|
|
 |
| |
Author Clare Allan says she has concerns over the increasing privatisation of lifeline mental health services |
Tempestuous time in mental hospital led me to Shakespeare
Clare Allan’s hit novel is based on her experiences after being sectioned. She tells Peter Gruner about the ‘dribblers’ and ‘flops’ who inspired her to write again
Poppy Shakespeare. By Clare Allan.
Bloomsbury £7.99. order this book
SCRATCH the surface of a successful author and you will often find years of struggle against rejection and failure. There will sometimes be periods of depression and even battles with drugs and alcoholism.
Clare Allan, 38, the Islington author of the phenomenally successful Poppy Shakespeare – shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award – spent 10 years as a patient in a Highgate mental hospital.
Now she has turned her often-traumatic experiences into a highly inventive and darkly funny book, which will grace our screens in a Channel 4 feature film early next year.
The book is full of wonderful comic characters as well as being a deadly satire on the state of Britain’s ‘Cinderella’ mental health service.
Day patients are called “dribblers” and those needing full-time care are “flops”.
This is a world where patients sit around chain- smoking, awaiting their next tranquillising drug. They include armchair politician Middle Class Michael, Rhona the Moaner, Astrid Arsewipe, Canteen Coral (“peas or carrots? You can’t have both”) and not forgetting Poppy herself. She’s a feisty, very sane single mum who signs up for a media course only to find that, bizarrely, she’s suddenly being declared mad.
Clare had been living in digs in Archway, writing the occasional article for newspapers, and paying the bills by working as a switchboard operator, when she suffered her mental breakdown.
At the time she was run-down and stressed. “I didn’t think I was ill,” she said. “But the doctor picked up that something was wrong.”
When she arrived at the Belle Ridley Psychiatric Day Hospital on Highgate Hill – which has since closed – she had nothing left to lose.
“I’d lost my home, my job and most of my friends. I weighed under eight stone,” said Clare.
“My life had shrunk to a series of seconds, each to be somehow survived. I got through by walking, day and night, one step then the next, mile after mile of mechanical walking, reciting poetry over and over to keep the thoughts from my head.”
Of the hospital, she said: “I can’t say I regret going there because I met such fantastic people and the patients were brilliant.
“But the idea of sticking a load of people with mental distress in a dirty, ugly common room with nothing to do but smoke is quite odd. It certainly didn’t do a lot for me and, in fact, I got worse. It was definitely not a therapeutic place to be at all.”
Soon the psychiatric common rooms and wards were Clare’s reality and she felt she didn’t belong in the world outside.
“My health deteriorated rapidly. I tried to take my own life,” she said. “In the end, I was sectioned and put on the wards. It was a relief at first that turned quickly to anger at the way my freedom had been taken away.
“The ward was a desperate, hopeless place. There was no activity of any sort and no therapy other than drugs.
“In the coming years, I would be readmitted to the ward perhaps 20 times as I struggled to believe that I could exist outside.”
Her eventual rehabilitation came not in hospital but in the Hargrave Park estate in Archway. Homeless, she moved into a small council flat and ended up becoming secretary of the tenants’ association and representing them at meetings of Islington Council. She has since moved to another council flat in Myddelton Square at the Angel.
“I still love Archway with its strong sense of community,” said Clare.
One of the themes running through the book is concern that creeping privatisation is being introduced in the mental health service.
Clare said: “Mental health, just like education, shouldn’t be a business.
“These are services that a civilised society should be providing. When the priority is making money, mental health will always be bottom of the pile.”
In the struggle to support the front-line NHS services, millions are being diverted from psychiatric help, which means day centres are being shut down and charities running out of money.
Clare is particularly concerned about the future of Camden and Islington’s mental health services.
“I’d hate to lose the marvellous Highbury Grove drop-in centre, for example,” she said.
“I went there lots of times if I couldn’t sleep and was stressed out – sometimes at 2 or 3am. It’s a real life-saver.”
Clare is currently working on a new book, this time about the dreaded media and some of its unsavoury characters.
She writes a regular column for the Guardian. “It’s called my life but I wanted to call it Mad World,” said Clare.
“Sadly, it was feared that some people might take offence. Mental illness is still very much a taboo subject. When people write about it they can be quite worthy.
“I think madness can be very funny – not always, there’s pain, too – but humour is a survival mechanism.”
|
| |
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
