National Preventative Mechanism Conference. Bristol 2014
Hello, thank you for inviting me to your conference. It is a pleasure to be given the opportunity to speak to you all.
I have ten or fifteen minutes to cover the topic of detention and the monitoring that goes with it. As I’ve just written 96000 words for a book related to that subject I think I am going to have to be very good at distilling my message into something concise and succinct.
An introduction – my name is Graham Morgan, I am 51 years old. I have a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and depression and anxiety and I have been known to drink far too much.
I have an MBE for services to mental health, I manage four staff in a small project in which the organisations HUG (action for Mental health ) and People First Highland speak out to change the world. I am here to speak on behalf of myself, HUG and VOX our National voice in Scotland.
I have been detained under the mental health act for the last four years I think, it’s either three or four.
I have been detained lots of times before but this is the first time I have been detained under a compulsory community treatment order.
And already I see that some of the stereotypes fall away slightly, I am not one of the 85% of us who are unemployed, I have no criminal record, I don’t live in poverty.
In fact I have a rich circle of friends, a rewarding and vibrant work and social life, I am busy being in love with my new beautiful partner, I eat a fairly healthy diet, I go for walks on the beach most days, I have my own ,admittedly small, house which I live in alone and happily.
In most senses of the word my life is not a tragedy, I do not feel personally oppressed and I do not feel marginalised but perhaps the way in which we choose to view ourselves is one of interpretation.
Last night I made dinner for my friends Chris and Jo, as is the way of communities we all belong to, we can gravitate to people with whom we share bonds and experiences. Both Chris and Jo have been sectioned. As far as I know, neither has been sectioned because they were about to kill themselves or anyone else and yet I do know when they were sectioned, they were acting in ways that some people do not recognise as normal.
At least one of those people has, since then, been suicidally depressed and not sectioned even though her life was at great risk. I will come back to both those subjects later.
Right, an anecdote.
Many years ago I was asked to speak at a conference, partly sponsored by drug companies, on ‘the democratic deficit.’ I do not and still don’t know what that is, but I chose to speak of some of the experiences people like me have had in the last fifty or so years.
I talked about lobotomies, and unmodified ECT. I talked about lifetimes spent in institutions and lifetimes hooked on valium and I talked about eugenics and sterilisation, really sort of a traditional, this is our story, this is our version of oppression, sort of thing.
At the end, one of the drug company employees stood up and challenged what I said.
I was, sort of, nervously delighted.
When you get people like me to tell our stories publicly, people very rarely have the courage to tell us that we are talking rubbish.
Anyway I answered him, I think, quite well.
At lunch time, the senior drug company executives went into a huddle and asked me to join them where they formally apologised for their employees conduct and implied that he would not spend much more time at all in their employment and I said “Thank you” because I did not know what else to say and felt a bit sick.
It is in that wee anecdote that the need for monitoring and safeguards are so abundantly apparent.
In our life time terrible things have been done to people like me across the world, in fact they still are, people are stilled chained up in various parts of the world, because there is no treatment available in some communities and, even in this country, abuse and prejudice is common.
I certainly have been told I should be killed, when I told a stranger my diagnosis.
Life changes, culture changes. I don’t have confidence that the abuse we now see the past to have been won’t be replicated in some new way or that our present treatment won’t be seen as abusive by future generations.
I don’t have confidence in the security of those anarchic voices of dissent that are free to challenge and criticise and not be intimidated by the establishment or the culture they live and work in.
We need those safeguards, we need that voice that won’t allow for or rest for changing the terrible fact that 13 percent of people like me have not been touched by another person in the last year.
We need the agencies that safeguard, like the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland and we need them to be independent of government and the statutory sector and we need them to be strong and influential and in tune with the experience of people like me.
We also need the growing flood of advocacy groups like Hug and VOX and the people who speak up and are public about their experience and confident of their reception, because when we are visible and can point out the sadness of our lives and the occasional poverty of our treatment; the temptation to do awful things to us for our own good or for the good of society becomes harder to enact because we are witness and we are visible and we make the people around us witness too.
And at the level of the individual we need those safeguards when our liberty is taken from us and we need those principles that give us a right to appeal and give us the right to be represented and heard. To have independent mental health officers and solicitors and advocates and named persons
Because, when you take away our freedom, when we have usually committed no crime and when you treat us differently to everyone else you need to be sure that you are doing the right thing and that, for lack of safeguard, it doesn’t become a very bad thing indeed.
I’d better make this real not a lecture where you know all the answers already and I’d better not refer to you as ‘you’ because I know most of you are here to protect against abuse and are not the ‘you’ I would like to refer to! If that makes sense!
When I last went into hospital, I had in effect, collapsed after a very bitter and traumatic separation, in fact it is still bitter and desperate. It is now five years since I have heard from my son, I do not know where he lives or what he does or who his friends are, and now that our house has just been sold neither do I know where my wife lives any more.
Any way I got to a place where I could no longer think or sleep properly. I got to place where I would drink too much and fall asleep in my chair and drag myself to my mattress on the floor and find my dreams turn into living nightmares and my thoughts roar in my head. I woke up with my eyes red raw, didn’t want to eat or wash or tidy and was obnoxious at work and, in that world, I forgot to take my medication and by and by decided my medication was something I should never take and by and by the knowledge that I have, that I am filled with evil swilled around me and the knowledge that I am possessed by a devil took me over.
To me it seemed obvious that I needed to get rid of the pain and agony and evil I inflicted on everyone around me. I thought to myself that I could not cope with the mess I made of life as a human but maybe I could become a spirit in the sky. A beautiful spirit that gave love to all the people I was hurting.
To burn myself to death, to release that spirit seemed obvious and to cut my wrists so that all the contaminated blood in my body flowed away also seemed obvious.
I thought then that no one would be hurt and that I might find some peace.
The various professionals that help me thought the opposite and I ended up in hospital on a section.
For the first seven weeks I was on special observations. I will never be able to convey what it’s like to have a nurse by you every moment of every hour for seven weeks.
I am part of a small group of people who can shudder at the memory of not being able to turn the light off at any point, not cover myself with a bedsheet, not sit on the floor the other side of the bed. I am one of those people who have learnt which nurse will keep the door almost shut when you are going to the toilet and which one will slightly avert their eyes and I am one of those people who hangs on for hours until that nurse comes on shift.
I know what it is to be all a jangle and to run and have the alarms set off, the whole hospital shattering with the bells of those alarms, to be chased down corridors by nurses, to have cars slew to a halt in the car park and then to be escorted back to the ward by a crowd of people in front of my shocked and upset friends.
It is lonely and humiliating and awful and you would think that I, who have spent a lifetime standing up for patients’ rights, would do the same in this situation for myself. But when the mental health officer gave me booklet after booklet on why I was being detained and what my rights were, I put them away in my locker unread and when I was told I had a right to an advocate I only wanted that advocate to make the ward allow a colleague who had been told she couldn’t hug me when she visited to be able to do so and when I was told I could have a lawyer I was keen to ignore this and speak for myself.
And on the day that the first tribunal was to be held to determine my liberty for the next 6 months I was frightened and anxious but above all excited. To walk out of the hospital, to touch the grass and smell the air and walk on mud on my way to the tribunal and to see all the people and cars and buildings as I journeyed across town was wonderful and joyous and just absolutely fab. I was much more interested in the fresh air than the paper that detailed my rights or the forum that would hear my voice.
And that is why we need our treatment and our care and our detention monitored and safeguarded because, when we are in these places and when we are powerless we often accept everything that happens to us.
We become quiet and the right to a voice and to involvement becomes a concept we cannot quite grasp. And if we are indignant and noisy then we become someone who is ill and needs managed and whose voice is heard but not listened to.
And yet we remember. We remember the loneliness of detention, we remember the pain we are in, we remember the burns as we poured boiling water over ourselves when escorted to the kitchen and can look at the scars on our hands from where we gouged tracks in our skin with the forks from the dining room and the memory is terrible and the knowledge that without all this restriction we would be damaged awfully or dead is something that is hard to come to terms with or make sense of.
Now onto freedom. My compulsory treatment order means that I have to get my jag every two weeks, it means I have to let my nurses into my house and see my psychiatrist.
Some people ask me, when I am so well, why I accept this, why I don’t challenge it.
And in two weeks I will – I will go to my first tribunal in three years and I am not sure that I want to say anything, I just want to see the people who do these things. I am not cross with them and in fact I am almost more anxious about what will happen if I win.
I don’t want to take my medication – I know and everyone around me knows what happens when I don’t but I don’t want to take it because my heart tells me there is nothing wrong with me, that I can live fine without those drugs but I do find my life very precious and very joyous and I do not want this to change.
I want my life to continue to be wonderful but given the choice I would do what my intellect tells me would destroy it and the joy I have around me.
And what does it mean? – half an hour to get my jag every two weeks, and hour to see my CPN, who I think is a lovely person and enjoy seeing.
A wee bit of difficulty if I want to travel much or go abroad, but it’s not that much of an imposition – I have less choice in many other areas. I have to live by all the laws and conventions we all live by, I have to work, I have to behave, almost.
I would sort of like to say;
“How can you all do this to me?”
And yet if I am brutal with myself, not much is being done, my life is good and perhaps, without such measures, I would be more frequently back to that place of awfulness where my life, my world is at risk.
And yet I can think of many people who would give a different story, people who reject the medical model of illness, people who don’t believe they are ill, people who see their experience as a spiritual awakening, people who are not part of the mainstream and crave the chance to be left in peace to get into whatever mess they are likely to get into without being scrutinised and told what to do and how to live and what to do to keep, as we might call it, ‘well.’
And I think to myself this is true too and that if I were in a different world and a different place, I would be filled with anger and resentment and certainly wouldn’t come to events like this.
And lastly
There are some very loud voices against detention, in fact the people who represent people like me at a global level are trying to liberate people like me from the oppression of my detention even though I tell them it would probably result in my death.
The UN rapporteur on torture has stated that compulsory and forced treatment for mental illness amounts, in some cases to torture, and is always inhumane and degrading treatment and that it should be stopped.
So let me turn in another direction. My conversation with people who have been detained nearly always reveals great ambivalence and unease about detention but most often an agreement that it has or can save either their lives or the lives of those close to them.
And I would begin to finish at long last with the statement that, in groups like Hug we are very used indeed to hearing our members saying that they have turned for help when they are suicidal. Yet when they have gone to the hospital, the nurse or the doctor says that they are not ill enough for admission, even that they are not ill at all and can get no treatment.
We hear the words that; if we want to die, we have every right to and no one can stop us and this fills us with despair and confusion because often we are doing all we can not to die and to be told death is our right helps in no way at all.
Although in reality it is often the police who do intervene when we are in this desperate place.
I was on the Millan committee that did the work for the present mental health act in Scotland.
People say;
“Isn’t it ironic that you are detained by the very legislation you helped create”
But sometimes I think;
“Isn’t it sad that legislation that is meant to protect and care for us has allowed us to walk out of our houses in despair, craving help, a soft voice, a hug, some sort of a solution, only to be told that we don’t have that right.
I think it sad that when I speak to the police, that they automatically know what I am talking about when I say we are used to them taking us to hospital when we are in despair, only for the doors to be closed to us.
That, when we are desperate, especially if we have got drunk to deal with it, that it can be easier to arrest us for a breach of the peace and to keep us in the cells instead of finding that sanctuary and security we can all need and crave at different points in our lives.
Well that was a sad point to finish on.
I would remind you . I am on a section – I am meant to have a terrible illness, I don’t believe I have.
I am meant to die twenty years earlier than the rest of the population I don’t believe I will and I don’t much care.
Tomorrow I will be being silly with my love, we will be kissing and cuddling and laughing – I am blessed, unlike so many other people.
So many people that I work with who also speak out and want to change the world but still have that edge in their voice that says life is always difficult, may always be and that it is in these desperate places that we need those daily demonstrations of humanity that remind us that police, psychiatrist, social worker, patient, carer. We are all a part of this, we all have a need for understanding and warmth.
We need understanding even when our friends and loved ones are in tears and pain and bitter about the worlds we enter and can feel that we seek those dark places, despite their love and their care.
We need warmth even when the nurse pulls the barrel on her alarm as yet again we try to gouge hurt into our skin, and we need warmth as the staff rush to our room and we need warmth when our nurse gets impatient with following us from place to place on the ward and we need warmth when we are angry with the very people that would protect us.
And most of all we need warmth because when we are detained, for whatever reason, we can feel alone and abandoned and apart from the world of those people who cannot even imagine the possibility that they would ever do or think the things that could get them locked up and taken away from the buzz of a café, the chatter of their friends the cuddles of their children, the taken for granted belief that life gets better, that hope is just around the corner.
And here I finally finish. I am writing these last words in the early morning in a country hotel. I am looking out at the rising dawn on the loch that I can see through the window of the wood panelled room that I am sitting in.
I am making assumptions about who I will be speaking to today but I would guess this is the sort of place many of you would go to for a break, a celebration, and you, who might be the person who next walks through the door as I write this, need, I think, to remember that when you protect and cater for people like me that it is not some alien group or difficult person that you are looking out for, it is your next door neighbour, it is the person drinking wine at the table besides you, it is possibly even you yourself that the safeguards need to be there for and in place for.
Thank you so much for listening to me, my world has on many occasions been so dark that I cannot describe it but after this conference I will walk the streets of a city I do not know and I will sit in cafés and look at passers by and think in a short while I will be back with my love and I will be happy as I am much of the time nowadays.
I will never forget that if I hadn’t been detained I would not have the brightness or lightness in my step I have today. I wouldn’t be here at all. And so going back to the beginning of my talk, oppressed me? It depends on how you want to see the world.
Thanks again