REPRESENTATION & SECTIONING: BEING LISTENED TO

REPRESENTATION & SECTIONING: BEING LISTENED TO

Highland Solicitors 2010 and Mental Health officer Training from 2012

Thank you for letting me have an opportunity to talk to you.

I am going to talk about sectioning and the mental health act and tribunals and representation and the whole feeling of not being listened to.

I have been sectioned in total 10 times and am currently detained under a community treatment order. I have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and alcohol abuse.

If I am going to appeal to those of you who will one day move in to mental health and the whole legal bit that goes with this then somehow I feel I need to make what we go through as real as I can manage.

What I will talk about, in a moment, may make me seem alien and confusing, it may make you think why deal with such terrible times? but hopefully, as I speak, I can make people like me seem real; as often damaged people but nevertheless people, who, without any doubt are the same loving, feeling, confused, supportive people that you all encounter everyday amongst your friends and your families and your colleagues.

I am 54 years old, I am a father, I lived with my wife for 25 years, I have worked full time for the last 20 years, I am quiet and love writing and reading. I love walking on the beach in gales as the wind whips the sand around my face and I love musing in the late evening as the sun sets and turns the dark water red. I love to write poetry and prose and the read and read and read, I love to walk in the hills and to see my breath panting as I ski badly in the forests. I have a work life that consumes me and wonder every day at the wonderful people that I am privileged to work with. I have served on government committees and in fact was one of the two users who were on the Millan committee that paved the way for the present mental health act. I have an MBE for services to mental health and I find nothing better than walking besides a wee toddler as her mother and friends natter outside a café on a Saturday morning. I am busy being in love, walking hand in hand with a beautiful person whenever I can, talking through the night, being silly, planning futures together, reinventing our histories.

And yet I get ill and, even worse for someone who is generally seen as intelligent and rational, in my heart I don’t believe that I have an illness or, when I am seen as ill, accept help willingly and then I get sectioned.

So what is there to tell?

Imagine that you have had a long, long day, your mind is fuzzy, your eyes itch with the hot prickle of tiredness. It’s been a hard day at work and you can’t get the arguments and the issues out of your mind.

You crave sleep and a drink and a soft bed and someone to talk to.

You go home and remember you are alone, that you no longer have a wife and son and the friends who populated your past.

You can’t be bothered to make a meal and think it would be good to have a shower and then you say to yourself why bother? You’ll have one later and you slump into your chair and pour yourself a huge drink.

You think you would love to talk to someone but then realise that there is no one you feel able to speak to. Late in the evening you think that you should go to bed but you feel dragged down with the weight of your thoughts into the heaviness of your chair, so you have another drink.

Finally you go to bed but the mattress on the floor is uncomfortable and the sheets dirty. You lie there absolutely exhausted but you can’t sleep. You just can’t stop thinking, so you turn on the radio and after a time slip into a doze only to be woken by the shipping news.

You turn off the radio and lie there thinking again, praying for sleep but you don’t sleep, sometimes you slip into a doze that is populated by waking dreams that you can’t make sense of but which seem as real as day.

You wake early in the morning and lie staring into space, too tired to drag yourself out of bed. Eventually you get up or you’ll be really late for work, you quickly drink a cup of coffee and drive to work where you lose yourself for a time in the mechanics of it all and then you come home again and you are even more tired and want a drink even more and you wish so much for sleep, but again you only doze for a few hours, and this carries on for day after day after day.

As the weeks go by, your thoughts begin to get tangled, life passes in a blur, you can’t really concentrate, your pills for depression and schizophrenia lie in the untidy bathroom and sometimes you can’t be bothered to take them, until somehow, you never take them and it seems to you that you never needed them in the first place.

In fact the more you think about it the pills are horrible, it’s like willingly poisoning yourself so you decide never to take them again.

And as the days go by you realise that it was true all along that you are a horrible person.

All this talk of illness is a lie, in fact you are so horrible that you are evil, all you have ever done is damage people. You damage people because you have a devil in you.

It is terrible to be such a bad person, to be so awful to everyone around you, you wonder what to do to stop it.

You really don’t want to die and then you realise that, of course, if you could purify yourself. Maybe, if you could get rid of the evil and welcome purity into your life then you could do some good again.

That is what happened to me in December ten years ago following a very bitter break up to my marriage. My decision, when I got to that fractured point was to find some way of becoming a spirit of beauty.

I thought I was no good as a human, that if I could just find beauty and purity I could live as a spirit in the air above the beach in Nairn and waft a wonderful energy into the community.

I needed to reach a new dimension and, in order to do that, I thought if I could drain the blood from my body which, as I saw it was infected by evil spirits, and then pour petrol over myself and incinerate myself, then I would be bringing a great gift to the world. Not only would I stop destroying everything with my evil but I would actually reach a state of beauty that could only do good.

It seemed so good all this and so laughable that people thought that I had an illness. I wished they would understand me.

I phoned my community psychiatric nurse to tell her I had never been ill and no longer needed help from people like her and within a few hours had been sectioned and put in hospital where I stayed for the next three months and now, although I am at home now and working in a stressful and responsible job and am extremely content I am still on a section.

So my task now – why on earth would I need representation and advocacy, why would I need the independence of a MHO or the help of a solicitor?

In retrospect, I am so grateful that I was sectioned; it kept me alive, kept me breathing, allowed me to regain an appreciation of myself and this wonderful world.

If a solicitor or an advocate had somehow managed to represent me at tribunals and we had won, I would be dead today - so what on earth is the point in involving such people when there are professionals far more qualified in the intricacies of mental ill health to make decisions about people’s health and treatment than a legal professional or an advocate would be?

And yet let us think.

When I was sectioned, I believed with all my heart that I was on a mission to save the world and my friends, it seemed so unfair to me to take away my freedom and autonomy.

When I was admitted to hospital I was immediately put onto constant observations. This meant that a nurse accompanied me wherever I went.

I had not a moment of privacy. I was not allowed to step foot off the ward. I couldn’t go the toilet or have a shower without being watched, I couldn’t have any part of my body out of view of the nurse, I wasn’t allowed to turn the light off at any time.

I had to take medication that I thought was poisoning me and, in those early days, when I ran off the ward to escape, the alarms would blare and I would be chased down the corridors by nurses and caught and marched back to the ward in front of my friends and acquaintances.

And all the time I was saying “Please, please let me do what I want to do”. And the nurses would say “no” and the doctors would say “no” and my friends would visit the ward and say “no you are in the right place” and my family would phone in bewilderment and say “no you should stay there” and my named person, who was my best friend, would say with complete candour that she fully supported all the restrictions being placed on me.

Do you know how terribly, terribly alone you can feel at times like this? When not one living soul agrees with you where you have not a scrap of freedom? Where what you think is good is impossible to do? and what you think is a terrible thing, such as taking medication, is forced on you.

The loneliness, as Christmas and New Year and my birthday and Burns night go by, seven weeks where you are deprived of every vestige of privacy and every vestige of freedom.

You are voiceless and there is no one at all who sympathises with your point of view

And this is not because I had committed a terrible crime, but because I was seen as ill.

Maybe it is possible to see that, when in extreme circumstances, we need to deprive people of their freedom that we also need safeguards.

We need safeguards, because when liberty is removed, we need to be sure that we do it with justification and morality, we need safeguards because when we take away autonomy, we need to, at least give the person the right to have their views known and we need safeguards because, without those protective features, in a different culture and in a different climate huge abuses can occur.

Where people feel voiceless and feel they have no control of their lives because of the intervention of the state, we need to be as sure as we possibly can, that there is an outside form of representation, and an independence of decision making, that keeps the gravity of the intervention and the reasons for the intervention as clear and ethical and as justified as possible.

When I was sectioned, I had a right to advocacy, in the sense that I could have someone help me speak out or speak for me on any issue that affected me and I had the right to a solicitor to help me appeal my detention or accompany me to the tribunal and make sure that my views and my rights had a legal airing.

When you are very, very alone; so alone that you think that not a single person will speak for you, this is a terribly important function but it is a complicated task, it is extremely rare for people to win their appeals at tribunals and this can be good to my mind, because although we may not believe it, in most cases we are desperately in need of the protection and treatment we so strenuously reject.

But we need that safeguard, so that we don’t get to the point where we pass over complete power to another person to make fundamental decisions about our lives, without that power being scrutinised and examined and, if we wish it, challenged.

The last time I was sectioned, I didn’t seek an advocate or a solicitor.

First of all, I had enough awareness, that I knew that I wouldn’t win, and secondly, I didn’t want the pain to be dragged out.

I didn’t want, yet another person, dragging through my life and with a polite smile rejecting my views but without the words that say it. But more important, I didn’t want an interim order to be taken out solely because the solicitor delayed the process or took so long to come from Glasgow to see me that all I would have, would be one tribunal shortly followed by another one with all the pain that entailed.

In matters as serious as freedom, you would think that a tribunal to determine my detention, would be exceptionally grave but my abiding memory was of my joy that I would have a couple of hours off of the ward and would be able to feel grass under my feet and fresh air on my face.

My nurse was nice and quickly told me what would happen if I ran away whilst off the ward whilst trusting me not to cause an accident whilst being driven across town.

It was great to see my named person and have a hug. The tribunal itself was a source of anxiety; what will happen? where will my future lie? But the clerk joked, in fact we all joked at intervals, and I was told what would happen at each stage.

It is hard hearing people you have spent every day with, saying versions of your reality that you disagree with, it is humiliating when you have your turn to speak and see every word falling on unreceptive ears, to know that each phrase is sealing you to another six months detention and being so desperate to stick to a truth that no one else shares.

I had a tribunal six months later that turned my section into a community one and this is where it gets complicated – I cannot bring myself to take medication, it pains my very soul but I do know that without it people think I may die.

At my care program approach meetings it seemed much easier to say as long as you don’t involve me or make me participate or have to think about it, I will not contest it and so of course it goes through each time with hardly a murmur.

Lastly, my MHO’s they have nearly all been lovely, if sometimes a little tired and a little harassed. They seem to go out of their way to listen to me, they research the answers to my questions, they provide me with mounds of information I never read, they give space to me when I need it and time to me when I need that.

My impression is nearly always of people who care; deeply caring, deeply compassionate people who always disagree with me, say I do have an illness, I am not evil, the devils are not there. They say they understand my viewpoint but that it is of a different reality to theirs and always I think to myself that their reality like that of my friends and family and acquaintances and workers is the one that always wins and my reality is always dismissed and for this I am usually grateful because if I were allowed to live in that reality I would have a very short life indeed.

We go into these horrific worlds for reasons that are still not understood but we do not lose our awareness or our humanity; we may not make sense, we may be a danger to ourselves or even sometimes to others; we may be bizarre. Our emotions and reality may be terribly painful to witness and we may be in great need of treatment; despite our fervent wishes not to be, but we still have rights and views and needs and taking away our freedom and control is just as huge a step to take as it is for anyone else.

Because of this we need assessment and also representation from people who will at least try to understand us and respect and be there for us when we have no one else.

Since I last gave this speech I have moved house to live with my partner and her twins James and Charlotte and have remained on a CTO – I saw my psychiatrist a couple of weeks ago and he repeated his wish to see the CTO continued next year. I suppose I will see my MHO in the next few weeks.

I rarely see her but I think she has clear ideas about my life. I think I will attend the tribunal this time and have really mixed thoughts about it.

I want to be real and I want to be free of the medication that stops me being real, as far as I am concerned it stops me recognising just how evil I am, just how much of a devil I am and how much a part I play in destroying the world and the joy in the lives of the people I love and meet day to day.

I feel in my heart that if I could actually recognise the reality of what I am I could do my duty and rid the world of people like me.

And yet I have the most wonderful life, I am overjoyed by how my life is nowadays; whether it is being crawled over by the twins in the evening, cuddling up to Wendy, going for walks, I know that when I stop taking medication I always recognise my evil and at some level I am terrified of when I am free to stop taking it, I want my lovely life to continue and yet I should not.

In many ways I hope that the wishes of Wendy, my family and others around me to keep me detained are successful but in others I just want to be free of all this.

I think I will finish seeing as I am surrounded by MHO’s by talking about you.

In some ways you are peripheral to my life – even at the worst of times I have rarely seen much of you but I have been grateful for your contact and independence.

I am particularly grateful to the one who the last time I was sectioned, researched my notes and was able to tell me that I was sectioned twice when I lived in Edinburgh 23 years ago as I didn’t know this and had spent many speeches talking about de facto detention when I fact I was detained.

I have a trite thing to say – when I am desperate I need communication and I need warmth and I need the restrictions that are carried out on my to be done with love and warmth and respect.

I need people to recognise that although I struggle to speak that I am always ready to pick up when people are bored of me or fed up with what they are doing, that, even though sometimes I do not want to speak or be in your company that, at another level, I do.

That respect can be communicated in the way you smile or carry yourself, and that when I am alone and frightened, small things like this, even the fact that you are exhausted and want home for your tea can have a huge effect on people like me who have lost control, have little voice, feel frightened about what is happening in their internal world and are especially worried about the opinions and feelings of those who have decided to take control of their lives.

I will finish now – hopefully we will have lots of discussion now maybe about MHO’s perhaps about advance statements or named persons; hopefully something before I get embarrassed and run out the room to hide!

Thank you

For more information about HUG (Action for Mental Health) visit https://www.spiritadvocacy.org.uk/hug

(Photo: Hermitage Park. Helensburgh 11 2020)