Health news - ‘It’s like being in prison with drugs’ - Actor who suffered breakdown writes play about how mental illness is treated on the NHS

Published: 22 April, 2010
by JOSH LOEB

What is it like being locked in a secure psychiatric ward?
Clare Summerskill knows all about it. Three years ago she spent two months in one after a suicide attempt.
The actor, who is the sister of gay rights activist Ben Summerskill and granddaughter of Labour Party politician Baroness Summerskill, offers stinging criticisms of how mentally ill people are treated by the NHS in a new play about her experiences that will be performed at Holborn’s Cochrane Theatre next month.
Clare says over-reliance on medicating and the stigma surrounding mental illness hamper rehabilitation. And she is full of praise for “alternative approaches” such as those taken at the Maytree Respite Centre in Finsbury Park.
“We live in a very medically-oriented part of the world,” said Clare. “We medicate and pathologise mental illness, so if you’ve got any form of mental distress, you are given pills. I wanted to show that things can be done another way. Why the NHS is choosing to do things in this very brutal, confining and medicalised way, I don’t to this day understand.”
Clare’s play, called Hearing Voices – a reference to schizophrenia but also to her view that the opinions of mentally ill people are rarely heard – is based entirely on interviews with psychiatric patients and those who work with them.
“It’s so-called verbatim theatre,” she said.
“Everything in it is something that has been said by a real person.”
The play ends with the hard-hitting conclusion that a psychiatric hospital is “like a prison situation except with drugs” and that more money needs to be invested in mental health services.
“When I went into hospital I had just had a breakdown,” said Clare. “I was in therapy and it was to do with some childhood traumas that had re-emerged after a relationship break-up.
“I went off the rails. It was more than depression. After struggling with it for a number of years, I tried to commit suicide and took an overdose.
“Someone was worried about me and they alerted the police, who alerted the fire brigade. They came into my flat and rescued me while I was unconscious.” 
Clare says she wants to “publicise how appalling the treatment is on an NHS psychiatric ward”, adding: “I’m not ashamed to call it political theatre.”
But the production also tries to show that there may be other ways of treating mentally ill people – including the approach taken at Maytree, a “sanctuary for the suicidal” which was established four years ago in a family home in Moray Road. Vulnerable people can stay for a one-off period of four days while staff prepare them for re-entry into the world.
“We set up Maytree as an alternative to psychiatric admission,” explained the centre’s founder, Paddy Bazeley. “It’s for people who want a safe place to go, but don’t want to go to hospital.”
Clare also interviewed the clinical psychologist Dr Rufus May, whose radical approach to treating schizophrenia involves using no medicines.
“Rufus says that mental illness is about mental distress and that mental distress is often caused by brutality and in our society,” said Clare. “We don’t really want to hear issues about people being victims or harmed, and so we try simply to medicate. I suppose what I’m saying is there are other ways of doing things.”
• Hearing Voices is at The Cochrane, Southampton Row, WC1, on Sunday May 9 at 3pm and 7pm. For tickets call 0207 269 1606.
• The Maytree Respite Centre can be contacted on 020 7263 7070.