don’t know it.  Something’s missing in here.  You don’t know what it is, and it’s the most awful feeling.  How can people do that?  How could people do that?  I’m so sad for them… I’m so sad.  I’m a Shaman… each one of those people, got it back.  I don’t believe in vengeance, but I wasn’t having it… I pushed it back.  I pushed the electric back.  I don’t think any of them are alive any more.  I’m sorry about that… I’ve got guardians.  So… systematically stowing my head in…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`…and my crime was that I didn’t communicate any more, ‘cause no one ever listened anyway… and I got twelve of those, and there was fuck all I could do about it.’
 
`One after the other?’
 
`Mondays and Fridays.  Nine o’clockish.  And no breakfast, because of the anaesthetic, and constant fucking hurting my hand.’
 
`Did you start talking?’
 
`Yes, I did… yeah… I had to keep moving.  I talked for my own reasons.  One of the boys was stealing my sugar and I was getting bullied, so I had to start fighting back.  And it came to the point where he did his usual… removing this.. and I, I got up… and I went like this… I went… [actions]… and then we became friends.  This is the way it goes… I mean this is… you know, this is prison, this is mental hospitals, this is any confined institution, if you don’t fight they eat you, so you fight and you eat them.’
 
`Also, do you find like survival is one of the best ways of… of, of getting better?’
 
`Yes.  Yes.’
 
`Do you see what I mean?’
 
`The greater picture was that… if I wanted I had a voice, and now I have no choice but to use that voice, because I’m watching my… my voiceless sisters and brothers getting systematically murdered, in the name of some alleged medicine… and I cannot be silent any more, so I start to get political, and I start to fight back, and I start asking questions which make it very dangerous for me.  And I start to join my sisters and brothers who are daring to fight back, because, you know… almost… its almost that if you don’t fight back, you’re assassin… you’re the living dead.’
 
`Were there meetings in the hospital? Morning meetings, did they have those?’
 
`They had all kinds of set ups…’
 
`And..’
 
`…which were always power balanced towards the staff and us feeling more and more hapless if we fell from a drip, but there were ways of rebelling against that… there were ways of taking power at that meeting, and you know… because of my pre-training, umm… I was getting into gear and I was fighting back, and also to the point where I could, if I wanted to, get out of that ward using a bit of the old psychology, with… what I used to do was at nine o’clock in the morning on Elder, I used to go the nurse that… you know, I could feel would be the most receptive and say look… you’ve got twelve hours, you know… I’m locked in here for twelve hours today, you’re locked in here for twelve hours today.  Now I can make this easy for you, or I can make it difficult.  You can let me go now, which is what I want, and I’ll… you know, you’ll have a day where I won’t do your head in, but if you lock me in here for an hour with you, I’m going to do your head in… and there’s nothing you can do about it.  They used to let me go, because I’d built up.  Certain nurses would open the door and let me go…’
 
`And you came back again?’
 
`Yeah.  Because they couldn’t bear an hour with me… [laughs].  Now, I’m not criticising them, I’m grateful to them.  So, you know… again, tacit relationships… and even to the point where if there was a birthday party or there was a staff social, depending on who was there I would sometimes get invited, because I was ok as far as some of the nurses were concerned… and they admired my tenacity… some of them.’
 
`And what were you… what, what were you screaming to them about… ECT?  What was the thing… what was the burning issue… that was it?’
 
`The burning issue was that this whole thing was a façade.  This was a way of containing people who… you know, had an absolute right to behave differently to the majority crazies, and there was a tacit kind of understanding with the more intelligent ones, that, you know, if you aren’t crazy in a crazy world, ie me… then you must be crazy yourself… who’s crazy?  So I gained quite a lot of respect with certain individuals, and I could then use that to turn… to turn the key to get me out.  But I mean, I wasn’t all there myself… you know, I wasn’t really functioning as a human being, but within what I could function with, I was pretty good.  So I had become a professional lunatic by this time, and I was about to climb the career ladder.’
 
`Were you… were you kind of like a union rep?’
 
`To a certain extent, it wasn’t as unsubtle as that though.  You know, I would find, umm.. fellow wardees, who were similarly kind of either, you know… they, they were questioning the system or were revolutionary anyway and, and, and then I would build groups that way, and then we would have kind of protests.  We would… we did a thing on the ward which was that… that we refused to… do occupational therapy, and I realised that if I could get the whole ward to do a… you know, a tools down process, then we could get somewhere, they had to take notice, and I was learning my… my… my politics now… that, you know… and, and I had a captive audience… I mean literally [laughs] and that was the nurses as well as the staff, so you know… on one hand I could kind of raise the consciousness of the staff as to you know, what are you doing in this fucking concentration camp, you bastard, or alternatively, if we’re… if we’re recipients of services, what are we doing to fight back and we formed the escape committee, so this was my Colditz, you know… and I, I was going to use it.’
 
`But what were your demands though?’
 
 `My… my demands were humanity.  My demands were respect.  You know… for goodness’ sake, I was born in this sort of shit… it was happening again, but now… I had some… I had some armament as to what… you know… I mean my first encounter with… was this… with this… was that I was born into it… now I was an adolescent in it.  I… all-be-it that I was emotionally backward, I was still sharp as regards to… if I can get enough people, to do… you know, a silent protest, then we’ve got something here.  And at the same time, others were thinking along you know, similar lines, and… and some of them were my teachers.  The Mental Patients’ Union was formed, and, you know.. the fact that we could be proud to be different… that… you know, the seeds of… of… of awareness about racism and sexism were… flowering… mentalism wasn’t on the agenda yet, but that was… it was my job… that, that… to point out… that’s as evil as sexism and racism, and is part of it too… and then in a way I found my life through that… this is what a Shaman does, you know… is reset the balance in a harmonious way.  What a great opportunity. And so that eventually led to… to me being elected Vice Chair of National MIND as a collective action, you know amongst survivors and our groups and lobbies.’
 
`And it started with  the Mental Patients’ Union?’
 
`Yes it did… yes…’
 
`Yeah’ [both talking together]
 
`This was the first collective of folks who were like-minded and was one of the most exciting experiences of my life.’
 
`You started that while still in the hospital as a patient…in patient?’
 
`No… I was out at this time… I had married… a… a recipient of services, and…’
 
`Was that Colleen?’
 
`Yes… yes…’
 
`Ah, right…’
 
`Yes.  Umm… her first… vision of me was, `what is this loony wondering into here with… and for…?’, ‘cause I was dressed, you know… this was now 1960… 1970ish… 1969… umm… and I was, you know, dressed as you know, sort of back up vocalist for Santana or something.  I had this incredible sheepskin thing on, the yellow trousers, the red shirt, you know… when no one wore yellow trousers… and… her first impulse was, you know… to absolutely hate this guy.  He was too loud mouthed and… you know, but eventually we… yes… funny how it goes isn’t it?  Because also she… she was misplaced there like everyone else… she had experienced depression as part of cause and effect, and I recognised what was happening with her and I thought this place is not for you, so I was doing the knight in shining armour.  We leave together with… you know, semi-against medical advice that… two shrinks speak with each other about the two patients leaving together, you know, to co-habit, and they’re not so sure about it, but… it might be… a novelty, and so we leave together and eventually get married, and… and I go to Paddington Day Hospital now, and that’s where the first meeting was of the Mental Patients’ Union.  Err.. following this tradition that’s always been about people who are defined as mad, you know… some… that… the alleged lunatics friends association, 250 years back, and now Mental Patients’ Union, 1970ish, inaugural meeting… 300 individuals, all of us… some people even escaped from Rampton to be there for the day and then go back under cover…’
 
`No… really…?’
 
`Yeah… yeah, absolutely.  There were folks who did the most amazing things.  I mean, I learned escapeology from some of my sisters and brothers.  There were folks that you know, did things with bed sheets you can’t imagine, and escaped from these places… unbelievable tenacity.  You know, we had people who… people worshipped them because how could you leave, you know, a maximum security ward, and then appear again later? [laughs] Very clever… very clever.  One guy regularly, you know, too short on the bed sheet used to do his ankles in, ‘cause he used to go through some sort of a hidden skylight thing, and then… dangle… you know, like… it was Colditz, it really was.  And also the thing about hiding in the cupboard, you see, if you couldn’t get out, what you did was you usurped the system by displacing yourself somewhere where they couldn’t find you, so some guy had spent forty eight hours in an out-house cupboard.’
 
`Mmm.’
 
`Unfortunately, sometimes they were found dead… they were severe circumstances.  Yeah… and learning that, you know, here are the best brains of my generation having their brains bombed out, by some shrink who’s an agent of… of politics.  Social controllers of the world disunite… and so our answer was yeah… someone was in the grounds with a collecting tin, it had MPU on it… I didn’t know what MPU stood for… what does MPU stand for?  Mental Patients’ Union… I like the sound of that… you know, here’s the stuff I just filtered out of the charge nurse’s pocket… put it in the tin.  Give generously [pause]… and little scams like… you know, the night nurse’s milk for his tea… what we did was empty the bottle and paint it with emulsion, you know… if they’re going to do us for being nuts, we make them… persuade… you know, persuade them that they’re nuts, little tricks like that… what can you do?  What can you do?  The only time out we ever got was this two hours with Madam Sex in the art therapy department… wow… you know, the most unlikely artists in the world, there with their canvases… amazing… [pause] [laughs].’
 
`How… how old was she?  Where did she come from?’
 
`I don’t know what it was… but the art therapist woman, if there was a woman there, was always Madam Sex.  Now I think its because if  you’ve got forty men on the ward and the hormones are bubbling… if you actually get anywhere near a woman, things go quite berserk, and the other staff were aware of this… I’m sure they put Bromide in our tea as well as the Largactil.  Maybe there isn’t much difference.  Bromide… Largactil… but it’s a very strange thing about… you know, you can go to art therapy on a Wednesday afternoon and you see just to get out of the ward you’d do anything, so you know, you had forty aspiring artists on a Wednesday afternoon… you just wanted to get out of the ward.  Always a very attractive female on… [both talking together]…’
 
`Did you ever… do any kind of classes with women at all… or was it always just men?’
 
`No… I mean the occupational therapists were, were… usually women and this was the highlight of our lives… err…’
 
`But there were… there are women at Napsbury, but miles away…?’
 
`Well we were segregated on the ward, so they were all male wards until the 1970s, and that was quite horrible… and then they started having mixed sex wards and you get really weird things happening, like people would forget their apparel… so you would get, you know… a bottomless woman, in the sense that she wouldn’t have anything on except… you know, a blouse and her top parts… you know, and then compositely, you’d have men who just had their trousers on… it was a very strange parade for breakfast.  We had breakfast on the ward… you… you know… different people would decide to leave off different parts of their apparel… it could become very interesting…’
 
`Yeah… or create problems…? Yeah…’
 
`Or create problems… and if you dropped a cigarette there’d be a scuffle for that cigarette, because cigarettes were the mean currency, and everyone wants nicotine because it kicks back the effects of the drugs.  We didn’t know that, but that’s now been revealed in… you know, with… with the dogmatic research… [pause]… and people were fixing Largactil… you know, if you weren’t sublime you’d get ridiculous, so you know, I was giving my Largactil, quite innocently away, ‘cause I didn’t want it, and someone else was actually sticking it into their arms, round the corner, having got the illicit syringe… so all kind of variations on a theme… you know, it seemed to be all right to be used as a pin cushion by the staff, but if you ever dared do any initiative yourself you were well out of order.’
 
`They were fixing it?  You can… its an opiate…?’
 
`Yeah… and its actually much preferable, you know, if you’re going to have Largactil, stick it in your arm and get a hit… its got to be good for something.  Like the first Melleril always gives you a hit, but its downhill all the way after that… so, by all means have one Melleril, but don’t overdo it… and the Stelazine was horrible… you had… and the Stelazine is having one eye slightly higher than the other, it kind of distorts the whole facier… facial… deal… as if you didn’t have enough problems.  You know, that far away look in your eyes, due to the drugs, didn’t enhance your job catching prospects… [puts on slurred accent] `I’ve come for a job…’, it doesn’t work… but of course the doctor says if you don’t get a job, we’ll re-admit you… so we’re hopping in and out like yo-yos, trying to get jobs looking like Quasimodo… not getting jobs, lying in bed, you’re back in again, so then you have the perpetual game of Scrabble… you can actually be discharged half way through a game, be readmitted before the game ends, but you always lose… and the nurses place the pieces.  Some very weird spellers amongst the nursing staff of the world.  I’ve noticed this.  The country dancing… you learn how to fall.  The Scrabble… you learn dyslexia if you haven’t got it already, and variations on the sex life… you know, Melleril for instance… they never tell a man, on Melleril, Melleril for men… that you will have no ejaculate… so if you can get it together to have a wank, don’t expect anything… that’s today’s tip.  That’s enough to drive you mad, you know… they don’t tell you things… [puts on American accent] `hey doctor, I’m not coming…’, `you’re not supposed to son, you’re here for your treatment…’[pause]… but you’re still a human being with all that a human… we need to feel special… and you feel special in the wrong way…’
 
`About the time when you were wondering around in your yellow trousers and red shirt…?’
 
`Whey… [laughs]’
 
`…that was your spiritual… about the time of your spiritual awakening and…yes?’
 
`Yes… and meeting…’
 
`Tell me about how you got into that kind of thing… and, and of course, meeting Colleen… but your spiritualism and the… you know, your… and also your conversion to… Islam?’
 
`That was years later…’
 
`OK, years later… but there’s still something… obviously there was a spiritual side in you even then…?’
 
`Oh, absolutely… because there was always someone on the ward who was canny enough to see through the nonsense… that this was a containment area… that what we were experiencing was… the allegation of care, which was in fact brutal management at best… and abuse at worst… and you could always find confederates, because it wasn’t that thick a screen that they put up… and so there were four Lainguages going on at the same time.  There was the official Lainguage of the ward, which was, you know… the whole mental illness trip… there was the real Lainguage of the ward which is, what the fuck are we doing here, whether we’re staff or patients… and the third Lainguage, which was the power Lainguage between the two… and the fourth Lainguage which was conviviality… umm… you would have to make something out of it.  Now, you know, I was developing spiritually and of course this meant more labels as far as the western doctors were concerned, so magically in ’83, years later, I was converted from schizophrenia, this often happens, to being a manic depressive, which is actually more sexy, as far as they’re concerned… its all bollocks anyway… but that’s more sexy as far as they’re concerned.  And that meant the Lithium shit… which is another load of crap… and that meant more ECT… but for a different reason.  So you’ve got nineteen different reasons for kicking a bloke’s head in… and trying to justify it.  But ultimately, part of a person knows that you’re kicking the person’s head in if you’re staff… and part of the person knows that you’re having your head kicked in if you’re a recipient of services.  In between the conventional Blairite dialogues go on… bollocks…’
 
`Right… so at some point you said bollocks to the hospital, and walked out hand in hand with Colleen… how did that go?’
 
`It was wonderful… it was wonderful.  But I hadn’t caught up… I never quite caught up with myself.  So… we had three years, and she got very strong, and she outgrew me… I stayed behind, so you know, the point of attraction for her, as she said, was that she didn’t know who she’d wake up to the next morning, ‘cause I was all people to all… to all of her… but the point of detraction was she didn’t know who she was going to wake up to next morning, and she wanted to know.  She had moved on.  And so, I was out of the hospital, largely because of my idea of, of… I mean I didn’t know the word co-dependency at the time, but I had, you know, moved the institution into a person, and so she was my institution… and I had this wife… err… ever since I’ve had this wife… you know, Madonna/whore relationship with the women in my life.  Umm… which most men do but don’t know about it… and so, you know, very quickly after being the knight in shining armour to get us out of this Hammer House of Horrors, psychiatric Napsbury, umm… then… err… I regressed again, and I became the dependent child, to the strengthening woman.  I’m great at the first bit, but then I go back to regression… which again is a Shaman…’
 
`Which again means… I mean practically speaking, you either have to get a job or go back to the hospital?’
 
`Yes.  Yes.  And I got the weirdest jobs, and some of them I stuck to… you know, sheer perseverance, but they weren’t me… I am not your office clerk.  It just isn’t me… I’m a performer… I’m a musician.  Later I was about… you know, I was able to… to fulfil  those things.  I’m a very creative person, but I’m not conventional, and I’m very anarchic, but that doesn’t mean that I have to have my brains blown out.’
 
`You must have experimented with like… stopping taking your drugs… stopping…?’
 
`Oh, every time I could.  I mean the psychiatric stuff just didn’t do a thing for me, but you know… the… like… again, when I was nineteen, I’d had my first one or two ECTs and… a chap comes up to me and he says, `would you like some wisdom weed?’, so I thought, `whoa’… wisdom weed sounds good to me, and I… you know, started my road to token rastafarianism.  There is a subgroup of us who actually need dope, and it should be prescribed, because everyone who knows me… you know, knows that (a) I don’t respond to Cannabis in the conventional way, and (b) I’m much more harmonious as an individual if I’m smoking… also I’ve got glaucoma… so you know…’
 
`And how do you find smoking mixed with Largactil, for instance?’
 
`The Larcactyl’s crap…’
 
`Yeah?’
 
`The Largactil is… is just evil.  I mean, I… I think it should be banned immediately.  Largactil has no purpose whatsoever… it’s a terrible poison.  If you want Largactil, you know, do less damage and drink very bad brandy.  It’s preferable.  Because some of the effects you get with Largactil, first of all are irreversible, you know… you get the famous, what we call `moby dick’, which means that… you’re never actually going to have a decent sex life, ever again, because you’ve got no control over it… that’s what Largactil does… and, and… you know, one can get deeply angry about that, understandably, but in order to preserve ones self, maybe one should get constructively sad… that’s, that’s more useful.  I can’t turn the clock back, you know… I can’t get my dick back… but what I can do is fight so that others don’t lose theirs, and that in a way is… is… is what has kept me going for a long time, is to stop the rot.  You know… I come out of the holocaust, I’m a child of the holocaust… I can’t bring my relatives back, I can’t bring my sisters and brothers back from the institutions, but I can try to stop them continuing to genocide us.  Now that’s very important to me.  That’s why I’m alive.  And the way I choose to do it is through music and entertainment, because too many long words… you know, people don’t want to hear that, but if you can sing to them, you know, that’s something… that can be quite beautiful, and that’s a very old tradition.  Yes indeed.  And so… you know, the paradox for me is that… because of these terrible experiences I then got the big break, which was to replace the professor of psychiatry, which was that… you know, an ordinary person… excuse me… an ordinary loony…’
 
`That was a few years later, was it?’
 
`That’s 1986.’
 
`Yeah.’
 
`You know, my first wife leaves me and she says, `look, Mike… I can see what’s going to happen… you’re either going to be a dirty old man, or you’re going to become a political campaigner… so I took the middle path.  I’m now a dirty old man who campaigns… [pause]… and that was a great honour for me… you know, to support my sisters and brothers that way.  And to get in… you know, to replace a professor of psychiatry, someone who’s been labelled as garbage, someone who’s been labelled as a schizophrenic… that was wonderful… and, and… and incredibly stressful, because you know, you’ve got an incredible responsibility… everyone expects you to change the universe now.  `Mike, we voted for you because we wanted you to change the universe.  Why hasn’t ECT stopped?  I voted for you’… and of course, you fall short of the mark, but at last, you know, I mean I hate charity... I think it’s the sap of government.  I think, you know, charity is in a way… a… a disgusting evidence of the failure of everyone else… but I… you know, it’s the old… new boots for the concentration camp, you know… ideally… you see, this is the thing about like… people say… `ok, if we close the loony bins down, what do you want… what do we have to do in their place?’ and I say to them, you know, do you have to question what happens if we close concentration camps down, you don’t… you know, you don’t have to substitute for hell, you have to end hell… do you see what I mean?’
 
`I do… but there is a difference.’
 
`Yes there is.’
 
`Because concentration camps really are… physically in the business of killing people…’
 
`Ok.  Now.  Here’s a psychiatrist’s quote… Professor Basalia [ph], this is 1970 something, in Italy… and he says this.  He say, `…today’s mental hospitals are concentration camps.  The only difference is, that it takes longer for the people to die…’, that’s a professor of psychiatry, in Italy, before the law 180, which was to close down all the institutions, because they’re basically crap.  For a certain while, that lasted…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`…you know… err… there is a difference.  Yes. Yes.   And I mean out of respect for my… for my ancestors who I will never meet because they were murdered, I mean great respect to them… I had it a lot easier… never the less, its still something of the process, you know… to deny someone’s reality by calling them mentally ill, that’s… that’s an assassination.  Now, you know, its not as brutal as putting them into a gas chamber, but it partially is… [pause]… you know, when you see the folks now who are doing the compliant thing, who are taking the Modecate and the Lithium etc., they… you know, the folks have had the spirit knocked out of them, and so they are the walking… you know, the walking hibernants, and its not their fault… they have been pushed into this… you know… I don’t want to get into victim politics, I don’t mean that… but you know… on, on the basis of a humanitarian thing, umm… if someone is different it doesn’t give anyone licence to kick them to death.  And we go round in circles until we stop, so… I mean in 1983 I was back again…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`I had met my second Colleen… I’d got married… she… this time it’s a nurse.  Yeah?  You see I had this great need of… of… of nurture, for understanding….’ [both talking together]
 
`Hang on a minute… what happened to the seventies, if that’s not…’ [both talking together and laugh]
 
`I kind of missed it… err… well my wife left me and I started to become… you know… the bachelor campaigner.’
 
`Right… let’s go on the bachelor campaigner trail’
 
`Right.  Did my first radio programme, Radio Four… `the man who lost his job, simply because he’d once been mentally ill’… this was the beginning of my politicisation… in 1976… Radio Four.  And I was the guy in the… who joined the Civil Service as a casual, and was booted out under the Barbara Castle administration, when she’s saying in the house, `we’ve got to re-absorb the mentally ill back into the community’… she’s booting out all the ex-psychiatrics because we’re likely to get established, which means we get pension rights, so here’s the double standards of the old Labour party… 300 of us… yeah… and so I fight through the union and through MIND, to keep my job, because the reason that I’m thrown out, is because my department have put me forward for promotion, and establishment, because of the goodness of my work.  I was good at my little clerical work… so the department put me forward for establishment and promotion, and the Civil Service commission turns round and says, `no… for confidential health reasons, he’s out’… so I fight with umm… the Clerical and err… Public Services Association, CPSA… and MIND, and we do a joint kind of campaign… for little Mike’s job.  And that’s how I first get to know about MIND, and eventually I’m to become Vice Chair of National MIND… as it goes up the ladder.  And that’s because we’re forming groups, we’ve got the Mental Patients’ Union, we’ve got… the Campaign against psychiatric oppression, we’ve got the Sixties magazines, and you know, its our time… the Sixties was a time for… you know, Ronnie Laing to write `The Divided Self’… and the early 70’s… Mental Patients’ Union, it kind of comes together.  Ronnie Laing’s doing this big thing that… what is it… the… at the Round House… there’s a great big meeting about the philosophy of life and the dialectics of… of… of reason, etcetera… I mean anti-psychiatry was actually… the name comes from… I think it was Ronnie Laing who first came up with the idea of anti-psychiatry.  He was a psychiatrist.’
 
`Mmm.’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`…and a jazz musician?’
 
`Yeah, he damaged his hand in a rugby match… which meant that he became a military psychiatrist… but he wanted to be a jazz musician… brilliant musician.’ [pause].  Along with David Cooper, who writes `The Lainguage of Madness’, `The Dialectics of Liberation’ is a Laing and Esterson [ph] book, I think… and you get… you know, you get this… and you get Allen Ginsberg writing how… `I saw the best brains of my generation being murdered… having their brains blown out… and there is a consciencisation … you try saying that.  And I’m certainly getting politicised… [puts on Amercian accent] `hey… I’m getting politicised… hey…’ and I become fat boy medium… [pause]…’
 
`Would you say this is like the first stage in your life where you’re… really feel like you’re getting ahead?’
 
`Its taken fifty years for me to start.  Yes.  Yes.  For the first time…’
 [both talking together]
 
`I meant really at…’
 
`Absolutely…’
 
`…sort of ’76 kind of time… then…’
 
`Right…’
 
`…maybe, is that right or wrong?’
 
`Yeah, its right’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`Its right… I’m finding some feet. Yes.  And to find someone who might love me, and she did… and to find someone that I can love… and I do… and, and to realise, you know… what, what some of it is about.  Absolutely, yes.  Yes.  But to become… you know, a fully kind of activated Shaman takes forty two years, minimum, so I’m still, you know, in the outside lobby of my life… that’s if you survive.’ [pause]
 
`And to be a truly wise Shaman you have to have… lived and suffered like no other human being?’
`It’s wounded healing… that’s right.  The practice is that we feel the pain of others physically and we have to do something about it.  When you don’t have to go far when you’re inside one of the British mental institutions to feel the pain physically… they do help us along the way.  And it becomes entirely paradoxical, the whole.. the whole shit… because… I mean I have a lot of concern about what is happening to the spirit of the poor staff… I’ve seen some of those shrinks hang themselves too, you know… and… I mean at the moment there’s a shrink out there, he’s just lost nine of his patients… have committed suicide, and this geezer’s earning sixty grand a year… what the fuck is he doing?  You know, its not a very good record is it?  And in China, if you lost your patient, they’d top you… probably be more efficient… [pause]… and so, you know, I want a bit of social support these days, so that means I have to go and see a psychiatrist.  The psychiatrist has got an empty bed, she says, `we’d like to admit you’, and I  say, well, if its all the same to you, I’d rather not be admitted.  And I say well, if you admit me, what are you going to put me on?  And she says, `I’m going to put you on Haloperidol’, and I say, thank you very much, I’m allergic to it, but you don’t know that, because you don’t read your shit… you don’t believe in it either, its all in my notes.  I’ve got notes that big… its all bollocks anyway, but I’d love to get hold of them.  And… she said, `oh’… and I’m saying look, if its all the same to you I’m quite busy… so maybe I’ll see you another day.  But… it isn’t as easy as that.  If… if they can pull the section… but if you come into the hospital, you’re a voluntary patient… well I was a voluntary patient before I was sectioned last time, and you’re voluntary as long as they allow you to be, so you’re not ever voluntary.  You know… and so I’m saying to the consultant… what would you do… I come along to your Registrar, and she says, `oh, by the way, I’d love to admit you and I’ll put you on Haloperidol’… next thing is, umm… you know, you’re… you’re going to go to the place where you’ve had so much trauma, and you’re going to get put on to something that you’re allergic too, and that’s standard practice.  So, you know, we haven’t moved that far up the road these days.’
 
`No…’
 
`And I’ve had thirty three years of this stuff… so I know a bit of what I’m talking about.’
`That was recently was it?’
 
`That was two weeks ago.  You know, I was on the park, smoking my eye medicine, and plod comes along, after I’m told by the plod office, that they’re not ever going to touch me, because I train them in mental health awareness, but a new plod comes along and says, [in `policeman’s’ accent] `Here… I arrest you in the name of this spliff… which I understand is a noxious substance what you are smoking, and anything you say may be put forward to an appropriate adult…’, and they can’t do anything with me because of my mental health background, so they’ve got to find an appropriate adult, and of course the police aren’t noted for their intelligence, so it takes them three weeks… I’m on bail of nothing.  After two and a half hours in a police cell, with a magnolia wall, which is not always my colour… right… and I’m doing the old bi-phonic in there… so, he said [in `policeman’s accent] `oh, we’d like you to leave the station now, and we are arranging for an appropriate adult to appear with you in view of the case what will be taped for evidence for a later event, sir…’, like that… and so I go along there, and they make this tape that they won’t give that to me either, with an appropriate adult.  And they release me on a caution of three years… [in `policeman’s accent] `if we ever catch you smoking the… what we call the spliff… in the park again, then you’ll be hung by the neck ‘till Alcatraz is dead… and it may be used as evidence against you… whatever you say and your trousers’, I say thank you very much officer.  Now I go to one of their parties and they’ve got the finger print powder spliff and its being passed round left, right and centre… double standards or what… meanwhile… care in the community.  You get a suicide flat, you know… imagine, you’re not feeling too well, you leap out of a window.  This is community care.  Hey! [laughs]…’
 
`I think we should take a break there…’
 
`[laughing]’
 
`Have a lager break…! [pause]… have a bi-phonic…!’
 
[camera man inaudible]
 
`[Mike’s bi-phonic singing]’
 
[End of DVCPro Tape 2 of 4 – VHS Tape 1 of 1 continues]
 


[Start of DVCPro Tape 3 of 4 – VHS Tape 1 of 1 continues]
 
`So Mike… you were talking about… the unfairness of psychiatric… the psychiatric treatment and… how that led you to get more politically aware and to work with changing things.  Can you tell me about how you started to do that and… how it progressed to you becoming the Vice Chair of MIND?’
 
`Well… I think somewhere along the line I realised that what I was experiencing was not in fact what I was supposed to be experiencing in the sense of it being an illness.  It’s very difficult for a person to accept distress in their lives and then it becomes considered to be their life… what I mean is that being called a schizophrenic can define you out of existence as a human being… and I think one of the beautiful things I have learned out of this, is that there’s much more to us, obviously perhaps, than the psychiatric label… and in fact, strangely enough, getting a psychiatric label can give one a sense of purpose in the sense that one needs to do something about the misunderstanding that this is all about, and so from… from that… from… in a way wanting to accept that I’m ill, wanting to accept that… here is an illness that a good doctor in a white coat can cure, I realised it isn’t… it isn’t true… I was experiencing something that I needed to experience in the way of bereavement, and I was behaving as someone would behave if they are grossly misunderstood.  And the consequence was, that I became politicised… largely through the kindness and, and love of people who were not part of the psychiatric paradigm… other… other survivors… and people who were questioning the whole basis of… of biological psychiatry.  There was always someone canny around who… was wonderful enough to have an alternative view point, and I moved from the idea that I’m an ill person with so called schizophrenia, to I’m a misunderstood person who, if I fight hard enough, can contribute something that might be of value to other people as well.  So… so that became my salvation, in the sense that I still… if I wanted to, could articulate, and this was quite rare, because on a ward where most people were getting so much Largactil that you couldn’t really talk, to have the facility to be able to communicate was.. is… a great gift… so I thought, let’s use it.  And so I got involved with… the psychiatric survivors lobby… I got involved with Mental Patients’ Union… and I started reading the accepted wisdom… I started reading books on psychiatry and psychology and realised that, you know, in essence, it was… it was a misnomer… the whole thing was a fit-up, which wasn’t actually… it isn’t actually having any basis in truth.  Biological psychiatry has no.. empirical evidence to back it up… what we’re talking about is autonomy, we’re talking about power, we’re talking about culture, we’re talking about a socio-political misunderstanding, and the convenience of a political system that pushes people under the carpet, who do not comply under the guise of medicine.  And I learned this, from my experience, and the next thing was to do something about it, so… I… I met some wonderful folks who were written off as crazy, and who had incredible wisdom about what this life was about, and in a way they fired me up to articulate, and… I got involved with survivor’s poetry, and I was listening to music and it was the sixties and it was the seventies… and I got politically active, so that when I got booted out of the Civil Service, simply for being an ex-psychiatric, in between being admitted and being pushed out of the bin… with the… the rotating door ideas… umm… I… I… fought for my job in the Civil Service, while the Minister of Health was talking about re-absorbing the mentally ill back into the community, I was being kicked out because I had been diagnosed… and the reason that I was being kicked out was because I was being promoted into an established position in the Civil Service, and the Mandarins of the Civil Service wouldn’t accept ex-psychiatrics because it would mean they’d have 300 extra people on their books, who as far as they were concerned, were a health risk, but they couldn’t come up with the direct truth about this, so I was sacked… for confidential health reasons… I mean obviously it was because I was an ex-psychiatric, and that led to… to a news item on radio four… about the… man who’d been sacked… simply because he’d once been mentally ill
and from that I got involved with MIND and… the, the trade unions, to fight… to fight for the rights of people who had been psychiatrised.’
 
`So MIND actually took up your cause, specifically?’
 
`Umm… in, in the sense that we were fighting an industrial tribunal, against the wishes of the Civil Service, because the Civil Service have an internal mechanism… it’s the Civil Service Commission, but what had happened was that there was an enormous delay in any kind of appraisal of my situation, so… I was fired, and the Union appealed against this, but we were running out of time as far as the options were concerned, so… the Trade Union at the time, got together with MIND, the National Association for Mental Health at the time, and fought a case for my job... for... that I should get my job back… and we took it to Industrial Tribunal… sorry, Industrial Tribunal, and the case was out of time… so on the technicality we lost on that basis, but my campaigning had started and… and it hasn’t ended.  So we kind of lost the case but we… we won the moral high ground on this one because there was a… there… you know… it… it… it was the first time I spoke on the radio about how ridiculous it was to… to experience mentalism… you know, perhaps people know about the evils of sexism and racism.  Mentalism wasn’t on the agenda yet, it was still acceptable to punish people because they behaved differently.  And then, from Holland came the Dutch… a Dutch delegation of advocates to Newcastle… a meeting in Newcastle… and I was now going round to meetings on mental health issues, and the rights of… of people who experienced psychiatry… and… they were well ahead… well ahead of the field, because they had run away houses, so if you made it out of the loony bin into one of their safe houses, you would get alternative support to psychiatry… but they were far and few between… these kind of places, but it fired up the British movement as it were, of anti-psychiatry and the lobby for the rights of… of survivors, and… and endurers, and at that time we had the Campaign Against Psychiatric Oppression, and we had, after that we had the British Network for Alternatives to Psychiatry, and at that time in Italy, Law 180 was put on, on the legislature… which meant the closure of the… of the institutions, and the beginnings of so called community care, in Italy… which was to be followed by the idea of community care coming into its inception in the UK, with all the… with all the different lobbies fighting one way or the other.  So you had organisations like… SANE.. from, you know… the anti-Christ, Marjorie Wallace, who basically had a bad marriage with a psychiatrist, so wanted to punish everyone who’d been psychiatrised as her way of denying that… to very… good minded organisations in my opinion, who were for the liberation of individuals who were psychiatrised.  And then you had charities, like MIND and… similar… who… you know, well… the well intentioned blue rinse brigade, who were turning into something more… more appropriate perhaps… [pause]… and it gave me… I mean for the first time in my life,  a real sense of purpose.  I was also in bereavement of… the end of my first marriage, which was a marriage where I… umm… which was the thing which got us out of the institution, but I was still a very dependent person, and… my wife of the time, grew emotionally much stronger than I did and was ahead of me… and I was still, in the way that I have been to this day, which is, with the potential to regress… and become very dependent… which is something that doesn’t help my rep… my long term relationships… [pause]… It was wonderful to make the move from being someone who was… loaded down with distress and the effects of psychiatry, to someone who was beginning to get a life on the basis of doing creative things like, the Survivors’ Poetry, and … meeting my kindred for the first time… some of whom were either side of the medicine trolley.  There were a lot of disaffected professionals around who were prepared to speak… and there were books like `The Politics of… of Schizophrenia’ by David Hill, there was `The Divided Self’ by Ronnie Laing, and… I mean as a mental patient who didn’t know that there were other viewpoints… the accepted wisdom was that you were mentally ill and you needed Largactil, and you needed to be… managed for the rest of your life, when in fact the good news was that this is not necessarily so.  And the bad news was that some of the processes involved in psychiatry would do you in… so the big game of snakes and ladders… [pause]… and I was lucky enough to go all over the world and meet with… with other folks… and it… I learned that the culture creates the individual… and the… incredible time in Mexico when I was going to the biggest mental health conference ever… it… in view of the fact that there were 3200 delegates, and the Mexican contingency came out to the front of the stage and one point, where the learned professors were all doing their psychobabble, with this great big banner saying `we are possible human beings’, and I thought, yes, what psychiatry does, is it denies your humanity in the name of a medicine that isn’t.  And the… the puzzle is what can we do about this?  So as far as I can see we had a political problem which needs a political solution, and… meantime one has to pay the rent [pause]… leads me off into twenty two psychiatric hit numbers… `I talk to the trees and they actually talk back to me…’ and nineteen other songs… so its almost as if one has to lead an alternative life in order to get out of the catch twenty two situation, which is that if I were to subscribe to ‘normyism’ then I would be a clapped out, so called schizophrenic.  The good news is, one doesn’t have to do that.  The bad news is, its very tough because one is going against the grain.  So one either becomes the compliant patient, with all that that entails, including the… the visits to the Modecate clinic, and the dreadful mental health centres, where you stare at the wall and see a professional who doesn’t want to be there, watching the television… or you walk around in the park looking for something to do.  A lot of us become musicians and poets… [pause]  It was like I had found something… in the sense that there was always a couple of points… when a psychiatrist says to you, `do you hear voices?’, you may say yes or no… now I had gone one better, which was `yes, I hear voices, and doctor, I can actually relay what they sound like to you… do you want to hear what they sound like?’, at this point… virtually every psychiatrist doesn’t want to know…, but I do hear voices, and they sound like this… [sings bi-phonics]… this isn’t in the psychiatric text books.  I’ve got the psychiatric text books…’
 
`No, its not…I mean, hearing voices is a delusional state, so they say so they so, they get… it doesn’t exist, so they… how could you?’
 
`I remember…’
 
`…vocalise them…?’
 
`I remember a Welsh psychiatrist… it depends where you come from.’
 
`Yes.’
 
`And Welsh psychiatrists say that if more people went to church there’d be less schizophrenia, and so I suppose a lot of… a lot of cultures are saying if you don’t follow our particular culturally-imbibed God, then you’re damned, somehow, and the industrial revolution made it more difficult than putting people like me into… into churches, or into monasteries, on the basis that we’re experiencing some sort of spirit enchantment.  The industrial revolution had to make it more scientific than that, and that’s how we get into biological psychiatry.  You know, Mike’s behaving like this because his biology is up the spout somehow… that… that one doesn’t wash with me… because the Largactil doesn’t help me anyway, and even if there was something wrong with me, they’re not measuring the Largactil to any degree… so I don’t go for that, but it leaves someone like me as an outsider, of the conventional… I am a patient situation… and the, I am a normy [ph] situation, so I’m again the perpetual outsider, which has got its advantages and disadvantages, and it seems like there is a whole subculture of us, who have been through the psychiatry, have stopped our drugs against medical advice, and relatively, do much better in that way, but it doesn’t mean its easy.  I couldn’t do a nine to five job again, now that isn’t because I’m schizophrenic, its because I don’t fit in.  That also doesn’t mean that I’m mentally ill because I don’t fit in, whatever that is, it means that some of us do not fit in… [pause]… its almost as if my problem with psychiatry is… it has tried to quantify my existence, when I’m fully aware and thinking minded people are fully aware, that you cannot quantify anyone’s existence… and if you measure their behaviour accordingly, you’re likely to come up with some very strange stuff, depending on what culture you adhere to.  But it still doesn’t give licence to having the shit kicked out of you, which is what tends to happen to us one way or another… if we’re in the psychiatric frame… [pause]… it was incredible to be able to… in a way, indulge my way back to as near to the camps as I was born in, umm… and to do it largely unwittingly… I mean I didn’t know what would happen to me… I simply came to a stop with  my apparent life, and got another one.  I didn’t know… you know, the, the first… it’s the first cut is the deepest… I, I didn’t know what would happen when… as a consequence of my not being able to function in the normal… in the normal way.  And what happened was, I got psychiatry, and what happened as a result of that was, it gave me a reason to fight for humanity…’
 
`And a reason for carrying on… personally?’
 
`Absolutely… I don’t want to see a replication of the abuse that I received, and that’s a large reason why I need to carry on, because in the time that I’ve been involved with this, and its been thirty three years, umm… not a lot has changed.  The colours are a bit brighter on the hospital walls, and the Lainguage is a bit…is a bit different… and we’re now moving to social psychiatry, which I see as being probably just as dangerous as the overt oppressions of the chemical psychiatry.  I want some… I want something humane in all this… I want a realisation that simply because a person behaves differently… it doesn’t mean that we have licence to poison these people or electrocute them, whether its you, me or anyone else, and that in the name of humanity, we need to do something else, ‘cause it doesn’t work for anyone’s benefit, it works for shareholders making profits, you know… but, but… as far as I can see there’s 320 million people being done by this process, and it aint good enough… its not the way to get to Nirvana… doesn’t work… otherwise I just wouldn’t be here, talking about this…’
 
`No...’
 
`Now thank goodness there are examples of good… of good… support for individuals who are distressed, and that largely comes from the notion that a person knows what’s best for them, if you give them the chance to express themselves, and that we are so individual.  [pause].  Where I think psychiatry makes the big mistake, where it’s the big misunderstanding, is the assumption that you can take over someone’s life for their own good.  I think by default its impossible to do that… so it begs the question what does one do… and what one does, I think is one becomes wise… and the way one becomes wise, is to realise that there is a reason for a person’s distress… it can’t be explained away by some biology which can’t be replicated, but what you can do is… respect that individual for their behaviour, even if we don’t understand why… why it occasions, and support that person… that’s, that’s not part of the remit of capitalism… [pause]… it ain’t sexy to get diagnosed… [pause]… and again, I mean, for those people who say right, you know, you may criticise the system, but as part of that remit you’ve got to provide something in its place… I say that… you know, I criticise concentration camps, they shouldn’t exist… and its not my job to point out the alternatives, you don’t need an alternative to a concentration camp… you do need to support a person on their own terms if they’re distressed… psychiatry does not do that… [pause]… if it did…’ [both talking together]
 
`You said earlier… you do need some form of alternative…you need somewhere for these people to go in… in… in extreme cases of distress…?’
 
`I… I… I believe in the real asylum…’
 
`Yeah… yeah…’
 
`I believe in… in… and it almost existed with things like the York Retreat, which was quasi-religious, I don’t mind that, as long as it’s not imposed… so, you know, it seems to me that if a person is distressed, the first thing to do is to take that distress seriously as being part of a consequence… not part of an illness, and the second thing is… what can we as a society provide, to nourish that person through what can be a breakthrough rather than a breakdown… and I think that requires an uncapitalistic approach… that’s where gross national happiness becomes more important than gross national profit… and the trouble is… our society is geared towards dosh… now the moment that happens, the individual becomes a unit of potential dosh… that’s distressing enough in itself… to make you crack up.’
 
`Yeah… and part of a budget… or…?’
 
`Yes, yes… so we live in a political system that dehumanises everybody and some of us can tolerate it and some of us, for various reasons, cannot.  So… what I need is a change of the whole thing… I… I’m not necessarily going to get that, but I’m going to plant as many seeds towards that, with as many sisters and brothers as I can find…’
 
`There’s a problem here though, which is… if you give that much respect to… to the individual or the patient… where… its like… who takes the responsibility… if somebody is unhinged, then who’s… who’s… who… who, where is the bottom line, you know?’
 
`I’m a collectivist… we work it out together, accordingly, and what we do is we compromise without destroying the person… I mean obviously there has to be compromise in all this… what I’m saying is that the brutality of biological psychiatry doesn’t really serve anyone in the long run… it’s a bad idea… it doesn’t work… but it serves money.  And it serves the class system that created it in the first place.  So… ok, we’ve got a political problem, we need a political solution… [pause]…’
 
`Do you feel happier now… you said earlier that you don’t fit in… do you feel happier now in a sense that you feel you don’t need to fit in any more?’
 
`I think that’s the… I, I feel happier… because, I have learned to accept myself… and, largely that has been occasioned by the acceptance of some very unlikely individuals of me… by example… there are individuals who accept me… I think that’s part of being a human being.  One needs to feel special enough to accept one’s self… one needs to feel special enough to feel special… and as… as a woman survivor said to me, `I want again… the thing that I had before I was psychiatrised and labelled… I want the chance to take a risk and fail…’, this is what a normy is allowed to do… this is what a labelled person is not allowed to do… I want the chance to take a risk and fail, and take that risk again.  A normy is allowed to do this, a psychiatrist… a psychiatrised person is… is not allowed to do this… it inhibits our lives unfairly and it doesn’t serve anyone either…’
 
`And… exactly, it prevents people from doing… so much, because you always have to think about the consequence…’
 
`Yes… and so here we are, sometimes as survivors, and we feel we have to be triple sane, over continent, because we are so likely to be judged because of our record, and because of the insecurity of other people, they will never believe that we can be different, except what they saw in the first place… and what they saw in the first place was their illusion… [pause].  Who’s got the keys?  The person who’s got the keys defines what is normal.  It doesn’t mean they’re smarter or more right than anyone else, it’s simply about who’s got the keys… he who pays the piper picks the tune… [pause]… now I get an income as a disabled person, as a result of normies [ph] labouring on the millstone, that I’m unhooked from.  Millionaires and loonies are off the hook.  I’m off the hook.  But I’m not complacent about that… because a change of political atmosphere, and I’m back selling lottery tickets on the street [pause]… from the blue rinse brigade we got cups of tea and some patronage, from the Tories we got some benefits, and now we’ve got Lionel Blair and his dance troupe… the new Labour… doing the Tory trip, but worse… and threatening to take our benefits away.  Now, you know, for someone who is sensitive, this is already, you know, half a reason to jump out of the window… because what keeps us going is the fact that we do now get, you know, very rarely, we get our money, and that means that you can make an existence for yourself.  You have to build your own social support, and if you like that sort of thing, down the road you’ve got a mental health centre, but its steeped in the institutionalised mental health workers who work there… who are kind of very uncomfortable about being out of the ward themselves, so what they’ve done is they’ve created a day ward, up the road, in a house, and they think that’s community care.  Well it isn’t.  We haven’t got a community, and we certainly haven’t got care, so you know, this… this is the paradox… and of course those, those right wingers who knock us, they’re the ones who want the control back and the old class system, and the post-colonialism, which is if they make a funny noise they’ve got to be locked up because we’re stiff upper lip people… [pause].  The empire mentality creates a horrible psychiatry.  You’ve got two villages in Sicily which are non-psychiatric villages.  What they’ve decide to do there is they will not have psychiatric intervention if someone is distressed, the villagers look after their own… and I would love a community that would become community enough that we support each other… that makes the idea of psychiatry entirely redundant.  Now if I break the law, lock me up, but don’t do the half way thing, which is to drug me out of existence if you can’t understand my behaviour.  Most people who are labelled are safe.  We’re frightened to say boo to a goose, that’s the majority of us, but the tabloids demonise us as axe murderers, when in fact the homicide rate of people who are labelled, and sometimes they are labelled retrogressively, for the convenience of this tabloid demonisation… I don’t have an axe, I’m labelled schizophrenic, and I go out of my way not to kill flies, never mind human beings, and according to the figures, you’re safer with me than you are going on to the tube with normies, who might kill you more easily.  That isn’t taken into account by the tabloids when they do, you know, `schizophrenic axe murderer strikes again’, its probably my psychiatrist… [pause]… but it’s convenient, you know… this is the country of building people onto pedestals and knocking them down. [pause].  Princess Diana, what an incredible story, about you know, how she was demonised when she was alive and eulogised when she was dead, its almost like a psychiatrised individual experiences that, but we’re not that important… [pause].’
 
`There‘s a thought that struck me about… the community, and the community looking after people that are ill…’
 
`It’s going back to the Nazis…’
 
`Yeah… that’s… yes… it is going back, I know what you mean…’
 
`These are the people who rejected me in the first place.. I’m thrown back into their bosom… they will not nourish me… they distrust me…’
 
`But where’s safe though?  I think this is an important point…where is safe?’
 
[both talking together]
 
`Yes, because we’ve got… where is safe?  Well I think safe is like paradise, its in the head, and some of us haven’t found it yet, so you know, its part of the contradiction of this life… safe is in the heart, yet we think its out in Timbuktu… its inside us… its also not always inside us… you know, there are two things.  There’s my attitude, and there’s what happens.  There’s your attitude and there’s what happens.  Now, you’re… you’re attitude… I’ve learned this… that attitude can be moved an awfully long way to become different.  What happens, happens… so it’s the relationship between what happens and our attitude towards it… that also has within it, the definition of certain behaviours, which in… and it varies from culture to culture.  In one culture you’re politically active, in another culture you’ve got the symptoms of manic depression… [pause].  You know, in Italy I can have a great ding dong with you outside, with a… lovely political argument… if I do that in West Ealing the likelihood is that the police will come along, I’ll get put on a section 136 [someone knocks on the door] and they’re probably here now… it was the door… can I just answer that?’
 
`Uh huh…’
 
`I’m sorry…’
 
`Yeah, no problem…’
 
`Conveniently you see, the timing is…[pause]…’
 
[pause]
 
`This is thirty three years on.  I’ve had thirty three years of psychiatry, and I think, what I’ve learned is that people matter and things don’t matter that much.  But you need enough things to get by, and that somehow, psychiatry has given… you know, my… my response to psychiatry has kind of given me a life.’
 
`Mmm…’
 
`A life which needs the occasional prompt… One of the things about being psychiatrised is that when we get back into ward thirty five, ie. the rest of the world, one really has lost the cultural vibration, to know what to do, because its… it’s a subculture in the loony bin down the road.  Now you go in there for three months, you come out, you don’t know how to cross the road.  One of the things… its very difficult, if you’re not used to it, to judge the speed of oncoming traffic… so… one of the dangers is, one can become extremely hesitant about everything… there is a fear about making the wrong decision, because in hospital, your decisions are adjudged as whether you are weller or iller or not… so it becomes a major thing to cross the road.  It was also a major thing to get into the underground.  I remember one time my dad was in a hospital having an operation and, like… I felt like a king… because I managed to overcome my fear of going down the escalators on the underground, by myself, and to see my dad in hospital.  I adore… I adored my late… my late dad, and it was beautiful to have the courage to do that, yet because I’d spent x years on the ward, it was considered quite heroic to be able to do that… err… that’s difficult to explain to someone who’s used to going on the underground without thinking anything about it.  Also to come off the very debilitating drugs, because, I was sentenced to Modecate for life, and I don’t take any of it now… and that doesn’t mean its easy, but I’ve got my life back.’
 
`How long did you spend on Modecate?’
 
`I… I think I had something around the five year region.  But… without it being an excuse, my memory is very mashed, very mashed… and I deeply resent the ECT, the pro-lobby who say, `oh, you know, it gives you short term…’, it fucks your memory like nobody’s business, and, and I deeply resent that.  It’s also… I’m wondering, you know, about the folks who were there in the fifties and sixties and earlier, that the damage has been done and what… what acknowledgement is there of my sisters and brothers, you know, some of whom went in there, for… have… you know, women, for having babies, not being married, and they mashed them as well as they did any of the… so called… people like me, who were labelled schizophrenic and manic depressive, and what acknowledgement do they have about being so abused…?’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`You know, we’ve got the neuroleptic [ph] malignant syndrome, ie. if someone gets injected and they die, now I call that murder… psychiatric murder… and I think, you know,  we have to become more honest about this, and two folks die every week as a result of that kind of psychiatric murder, and it’s covered over as neuroleptic malignant syndrome… and the other great myth about side effects… I cannot persuade my body that this is a side effect so I can kind of slightly dismiss it… when my body shakes, its awful, I don’t like it.  It doesn’t make me sexier, to shake… it doesn’t make me sexier to drool…’
 
`Have you had quite long periods when you’ve been away… away from treatment?’
 
`I… I did have quite… you know… quite… yes… I’ve had long treat… times when I was getting support, and you know, when I was in a relationship, where I basically turned my back on the whole deal of psychiatry and forgot about it, almost… so yes, yes… wonderful… wonderful…’
 
`So sort of several years at a time?’
 
`Yes.  Yes.  And then it almost seemed too awful to… you know, it seemed… that I needed to deny psychiatry’s existence, just to breathe, just to be… [pause].  You know, a wonderful time in Wales… I mean at that time I was Vice Chair of National MIND and yet, you know, to actually do the… to do the relationship thing, and to… lead a relatively
normal life with someone else, as normal as I ever get… it was wonderful, and part of me and part of her… we were thinking, you know, let’s leave the psychiatry behind, because the other thing I do, is I’m a musician… and I love the idea of doing that, and you know the dirty political stuff I’m not so keen on, but it keeps pulling me back, because when I go up the road to visit, if I can face that horrible place, I see exactly what was happening thirty three years ago, with different Lainguage, slightly different paint on the walls, but its still just as awful, you know… different named drugs now.  But still doing the same stuff.’ 
 
[pause]
 
`Have you found any of the treatments that doctors have prescribed you, over the time… have you found any of them positive at all?’
 
`I didn’t… its… the treatments, I never found any of them positive.  Some of the folks, and this is what… it, it was the persons, it was the people… if the… if the person still had a heart, then we could maybe do something that might be useful, but if they were following the text book, whether its psychotherapy, which I don’t have time for, or whether its psychiatry which I have even less time for, umm… the criterion was the person who was sitting on the other side.  There was a time when I had the psychotherapy and the person there was saying `you’re not actually in the room with me’, and I elected not to be in there, because I knew abuse when it was happening, and here was, you know, the wanky abuse of psychotherapy.  It wasn’t chemical and it wasn’t electric, but it sure was abuse… where the person there with the glasses and their Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian or whatever school they adhered to, were having a wank over me, and I deeply resent that stuff.  But if the person had a heart, maybe you know, we could share something of that, and it could be harmonious, but a lot of the time, it was a power trip, which was so weighed against me that there wasn’t any room to manoeuvre, so I left the room, although I might have physically stayed there.  I hated the idea, that someone could come out of university, with some sort of a wanky degree of… of psychotherapy and, and tell me how to fucking live, because they had no idea how I lived, and if they did it would be a straight diagnosis.  You know, I was kind of trapped like that… and again it was… it was only years and decades later, that on the web I’m seeing the life stories of Siberian Shaman, and here’s my life story, and here’s the agony, here’s the blessing, here’s the curse… and these folks had experienced this in a different culture, and yet measure for measure, there were my people, and I didn’t know the words for them… but I’d lived the life… and it was so affirming.  And then to see a programme on TV, where the affirmed it further, to see… you know, a… a brother from Cape Town, and a split decision, whether Western psychiatrists said first rank schizophrenia, and the local individual said `this is initiate Shamanism… we will take the brother to the Shaman, he will become a great healer’, and he did.  Now in Western terms, first rank schizophrenia, in the local… South African terms, here is the Shaman, ready for work. So one of the things I want the Royal College to do, is to appreciate… you know, I saw this when I first went there… there were wards and wards of very spiritual people, who had got into spiritual trouble, and psychiatry was never going to help them.’
 
`So your general feeling is that psychiatry is bad for people?’
 
`I think its… I think psychiatry… err… in, in my experience… [pause] is… is ye… is… what culture… the Nazism that our culture accepts.  It is the thought police. It is the… the drawing… down of the space that we need to live in, into something so narrow that everyone gets squeezed.  It’s the manifestation of the applied stiff upper lip, and the anal retention, and you know, just because the psychiatrist wants me to be as miserable as usually he is… that doesn’t mean I… I… I am wrong if I elect to… not to do that, but they are very coercive in the process of trying to make me…. [pause]… I see psychiatry as social control, and by definition, as… as a musician and as a human being, umm… social control destroys the orchestra… it… it has no valid place and it serves no one. Not… not… not in the long term.  Now that doesn’t mean that people are not distressed… it doesn’t mean that people don’t need an awful lot of support… but what I’m saying is that that support has to be on their terms, and that that support has to be… if the person is dangerous to someone else, we have a right to defend ourselves… I’m all for that… you know, if I’m a danger to you, put me into prison, but don’t give me mind numbing drugs and electrocutions in the name of changing my mind about something.  If I’m out of order, lock me up, but don’t fuck my head up in the process.  I mean as it happens, you know, I have not committed a crime, but I would have preferred, in a way, to have kept my brain and lived in Pentonville.  The trouble is, in Pentonville they’re also giving Largactil, so it ain’t as easy as that.  But there is no other group in our society that gets locked up at the whim of behaviour and hasn’t done a crime… and I think, this, you know… this… this is obviously wrong, to imprison people, when they have not committed a crime.  And I also don’t like the insanity plea back up that psychiatry uses, in the sense that… umm… err… psychiatry justifies itself to do the liberal thing, with people who have committed felony, people who have committed crimes.  So, you know, say, oh, hey, I’m the psychiatrist, this person has got a mental illness, that’s why they punched you on the nose… I don’t go for that one… if I punch you on the nose, I must take responsibility, I don’t want some shrink coming in saying I’m a nutter.  That’s quite a… quite a difficult one that one, conceptually, about the… you know, psychiatry coming in as social agents to actually back up the… the… the potential patient on the basis that the patient was out of their minds at the time that they did this thing.  I don’t think that’s an excuse and I don’t want psychiatry, validating itself on that basis.  If I would have had the straight choice, go to prison for most of your adult life and don’t get any drugs, or electrocution or patronage, then I think I would have elected for that.  But no one asked me…  I’d also have come out, you know, with a dick that works and a brain that works, but unfortunately, I’m not that lucky.  You know, there… there are many hidden sides to the oppressions that they do, and, get enough Modecate and Largactil, say goodbye to your sex life, sometimes forever.  The other thing is it doesn’t do much for your self esteem, its not easy… when, when you are considered to be mentally ill to go out and fulfil your social requirements, because you come out of a place like that and you think you’ve got it stamped on your head, you know, `I am garbage’, and we are supposed to feel that as well, and very grateful to some wanker who might come round here for half an hour to patronise us in the name of social support [laughs]… and then we have to take them shopping when we don’t want to go shopping… you know, I mean I… I wanted social support, so I roll along and say hey, I need social support, and they say, well you can only get that by referral through the shrink, so go and see the shrink, shrink’s got the empty bed, she wants to bin me, you know… all because the woman wanted Milk Tray… and my problem is… I need someone here sometimes to help me sort stuff out.  Now, in our society, that is such a crime, that I’ve got to see a psychiatrist who wants to put me in a loony bin for it, in order to get there… that isn’t giving me my Milk Tray.  So it’s the individual versus the policy, and the policy will always work as long as the political will is on the side of the policy, and of course it is.  `Mikey’s a bit too real, let’s call him a schizo…’’
 
[pause]
 
`And of course that’s always the catch twenty two…?’
 
`And… and this… this incredible… what do they call it, you know when you have to walk through this thing where they’re all beating you with things… the trial by ordeal… you know, community care in practice, is trial by ordeal… you get a plastic bag with your pants in it and you’re told to fuck off out of the loony bin…’
 
[telephone rings]
 
[End of DVCPro Tape 3 of 4 – VHS Tape 1 of 1 continues]
 
[Start of DVCPro Tape 4 of 4 – VHS Tape 1 of 1 continues]
 
`Let’s go back to 1983 Mike… you told me you were in hospital again, for some period… what… what led up to that admission?… and how was it?’
 
`I was… experiencing the end of my second marriage… what had happened was that… err… my behaviour had become so difficult as far as my second wife was concerned, that… I got myself `binned’… it was after Glastonbury in 1983, and part of the consequence of… there was a simultaneous thing… I was getting binned and it was the end  of my second marriage… and err.. I’d done the deed of getting the mortgage, doing the marriage and pretending to be normy… Mr Normy, I was… and, I’d done three years selling… wall coverings… contract wall coverings in King’s Cross.  I’d done the marriage thing, `a la norm’… and part of me fused.  I couldn’t handle it any more, so… on the way back from Glastonbury, I kind of lost it, emotionally, I… I went to pieces.  And I found myself on the admission ward of St Bernard’s Hospital, Ealing… up the road, ‘ere [in accent]…, and I realised err… that I… I… I was falling to pieces, and part of the reason was that I had blown my second marriage.  And it hurt a lot… and the consequence was that the shrink, this time, using the triple D… Dr Dependent Diagnosis… now this time, I magically had my label changed, to manic depressive.  This was the opinion of the present consultant, in 1983, and this meant that I was put on about six different… umm… neuroleptics… Largactil, plus… and that completely zonked me out, to the extent that my wife went to see the consultant and said, `you are actually destroying my husband, because you’re treating him for what he is… and you’ve gone in too deep, in the sense that what you’re doing with chemicals, is you’re destroying, the authentic Mikey, you’ve got to stop it…’, and he told her to fuck off.  And… I started going round on the ward, asking very, very… sensitively, those folks who were signing for their ECT on the ward, if they had full information.  I was summoned into the ward office and told that I’m not allowed to talk to any of the patients from now on.  So I’m on the ward, I’m now not allowed to talk to any of the patients, the staff don’t talk to me, and I feel absolutely dreadful… and within a week or two, the doctor og the time, Dr Silverman, is telling me that I need to have ECT, the alternative would be even more drugs, and I was drooling, and I was very pushed down by the chemicals, one of which was Lithium, that I really didn’t get on with… err, but without knowing it, I was antidoting myself by spraying salt on my food at dinner times, and that apparently is the antidote for Lithium Carbonate, so he was thinking that I was ‘cheeking’ my tablets.  You know, in other words, keeping them and gobbing them out… which I actually wasn’t doing, for some of the time, but of course, I mean anyone with any sense would always try to spit out poison.  So… I very reluctantly, and unknowingly, the spider signature on the ECT consent form, and I get my first three ECTs, and they fuck my head completely, and I’m just a complete mess.  So I refuse the next ECT and then they really go to town, and give me so much shit that I don’t know which way is up at all, and so I very reluctantly agree for the fourth ECT but I am very suicidal, I don’t see a way out of this… emotionally I’m falling to pieces, umm… the… my wife has left me, and I’m stuck in… in the hammer house of horrors up the road, err… and I don’t see… I do not see the possibility of a future for myself, and I just don’t know what to do.  And then I realise one of the most horrible things, when you really feel that you want to top yourself, and there’s still something that doesn’t give you the courage to do it properly, and I feel double inadequate, and it was one of the worst times of my life… so you know, my… my folks are coming up to visit me, and I’m standing outside the ward, with just, I’m crying my eyes out… big tears are rolling down my face… here’s a man of thirty five, crying like a baby… I don’t see a way out… err… and then… I suppose I got so angry, after the sixth ECT for some reason I pull myself back into the conventional gear… and I go to homeless families and I’m alone… and I’m alone.  And again…’
 
`How do you mean, go to homeless families?’
 
`Right… umm… I couldn’t… you see… one of the deals was that with, with my ex-wife… to be, as it were, the divorce is in process, we’re doing our own divorce thing… umm… I bought a house, and part of the thing is that I can’t maintain the payments on it, and she doesn’t want to live there, and… I don’t really want to live there… so, basically I kind of give myself up in the sense that… we put the house on the market, that means I’ve got nowhere to live… I can’t maintain the payments…’
 
`So where did you go?’
 
`I went to the… homeless families… and they sent me to a place called, err.. something Court… some homeless families place, it was fairly… fairly new.  It was a converted old age home… and… you know, again, I’m in my version of… the internment camp… so to a certain extent, part of me is beginning to pick up, and I’m doing… I’m a trainee in a sheltered workshop, you know, putting bits of… doing… soldering up bits of electrical stuff, and I’m meeting a good compatriot… the chap who now lives upstairs in this block, err… and we affiliate and support each other, err…’
 
`Who was in this place?’
 
`What, in the homeless…?’
 
`Yes’
 
`Right.  Folks who are… err… from… you know, who are political refugees, folks who are ex-psychiatric who… who got homeless and… folks who, for one reason or another, have got nowhere to live… and, and… you see, if you have… certain forms of the labels, you get points on the… you know… if… The Homeless Persons Act of the time, that if you’re ex-psychiatric, you do… there is… umm… a… a council… obligation to house you in temporary accommodation.  So, it was kind of half… people who had gone through the psychiatric system and had nowhere to… to move to, but were kicked out of the bin, and half folks who came over on the plane to Heathrow as… as refugees from their countries.  Ealing being the area for the Heathrow…’
 
`Was it like a hostel, with…?’
 
`Yes…’
 
`Yeah, yeah…’
 
`Yes… and, and it was pretty good actually… relatively, and I was working in this strange place as a trainee, umm.. which was a sheltered workshop at the time, you know, for ex-psychiatrics, doing really menial tasks, but in a way having some sort of… some sort of a life… and eventually the council… gave me a beautiful council flat, out in Northolt, and I resume my life… and my wife comes back to me… and for a while, we are very happy.’
 
`Were you working?’
 
`Some of the time… some of the time, yes.  But my last major job was in… in… ended in ’83, that was the last time I was working any sort of… continuity… selling these wall coverings for three years, which completely did my head in.  Actually one of my bosses said, `I know what you’ve been doing, you’ve been acting all this out, ‘cause it isn’t really you, is it?’, and, and I felt obliged to be the actor, who sells wall coverings, to maintain my marriage and my normy life, but I didn’t do a very good job… and so… err…’
`So you were home, back in your flat with your wife again for some time?’
 
`Yes.  Yes’
 
`It must have been a relief to back with her, at the time?’
 
`It was quite beautiful in a way, but… we had lived our lives out… it was time for me to move on… and then I met the wonderful person, who [laughs]… who was to become my common law wife [laughs]… God, you’re going to do me with this… this is Police Five isn’t it? [laughs]… and… and this was going to be the long… [laughs]… longest relationship I have in my life, so far… [laughs]… a journalist.  A very beautiful journalist, who took me [laughs] to her cottage in Wales…’
 
`Did she come to interview you?’
 
`Umm no… ‘
 
`I was just wondering…’
 
`I met her at a party, and my opening line was `schizophrenia doesn’t exist’, and on the basis of that I spent the best five years of my life with a woman that really I could love and who loved me.  Two pussycats and you know, three years with the cottage by the sea.  Years earlier I’d been on the ward, and a friend of mine said, `not that you’re ever going to get out of here Mike ‘cause you’re too loopy, but if you ever get out of here, what would you like?`, and I said, `I want the person who loves me, that I can love and I want the two pussycats, and I want the cottage by the sea’, and for three years I had exactly that, but I didn’t like myself that much so I eventually blew it, and it was time to move on.’
 
`And why did you blow it?  What was… what… what… what were the ingredients to the explosion?’
 
`I’m not used to being happy… it unsettles me… I have to, in a way, have something to do and something to fight.  It was too beautiful… to be in that village, in love, and to be loved.  There was something too much of the void about it.  I’m someone who… I’m the fuck off kid, yeah… I’m used to people telling me to fuck off and they fall in love with me later.  This time it hadn’t happened yet, so it was too good to be true.  I acknowledged that my dream could come true and I left it.  I had a vasectomy and she ran off with the music teacher.  [pause] [laughs]… to have his baby.  It was only in Mexico that I learned what it was about…’
 
`There’s a good reason…’
 
`The Mexican women told me… that you see on the way to the vasectomy clinic, she said to me, I’ll have your babies if you want me to, and I did the thing that you can never do as a man, which was to say, `I couldn’t handle the competition’, then the fight was on.  Also the rendezvous in London where I was a bit illicit one time, or… once… [pause]… so, in fact I’d blown it big time and by the time I kind of came round and realised the damage I’d done to my life, err… very understandably the woman in question had decided it was time for her to move on as well.  So my door was never… you know.. the… her door was not open to me again.’
 
`But did you get a bit bored in Wales?’
 
`I did actually… I was turning into a kind of blob on the settee… ‘cause I was doing… co-dependency deluxe, in the sense that this wonderful person, was becoming more and more of a Madonna and less and less of the Mrs, and so, you know, it came to the point where we’re lying in bed and she’s saying, this is an incestuous relationship… you know, I being Jesus and she being Madonna… you can’t screw around like that.  You have to split. I’d regressed again, I’d become the child.  No woman wants to fuck with her baby, its unseemly… [pause].  You know, this is part of my, kind of way, which is that I move from the dependent child to the warrior, but it… it can go either way.’
 
`And that’s what I was about to ask you… did you find you were getting itchy feet and wanting to get back to the city and… something to… you know, something to shout about?’
 
`I think part of it was that… I needed to justify my existence more… it was almost too comfortable, and it was almost too near to death, to be loved so much, was so beautiful, I couldn’t really allow it yet… there was work to be done.  Now here was a wonderful person, who actually… who, this person… through her, I was able to become Vice Chair of National MIND, so this was a big victory in my small world.  So she had built up the monster…’
 
`But what happened, Mike, you got to Vice Chair of National MIND and then… you…?’
 
`And then I needed to become the little boy again.  This is a constant return to the camps, because I’d never really resolved it, so the co-dependency is, you know… a three way stretch.  I make the loony bin, my return to the camp, then I meet the good woman who becomes my investment for the next co-dependency, then I go back to the camp.  So after this relationship I’m in a loony bin in Wales [laughs]...’
 
`So you weren’t surprised?’
 
`It was terrible… you know, I mean we had agreed on the politics and there we were, me asking her to drive me to the loony bin, you know, this is part of my ghetto mentality.  Neither of us believe in the loony bin, where else can I go to?  So I go to the loony bin, and heartbreak hotel, which is the hostel in that area, and I think, shit, it’s about time to hot foot it back to London… in between time, I’m in a MIND hostel in Abergavenny where they’re having their minds blown, by the Vice Chair of the National Organisation, appearing as a total loony on their doorstep as a recipient… and of course they don’t like it, because I’m destroying their pecking order.  The staff think I’m a pseudo-patient in there to check out their efficiency, and the recipients think you know… who the fuck is this, so while I’m in Mexico doing the biggest Mental Health Conference in the world as part of my brief as Vice Chair of MIND, they’re voting me out of their house, which is a MIND house, so I’m back in London, and I decide hey, let’s pop into Ealing, ‘cause their computer’s probably been down for three years, pops into Ealing, and as luck would have it, here is a wonderful housing officer who has been to some of the meetings, where I as charismatic Vice Chair of MIND, had been telling her about the evils of psychiatry.  She’s about to leave, umm.. that week, and so I get my permit to go in to the YMCA up the road.  Mikey’s homeless, again, but he’s in the borough… he’s in the area, and he’s getting busy.’
 
`Right.  Time to put down some roots?’
 
`Time to put down the roots.  The Shaman returns to the area that was previously Shamanised.  I’m in the YMCA, then I go back to Dove House Court, seven years earlier I’d been there in homeless families, after the break up of my second marriage.  Here I was again, but the place was in bits.  Seven years later it had fallen to pieces… morale was bad, but its living… so I was trying to get my status back in Ealing as a homeless person covered by the Acts, and because of the kindness of Ealing council, our sponsors, I’m still here.  So I did the circle again.  I’m in homeless families seven years later after the first time, and they allocate me the beautiful, [deleted], here… yes… and here I shall probably go into the body bag when my life is done.  Thank you very much.  It’s been a long way from Kazakhstan, but you get the mini disc, the DAT and the computer that never really works.  The moral of the story is, folks… if you feel distressed go and see the person next door… go and see the plumber… whatever you do, never see the shrink.  It never works.  How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?’
 
`One, but its really got to want to change.’
 
`Well that’s the psychotherapeutic aspect… no.  It takes one psychiatrist, but none of them ever see the light… [pause].  So, it’s 1991, and I’m back in St Bernard’s, but this time there’s much more respect because I’ve developed a reputation as an advocacy…’
 
`Hang on.  You’re… you’re… you’re in [deleted]  now…’
 
`I am now…’ [both talking together]
 
`And what year is that?’
 
 `That’s 1992.’
 
`Oh… so… so you, but… ok, so let’s take it back a bit…’
 
`Yes.’
 
`You’re… you’re at the YMCA…’
`Yes…’
 
`In 1990?’
 
`Yes…’
 
`And then… ah, but then you got in… into hospital again, St Bernard’s?’
 
`Yes… because I couldn’t handle… being seven years down the road and being homeless again, and having blown my third major relationship… and so I’m on the admission ward, I’m on… I’m on William Sergeant ward of the new wing of the Ealing hospital… `psychiatry a la wank wank …err… new colour walls…’
 
[both talking together]
 
`I hope you didn’t find another wife…’
 
`No… I realise my limitations… [both laugh]… but recently I met wife number seventy three… she doesn’t know this yet… there’s a slight age difference, I’m four years older than her father, but who’s counting.  It’s 1992, and… on the way here I tell… on the way to the housing office I say to… because we get the golden letter… there are two golden letters, one of them is to give you status, in other words you’re a displaced person, yet again, until you get the council’s letter saying that we take charge of your housing.  Because you’ve got a two way avenue… they either throw you out, which… which is a legal thing, yeah… but for reasons that I don’t want to go into… Ealing accepted me back on its books, umm… and I was fortunate enough to get this delirious place.  But that was after the YMCA which was excellent, and Dove House Court, which was depressing.  And…’
 
`And with a short stay down the road?’
 
`The few odd days in the bin… where I’m frozen with fear, because I’m very freaked out.  It seems like… and there’s a wonderful incident where I’m seeing a senior social worker and I’m saying to the senior social worker, you know, I’m Vice Chair of National MIND and he says `today you’re not’… and I say, ‘phone them up, you don’t believe me, do you? Because it… you know, it could be grandiose idea… I’m Genghis Khan and he ‘phones up and the PA gives him an earful, `how dare you question Mr Lawson, he’s our Vice Chair’, and I’m thinking wow, that was a near one, I wasn’t sure myself… [pause]…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`And that… that… that was excellent, because I wasn’t that sure myself.  But she gave him an earful, so the kind social worker gave me a bit of respect.  Months passed in homeless families… Dove House Court, I’m getting depressed, I’m going in and out of the bin and they can’t keep me in the bin but they’re very intrigued my… by my behaviour, because I’m super deluxe this time.’
 
`Are you taking their drugs?’
 
`Umm… not if I can help it.’
 
`But its hard not to take drugs when you’re in there?’
 
`Its very hard, because they drive you completely nuts, and so you need something to help you get by, so if I’ve got a bit of a spliff I’m all right, but if I haven’t I’m in big trouble.  So… the occasional drug, but…home for… well, back to the hostel for a spliffy… anyway… then eventually I get this beautiful palace, and I fall in love.  We repeat the patterns until we don’t.’
 
`Mmm’
 
`I mean, I thought my life was over… here I am hobbling about with my vasectomy, feeling no woman ever wants to know me again, and I meet a most wonderful woman.. [laughs]’
 
`Just out of interest…[both laugh]… why did you decide to have that done?  I mean why, did you get somebody pregnant… or…?’
 
`I’m… I’m a nice geezer…don’t laugh too much at this… I wanted to take her pain away [laughs]… and she runs off with my music teacher for his baby for fuck’s sakes…’
 
`Umm… you couldn’t it much more wrong really, could you?’
 
`I… I can practise… but, no, I couldn’t…’
 
`Because you…’
 
 `It’s… it’s a delicate situation, this whole baby business… I’ve learned this, the hard way… [laughs]… whoaa!… no, I loved her so much.  Err… it had come to the point where she was saying, look, I don’t want to stay… you know, I don’t want to be on the pill any more, so I’m going to get sterilised, so Mikey dread here, said [in accent] `hey, baby, I’ll take the vasectomy because I’m Mr Cool’, not a terribly good move in that relationship, but it was time to move on, and if I’m going to move on, I think best if I fire blanks.  Yes, in between there had been the odd incident… umm [laughs]… an immaculate conception you may say… and that really hurt me, because, umm… yes, there was a wonder… a wonderful woman [laughs]… err… and she… she was slightly younger than myself, in between marriages, and she did get pregnant, and I believe it’s a woman’s right… right… [laughs]… I can’t say this… it’s a woman’s right to choose, I really do… and so I supported her, yeah, but it was… it was also painful for me.  No… I took the vasectomy purely as a kind of thing about, look, you know… I love you, I can’t bear you to be any unnecessary pain so I’ll get the chop. Little did I know… swans off with Mr fucking Music… [laughs]… to make babies.  I’m a sadomasochist, I think that’s fairly [laughs] evident by now…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`[laughs] I can’t get it right all the time… I… [laughs]… then, I met a wonderful woman… [laughs]… fade out… [laughs]… God this is serious… yeah… [laughs]…’
 
`So if life truly is a circle… then at some point, you’ll want to go back and look at the beginning all over again maybe?’
 
`Well, again, Shamanic practice is to return to the source, and so absolutely, I need to go back to the place of my birth before I can die properly, and I’ve got to win the bi-phonic contest… that’s all part of the brief.  It’s not a circle, it’s a double helix… it’s a double helix… but it works in circular patterns.  And… part of the deal is we need to learn what patterns we’re working.  So, you know, I have to lose my dependency of the camp and stop investing it in beautiful women, and they have to stop encouraging me… [laughs]…’
 
`Are there beautiful women round here?’
 
`Always.  I believe that the Royal College of Psychiatrists has got a slush fund, that is… you know, they’re trying to drive me mad with these incredible models that keep walking near to me, smelling like God… you know, as a Tantric practitioner, I’m very aired to the foibles of beautiful women… just doing my job… [in accent].  So, you may ask, what does the future hold… [laughs]…’
 
`I may, yes…’
 
`There was this incident whereby, I… I jumped over the wall of the bin in one of my escapades, and the consultant, umm… was very keen to get me back in… and so he sent a social worker to section me.  So I’m sitting here, rolling a spliff, and it’s the… it’s the… approved social worker, and a trainee… and the trainee pipes up and she says, `look, I’m all for legalisation, but can you stop what you’re doing?’, and I say to her, no… because if you’re going to section me I’m going to need this, and if you’re not going to section me, I’m going to celebrate… so you know, think of it as camel dung and you know… suit yourself, but I’m not going to stop rolling, I need this… I’ve also got glaucoma… so… she was very nervous about the whole thing, but as it happened, the approved social worker had been partially trained by me, so he felt that I wasn’t actually out of the bounds of normality, because he’d been kind enough to come to one of my training things, and… he did the unacceptable thing of telling the shrink that I was not sectionable, and the shrink didn’t like it a bit.  The old knock on the door… now you don’t know whether it’s a Jehovah’s witness, or someone coming along to section you.  This is also one of the apparatuses that you carry as a survivor, that the knock on the door can be something very frightening, because what if the geezer or… or, or the woman… is not someone who you’ve had in your training course, regime… they might just think, you know, you’re off the wall and its time for bye byes down the road in the Bernie Inn… not a pleasant prospect.’
 
`Especially if they’ve got the police waiting outside as well…?’
 
`That’s a horrible one… and on the Hindu holy day I had to do something ludicrous, because we’re celebrating the overcoming of spiritual strength over lust, and I nicked a pair of women’s shoes from the TK Mack’s place… but I dutifully went to return them.  I broke all their security systems with this pair of Cinderella’s boots, so I stroll along, tell the car parking attendant should I go back because I have taken these illicitly, and of course he says yes.  On the way down there the two gorillas jump on my face, and I’m going back into the area, to return their stupid boots, yeah… so they call the police ‘cause they think I’m raving, they think I’ve escaped from an institution, which in a way I have, and the police come along and say `hi Mikey, what are you doing?’ and they explain that I’m the mental health trainer of the plod station, and that, you know, I don’t really go around stealing boots, but I do weird things, so there’s no case against me, except that I’m banned from TK Mack’s.  They can keep their T-shirts, I don’t mind.  So, life goes on…’
 
`So you’ve got some pretty good friends then…?’
 
`I’m very fortunate…’ [both talking together]
 
`…to keep you out of trouble?’
 
`Yeah, but they never give me the videos or tapes.  When I got done on the park, talking about the Koran to some wonderful Muslim women and men, there were three obvious plain clothed plods sitting there pretending to have a tea, and they busted me for possession… and they were asking me all along the way if they were doing it correctly, because two of them knew I was a mental health training officer, but the rookie who busted me didn’t know… but I knew he was a plod, because he had very shiny shoes.  I know they’ve got all the casual gear, the Adidas top, but if you’ve got shiny shoes, its probably a plod… that’s today’s tip.  And so there I am, on three weeks’ bail because they can’t get an appropriate adult, for no `p’, and then I get a three year caution.  But next time I get busted I want something behind me to take it to Strasbourg, you know. I said, look, you’ve busted me (a) because I’m black, and (b) I’m allowed to smoke here in Amsterdam… [both talking together]… and they don’t have an answer…’
 
`You’re not black…’
 
`That’s a technical thing… I can sound… you know, I’m often a black person on the telephone… I’m Asian…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`Well anyway, I mean I’m supposed to be severely mentally impaired, so I am black… `neeer’… and in Amsterdam.  I say I’m not coming over here again.’
 
`How do you mean you were in Amsterdam?’
 
`Well no… I… was simply spinning a yarn..’
 
`Yeah…’
 
`It’s just that… two weeks previously a plod had come up to me and said, `we don’t care what you do, we’re not going to bust you for smoking’… two weeks later some geezer comes up to me and busts me for possession.  The left hand of the police station needs to know what the right hand is doing, otherwise, there’s no community relationship, and there isn’t.  [pause]  So, I’ve hit the half century, I want to go back to Kazakhstan, make my peace there, win the bi-phonic chanting contest, and continue fighting for a decent way of life for those of us who are alternativists.  I mean psychiatry and Shamanism, are a bit like the condom to the nun.  Totally, totally apposite.’
 
`Well I would say psychiatry and possibly just spiritualism, full stop. Religion, or spiritualism…’
 
`Yes. Yes.’
 
`…are the two antitheses to each other…’
 
`Yes.  And you get weird amalgams.  For instance the last consultant I saw actually acknowledged my Shamanism, and so you know, felt it was fair enough to leave me alone, but you’ve got no guarantees, that’s where the triple D comes in, about the Doctor Dependent Diagnosis… you’re dependent upon the eye of the beholder, in the sense the consultant has the keys, whether they use them or not, depends on their, and no one has a politically free opinion… opinion… it’s a matter of opinion.  Madness is in the eyes of the beholder, and you’ve got to be very careful if you’re presenting your alleged madness to someone whose got the keys, because they can always want to lock you in, for reasons other than your mental health.  If you’re a psychiatrist with a spare bed, you’ve got to fill that bed to justify your existence, now depending on the cultural atmosphere, it’s either, more easy to fill or less easy to fill.’
 
`Do you have opinions about…whether the state could have done more for you in some ways, or could have done more for people that have come out of hospital to be… rehabilitated?’
 
`I think one of the difficulties is that I don’t actually want to be rehabilitated into a world that I don’t accept the value system of… and there’s a difficulty here, which is about the idea of rehabilitation into a society that I personally… I’m always going to be on the margins of… so what I would like is enough space to operate, just outside that, and for a society that is broad minded enough to accept people like me, ‘cause there’s loads of people like me, one way or the other, and what happens is that the confines of the culture means that instead of being rehabilitated as a human being, you are re-processed to fit into the machinery of a very oppressive system, with the class system, it’s sexism and it’s racism… I say no thanks to that.  That’s how I got into this mess in the first place.  Now, I see that the political answer is to make room for us, then we can harmonise… I… I can contribute a lot to this society, if the society gives me enough space to work in.’
 
`Right.  Let me put it this way.  Do you think there’s… there’s… things that we all have in common after coming out of hospital, that… that… that, that could be… dealt with better so that people could feel that they’re… in whatever way they want to… get on with their own lives?’
 
`I think there’s always room for massive improvement, depending on the existent culture, and I think that… certainly the folks that I met who have endured the psychiatric system, are amongst the most creative and articulate around… and if there is enough space for them it enriches, we make culture for goodness’ sake, if we’re given the chance, but the culture is usually so impoverished that we are used as the punch bags of society… [pause]…’
 
`Those that are articulate, that have come out of hospital, I think are usually in the minority…’
 
`I think so too.  Yes.’
 
`And… I wonder whether you had any opinions about the question of… not re-processing, that’s an awful word, but it’s the silent majority… what you… there seems to be so much more that can be done rather than like you were talking about before with the sort of cyclical, capitalist ideas, of just everybody becoming some sort of number in a resource and you’re just maintained from one, you know, social services, from one group to the other…’
 
`Yes.  Yes.’
 
`… and there’s all this money being spent, but I feel that there must be… a different way… ‘
 
[both talking together]
 
`Oh, yes please… yes.’
 
`You know… and what is that?’
 
`I think the different way is the move, from the idealisation of gross national profit, to gross national happiness, that we need to make that transition, and that requires the Buddhist precepts for instance, of wisdom and compassion.  The compassion is lacking in capitalism, it means that if you are not a workhorse, you are seen as a defunct machine, and you are dealt with appropriately.  You become an anti-advert in the sense that if you dare to say no to the machinery that you’re involved in, then you’ve got to be seen as someone who is a danger to this society, because you… in, in the sense of pure money, you are… you are not creating wealth for those who get most from it, the men in grey suits, and so, it’s very dangerous if you dare to say no to the system, that… that we generally do not even question, and so… I mean at present we’re used as the bin liners, the psychiatric recipients, to justify these… these ghettos, and we’re also used as experimental guinea pigs, for the chemicals and we’re used to make profits for the shareholders of the drug companies, and we’re used to prop up this Nazi industry of psychiatry… which had all the hallmarks of Nazism and undercovers itself as being beneficent medicine, when it is not.  And so, the wider answer is, that the individuals who dare, or are distressed enough to be different, need space to be creative and contributive, capitalism doesn’t generally allow this.  So we have two… I mean… I don’t expect a revolution, yet it requires a revolution for harmonisation, but I can see that as a peaceful revolution, it doesn’t have to be a violent revolution, to accept that there are those of us who are different.  Now, you know… the diversity of those of us who are different to a psychiatrised, is so vast that one can’t generalise about it.  We’re talking about individuals, who for one reason or another respond to our situation in a way of behaviour that gets psychiatrists to consider that we are inside their domain.  Now that has got a shifting goal post to it, it depends on the political culture, if you’re going to be labelled or not.  Now the answer to that is, stop labelling people and give people the space to operate, protect us from those who would wish to you know, be violent or are violent, but you don’t have to do them in in the process.  In other words, what we’re talking about is social control, and the answer is to not have social control, but to have support and protection.  We don’t want management, but we certainly sometimes want care.’
 
`Ok.’
 
`And its very individual.  Now this… you see the systems of psychiatry are de-individualising… x percent of us are called schizophrenic, we get tarred with the same brush, although the diversity of the experience of the person called schizophrenic is more diverse in behaviour than people who would be deemed as normies.  You know, if we could have that category, if we could have the psychiatric paradigm, deeming the normies as normies, and the others as something else, the diversity of behaviour amongst those who are not normies is much greater than the majority group who are within the confines of normality.  Now, you know, capitalism decides that these people are garbage as far as they’re concerned, why, because they’re not part of the money making process, so there’s no interest in them. I want a world which regains its compassion, and actually supports `vivre la difference’… it’s like the Portuguese poet said, `celebrate all the people that you are’… in capitalism you can only really celebrate the money making machine that allows you not to get psychiatrised.  Or put in to prison because you’re doing it the wrong way.  You know, there’s almost a parallel between tax evasion and tax avoidance, and being the normy and being the labelled person.  Society defines how wide the goal post is, and it changes according to the political atmosphere.  Now certainly we need to be protected from people who go around with axes, but most of those people are not psychiatrised people, they’re just angry people, responding again, I think, to a very, very contradictory way of life, that we’re all air to.  Widen out the space and give us a go. We make culture. I don’t want to eulogise the psychiatric survivor… ’
 
`Do you think there’s anything wrong with asylums in the sense that… you have a wonderful building, beautiful grounds, and… if it had the right people and the right ethos, would there be anything wrong with it?’
 
`I don’t think so… I would join the housing list, if I could live there with some of my kindred, and if we would have collective control.  You know, we often talk about this as survivors, that we would love to live in the institutions, the difference being that we would be collectively making decisions, in a really democratic way, about how we conduct our lives, and we would support each other, without psychiatry, so I love the building, but I don’t like the shit that goes with it… ie. psychiatry.’
 
`Well that was the basis of the therapeutic community?’
 
`Yes.  Yes.  But in… but in its practice, the therapeutic community could be just as oppressive as chemical psychiatry, because if you’ve got some geezer there who’s got some school of phenomenology or whatever it is, and dogmatic about it, you’re back in the same prison, in the sense that, you know, if you’re not behaving in the way that the mid-Atlantic accent wants you to, you’re somehow in denial or some other shit… so you’re getting the psychotherapeutic imprisonment rather than the psychiatric one.  When in fact what could have worked there, would be to give… and again it comes back to power… autonomy to the recipients, so that… it becomes a collective which makes democratic decisions and you don’t get bonus points if you’re working there.  If you live there, that’s one vote.  Do you see what I mean?’
 
`Mmm’
 
`I believe in self harmonising communities, but again that’s at odds, capitalism doesn’t like that sort of thing, because capitalism works on divide and rule, divide and conquer… now the moment you get too big a collective, they call you some sort of… radical group…’
 
`Mmm’
 
`…when in fact you… you know, you might be much more sensible that the capitalism that no one questions…’
 
`Yes, and you have too much power, and then how do you represent that power to the powers that be in Westminster, you know, and…’
 
[both talking together]
 
`Absolutely…’
 
`… that, and the health authority…?’
 
`Yes… yes… so I say, you know, for the thirty two mental health employees that are paid… paid to kind of swan around me… don’t bother with any of that shit, let me do my own brokerage, or get a broker in, give me the cheque, right… it costs a thousand pounds to keep me in that shit hole down the road, give me five hundred quid a week, I’ll never bother you again.  It means I can do my own brokerage.  What we’re talking about is being co-opted… now whether its in the name of psychiatry or anything else, if that means you no longer have a voice, its… its actually not going to work, for you as an individual, so what we need is what everyone else needs… I need to be special, I need to be able to take risks, and I need enough money to be able to do that… and I’m… I’m quite prepared to work, but I can’t do the nine to five.  I’m not made for it.  I tried that… it drives me up the wall… that doesn’t mean I’m nuts, it means that I’m being asked to do something I can’t do… that doesn’t mean they have licence to electrocute…’
 
`But that doesn’t mean… that also doesn’t mean you can’t work from nine to five…’
 
`That’s right.’
 
`And what that means is, you can’t… you can’t go to work on a tube, to an office…’
 
`Yes.’
 
`…in Mayfair?’
 
`That’s right.  You know, ease up on me, I might be able to work down the road and do something really useful.  Give me some power, and maybe I can do something very creative.  But… but the way that it was, when it first hit me, I couldn’t operate within that system.  Now the only option to me was the loony bin, because my behaviour was adjudged to be out of order.  I’m saying that my behaviour was out of order, because I was in an impossible situation… and that’s what I find… that you know… where the psychiatric paradigm falls short, is it doesn’t recognise that… its difficult for people like me to face impossible situations… that’s not an illness, it’s a consequence… [pause]… and my whole life has echoed this kind of… I’m a round peg in a square hole… and how am I supposed to respond to that?  I would love to have the strength, partially, to kind of bow to the system, but I think we can do better than that.  Why should I bow to a system, that I don’t actually want to be part of, although I have no choice.  I want a system that has enough room for me, without doing me in… [pause]… so I want a re-appraisal.  I don’t believe in the mental illness shit.  I believe that there are a growing number of individuals who find the constraints of our expected way of life, too difficult to negotiate within, so we make another one.  I don’t [both talking together]… [inaudible]’
 
`Yes, but there… therein lies an almost a capitalist ideal, which is the thought of… well, if I go and make myself… buy myself a life the way I want it to run, then I have my freedom and I can do what I want to do.’
 
`Yes.’
 
`And that is what… you know, almost what Mrs Thatcher was preaching for ten years…’
 
`Yes.  Yes.’
 
`So, its not that far away…in a way…’
 
`No… no… its frustratingly near in some ways… you know, I mean now… I mean, maybe I could just about earn a living as a musician and as someone who teaches bi-phonic chanting, but its unconventional…’
 
`And difficult, and not necessarily a career path, and all the rest of it…’
 
`That’s right..’
 
`And… [pause]’
 
`But if the walls were wide enough, if there was enough space… I… I would be part of `normyness’… but because it isn’t, I’m not…and I probably never will be.  But I’m big in Japan.’
 
`Do you think other… there are other people like that in a similar situation to you?’
 
`I meet a lot of kindred… I meet an awful lot of people every day, who are not fitting into the requirements of our official society, and we are generally part of an under class… that is part of the society.’
 
`And genuinely teetering on the edge of… of… of, of benefits and so on…?’
 
`Absolutely…’
 
`…desperately wanting to get back into the…?’
 
`Yes… I mean this is not that far away from the 1960s middle European tower blocking in what was Yugoslavia, and you know… each person… virtually every person in these blocks is going to the doctor for tranquillisers or something, because, you know, we’re living above a car park which is poisoning us, we’re smoking ourselves to death because it kicks up our meta… metabolism because of old crimes against us, and most of us are under the doctor one way or the other.  That seems to be the working class way of life at the moment.  You know, how many thousands of people live, actually like me, in partnership or singly, basically being fed by the doctor… as the gatekeeper to something or other… I mean I wouldn’t be here… I… I… you know, because there’s a million year waiting list, if I was simply homeless… but being ex-psychiatric it allows me the privilege of this rat hole above a car park, and I’m grateful for it, I don’t know any better.’
 
`Well, you do…’
 
`I want to go back to my [inaudible], but how could I survive there, I’m not used to that either… and I don’t know if I can still ride a horse.  You know, I mean I think in some ways its an incredible mother state, that I get a bus pass, pay nine pounds a week, and I’m expected to be quite a raver… I appreciate the space that I’ve been given within the subculture that I live in, but my saving grace is that I’ve still got a gob that works, otherwise I’d be in real trouble, because I’d be co-opted out of existence, and I’d be… going down for the Modecate clinic thing every two weeks and I’d become a very good, compliant patient.  But I wouldn’t be able to talk to you because I’d be too zonked out… on… on my maintenance dose.  And I would be less trouble.  But is that… is that humanity, I don’t think so.’
 
`If you won the lottery would you have any difficulty in deciding what you’d spend the money on?’
 
`No difficulty at all… I’d…’
 
`Would you enjoy it?’
 
`I’d love it.  But I don’t gamble… I just don’t gamble.’
 
`I was just… for arguments… ok, I mean… you, you, you… you inherit, you know, a large amount of money, what would you… what would be your dream?’
 
`Well my dream has always been the same.  Its actually something you referred to earlier on, which is to live in a community, an autonomous community, which is kind of out of the way, rather like the Sicilian village, where they put the `no… no… psychiatry no thanks’ notice on the village gates, and we look after each other. Umm… so I would love to have enough money to buy part of the healing village, this is something that I want to build, umm… you know, which is for people who are alternative, but we… but we make our own… we make our own lives there, so it would be a culture within a culture, but it would be democratic and collective.  That’s… that’s my dream… [pause].  I’m a very gregarious person and I need my own space, so you know, I would buy… [horn outside] I would Napsbury if I could… and turn it into a domicile, keep the grounds beautiful, with a collective… um… set of folks, who are like minded, living in there and we support each other, and there’s no psychiatry allowed. That’s my dream, a healing village.’
 
`But that wouldn’t be exclusive though? I mean, you wouldn’t…’
 
`No’
 
`… anybody could come…?’
 
`Yes please.  Anybody who follows the rules of non-violence and… umm.. kindred.  Kindred compassion.  And these places, you know, that we’ve got Buddha Valley, in Dumfriesshire… now you know, because there’s a Tibetan Buddhist place up there, err… people are coming from all over the world to buy property in that valley because it’s a wonderful community.  Again, in a way I’m hankering back to the collectivism of the camps, you know, I want all the good bits.  I want to live in a community that… first of all I want to live in a community, secondly I want to live in a community that electively cares… [pause]… and I want to be part of the supporting of that, and I want to be an equal of that… [pause]… and within the realms of capitalism, this is an extremely difficult thing to pull off… when you’ve got the devil all around… [pause]’
 
`Probably it’s impossible, that kind of thing, to get funding for something like that, you need a… you need a…you know…’
 
`You need a drug company to sponsor you…’
 
`Yeah…something… yeah…’
 
`You know… this is… this is the catch twenty two…’
 
`Or a millionaire or something that’s just a  bit…’
 
`But it doesn’t stop one working as far as one can towards it.’
 
`I mean in Victorian times there were the… the old… the old fashioned… I was going to say Philatelists… but that’s the wrong word…umm..’
 
`Philanthropists?’
 
`Philanthropists…’
 
`Yes… yes…’
 
`That had a… had… had a… I mean a vision…’
 
`The Quakers… the Quakers did it, beautifully…’
 
`Yeah… to build these places.’
 
`You know, they can keep the religion, I want the communality, and sometimes I want some of the religion.  But I want that always to be optional.  I think what makes a person old is dogma.  So its good not to know, it keeps you young… but its great to try to find out, as long as you never find out, that’s all right.  Maybe we can.  So basically I’m demanding Nirvana straight away, but it takes a time…’
 
`Well be ambitious…’
 
`Absolutely.. the… and the thing is to be realistic and wait for a miracle [pause].  Now within the existing frameworks we can do a lot better.  One thing is to turn the ECT places into ping pong halls, that’s already a long way in to doing something much better.  The second thing is to stop the biological nonsense and get into some real compassion, and into some real support on the basis that the other person decides what is done to them… nothing is done to a person without their… without their say so.’
 
`That’s a huge step though, Mike.’
 
`Let’s take huge steps…’
 
`Because that’s… I mean how do you… I mean that’s almost saying let’s have a hospital without drugs, almost…’
 
`Absolutely.  They never worked in the first place.  Yeah.  And you don’t have to call it a hospital… you can call it a retreat… you know there’s an over subscription to some retreats, of various orders… some of them are Buddhist, some of them Christian, where people basically hang out for a bit of peace.  Now, you know, with mainstream capitalism you need more and more of that, because it is a very destructive process that is the norm… [pause].  So now.. before we get there we can improve the existing, you know.. if its new boots in the concentration camp, we still need the new boots.’
 
`Uh huh…’
 
`Sad as it is.  But ultimately we must… we must venture to destroy these places because they destroy people… it doesn’t work.  Psychiatry is bankrupt, and psychiatry knows it, but the danger is that because psychiatry doesn’t know what else to do, and society doesn’t know what else to do, we are kind of stuck with it, in the meanwhile… as we move over to social psychiatry, which could be just as destructive as what we had before.  You know, we’ve moved from the religious institutions into the pseudo-medical institutions and we’re now about to move into the pseudo-social institutions.  And its not necessarily a move for the better… [pause]… but where there’s life there’s hope, and the best people, whatever… whatever the trip is, if it happens to be psychiatry, the best people are the people who have had direct experience, because the other people are simply theorists.  I do believe in the validity of experience, so the people to construct our new Jerusalem have to be those who suffered at its behest, otherwise we’re going to get it wrong again.  No one knows better than yourself, and who consults you…? [pause].
 
`Well… thank you Mike…’
 
`Thank you doctor…’
 
[camera: `we’ve got a few seconds left on there, can you give us one of your chants?’]
 
Mike chants.
 
[End of DVCPro Tape 4 of 4 – End of VHS Tape 1 of 1]