Am I Still Ill?

London one massive Downhills Ward at St Ann’s Hospital (name, shame and expose!!) It’s way too hot and what’s even worse than the heat is the retards crowing about the ‘beautiful weather’.

I long to wipe the silly grins off their faces with a cold snap followed by a monsoon…

So why is today Downhills Ward, St Ann’s Hospital, Haringey, London (name and shame, expose expose expose) writ large? Let me explain.

You wake up out of a beautiful dream of being someone who matters to a living soul. You wash, brush your teeth, make your silly hospital bed with it’s incontinence-proof mattress.

Then, as is your wont, you think, right what now?

Picture this. A TV lounge with a fucked-up TV that will now only transmit Magic FM. Picture, assorted drugged-up females ensconced on the squashy leather, somehow-still-uncomfortable sofas.

Wish you were way more drugged up than you are in order to endure this.

That’s your day folks. Unless you want to count…

The Community Meeting. Want your head done in to set you up for the day? You could do no better.

Cue an inept-but-well-meaning professional or six, who will ask us all to introduce ourselves with today’s ‘task’.

Task Monday. If you died and were reborn, what would you come back as? I kid you not folks.

Task Tuesday. What’s your lucky number and why?

Task Wednesday. What advice would you give your sixteen-year-old self (in the light of experience and hindsight).

If you think the ‘task’ is not enough to send you right over the edge you should then hear the response of the roomful of drugged-up females.

No one appears to have taken part in any meetings before, so they keep jumping in randomly and obdurately refusing to stick to the script.

Head clutched between hands you run screaming from the room to the astroturf smoking area, where a lone pigeon hobbles around, starving since it snuck in through the net and now can’t get out again…

That pigeon reminds me of me. I roll a fag. I cry on the phone to my social worker. This is the cue for several of the other patients to launch into a tirade of verbal abuse against me, and for a particularly brave one to snatch my tobacco off me.

They brought me here for non-compliance with the full force of the law of strong-armed psychiatry. I was recovering well without meds and simply wanted the Home Treatment to butt out and leave me alone, but I was nevertheless deemed somehow a danger to myself or someone else…at least potentially.

They lied to get me here without violence, saying I would be released later that day. What’s to stop them continuing in the same vein? How sane does a lady have to be before she’s deemed capable of making up her own mind? I’m upset about being here…I’m terrified frankly, I’m in fear of my life from some of the other patients who are like something out of Broadmoor. What’s to stop them finding that sufficient evidence of psychosis to keep me here indefinitely?

What the heck, these drugs are not sufficient to dull my mind sufficiently to sit on one of the squashy sofas for longer than five minutes. What’s wrong with me! They seem to work for the others…

I hear the howling of souls in torment all day in Downhills Ward (name, shame, expose to the power of 20). There’s fuck all I can do. I can’t even hand out fags, because I’m too shit-scared of running out myself, and I feel selfish and guilty.

I see violence, demon-possession, and fights break out like little fires in a forest blaze. I see the Black Sisterhood of mainly African nurses chattering and laughing their heads off while Downhills burns.

And then, five days on, I am released as randomly as I was brought here. Ironically, I am now a lot iller. This little adventure has set my recovery back by weeks.

Ach, St Ann’s Hospital Haringey why should I put in the effort of exposing you when you are doing such a fine job of it all by yourselves?