FREEDOM - Graham Morgan

Posted by See Me, 19 March 2019

Graham Morgan has previously spoken at our Human Rights, Equalities and Mental Health Event in December 2018. He has recently written a book called 'Start' and has kindly given us some extracts from it to share with you over the coming weeks. Graham has a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, has an MBE for services to mental health, helped to create the Mental Health Care and Treatment Act and has been on a compulsory treatment order under the act for the last 9 years.

FREEDOM

Today they were deciding on whether to recommend renewing my section again. Sometimes I just get so fed up with all of this. So fed up and angry.

I am called for my care programme approach meeting and then not called for it and then called for it after all, by which time my car is in the garage and my named person is a day’s journey away when she had previously booked the time off. It just feels like they cannot care. And yet I know they do. In a way.

But I work. My named person works. I have things to do. I do not like being juggled around because someone, somewhere, has made mistakes with schedules. I do not like the fact that I have to travel for three and half hours, cover only thirty miles, to attend a meeting I didn’t want to go to.

I hate co-operating; being honest and open and friendly and sharing a laugh. It is my freedom you are discussing and taking notes on. I know the arguments. I do know them. I am furious.

What are the conditions for my section? You almost tap them off your fingers; we are so used to this debate. I have schizophrenia. So I have a mental illness. Well, I know I don’t, it just looks like I do. I don’t feel ill. I don’t feel different. I am me. That is all. I am me. You are saying I am ill because I am me.

I benefit from treatment. There is nothing to treat, there just isn’t, and yet I can neither explain this to myself or to you. My CPN, what she does is great, it is all anyone would want – those warm and wise conversations and that wonderful support when I find the world difficult. Everyone should have someone close to them like that who they can confide and share stories with.

I know, I know so well those days when we went through my hospital notes, all those points you made, see? 

‘You stopped taking medication then and then and then and not long after you were in hospital.’

And I know, I know. I even know and remember that at the time I said, ‘I cannot argue with that, my diagnosis must be right.’

I cannot explain to you why it is wrong. I get myself all tangled up. It isn’t right.

Somewhere this has all gone wrong but I am not sure how, and I am sure that I am not ill . Sometimes I just yearn to be me.

Living a false life seems so wrong and taking this drug that hides my evil from me, how can I agree to that? All these years of breathing badnesss into the air, poisoning the joy that can fill life and just not seeing it because the drugs disguise the reality. And I dread more than anything those times when I really know how bad I am. But this pretence that I am not so awful, how can we let that slip by unnoticed? We must one day confront what I am and deal with it.

Yet sometimes I don’t think this. I think to myself that the medication is just some sort of placebo, that if it were changed to saline solution I would just carry plodding along not getting ‘ill’, not doing anything much, and at other times I worry that it is poison we slip under my skin every two weeks. But mostly I just know it is so wrong for me to take medication. I need to be real again, how on earth can we want for anything else?

I am at risk. And I just don’t think I am. I just don’t think I am. You, my psychiatrist, say I get ill quickly. That I want to set fire to myself without the jags; that I want to drain the evil away. And I know I do. But maybe, just once, I could live free; live with a joy in myself; live not thinking about evil. Maybe I will not always be that way. Maybe I could take that chance?

And my judgement is impaired. I am making sense now! I am seeing your point.  I know your arguments, I realise that it might be right, it might be true that I have an illness. Being evil might be a delusion.

I know you might be right and me wrong, that all these things might be symptoms of an illness.

Doesn’t the fact that I can see this, mean that my judgement is not impaired? Doesn’t the fact that I know I might have impaired judgement almost mean that I can’t have impaired judgement? Doesn’t it? The fact that I am almost as frightened as you all are of the day when I can be free and stop that medication, that jag. This must mean that I know what I am doing. Sort of?

I want to walk in the clouds where no one ever looks at me again. I don’t want this to be happening. I don’t want my life to be this way.

I don’t want to have to say how angry I am with my obtuseness, my refusal to accept what everyone says. I want to go right back to the beginning and make none of this happen. I want to be a stockbroker with three children and a Labrador.

I don’t want to humiliate myself any more with the stories that I have to tell the tribunals, where they look at me with kindly faces and dismiss what I say.

I don’t want to be in that bulging file of notes that you carry around with you. And I don’t want to be unusual.  And I don’t want to be summoned at a moment’s notice to my tribunal. My tribunal where I will be stared at and studied and decided about. Where even I will be frightened about what will happen if I win. And I don’t want to make jokes when I am miserable. And I don’t want to be intense and I don’t want to be here.

And I know you phoned my named person on your day off and I know you will work over Christmas and that you will do it to keep me safe.

I know all of this. I know every single little scrap of all of this.  I want to curl up.  I don’t want to speak.

I hate mental illness. I hate every element of it. I don’t want to go for my jag tomorrow.

I don’t want to sit in the waiting room, wondering how much it will hurt. I don’t want to take my antidepressants. I want to be free of all of this. I want to cover my eyes and scream and I want to say, ‘I don’t see you, I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are, I don’t recognise you.

And then I want to whisper that I don’t know what I am and I want to whisper, ‘someone put their arms round me and hold me and let me know how to feel again.’