This is all going to be a bit muddled, but it is about time I got in touch with Mad in America again about a follow-up to this –https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/06/drugs-thank-you-ill-pass/ ]
It didn’t paint the picture I wished to paint. I aimed to show what a selfish git I was. I only partially succeeded. And I was aiming frustrations about my own unacceptable behaviour towards a few silly psychiatrists etc.
I left out all the important bits (the selflessness of others), in a misguided attempt to protect someone from being embarrassed.
“As far too many people know today – especially the distressed families of young men and women derailed by marijuana use – Powell’s decree was all too successful. Hospital beds for the mentally ill are extraordinarily hard to find and keep.
We are good at destruction in modern Britain, just as the Victorians were good at building.
This country, almost incapable of completing any major building project well and on time, is extraordinarily diligent and quick when it comes to trashing the irreplaceable legacy of a wiser past – ripping up railway lines, destroying grammar schools, driving mental patients out into the wilderness while selling off their hospitals as bijou ‘luxury’ apartments.
No doubt there was plenty wrong with the old mental hospitals, back in 1961. Nobody is suggesting returning to their methods and regimes. But that could have been put right without shutting them down, a money-grubbing, and yes, ruthless, short-sighted folly.
The mistake, like so many others of the time, seems to be so big that nobody will admit it was wrong and reverse it. Yet, if we do not, the price will grow higher every year.”-Peter Hitchens :Enoch’s craziest, cruellest idea
I remember first reading that article over four years ago. It hit me where it hurts the most, (and it had nothing to do with Enoch Powell being fairly criticized). I initially disagreed strongly, then 30 seconds later so many things were sinking in. It wasn’t a lot of fun.
I’ve been haphazardly studying the history of psychiatry, psychology, eugenics, euthanasia, song lyrics and a few other things ever since. It is very difficult to get one’s head around these things. The authors of the best and worst artefacts have various biases that can be hard to detect by someone not formally trained in such matters. I definitely am not formally trained!
But gradually I am forming my own opinions on various things. I won’t intentionally bore you with what these opinions are right now. Many of these opinions of mine are built on very shaky foundations, and it only takes a few lines of a few good articles to blow down the partially furnished straw houses in the most populated neighbourhoods in my mind. Blah blah blah… etc.
Each time I’ve read ‘Enoch’s craziest, cruellest idea’, it has usually led to distant foggy memories I’d rather not remember. Then I walk through the fog almost blindly, writing down what I see in the form of ugly poetry.
A week or two ago, the memories were a lot closer to the present, and the fog wasn’t so thick. I wrote this:
There is no way I should have been released to the public in February 2017. A__ came to pick me up from the hospital one Friday or Saturday morning, and after many hours of bureaucratic nonsense I was set free.
I shouldn’t have been. The concerned nurses expressed to A__ their concerns. I was oblivious to all that at the time. The decision to release me was because I was one of the least crazy people on the ward, and I was taking up a much-needed bed.
I can argue until the cows come home about how disgusted I am about the drugging of the mentally ill against their will etc… And I probably will, and when the cows decide to leave home again I won’t even have run out of breath in uttering the first paragraph of why such practices disgust me.
But the incompetence of the psychiatrists aside. The nurses, health assistants etc, the lady who dished out the daily lunches and dinners, and all the other staff ‘in the trenches’, the wide variety of volunteers who did everything they could to introduce sunshine to the darkness. A couple of ladies in some sort of small building in a park, which I am almost certain had something to do with the Church of England, handed us field-tripping crazies out menus with prices that were probably identical to greasy spoon cafe prices in the early post-decimalization 70s, handing out double portions of toasted cheese sandwiches, and other delights, perfectly brewed tea that seemed a lot sweeter and milkier than what was asked for… I can’t keep up with the thoughts that are racing about. There was so much selflessness. Almost unbelievable.
Poor A__. She drove several miles to visit me every single day. She went out of her way to, well… She had a lot to contend with. She worked full-time. She lived in a family home with one of her brothers. Only a couple of years after her father had passed away, and only about 4 years after her mother had passed away.
Bills were piling up for various reasons. If I hadn’t been a cannabis fiend I know without doubt that I would have been able to help them not have to sell the family home. It was an ongoing thing before I was sectioned, but I paid no mind to it at all. All I cared about was getting high etc. She had so much on her big little shoulders. And I did nothing to help her. And when not visiting me she was finalising the sale of a house that she never wanted to sell. The proceeds were split three-way between her and her two brothers.
I kept whining every day about how I wanted to be free. How everything was so unfair. It was all about me. And she did everything in her power to get me out, so she could take care of me herself.
In February 2017, She found a place in a nice area of East Cheshire and put a deposit down to rent the best property she could find at short notice. She didn’t just put down a deposit, she paid six months’ rent in advance.
She gave up her job.
I was released from the hospital.
She took care of me for as long as the money ran out. And somehow she applied for a passport for me. We went to Belgium for a week. After 6 months or so, money was beginning to run out, so she started to work again. And by January 2018, she helped me find some sort of work. I was not exactly fully sane, but I was sane enough to realise what a sacrifice she had made for me.
I should have been in some sort of asylum at least until then.
And there should have been people assisting her as well. I am guessing that in days gone by when the sounds of funeral bells meant something to most people, it is unlikely that she would ever be in a position to sell her family home.
This is all a bit muddled. And just a sketch of a picture I intend to paint one day soon, hopefully, my follow-up article to ‘Drugs? Thank you, I’ll pass’.
In subsequent years, things have gradually improved. And, well, A__ has been through a lot. And it is about time I got my finger out. I am not insane anymore!
This barely scratches the surface, but I will be writing an article and A__ will be at the heart of it.
It is about time more mental health blog articles were about the damage cannabis can do, focusing on the mostly unsung heroes, good Samaritans… The real victims!
Selfish gits like me deserve little to no sympathy.
Even if I was the most selfless person imaginable now, which of course is not close to being so, there is no excuse for my very recent past behaviour.
God bless the real victims of Enoch’s craziest, cruellest idea.
…
Beware, Oh Take Care