Read Online The Dark Threads by Jean Davison - Free Book Online Page A

through a nightmare. First, you wake up and wander round with other confused, dressing-gown-clad patients in a daze, not knowing what day it is, what time it is or where the hell you are in this planet of pain. You try to think clearly, realise you can’t and fear you must have finally gone completely crazy. Back in the ward, it’s difficult to remember the simplest of things, such as the location of your locker, bed or the toilet. You don’t want dinner. If you can manage it while Sister isn’t looking, and if you can remember where it is, you empty your food into the slop bin, but then the after-dinner drugs rumble around queasily in your empty stomach. Along with your usual drugs there are two extra pills. These are painkillers, which are supposed to take away that dull, sickening pain inside your head, but you’re lucky if they touch it. You long to lie on your bed, to escape in sleep, but instead you must face your usual afternoon stint at OT.
    And sometimes, while still in this post-ECT fuddle, you wonder what they are doing to your brain. Poor brain. Doped and shocked. Numbed and stunned. Has it been damaged? The mental hospital environment is one that can greatly endanger a person’s physical and psychological well-being; that’s not being paranoid, it is a fact.
    â€˜What can I do? They are trying to kill me,’ says Eric, a young man I see at OT who, I think, has been given a ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ label. ‘They watch me closely to make sure I swallow the poison and if that doesn’t work then they’ll do it by electrocution. If I don’t kill myself, they’ll murder me.’
    Eric must be very sick to talk like that, I realise, and yet his words do seem to make sense in this place. More sense than the words of the staff. I sympathise with Eric’s dilemma.
    Meanwhile, Mabel rocks back and forth, Deirdre mutters obscenities, Mary laughs and laughs, Lilly sucks her thumb for comfort and Gary plays with his genitals. I am sitting quietly staring down at the small coloured tiles on the workbench used for making ashtrays or sticking on to bottles to make table-lamp stands. I am remembering how, when first admitted, I looked for signs of sickness in other patients behind what I thought was a façade of normality, but now I find it easier, even when watching patients displaying bizarre behaviour, to see the ‘normality’ behind the ‘sickness’. Normality? Sickness? What do these words mean? As I stare at the tiles till their colours blur together, I am coming to believe that the dividing line between ‘normality’ and ‘mental illness’ is a very fine one.
    Danny came to visit me one afternoon when, only a few hours earlier, I’d been given ECT. I tried to pull my thoughts together to make sensible conversation with him.
    â€˜Yes, I know. You’ve already told me that a few minutes ago,’ he said, his soft brown eyes full of pity.
    â€˜It’s the ECT,’ I explained quickly, anxious to let him know I wasn’t crazy. ‘It makes you forget things, but only temporarily.’ At least I hoped the way I felt would be only temporary.
    I remembered how before my admission Dr Sugden had said I was ‘heading for’ a nervous breakdown. That’s why he’d wanted me to come into hospital, wasn’t it?
    â€˜Danny, I’m scared that I’ll go … that I’ll have a nervous breakdown,’ I said, squeezing his hand.
    Danny shook his head knowingly. ‘No, you won’t. Not now that you’re in this hospital where they can prevent that happening.’
    I stared at him in surprise. He might just as well have said: You won’t have a nervous breakdown now because you’re under too much stress.
    â€˜But it’s awful in here, Danny,’ I confided. ‘I look at patients in OT who are laughing and talking to themselves and … and I’m scared I