Not long after my daughter Isla was born, she was 12 weeks old, I had what is known as Peurperal Psychosis. This is when a new mother tends to get very high rather than low and you become what is known in the psychiatric trade as manic. I had returned with my baby to my parent’s home to have chiropractic treatment on my back, because it had been damaged during childbirth. Somehow my chiropractor released some tiny part of my neck and back that allowed magic to happen.
For me it was the most exhilarating period because it opened a part of my brain that few of us use unless we are labelled “psychic”. I firmly believe that all of us possess this ability, it is just that most of us have forgotten how to use it. It is what I call the primitive part of our brain. That is not to say that it is unformed or basic, but that it is an instinctual part. This actually makes it infinitely more sophisticated than the bits of our brain that we DO use, no matter our intellect.
It is the part of our brain that our ancestors used to their advantage so they knew which way the wind would blow, to disguise their scent and to keep them alive. We can marvel at what successive civilisations have achieved but somewhere in the process of becoming civilised, successive generations have lost the ability to truly connect with our world. We are no longer rooted to the earth and our place in it like any other creature or as our early forebears were.
I believe that because I was so flushed with unconditional love at the birth of my daughter, that this missing link reactivated and some extraordinary inner knowledge of the world took over. I could predict with effortlessness exactly when the rains would come, when the sun would shine. If the phone rang, I would know who was on the line before anyone picked it up. Or I would pick up the phone as it rang and immediately greet the person on the other end by name before they spoke, because I knew who it was. If someone had been shopping, I could describe, in minute detail, what they’d bought without having seen it.
On one occasion, I was breast-feeding my daughter and stopped momentarily to consider what her father was doing at that given moment. I looked at my watch and just instantly KNEW. He was in Somerset and I was clear across the country in Hertfordshire at the time. He rang later that evening and claimed he had not stopped all day. To his astonishment, I corrected him by telling him that he had sat down at 3.30 and drunk a mug of asparagus soup.
But alongside these talents came the drive to remove anything impure or unclean. Poverty, hunger, conflict, strife. I found myself walking into the middle of a bonfire in my parent’s garden and stamping out all the negativity in the world. As I named each vice, I would do a little ‘war dance’. I remember thinking, whilst I was doing so, that anyone watching me would think me mad. When I gave birth to my daughter, the woman in the room next door died in childbirth. I recall reflecting for hours why it had been her and not me.
I did not sleep for 3 nights on the trot. I called it wakeful sleeplessness. I found myself chanting in languages that I do not speak, but instinctively knew were the languages of the ancients. I could astral project my body. Next day, I would write down what had happened when I did and get someone else to sign and date it, including the time of day. I would then ask whoever I had ‘visited’ to write down the dream they had had the night before and date it. The two accounts always tallied. I had a strange rash on my arms and attempted to remove this sign of impurity in myself, by rubbing them raw with a pumice stone. And that is when I was stopped. Quite rightly.
But what happened next wasn’t right. The GP was brilliant and said that all I needed was to sleep. She was right. Trouble was, I would only imbibe natural substances. She could not find anything powerful enough that was herbal so my family tried to trick me by putting a sleeping draught in a drink of hot lemon. I instantly tasted it and refused to drink it. That’s when the psychiatrist was wheeled in.
Now, one of my good friends is a psychiatrist and he is brilliant. This one, however, was rude and offensive, and in my opinion, not up to the job. She, the GP, a social worker, my husband and I, sat in my parents’ sitting room to plan what was to be done with me. The entire time, with me sitting in the room, this psychiatrist referred to me in the third person. When I pointed out that this was insulting and depersonalising, I was labelled “difficult”. The GP proved to be my heroine. She begged my husband to sign the paper that would ‘section’ me, because my admission would then be considered ‘voluntary’ and leaving the unit would be easier for me.
Thank heavens she did. My husband was discouraged from coming with me so I went in the ambulance alone. By then the sleeping draught had started to kick in. I was confused and disorientated. I could not really grasp what was happening to me. When they had to take me through the mortuary to admit me, I began to wonder whether I WAS the woman that died in childbirth. To believe that this was my technicolor version of purgatory. By the time I got to the unit, I was unsettled because nobody would answer my single question, how long would they keep me there?
I got so frustrated by the endless unhelpful or mealy mouthed responses, that I pulled a phone towards me sharply, to ring home and ask THEM if they knew. The cord came out the wall. Suddenly, I was labelled ‘violent’. Separated from my baby, I was put in a ward three floors above her. You could only access this ward by a lift worked by a key. It was austere. Extremely. I could do no damage to myself or others. I was watched like a hawk. I was given drugs in a small plastic cup and observed closely to ensure I swallowed them. I felt disenfranchised, dehumanised, disaffected. I felt totally alone. That no one heard me. That nobody would. Why? Because they chose to fit me to a set of behaviours and label me. And that little would change their minds.
I slowly made sense of what had happened to me. I told no one else what I thought. My experience of psychiatrists to that point filled me with distrust. I began to suspect that they would listen to what I said but not really HEAR. That they would just put me in a box labelled ‘manic’, ‘hysterical’, ‘delusional’. So I learned what they wanted to hear and said it. I did anything to get myself discharged.
Eventually, I was. By then they had obliterated what they could not understand. What they feared. My ‘psychic’ abilities. They turned me in to a zombie. And I got the more common form of post natal depression. I lived in a fog for 18 months. Inside I was screaming, “I’m here! I’m me! Can’t you see me?” To the outside world I was disengaged, disinterested, dysfunctional. My family watched in horror, but did not know how to reach me.
It was only when my brother-in-law, who I love very much, told me I had to make a change, that I did. I summoned all my courage and went to another psychiatrist. He told me this:
You have a chemical missing from your brain. Your symptoms tell us this.
We do not measure how much is missing.
We cannot tell you now how much you will need to get better.
We only know when to stop the drugs when you stop displaying your symptoms.
That’s what you need.
So I said to him, “Given the questions anyone would ask you about the science, or apparent lack of it, of what you’ve just said, who do you think a Martian would consider mad, me or you?”
He conceded that, on the face of it, that he would probably be considered insane. However, he believed that the medication was what I needed. I, on the other hand, was of the opinion that counselling is what would help me. I proposed a compromise. I would take his drugs if he referred me to a counsellor. It took 18 months for me to come out the other side and to reclaim myself.
The abiding impression I have from these experiences is how often mental health patients are marginalised. All this does is to exacerbate the problem. Why is our attitude to psychological problems still so often trapped in a Victorian mindset? Something like Mr Rochester locking his wife in a tower? Why do we pour sympathy on someone who has broken their leg and has it in plaster? And yet we tell someone struggling with emotional issues to pull themselves together! Are we really that superficial? We only believe an illness is kosher if there is visible proof? Too many mental health patients are given the same medication over and over again. If it is working, fine. If it’s not, why isn’t it changed?
Laziness? Disinterest? Or the malaise that seems to affect this country…that if it isn’t visibly broken, there is nothing wrong…
Caro Field Author 