Not single spies but in battalions

Don’t you love today’s news story?

Pretend doctor practises for 23 years without the appropriate qualifications, no one noticing anything untoward. Not her patients: not her colleagues.

You can’t imagine a brain surgeon faking it in the operating theatre, can you? Or a cardiologist pretending to know how to fit a pacemaker? Any more than you could pretend to be a violinist when you don’t know an A string from an E: because that is a real, measurable skill.

There is only one medical discipline, of all of them, which you could make up as you go along. And nobody notice.

(And as Ben said, quite possibly do a lot less damage than the real thing...)

But back to

January 2006

and how was Bink coping with all we were going though?

I estimated at the time that it set her back five years of her previous recovery. Which turned out to be a lot more than five years of her future development, in the effect it had.

I learnt, over and over again during that dismal time, why sorrows come not single spies. One knocking another knocking another in a long and overwhelming line throughout our family.

She was absolutely right that losing her medication had lost her a place at the college she had applied to. Nevertheless, she was pooled and offered a place at another Cambridge college. 

She wanted to turn it down and apply again the following year.

It sounds absurd, I know – and everyone told her it was – but I understood her reasoning. It was at a single sex college, for mature students: she would be 21 by the time she started. She should have got into the college she’d applied to; and if she hadn’t lost her medication just before her interviews, probably would have done. And she would have been really happy there.

Bink was not one of those who socialised more naturally with her own sex: she hated being at a girls’ senior school, after a mixed prep school where all her friends were boys. (Like me at her age, she was a tomboy. Like me too, if we’d both lived in a later age, she would almost certainly have identified as a boy. Either of us quite possibly opting for transition. Thank goodness we lived when we did: what a scary thought…)

And a mature college more or less shuts down at the weekends.

But everyone told her it would be irresponsible. So she gave in and agreed to start at Cambridge the following Michaelmas.

She went to London for an interview at her old school and was offered a smashing job: an extremely well-paid post as a teacher’s assistant. It would have covered a substantial proportion of her expenses at university. And spring-boarded her into work afterwards.

But she also went for an OCD assessment at the Bethlem Hospital and was told yes, she was easily ill enough to bypass a GP’s referral and be admitted as soon as they had a bed, probably in April.

She couldn’t do both. She chose hospital.

It was wise – and remained, until this year, almost the only effective treatment she has ever been offered for her OCD, giving lasting help.

But the other side of it was is that, to this day, she has never done a day’s paid work. Having that on her CV would have enabled her a number of times since. She offered herself for voluntary work in a church primary school, for instance, but was turned down when the head discovered she had no experience.

So being homeless, by robbing her of the recovery which she, and we, had worked so hard for since the Florence Nightingale Unit, also robbed her of any work she could have done for many years to come.

Domino effect.

Insight

I’m sorry: I realise I’ve missed one or two loose ends.

This is like when Lionel Blue dropped his second page during one of his Thoughts for the Day on the Today Programme on Radio 4 and simply stopped mid-script, and everyone wrote to the Beeb afterwards saying, “We had no idea Thought for the Day was live.”

(Even though the speaker is announced every single morning as being there in the studio. You’d be amazed the number of people who ask me if it’s recorded weeks in advance, though the brief specifies that we comment on a current item in the news.)

Anyway, at least now you know I write this blog each day. It’s not a book I scribbled down in its entirety fifteen years ago, shoved under the bed, found again earlier this year and tore up into bite-sized pieces which I then pre-scheduled into daily posts before emigrating to Australia.

And given that I’m writing it every day, my memory sometimes wakes me in the night and fills me in on gaps we’ve already skipped over.

Earlier in 2002

Such as the debrief, after we rescued Bink from the Florence Nightingale Unit in late January 2002.

We were sitting in the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital two or three months later, Bink’s life a bloody and devastating car crash as a result of that referral to the Florence Nightingale, and the consultant who shoved her in there crossed one expensively trousered knee over the other and opined for an hour about... oh, something or other. Bink. Treatment. Not.

To be honest I’ve no idea. Nothing useful whatsoever. This was that same six-figure-salary consultant who did absolutely FA for a year after Bink was diagnosed, leading her to take a token overdose in a desperate bid for treatment, which was what landed her in the Unit. I’ve often wondered what he did do, to justify living so comfortably off our taxes: he can’t have had many patients more worthy of treatment than Bink, and he didn’t lift a finger to help her.

Be that as it may, I sat there politely all that time – we both did – listening courteously, no doubt occasionally nodding or chipping in, and when he’d finally run out of steam and said all the important things he wanted to say, I ventured to enquire, excessively deferentially, just in case there might be some explanation which might help me sleep at night:

“May I ask you a couple of questions, please?”

He inclined his head.

“Why did you refer Bink to the Florence Nightingale Unit? And did it achieve what you wanted?”

“Not really,” he admitted casually, brushing a mote of fluff from one of his neatly pressed cuffs. “We believe that sometimes, the problem is the family.” He smiled in explanation. “In your case, it obviously wasn’t.”

That was it. His entire reason for ruining our daughter’s life. And her siblings’. And ours.

A random experiment.

Just in case.

Based on that pernicious pseudo-philosophy and catch-all-diagnosis I’ve come across time and time again in mental health clinicians and para-clinicians: The Parents Must Be To Blame.

I wonder how he’d have felt if I’d picked up his Parker pen from off his desk, skewered his eyes out with it, plopped them in the basin, gazed thoughtfully at his craters and said, “Mmm. Oh well. Sometimes it makes me feel a bit better if I Gloucester-out the eyes of someone who’s just blown up my life. This time is obviously hasn’t.”

Dear Diary

Spring 2002

It is eleven o’clock in the morning. I have not done any work yet today. I haven’t done any work for days, months… years if you count books, my only real work, the only work I value; what with Alex’s unhappinesses, and now this. Others find their work disrupted when babies first come along. But that was easy. Easy to find the discipline, even with three in terry nappies, one at nursery school, no car, no help, no money.

I remember when Shaun was on a conference and I wasn’t well, and I had to pile all three of them onto a tricycle to get Serena to nursery school, and then dash back to get them occupied long enough to meet a deadline: one of my first writing commissions, for a magazine. The day before I’d been issued with notice to quit the house by the end of the week. With Shaun away. His first post, as Assistant Curate in North London, was due to end and he was looking for another, and his boss, our vicar, thought it was “businesslike” to evict us.

It was possible to cope with all, then. It didn’t sap the spirit in the way that this does.

Upstairs there is a terrible, dark and brooding presence. It is like a thunderstorm waking to break.

I have been out to Starbucks to buy hot chocolate and an almond croissant. There was a time when I would have thought, I can’t afford Starbucks; but I have run out of other ideas. Besides, so much money has been poured down the drain, it now transpires, over the last year and more, that it seems futile to baulk over a few more pounds. All the savings Granny gave her in her post office account, hundreds of pounds being preserved for some special treat or project, all bled away. All Serena’s too, lent secretly to her sick sister, our Iphigenia, to appease this awful god that is poisoning all our lives.

I understand now, about the changelings left by the hidden people. She is gone. The ray of laughter and music we once knew is long gone. It went into hospital and what came back eventually, when they were done, the husk that was spat out, was this, this other, this possessed thing, this thing bewitched by the powerful doctors with their hidden arts and powers. We thought she was escaping from hospital, I thought I had outwitted the doctor by stealing her back again. What I now realise is that it was already too late.

They took her by various strategies. A friend, a close and dear friend, saying we must let her go, because she will do it again and one day she will do it for real. She wouldn’t, I knew that. But they frighten me and bully me, and I don’t stand up to them. Why, when my own child was at stake, why didn’t I? Because they came in the guise of friends. And because they threatened suicide. I know how suicide is, how much worse than accident or murder, because it nearly happened to Alex. But do you really think, I say angrily now, do you really think suicide would have been worse than this? Death would be sweet, compared with this. Death would be easy: no more awful hoping that she might come back.

A few days after she came home, after what I thought was she had come home, I went into the room, the guest room, not her room, where she was not exactly sleeping but brooding, and found a snow storm. Every page, every Indian-paper-thin page, individually torn out of her bible, the bible she was given as a baby at her baptism, and the room was white. The bible that had tormented and taunted her with her illness and God’s deafness and his unheeded promises.

She must get up, the doctor had said, the witch doctor who had to let her go. She must get up, and out, and do something, do a job or something. I was outraged, that she could contemplate labour for this child, such a bright child, who had been snatched out of her education so prematurely by these wicked doctors. I would not have it. I will not send her to work. She will finish her studies, she will. Make sure she gets up every day, the doctor said, to work or attend school or anything. I smiled, happy to agree to anything, so that she should be free.

But how? How do you get something, so solid and heavy, up and out of bed? How do you insist? Do you scream, do you steal the bedclothes, do you drive her to tear every page out of her bible?

You go to Starbucks and buy her favourite treat and pray, or leave your friends to pray for you because you have no emotional or spiritual resources any more, because all you have left is the tiniest trickle in the bottom of the vast wide empty riverbed, so dry it doesn’t even catch the sunlight any more. You hope that hot chocolate will do it, because you simply can’t think of anything any more. You plead. You go up every few minutes and plead. Your favourite treat, downstairs in the kitchen.

Two hours later, I wrap the almond croissant, her favourite, their most expensive, in a paper napkin for some use, sometime… something. I don’t know what, but something. It cost too much to waste. I pour the now cold chocolate down the sink.

I still have not done any work. Not for a long, long time, nor a long long time to come.

Snowstorm

February 2002

Our children were brought up as Christians.

Before someone asks, “Isn’t it better to let them decide for themselves?” let’s knock that naïve two-dimensional pseudo-liberal notion on the head once and for all.

1. Of course our children must decide for themselves. We all have to take responsibility for our choices eventually, whatever beliefs we were brought up with.

2. There is no such thing as a philosophically “neutral” upbringing any more than there is English spoken with “no accent”. If you bring your children up to “decide for themselves,” you are teaching them the overriding supremacy of Western relativism as surely as the Amish are teaching their children... whatever it is the Amish pass on to their children.

3. If we ourselves have concluded that Christianity is – probably, on balance – the most credible interpretation of the facts available, we have a duty to pass this conclusion on to our children; just as we have a duty to teach them that the earth is round, or climate-warming is – probably, on balance – really happening, or any other article of faith which (after doing our research as thoroughly and honestly as we can) we believe holds the balance of probability. That’s what parents are for.

So that’s how we brought them up. (Got an issue with that? Get over it.)

Bink loved our Parson’s Green church. All our children did. She played her fiddle every week in the chamber orchestra, which eventually she ran. She lent a hand with the children in Sunday School, or handed round refreshments, or helped host the Harvest Lunch, or welcomed people into the Vicarage garden for coffee after the service. She took as full a part in the church as the rest of us did.

She also loved coming on the teenagers’ Christian holidays which we led every summer, eventually going on such holidays herself.

After one such, she came home bubbling over with a deep and thrilling personal experience of God. She was all for being re-baptised, and celebrating with the church and all her friends. To my shame and lasting regret, I told her that you can’t really be “re-baptised” any more than you can be “re-married” to the same person… though we would certainly celebrate with her.

In the years to come I wondered how I could have put such doctrinal exactitude above exuberant enthusiasm. Well, there we are. (Now I think about it, I wonder why I didn’t suggest confirmation, as she was the only one of our offspring not yet – and still not now – confirmed. Perhaps I did.)

And as I explained in an earlier post, Bink packed two books to take into the Florence Nightingale Unit. One, naturally and wittily (Bink being Bink), was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 

The other was her Bible.

Bink had been home for a few weeks. For some reason she had moved into our guest room. Presumably because her own room had become “contaminated.” She has frequently, since, needed to discard clothes or a room or even a house for this same reason.

Dr Ratched had insisted we must get her up in the mornings. This was a bit like saying, learn to fly. Two-year-olds, easy. Sixteen-year-olds? Just try it some time. Not with a normal teenager, who simply needs the stick of being sacked from school or work, or carrot of not having the bedclothes yanked off and a bucket of water thrown over whatever remains, in order to jump joyously from bed.

But a sixteen-year-old who is absolutely, adamantly, completely, hell-bent-determined on not getting up. Or is simply too depressed and defeated to be capable. It may not be completely impossible but believe me, you can spend several hours of every day, for over a year, on the attempt. You can see my t-shirt if you like.

Still fairly early on in this dismal experience I went upstairs to embark on the daily, fatuous, enervating and prolonged exercise of trying to extract Bink from Bink’s bed so Bink could have a life.

I walked into a cloud. The room was white. I found myself in one of those children’s executive toys you turn upside-down to make Big Ben swirl with the kind of Victorian Christmas the Victorians probably never experienced.

Every single India-paper page of Bink’s Bible had been torn out. Every page ripped up into tiny little pieces. Every piece hurled into the room. Every scrap had snowed down and whitened her room with tears of scripture verses.

Year after year after year she had begged God to take away her pain. Year after year after year her prayers had fallen on what certainly seems to us mere mortals to be very deaf divine ears indeed.

I know how she feels.

And she was sweet sixteen.

Wouldn’t you weep the pages of your Bible, which had drifted down such lofty and pretty snowflake promises throughout your childhood merely for them to fall into the fire of your adolescence and melt into a wet and dripping howl of nothing?

Anger

Late January 2002

Bink was home again.

Except she wasn’t.

This wasn’t the Bink we knew. She went into the Florence Nightingale Unit with OCD. She came out unrecognisable. Feral. Insane.

For one thing, she was now on highly addictive medication. That this was doing her no good was evidenced by the fact that she was so very, very much more ill than she’d gone in. I’ve always estimated, by a factor of about ten.

For another, she was now understandably terrified of treatment. Even if we could find something appropriate for her condition, she didn’t want to have anything to do with hospitals or doctors ever again.

Thirdly she had now dropped – or rather been forceably yanked – out of school. She had no structure, nothing to do, and no reason to get out of bed any more.

“She must have an activity,” Dr Ratched had said. “A job in a shop, or something.” Three months earlier Bink had been half a term into A-level maths, further maths, physics and English at one of the most academically rigorous schools in the country. Was her education now over? Could she have no higher ambition than this?

It soon transpired that getting out of bed before noon was an ambition considerably higher than she could now achieve.

And her school didn’t want her back, after what the Unit had done to her.

More pressing than any of this, she was angry. Very angry indeed. Young as she was, she knew Robin had treated her appallingly. She wanted an explanation.

Robin operated from (and perhaps owned) a smart clinic in Sloane Square. 

Shaun had given Bink a hat of his, presumably for the winter. Bink has always been petite: five foot three, seven stone. Since the Unit, she wore large clothes. I see her still, diminutive figure, large man’s coat, jogging trousers, all topped with the black beanie she now wore all the time, setting off with Binkish determination from our Vicarage in Parson’s Green, headed for Sloane Square. We tried to stop her a number of times. But, unlike the Florence Nightingale, we didn’t lock her in.

The crunch came during a working breakfast for a preaching group of fellow clergy. Earnest muscular Christians, good friends, getting to grips with the Book of Romans or whatever, over bacon and eggs at our large Vicarage kitchen table.

I don’t know whether you’ve ever attended, or indeed run, a smart counselling-cum-therapy surgery in Sloane Square. Even if you haven’t, you can probably imagine that one of the items you might not put at the top of your wish-list-business-plan, as a ploy for enhancing custom, would be an obsessive fruitcake, dressed like a tramp, camping out on your smart Sloane Square steps, day in day out and all day long, frightening the horses. And all the other patients going in and out.

Whether or not it was topped by a black beanie hat. It probably wasn’t the deciding factor, to be honest, but I don’t think the beanie helped.

Now it was Robin on the line, interrupting the working breakfast. I usually answer the telephone in our house, but for some reason Shaun had taken the call.

After ten minutes, he gave me a summary.

Robin was advising sectioning.

Every so often, in telling this tale, I have to break off to deal with my own anger. I had thought it all long gone, swallowed up in sorrow. 

Sectioning is, obviously, an extremely grave infringement of anyone’s freedom: essentially, putting an innocent person behind bars, without trial, to prevent loss of life or serious harm. The one and only criterion, as I understand it, being threat to one’s own or someone else’s safety.

Never have I heard, read or seen anywhere discussed in the press the following additional criteria: that someone is threatening the reputation of your smart counselling business in Sloane Square; that you feel a bit freaked out; that you don’t like her sitting on your doorstep.

It also stands to reason sectioning is likely to have far-reaching implications: not just the immediate loss of freedom, but loss of possible future freedoms such as callings to the Church or the Armed Forces... not to mention working with children, the one consistent ambition Bink has had.

“Over. My. Dead. Body.”

I may have thought, but didn’t say, go to the frigging cops and get a harassment order, like a grown up.

“I’ll take that as a no, then, shall I?” Shaun asked tentatively.

The really frightening thing is how easy it could have been. If I hadn’t resisted, Robin could have picked up the telephone to Dr Ratched and Bink could have been banged up before anyone had even had time to think, “Human Rights.” Given the damage done to her by three months’ supposedly voluntary incarceration, I don’t even want to imagine what that might have done to the rest of her life.

Bink wasn’t then and never has been sectioned. Presumably eventually Robin had to man up.

Though Bink still believes, all these years later, that he should be prosecuted, sued or at the very least reported to the apppropriate regulatory body for what he did to her.

Perhaps now is the time to do it.

Battling for Bink's soul

Late January 2002, Thursday morning.

Everything we had been praying for, for three months, lost in one idiotic slip-up: letting Bink see Dr Ratched without us. We had no idea how she had persuaded her to go back into the Florence Nightingale Unit (then: we discovered later) but whatever it was, it was damned effective.

Bink looked utterly crushed.

“Your mother will go home and get your things,” Dr Ratched said sweetly, “while you go back to the ward. Now,” she added with an undertone of firmness.

“No,” I smiled helpfully. (But, I like to think, with just a soupçon of slightly impressive steel.) “I won’t know what she’ll need. You come back with us Bink, and we’ll pack together.”

I didn’t for a moment believe this oh-so-obvious tug-o’-war could work.

“Ok,” Bink said, and got up to leave with us.

Phew. Fifteen all.

A long match still ahead of us.

As soon as we got home Bink asked if she should pack.

“No hurry,” I said brightly. “Let’s have lunch first.”

I nipped upstairs to ring a few friends and ask them to pray.

And then a Neuro-Developmental Consultant, David Mulhall, who had treated Alexander. Alex‘s schooling was blighted by repeated and relentless requirements to perform tasks which, with his Asperger’s syndrome, he was completely incapable of. Particularly if they involved time, which Alex doesn’t really relate to. I’m still not sure what effect David’s numerous and tedious exercises had, morning and evening every day for three and a half years. Time seems to have remained a bit of a stranger, to be honest. But Alex credited David with enabling him to relate to neurotypicals, at least. (Being Alex, the exciting breakthrough came when he realised, face shining, that he could communicate with the horse he’d just been allocated for a week’s family trekking in Donegal. Perhaps it was an Aspergic horse and they were on the same wavelength. Which is kind of cool as well as significant, given that he now works in the Equities department of his firm.)

David’s treatment was costly (for a clergy family) and time-consuming. It might not help. But it was harmless. If he treated Bink, the worst he would do would be nothing.

Very much unlike the Florence Nightingale Unit, then.

He offered to see her that afternoon.

“Come on!” I said, with irritating cheeriness. “Let’s see if David can help.”

The thing about OCD is that if I’d asked Bink to go to an appointment tomorrow or next week, it could have taken her three months to get ready. If something is immediate, there’s no time for any of the rituals so you just shrug and do it. Sometimes.

He assessed her and said he might be able to help. In a flowering of kindest generosity, he offered to treat her for nothing. (And did, for the next two years.)

“Do I have to tell you how I feel?” she asked, obviously frightened.

“Absolutely not. You don’t need to tell me anything. I’ll just give you some exercises.”

“You don’t need to know stuff about my childhood? Or my emotions?”

“Not in the slightest. I wouldn’t want to.”

She could scarcely credit this. “Do I have to believe in the treatment?”

“Not at all. My exercises work whether you believe in them or not.”

Her relief was heartbreaking. What had they done to her in there? 

As soon as we got home, I suggested tea.

“Don’t I have to pack and go?”

By supreme good fortune, a friend – of whom Bink was extremely fond and with whom she had played chess every week after church, in happier times – had just rung to say he was nearby. I seized my chance.

“Nick’s coming for supper,” I said. “Roast chicken, your favourite. Why not leave it till tomorrow?”

Fifteen thirty.

I hardly dared breathe.

The next day the spell has loosened sufficiently for Bink to tell me how Dr Ratched had persuaded her.

“She’s promised I’ll see Robin.” My heart sank. We couldn’t compete with this.

In case you missed this, Robin was the therapist who had bombarded Bink with inappropriate verbal and physical affection until, understandably, he became the most important influence in her life. Both he and the Unit had promised he would continue to see her in there, but after the first visit the Unit told him it would be professionally unethical for him to continue treating her while she was their patient. Probably the only sensible thing they ever did.

How the sands of morality had shifted so it could now be either professional or ethical to promise he would see her, as bait to lure her back in, will forever remain more inscrutable than the Bermuda Triangle.

And what if Robin himself hadn’t wanted to play ball? Daft question. For one thing, he was too wet (and presumably too terrified of his previous misconduct) to object. For another, they would simply do what they did first time around. You don’t need to keep promises to loony people, silly. Any more than promises to... I don’t know... spiders or children. And, you know, staff.

Perhaps Bink bore this in mind when she made a decision I never would have thought possible.

“I’ve realised,” she said later that day. “I don’t really want to see Robin that much.”

Shaun has a superb tactic – perhaps many men have – of simply ignoring someone or something unworthy of his attention. I answer my telephone to every cold caller. I explain in meticulously courteous detail why I believe they might be mistaken in thinking I’ve had an accident which wasn’t my fault, or am owed a life-changing fortune in mis-sold PPI. At some stage during the conversation, usually when I’m mid-sentence, my cold caller hangs up without so much as a goodbye or thank you. I’ve decided to stop feeling personally hurt by this.

The trouble is, such appalling behaviour isn’t the fault of the next cold caller, is it?

For once in my life, just once, I managed to employ Shaun’s approach. (Unlike each new cold caller who is an individual in his or her own right, Dr Ratched had form.)

She had been expecting Bink back on the ward since Thursday lunchtime. Heroically, I resisted the impulse to pick up the telephone any number of times all Thursday afternoon, to give her an über-polite update. I even managed not to ring her the next day too.

Last thing on Friday, she rang us. When would Bink would be arriving? Best before the weekend; the nurses would have her room ready by now.

“She won’t,” I said. No explanation. No excuses. No chit-chat. Then I hung up.

(After saying goodbye, of course. And hope you have a nice weekend. And… um… life.)

Shaun should have been proud of me.

I’d like to say, game, set and match. We had won that tournament, at least. Bink never went back into the Florence Nightingale Unit, or saw Dr Ratched again.

But alas: seventeen and a half years on and we are still whacking vicious balls over the net from the effects of those dreadful three months.

Which is why it is now down to the Priory to help Bink win the Grand Slam.

Outwitted

Late January 2002, Monday morning.

After three long months. Three months in which I had lain awake sick with worry every night, aching to bring her home. Three months of dreading, and fearing, and being impotent to prevent, the damage the hospital was doing to her. Three months of hopeless and helpless hell.

Bink on the telephone.

“This place is awful,” she said. “I can’t stand any more. Will you come and get me?”

I had to write my Thought for the Day script for the next morning – something I find almost impossibly difficult – before anything else or my day could slip out of control down the plughole and I’d still have nothing to say by midnight. My producer and I had agreed the topic. We had discussed the line I might take. Now to the writing, which can easily go skidding off in directions you really don’t want.

“Of course! Let me just draft this script. I should be able to set off in about an hour.”

“Ok,” she said, and hung up.

Eh? What did I just say?? Write a script! What was I thinking? I must be more mad than she was...

I rang my producer (and very dear friend) Christine.

“Go!” she said. “For goodness’ sake, go! Go and get your daughter!”

There’s a phrase I’ve heard Thought producers use occasionally, to instil a sense of proportion. You know: when your mother’s just been rushed into hospital with a massive stroke and you think it would be really irresponsible to ask if you might swop your slot; if you’re tempted to stay at your desk finishing your script when your house has caught fire. That sort of thing.

“It’s only radio!” Christine reminded me.

When I reached the Florence Nightingale there were very few people around. Bink was waiting for me, all ready: no packing needed. A concerned nurse fluttered, anxiously, saying we’d better wait for Dr Ratched. The psychiatrist would need to discharge her: she would be doing her rounds soon, she was sure.

I know what that means in hospital-speak: half a day at least. Nonetheless I wasn’t taking any chances. I couldn’t get Bink out of that building fast enough.

Dr Ratched wanted to see us. Could we attend, with Bink, on Thursday morning so she could discharge her properly? We’re conditioned, aren’t we? Less now than a couple of generations ago perhaps, but when someone with a hospital badge and letters after her name says jump! you find you’ve done it before you’ve had time to work out that you were on the edge of a cliff.

Thursday morning, and we arrived a bare five minutes before our 11 o’clock appointment.

“You go in,” Shaun said. “I’ll park.”

By the time he found me in the waiting room, Bink was gone.

“Dr Ratched wanted to talk to her on her own first,” I explained. “She was called up without me.”

“You should never have allowed that,” he said ominously.

“Excuse me,” I went straight to the reception desk. “All three of us were invited for this appointment. When will we join our daughter?”

“You’ll be called.”

Five minutes later, “I’m sorry to disturb you again, but we’re wondering when we’ll be shown upstairs.”

“She’ll call when she’s ready for you.”

Another ten minutes. “My husband has an appointment and we really can’t stay any longer,” I insisted with fierce energy. “We need to go up now.” No need to add that Shaun would cancel a dozen appointments for his daughter if he needed to.

When Bink had left the waiting room half an hour earlier, she walked upstairs with a spring in her step, her head held high and her cheeks rosy. By the time we were shown into Dr Ratched’s consulting room she was curled in an armchair, foetal, grey and mute. She looked dreadful.

The psychiatrist welcomed us with a beaming smile.

“Good news,” she said. “Bink has agreed to come back in.”

Gone again.

End of 2001

We never discovered how Bink got the injury to her face. The charge against Shaun was quietly dropped.

I didn’t care. 

All I cared about was Bink’s state of mind, or lack of. What we had witnessed was terrifying, far beyond anything we could deal with. This was why we had taken her back to the Florence Nightingale, despite all the damage I knew they’d been doing to her. She had been nothing like that when we’d first taken her in, two months earlier. Yes, she’d had OCD: a very significant difficulty, making her desperately unhappy. But she hadn’t been, like, mad.

If she was that demented... I don’t think we could imagine a future at all.

The word Shaun and I asked of each other, not even knowing what it meant, was, “Schizophrenia?”

My brother is professor of nano-materials. He knew how to use the internet long before we did. A day or two after he and his family returned home to Oxford after Christmas, we received some pages of print-out.

Sertraline.

The drug Dr Ratched had put Bink on, very much against our wishes and hers. Which had “no negative side-effects” and which you could stop “at a moment’s notice, without any issues of withdrawal at all.”

And here were all the horrendous symptoms of coming off it suddenly, described on the internet, for anyone (who know how to use the internet) to read. And Dr Ratched had said there were none.

Was she ignorant or mendacious? Which would be worse?

Bink must have stopped taking her unwanted medication as soon as she got home, acting (sensibly) on the information she’d been given: that she mustn’t combine it with alcohol; and that she could stop it whenever she wanted.

She wasn‘t mad at all. She was simply exhibiting the known symptoms of sudden withdrawal. Palpitations, extreme terror, hallucinations. It was exactly as I had feared: the pills had made her very much worse.

Did no one in the Unit have any compassion at all? Could they not have thought to allay our wretchedness, as my brother so kindly had? We had been worried out of our own minds.

And of course, now we knew this, we realised with sinking dismay that we needn’t have taken her back into the Unit at all. Just stayed with her, and calmed her, and held her while the effects of the drug wore off, however many days or ghastly weeks that might have taken.

2002 began dull and leaden. Bink back in. Back on medication. Back incarcerated and beyond our reach.

We could do nothing. Except pray. Which we must have been doing almost incessantly, even though my confidence in prayer had been pretty effectively demolished when all our church prayed for Alexander a few years earlier. So it wasn’t because I had any faith in prayer left that I’d gone on praying.

Just, there was nothing else we could do.

Day after day, week after week, no change, no hope, no access. No communication at all.

Unless Bink herself specifically requested it. And she wasn’t talking to me.

It was a Monday morning in late January when I got the call.

I was writing a script for Thought for the Day, for Radio 4 the next morning. Racking my brains, as I always do, for something interesting, about an item in that day’s news, with a faith perspective, which hasn’t been said many times before. Bit of a bum brief, really.

Staring out of my attic study window at our neighbour’s roof in Parson’s Green. No inspiration there either.

When the telephone rings it breaks my attention, but it’s welcome because I’m stuck anyway.

“Hello,” said a familiar voice.

Wow. “Hello, Bink!”

Bat shit crazy

27th December 2001

It was the darkest hour of the not-morning when the telephone rang.

It would have been a pretty confusing call even if we hadn’t been groggy with sleep. Someone at the Florence Nightingale Unit, half an hour away in North London, was ringing us in Parson’s Green, garbling something about Bink who was supposed to be with Serena in the flat next door. 

We lurched into some clothes.

If that flat had been the city of Jericho it would have been rubble by the time we arrived. Bink was screaming the walls down. Bansheeing off them. If you’ve ever trapped a terrified wild animal in your bare hands you’ll know: I picked up a young field mouse as a small child and it bit me to the bone.

What assaulted us at the front door was a vortex of screeching fireworks. We went up the stairs into a caterwauling Charybdis. Trying to catch and calm whatever had taken hold of Bink was to embrace a water-jet.

And Serena had been coping with this alone.

It is years ago now and she has neutralised what memories she can, but still retains a few vivid details: her own terror; her realisation that this is what demon possession is; and the “men with knives coming through the window to get me.” Bink has always claimed she made them up, but I could see them in her eyes when we arrived. Serena too.

It transpired that, after we’d gone to bed around midnight, Bink had gone outside and started yelling her pain into the Parson’s Green night. Serena managed to get her into the flat but containment merely concentrated her incoherence.

The only thing which she communicated clearly was that Serena was not, under any circumstances, to call us. Serena must not ring home. She mustn’t tell Shaun or me anything. She was not to fetch us. She mustn’t she mustn’t she mustn’t.

Under no circumstances whatsoever at all at all did Bink want to see me.

So after two hours of this frenzied nightmare Serena rang the hospital.

This may sound strange to anyone under thirty, but when when we were children there was an idea – long left over from Victorians and smelling salts, for all I know – that the appropriate thing to administer when someone is suffering from hysteria is a slap. Like you say boo! to cure hiccoughs. No, that’s never worked for me, either. Perhaps sudden shock can tranquillise, or at least stop one in one’s tracks: I don’t know. Now that I’ve heard Professor Veale’s explanation about the calming effect of sudden cold (and read more about it myself) I presume a bowl of iced water thrown over the head could do the trick. Be that as it may, a slap in response to hysterics was a deeply ingrained idea, heard at our mothers’ knees.

What could we do with this shrieking maelstrom whirling round the plughole of Maggie’s flat? Nothing could contain her. In his panic and fear, Shaun slapped her.

No change. Even that couldn’t check the raging tumult that Bink had become.

We had no idea what to do. The hospital had rung us. They seemed to know what was going on. Goodness only knows why given the history, but all we could think of in that confused frightening whirlwind of howling in the most hidden part of the night was to take her back there.

We managed to steer her outside but my brother’s car was blocking ours in our Vicarage drive. He came downstairs, in his thin cotton summer pyjamas, and offered to drive us there.

The Vicarage in Parson’s Green is fairly public, even in the small hours in the deserted Christmas hols. Imagine you witnessed a slim, five foot three girl screaming in wild distress while two men bundled her into a car...

You might, sensibly, be too frightened to ask what was going on. So you might go home and do it from there.

I said that Shaun’s slap “did nothing.”

That wasn’t entirely true.

Power and punishment

November 2001.

As a result of this blog, Bink has been telling me more about her time in the Florence Nightingale Unit.

Apparently the staff did notice her hunger strike. By the time she’d visibly lost about 15% of her body weight. Which was how she managed to see Robin again: she told them she wouldn’t eat anything until they’d kept their promise – and he, his – that he would visit her there.

Another patient was due to be taken out by her granny. The staff chose that particular evening to keep all the patients at the table, not allowing them to get down until Bink had eaten something.

Which she wasn’t going to.

So this poor lass wasn’t allowed to see her granny. More to the point perhaps, her granny wasn’t allowed to see her… while they all sat there, waiting for Bink to do something she had made clear she wouldn’t do. Goodness knows whether the hapless grandmother had travelled ten miles or a hundred, but far more likely the latter because Bink was the only one with family in London.

This is the point at which I want to weep with rage. For the love of God, someone tell me: how does that help to cure an adolescent’s mental illness? How can it possibly be part of hospital care? To punish her – and her grandmother – because another patient is on hunger strike? 

Indeed, how was it appropriate to punish any of them at all? What was it supposed to be: a place of healing or a detention centre?

It is a while before I can say anything. “Were they angry? The others I mean.”

“With the staff, maybe. Not with me. We all knew they were being dicks. The other girl said she would have just drunk the milk if it had been her, but she didn't blame me.”

The staff backed down eventually. They had to. When Bink decides, she does: she would have sat there for days.

That’s the thing about a show of strength: it’s worth doing your calculations before you embark, isn't it?

“Tell me – exactly, in your own words – what Robin did wrong,” I ask.

“Touching me repeatedly. Professing affection. And losing my poetry and drawings.”

This is a new one on me: I’d rather have my house ransacked and every stick of furniture stolen than lose one poem or work of art I’ve created.

As a result of Bink's hunger strike, Robin visited her in the Unit. Once. She gave him everything she’d written and drawn while there. And then the Unit told Robin they were in charge of her treatment, so he sent all her work to the Unit and she never saw it again.

“Why didn’t he send it back to you?”

“Because they said he wasn’t to contact me.”

“Why not send it to us? Or return it with a letter explaining that he wasn’t allowed any more contact?”

“Exactly. That would have been enough. Because he was a drip.”

“He must have been terrified of his previous misconduct.”

“Yup. What pissed me off was the Unit repeatedly saying, ‘We know you’ve fallen in love with your therapist...’ I wasn’t in love with him at all. I just wanted him to keep his promises.”

I realise something with a nauseous chill.

Psychiatric nurses, obviously, are not trained to the same level as psychiatrists. “If you don’t eat we’ll punish everyone, so all the others will hate you.” Inappropriate, of course it is. But you can imagine it. I’ve seen teachers doing this kind of thing: it happened throughout my schooling and I survived, more or less.

Far worse to do it with someone mentally ill, of course. Though, even so...

But the bar for psychiatrists and their appropriate conduct is set a lot higher, surely.

So: they all thought she was in love with Robin, did they? 

There came a time – eventually... far too late – when we rescued Bink from the Unit. The psychiatrist, however, wanted her back in there. 

Guess what she did. It sickens me even to say it.

She promised her Robin.

Miracle medicine

November 2001.

We were not allowed to veto Bink's medication. But since we were invited into the psychiatrist’s consulting room on a regular basis, it seemed sensible to find out more.

Sertraline was the first (of many) she was put on. It was the elixir of life, that drug. Lily the Pink’s Medicinal Compound. The first genuine miracle invented by the human race.

1. It had no side effects. That’s right. Absolutely none whatsoever. At all at all at all.

2. It was also astonishingly easy to come off. The moment you wanted to. Though you wouldn’t ever want to, because it solves world poverty. But if you did. You could stop just like that. No negative repercussions or withdrawal symptoms. At all at all at all.

3. If you don’t trust us we can’t work with you.

Hello? Where did that come from? Have no parents ever asked any questions before?

Well no, I don't suppose they would. All the other adolescents in that ward came from families who wouldn't know how, even if they had the energy left over from surviving their own lives.

I happened to mention all this in passing, a couple of months ago, to a reputable psychiatrist – still mystified as to why anyone would lie so blatantly to a patient and her family – and she very kindly took the time to reply: “Ah, there is a good explanation. In the early years of SSRIs, we really thought they had no ‘discontinuation’ symptoms and were very safe to start and stop. It was only much later that they were discovered, so the doctor probably really was not trying to deceive but we would all have been unaware.”

It was good to get this explanation at last. Genuinely.

However... um... forgive my being awkward, but it still leaves two very obvious questions unanswered.

First, if the drug was so new and unknown that the body of medical knowledge didn’t yet include such basic stuff as the way it completely screws your head when you come off it, and that you can find yourself addicted to it for years and years and years, why experiment on our daughter? Have we learnt nothing from thalidomide?

And secondly, how then was it possible for my brother (well-educated but nonetheless a layman) to allay our terror a few months later – when we thought Bink must be schizophrenic, so dire were the effects – simply by looking up this drug and what it could do, on something we'd barely heard of called the 'internet'?

Be that as it may, what the psychiatrist didn’t bother to mention, to us and even more crucially to Bink herself, was that you weren’t supposed to imbibe alcohol while on it.

A couple from our church, with the hospital’s permission of course, took Bink out to Pizza Express. When they delivered her back, they were asked what she’d consumed.

A pizza. A salad. A glass of red wine.

Shit. Fan. Convergence of.

I must still have considerable residual anger over Bink’s time in the Unit: just thinking about the way our kind friends were treated roils my guts.

How about giving them information before they took her out, rather than demanding it of them when they brought her back? How about an apology for not advising them properly? How about the hospital's taking responsibility for the omission, rather than rebuking those solicitous enough to give her a generous treat, as if they were recalcitrant schoolchildren smoking behind the bike sheds?

And of course the reprimand dished out to the adults was nothing to the scolding given to Bink herself.

It’s exhausting: remembering. Anger is.

Let’s end on a positive note. A reader has just asked whether Bink get to her therapy session last Thursday?

Yes, kind friends, she did. “She’ll never make it,” Shaun had said with his customary encouraging Eeyore jollity.

But I knew she would, somehow.

As I wrote yesterday, mothers can be annoying like that. Knowing stuff without knowing how.

So give me grace to be right on this one too: that the Priory offers Bink the turning point we've all been praying for – for so many, many long years – to a glorious future of freedom. 

Lunacy

October 2001. 

I can no longer call the date ‘Half Term’ because half-terms were over for Bink, long before half-term itself was. That night we took her to the Florence Nightingale and were told we couldn’t take her home again, school became history. 

That night, the Police were called to the Unit, a common occurrence: a member of staff had assaulted a patient. (By way of poetic symmetry, the day she finally left they were there as well: one patient had attempted to rape another, and almost succeeded.)

That night too, we were informed that the nurses sat with the patients for every meal. We could rest assured she would be well looked after, and certainly fed. Presumably a necessary precaution, since they must sometimes have had anorexic patients.

The next time we saw her, a week later, I was stopped in my tracks. I could have sworn she’d lost half a stone. Always slight, Bink now seemed breakably thin. Having been told, so specifically, that every meal was monitored, I must be imagining it.

It was months before she told me that for the first ten days, apart from water she consumed one cup of tea and a biscuit. Nothing else. At all. For a week and a half.

A pointless protest, since not a single member of the staff noticed. Presumably, if she had indeed been anorexic she could have died before they did.

Her room was neat and clean but stifling. No windows were allowed to be opened. Anywhere in the building. Suicide risk.

It didn’t take Bink long to learn the only way to be allowed fresh air. Smokers were released into the street for ten minutes in every hour. An addiction Bink still has – and hates – to this day. One of the first things she asked the Priory is to help her quit nicotine, as well as all the other mind-altering substances she acquired in there. It has jeopardised her sleeping ever since.

Our children were brought up in your archetypal draughty Victorian vicarage: lots of cracks and crannies, no heating upstairs and the windows wide to the stars every night. Naturally she couldn’t sleep, in her overheated airless room.

I turned to Yellow Pages and spent a morning searching for a gym. After many fruitless calls I rang the Florence Nightingale reception.

“You’ll know the answer to this,” I said. “I’m looking for the nearest gym to the hospital, so Bink can get some exercise.”

“There’s a gym right here inside the hospital.”

“Oh. Brilliant! Thank you. How does she use it, please?”

“She can’t.”

“I’m sorry?” This seemed incomprehensible. “Why is that?”

“She’d need supervision.”

I was momentarily speechless. “She’s very keen. Isn’t there anyone who could be with her? I could come over myself every afternoon.”

“Wouldn’t make any difference. The gym shuts at four.”

“Well, why doesn't she use it before four, then?”

“She has therapy till half past three. She wouldn’t get there in time.”

Defeated as I was, I tried one more time.

“Is there anything you can suggest, please? She’s not able to sleep at night.”

“That’s her own fault. She’s won’t take the medication.”

Despite all my despair at that dreadful place over the next weeks and months, I have always believed in trying to understand something I don't agree with.

“Please, explain it to me,” I begged a friend whose husband worked in mental healthcare. “There must be some logic to it: I can’t for the life of me see what. They have thirteen teenagers cooped up in that Unit. All mentally ill. All physically fit. Why don’t they take them to the park every afternoon for a couple of hours of football? Or for a walk? Or cross-country running? Or anything. Surely that would be more beneficial than therapy. And then drugging them all to make them sleep. What’s the reasoning behind it? It seems completely insane to me.”

“It’s cheaper,” she said simply.