Not-Dinner-Party-Appropriate: anecdotes from the mental hospital

 I feel like a time traveller. I've awoken in 2021, sleeping through a pandemic and my teenage years, now in my mid-twenties. I have no dinner-party-appropriate anecdotes. Only mental ill-health with bouts of questionable wellness. I have been in four different mental hospitals, which I predict could be four more than most people. No one talks about it, including me. Like, at all. 

Whenever someone talks about mental illness, there is this most impenetrable silence, followed by: 'I knew someone who was depressed once.' Or a casual, almost nonchalant change of subject. I mean, we talk about mental health a lot - how to keep it afloat, how to do 'self-care' in a commercially-assisted sense. It's all body butters and face masks. 

I don't like it when people reduce preventing mental illness down to looking after yourself or not. That is a large part of it, a whole team of people looked after me at my worst. Most things cannot be made better with a face mask. 

It's lonely knowing that your past is taboo. That if you started talking about it in public, people would visibly recoil. I feel at home with people who understand, people who have been through the mill too. Or people who have an empathy so deep that it's cool and soothing to be in their presence. 

I wanted, incrementally, to tell my story. Writing a memoir at twenty-six seems a little presumptuous, like the most interesting things I have to recount have happened. I hope this is not the case. 

Today I want to talk about a girl I met when I was fourteen. I was in a Priory in Ticehurst, Kent. Its failings have been since documented on TV, so you might know it from the BBC. I'd never lived away from home before and it was a baptism of fire. I had a room of my own, well two. One on the ASD (autistic spectrum disorder) half of the ward, which was where I started staying because all the beds on the other side of the HDU (high dependency unit) were taken. I was moved to that side later on during my six week stay, which abruptly ended because the level of care was so diabolical that my parents discharged me themselves. 

There were some very, very ill people on this ward. There was a girl with the worst self-harm to date that I have ever seen. She was tiny and I can almost remember her face through the medication haze. There was another girl who just had no idea what day it was, who she was or where she was. She slammed herself against the door of my room periodically. 

The girl I remember most vividly had plastered the door to her room with cut-out pictures of goats. She adored goats - it was total obsession. We went to a farm to see some. She, I and two other autistic patients went. It was great - if you can say that that admission had a highlight, this was it. 

Also, she never spoke. She was a selective mute. I think she heard voices that told her not to speak but I imagine the reason was my complex than that. She did, however, sing beautifully. She played guitar, face half-concealed by fringe and sang out 'fuck the priory'. It is not dinner party appropriate, but it happened and I am grateful to have met someone so unique, but so sorry to have seen such suffering so young. 

We need to talk about mental illness. Not just mental health. About hospitals and all that comes with that. 

I am anxious about publishing this post. 

Thank you for reading.