04 MIKE LAWSON summary

PLEASE NOTE
This is a brief resume of the interview, not a summary of the contents in sequential order.
 
 
 
DVCPro Tapes 01 to 04 – VHS Tape 01 to 01
 
 
Early Years
Mike Lawson was born on 25th May 1948 in a Stalinist internment or displaced persons camp in Kasakstaan, part of the USSR. He was born, in his words, 3 months after the death of Mahatma Ghandi, his spiritual guide and in the same year as the state of Israel.
 
Release from internment
He survived double pneumonia and malnutrition at two and moved from camp to camp with his mother and grandfather until the age of four. After eight years of internment his father and mother were eligible for release in 1948, his father left. His mother, heavily pregnant with Mike she was considered unfit to travel. She stayed in the camps for a further four years with her son. On their release they moved to Berlin.
 
Life in Berlin
Mike’s mother found that she couldn’t settle in Berlin, because of experience of being a Jewess at that time. She managed to get a work permit for England and once there worked as a cook in a Jewish old people’s home. In Berlin he stayed with his grandfather and lived happily as a street child.
 
Moving to England
At the age of six he was sent to Switzerland for six months for his lungs. When he joined his mother in 1955.  He didn’t speak a word of English. He settled in Finsbury Park and attended junior school. He was a very slight, lean boy. He survived by attacking the biggest boy he could see and usually getting beaten up himself in the process. He felt very much like an alien until he was ‘adopted’ by an Italian boy who taught him English. He joined a gang and rose in the school pecking order. He missed his Grandfather and was unhappy in Britain.
 
Secondary School
He moved to Haverstock Comprehensive School after narrowly failing the eleven plus. This school was well out of his area and he was one of two thousand unknown children. He was considered to be bright but rebellious. He made friends with misfits; he felt displaced, lonely and isolated. He could not concentrate at all at school and left with 3 ‘0’ levels and a one hundred yard swimming certificate.
 
Events leading up to first admission
After leaving school he went on holiday with granny to Spain for three months which he hated. He was feeling very isolated and inadequate and was becoming withdrawn.
He said that this was a shamanic inititiation or could be seen as the beginnings of schizophrenia. Things became so bad that he was frozen in a catatonic state. His mother phoned the GP, The GP phoned the psychiatrist and he admitted him to Napsbury hospital.
 
First impressions of Napsbury Hospital
He was at Napsbury Hospital for Eighteen months, first on Blackthorn Ward and then on Elder Ward (locked ward after section). He was terrified and excited. He assumed he would be killed. He had abdicated responsibility for his life. Napsbury was a large red brick gothic building in extensive grounds He felt like he was entering a Hammer House of Horror style film with a collection of very weird people on the set.
 
Treatment in Hospital
Once there he decided to indulge his elated feelings and get into being a ‘mega-loony’ and
enjoy the experience. Because he was young and bright and troublesome he got most of the attention and most of the beatings and abuse from the staff. He was sexually abused for sometime by an Irish staff nurse. He felt that the staff thought that anyone with any spirit or a mind of their own should be reformed or done in. His mother felt he was just ill, so patronised him and didn’t listen to him. This made him feel frustrated and angry. He didn’t want any punishment for his abusers, as he doesn’t believe in vengeance only wisdom and compassion.
 
Escape from hospital
He ran away from hospital and when caught he was locked in Elder ward for one year under Section 26.
 
Daytime activities
He said it was funny watching over medicated patients trying to do elaborate high-speed country dancing and falling over. He spent a lot of times in ‘The Pines’ Tea shop talking and hoping to start his ‘dangerous liaisons.’ Soon after one of these afternoons he lost his virginity in the toilet of a Consultant’s waiting room.
 
ECT
While sectioned, he stopped talking and was considered so ill that he was given 12 sessions of ECT, two in a week. Before the first session he was terrified and convinced he was to be electrocuted in the morning. He needed a lot of extra medication to sleep that night. He was given no information about ECT, just that he was being given it because he was non-communicative. He did start talking after the treatment, but felt deeply de­humanised and abused. This made him determined to fight back.
 
Activism
He persuaded some staff that it would be in their interest to let him of the locked ward for a few hours. The implication being that if he stayed, he would make life very difficult for them and ruin their day. He had become a ‘professional lunatic’. He organised a patient’s strike, realising if he could get all the patients to down tools then the staff would have listen to their complaints.
 
Leaving Napsbury
He met his first wife Colleen in hospital and left with her, against medical advice eventually marrying.
 
Mental Patients’ Union
He attended the first meeting of the Mental Patients Union at Paddington Day Hospital in 1970. Patients had escaped for the day from maximum-security hospitals to be there at this first meeting. He was constantly trying to challenge the ‘alleged care at Napsbury. He saw it as ‘brutal management at best and abuse at worst.’
 
Marriage and work
He was married to Colleen for three years, but he regressed becoming ‘emotionally weaker.  He had many menial or clerical jobs for just a few days at time. He knew that ’they were not for me’ and the medication and concentration levels were a problem too. He stopped taking his medication when ever he could always seeing it as poison. He said of Largactil; ‘you would be much better of with a realI1Y cheap bottle of brandy than that stuff.’
 
Recreational drugs
He first tried Cannabis when he was 19, he says it has a different and beneficial effect on him than most other people.
 
Compares mental institutions with concentration camps
Mike believes that mental Institutions are essentially concentration camps and should be closed. He agrees with the statement by Professor Bersaglia, an Italian professor of Psychiatry that ‘the only difference between the Nazi concentration camps and mental institutions is that it takes you longer to die in these institutions.’ He contests that they should all be closed and ‘you need no substitute for hell’ adding ‘because someone is different that is no reason to kick them in the teeth for it.’
 
Political activism
In the mid 1970’s he started to get ‘politicised’ and this came to a head when he was sacked from a job in the civil service for on account of his mental health record. He campaigned with his union and MIND to save his job and others like him. He was interviewed on Radio Four about this in 1976.
 
Mike was also getting involved with pressure groups, such as the Mental Patients Union, the Campaign against Psychiatric Oppression and the British Network for Alternatives to Psychiatry His influences at that time included; R.D. Laing, David Cooper and Alan Ginsbourg with books such as ‘The Divided Self and ‘The Dialectics of Madness.’ Around this time Mike met his second wife, a nurse. He felt at last that he was starting to get ahead.
 
Reflections on civil rights and community care
Mike spoke a lot about the lack of civil rights former mental patients have and for being arrested for smoking Cannabis in a public park and the subsequent police interview. He goes on to discuss what he saw as the failure of community care and the futility of putting vulnerable people in ‘suicide flats’ in tower blocks.
 
Reflections on the psychiatric system
Mike realised that he was not ill but misunderstood, so he became ‘politicised’ to fight for change. Luckily despite all his treatment he is still very articulate and this is unusual for a former inpatient. He read many different books on professional psychiatry and psychology to understand the medical dogma and point of view. He found that the hospital system is more to do with ‘socio­political convenience’ than with helping people and that there is ‘no empirical evidence to back up that psychiatry works. He thinks the senior doctors all know that psychiatry has had its day, but is just being prolonged for political reasons.
 
Mentalism
Mike was one of the first people in the 1970’s to raise the issue of ‘mentalism’ and while feminism and racism were being taken seriously everyone still thought ‘reasonable to punish people because they behaved differently.’ he met a Dutch delegation of mental health professionals and found that even then (1970’s) they were far more advanced than the U.k. He tells us of his admiration for the Italian ‘Law 180’ a hospital closure plan. This plan lead to the inception of community care in the U.K.
 
Non-compliance and campaigning
Mike again goes describe how psychiatry has failed, why and how he has taken a non-compliant point of view and the problems of doing so. He feels that he ‘almost has to subscribe to an alternative life in order to get out of the system and not be the compliant
drugged up patient.’ He says ‘relatively speaking it is a better quality of life, but it is hard.’
 
He discusses the social responsibility for change and how capitalism will always be at odds with mental health care. He says ‘we haven’ got a community and we certainly don’t have care.’ The move to social psychiatry isn’t necessarily a move for the better at all, ‘we need more communities so psychiatry becomes completely redundant.. ‘it is all about who has the keys.’ Mike’s response to psychiatry has given him a life, however there have been periods in his life where he has left the campaigning behind to be with his wife and follow his musical interests.
 
The psychiatric system and shamanism
‘Psychiatric hospitals haven’t changed at all, the paint may have and some of the language, but that is all. He found none of the treatments that they offered in any way positive, because they were all exerting control and never starting from the premise that the individual knows what is best for them. Mike drew a parallel between the Siberian Shamans and his life. He finds their experience extremely affirming. His view is that psychiatry treats many people with spiritual problems and psychiatry will not help them. ‘Psychiatry is the Nazism that our culture accepts, it is the thought police. It is social control and serves no one in the long term. Support must be given on their terms.
 
Admission to Ealing Hospital
In 1983 Mike had another serious relapse. He went to pieces emotionally, it was the end of his second marriage, and he was admitted into hospital in Ealing.
 
Diagnosis and treatment
His diagnosis was changed from schizophrenia to Manic Depression.  This meant he was given a cocktail of 6 different Neuroleptic drugs and mood stabilisers including Lithium and the old Largactil. This left Mike completely ‘zonked out’ and very withdrawn. He was told he needed ECT or he would be given even more drugs. This was a most desperate time for Mike; he didn’t know what to do and couldn’t see any way out. He was now suicidal and found the feeling of double inadequacy because he wanted to die but didn’t have the courage to do it. He refused his second ECT so the doctors gave more drugs. He was so disorientated by now when it came for the next session of ECT he was in no state to refuse it. By the sixth session of ECT he pulls himself together somehow gets himself out of hospital and referred to a homeless hostel in the borough of Ealing.
 
Moving into homeless hostel
This isn’t a bad place he says it is quite new and he becomes a trainee in electrical engineering in a sheltered workshop. The hostel is filled with ex psychiatric patients, ordinary homeless people and refugees straight off the plain from Heathrow. Eventually Mike is housed in ‘beautiful flat’ in Northolt. His wife comes back to him for a time, but it didn’t last.
 
Third marriage
Then Mike meets his third wife. She is a beautiful journalist who he met at a party and spent three happy years on the basis of his opening words ‘there is no such thing as schizophrenia, you know.’ He got the life he dreamed of; a woman he loved, two cats and a cottage by the sea. It was wonderful but also ultimately unfulfilling. Mike described as ‘doing co-dependency deluxe.’ However without her he would never have become the Vice Chair of National MIND and this is something which he is obviously proud. This common marriage did only last for three years. He said that he was not used to being happy, ‘it was too good to
be true’ and now his dream had come true maybe it was a bit of a disappointment.
 
Sterilisation
He also made a fatal misjudgment with his wife that centered on contraception. The scenario was described as’ she said she was tired of taking the pill, so perhaps she should get sterilised.  She told him just before the operation’ I will have your children, you know, Mike.’ Mike went ahead with the vasectomy and she ran off with the music teacher to have his babies instead.
 
Return to Hospital
Mike was going back to hospital in Wales this time driven by his wife.  They both had rejected any form of psychiatry and yet at the end of it all, she was leaving him and Mike was going back to hospital.
 
MIND hostel, Abergavenny
He was not in the hospital in Wales for long and got a place in a MIND hostel in Abergavenny. This was rather an odd situation because Mike was still the Vice Chair for the national organisation. So the staff thought he was some sought of pseudo-resident checking up on their efficiency and the other residents didn’t know what to think of him.
 
Mental Health Conference, Mexico
Around this time Mike attended one of the largest world mental health conferences in Mexico. There were some 2,300 delegates there.
 
Return from Mexico
When he got back he was homeless and set about getting official homeless status back in Ealing. He returns to the same homeless hostel that he lived in seven years earlier, by now it was very shabby and rundown. He eventually moved via the YMCA and a few short stays in hospital to his present flat in Ealing.
 
More reflections on psychiatry and asylum
Mike goes on to talk about the prospects of being sectioned again dealing with social workers and the police and the lack of community relationship.
 
Mike believes that nobody has a politically free opinion, including doctors and you can find yourself locked up for reasons other than you mental health. This is the problem of the Doctor dependent Diagnosis. All the treatment that psychiatry has given him he does not want to be rehabilitated which he sees more like reprocessing in practice. Rather he wants more space to operate on the margins of society.
 
 
Dreams of asylum
‘If I had a lot of money I would buy a place like Napsbury and turn into an inclusive healing village where psychiatry was not allowed. This would be open to anyone that follows the rules of non-violence and kindred compassion. I want to live in a community that electively cares. That’s my dream... I think what makes a person old is dogma, but it is good to try and find out along as you never do find out... Where there is life there is hope. Mike then finishes with some biophonic chanting.
 
 
INTERVIEW ENDS