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This interview took place at a regular general meeting of the Hackney
Mental Patients Union. These meetings are open to anyone who is or has been
a mental patient, and are held at Robin Farquarson House in Hackney. They
are the controlling body of Hackney M.P.U. which runs two households,
campaigns for the civil liberties and welfare rights of its members and
generally represent their interests in whatever ways seem practical.
The views expressed in the interview are of those involved, however they
are generally representative of the ideas of M.P.U. activists. Taking part
in the discussion were Joan Martin, Val and Andrew Roberts, Austin Johnson
and others. The article that follows is a condensed version of discussions
that we had on several occasions.
When was the M.P.U. founded?
Andrew: In March '73 a meeting was called at the Paddington Day
Hospital by
a pilot committee and was attended by 150 or so people, about a 100 of whom
were or had been mental patients. This group drew up our policy document -
"The Declaration of Intent" - and established regular weekly meetings in a
squat in Camden. In June '73 we acquired Robin Farquarson House through a
housing association. Later the squat was repossessed and so the office and
meetings were transferred here. Our last national meeting was in March last
year when there were groups as far north as Dundee and south as Poole,
Dorset. It was decided then that local groups should be autonomous but
linked in an informal federation.
Are you attempting something like Cope or the Philadelphia Association,
setting up anti-hospitals or asylums, as alternatives to bins ?
Andrew: No. What were trying to do is to make patients in hospitals
more
aware of their rights and to press for changes in the running of hospitals
- such as the right to choose and refuse treatments and the end to
compulsory hospitalization. These aims are set out in the Declaration of
Intent.
We don't think hospitals are the right place for people to go to, let alone
live in, so we have three houses where people, who might otherwise have to
go into hospital for the lack of anywhere else to go can live. But that's
what they are - places to live not places for therapy. There's a general
feeling that any sort of structured therapy within the households would
make them like mental hospitals. Segregating those who allegedly need a
"therapeutic community" (as opposed to a community) from those who can live
freely maintains the degrading distinction between allegedly mentally "ill"
and "healthy" people. And along with it the allocation of different levels
of responsibility, rationality and power. Personally I would restrict this
criticism of therapy to living situations. Outside of the home, in
situations from which one can easily withdraw, therapy may have a role.
Val Anything a mental patient does or has done to her tends to be
termed
"therapy" - for non-patients it might simply be called "having a chat".
What we're trying to do is provide places for people to live as human
beings. We're a third choice instead of the usual two when the situation in
one's home gets impossible, of living on the streets or going into
hospital.
We don't think this alternative will solve the problem - political action
is necessary for that. But the way I see it, it's idealistic to think
either in terms of changing society without bothering about the problems
that exist now or in terms of creating utopian anti-hospitals as an end in
themselves without having a broader political awareness of the problem.
Do you have links with other trade unions or revolutionary
organisations?
Andrew: Left organizations in general seem largely unconcerned with
the issues
raised by claimants, prisoners, mental patients, gay people, women and so
on. We have no formal links with trade unions, though we did support the
nurses' strike. In principle however I think we should have and at the next
A.G.M. we've a motion calling for discussions with the Hackney Trades
Council about the exploitation of mental patients and ex-patients as cheap
labour.
How do doctors and nurses react to the M.P.U.?
Andrew: As an idea they often say they find it "interesting" or "has
possibilities", but if patients in their hospital form a group they are
terrified. Any collective action by patients threatens the whole notion of
hospitals and treatment - unless it's supervised by the staff.
There are a small number who are associate members and support our
activities - but their hands are rather tied, if they do anything publicly
they can place their jobs in jeopardy.
Why are you opposed to hospitals?
Andrew: There are a whole number of reasons - the main is I think,
that
treatment cannot solve the problems that people go into hospital with.
These problems are the result of living in an alienating society, where
jobs are uninteresting, where workers have little control over their work
situation, where housing is short and often of poor quality. Where people
live in isolated unite often without much contact with each other. The idea
of treatment locates the problem in the
individual and tries to change the individual. But that can only ever be
confusing since the problem is wider than a single person. Going into
hospital removes the person from the situation that caused the problem, but
that only means that the problem isn't solved.
Val: There are situations from which it helps to withdraw, but not
into a
mental hospital. Drugs and regimentation just create new problems for you.
Andrew: We need to create practical ways of collective defence
against the
social forces that break us down and on that basis fight back against them.
Mental hospitals are part of the process of braking us down. They are
societies effort to make our anguish and anger impotent and to force us to
acknowledge defeat. We are fighting back.
Can you tell us something about what it's like to be in a mental
hospital?
Andrew: Unless you've been in hospital it's difficult to realise how
much
your life is interfered with in hospital. One is always being supervised
and watched.
Joan: There's no privacy - you're always being watched. The rooms
are
usually huge so its very difficult to talk - staff always break these
situations by joining in. The idea is that patients can't help themselves
or each other, they need professional helpers to interfere in the interests
of treatment.
Val In one hospital I was in - Belmont - patients were discouraged
from
talking to other patients because the nurses thought it would make us
worse, more upset. As soon as three or four patients got together the
nurses would break us up and join in. Andrew; Hospital is the only place
where watching T.V. is made into a chore. If patients are sitting around
not doing much they are told to watch T.V. Joan; And if you don't want to
watch T.V. they think you must be isolating yourself so they give you extra
drugs which only makes things more confusing.
Andrew The same things happen at socials - if you don't want to join
in
they think you must be sick and so they try and make you join in.
Austin: It's just impossible to be normal in hospital - if you talk
too
much you're manic if you talk too little you're depressed.
Everything you do is watched, observed and labelled with some psychiatric
word - yon just can't have an argument with someone, its turned into part
of
your problem. You're paranoid, or too aggressive, or too passive and so on
and so on. It's impossible to be "right" - because the basic assumption in
the place is that something is "wrong" with you, you're sick, abnormal and
so everything you do is seen as sick and abnormal.
And then they write it all down in the nurse's report which you aren't
allowed to see and they call you "paranoid". Andrew: Hospitals alter the
significance of
every aspect of daily life. Food for instance is used for social control.
Nurses use food to reward or punish patients.
Joan: I remember they used to
refuse second helpings to patients who weren't behaving themselves. If you
were good you were allowed to help lay the table.
Brendan: When I was in Hackney Hospital the nurses were overworked
and no
time for getting themselves meals so they would steal patients' food.
Instead of putting it all
out on the trolley in the evening, they'd keep some back for themselves.
This went on a long time and I complained about it a lot but nothing was
done. Then one day I found a soup tureen full of soup that they had left
out by mistake and I threw it down the stairs.
What else could I do to show them how I felt? They ignored what I'd said.
And of course that was treated as some kind of abnormal, crazy thing to do.
Andrew: Censorship goes on all the time. About what can go on
noticeboards
- as we have found out - about what can even be said about what can be sent
in or out in letters. Very basic civil rights that we all take for granted
are refused to mental patients - supposedly in their interests. M.P.U.
activities counteract this interference and so threaten the hospital.
For instance doctors don't like their patients to know what the
side-effects of the drugs they are given are. When I was last in hospital I
developed the shakes so badly that I thought I was breaking up completely.
I didnt know that it was the side effect of Stelazine. M.P.U has produced a
list of the side effects which we post into hospitals. That really upsets
the doctors.
Robert Ashwell, a member in Rampton Hospital, had his locker searched in an
attempt to find these lists. The literature we were sending him was
systematically being removed from his mail. We wrote to the hospital
secretary asking him why they were not being returned to us - as they
should have been under the 1959 Mental Health Act. He denied that this had
been going on, but a few days later we heard from Robert that his doctor
had returned his letter to him.
Val: At two hospitals I was in, if you were
in a locked ward, you weren't allowed to send a letter out without first
asking staff. That's general practise in locked wards I think.
Andrew: We oppose the use of the mental profession to deny the
constitutional, legal rights of the individual. For instance there is at
present no effective right of appeal against compulsory hospitalization and
so in effect it is a prison sentence. If not worse because you are never
sure when it will end which is a very frightening feeling.
What do you
think should happen to people who are dangerous and violent and sent to
places like Broadmoor and Rampton?
Val: The abstraction violent/non-violent is not particularly useful,
in my
opinion. Violence occurs in a particular situation and must be dealt with
in its context not in abstraction,
Have you problems with violence in your houses?
Andrew: At times our houses in Mayola Road and Derby Road have coped
with
threatening behaviour, more than most households would. However sometimes
houses have had to ask people to leave.
Val: There are of course situations where all channels of
communication are
completely blocked and a violent reaction makes more sense than a
non-violent one.'
What about institutions that have been built specifically to contain
violent behaviour?
Joan: Violence should be a criminal offence and violent people
should be
charged. But they should not be put on a compulsory hospital order without
a proper trial and right of appeal. If someone commits a crime they are
punished, mental patients are punished not only for things they have done
but also for things it is alleged they may do in the future.
Andrew: There is no solution to this problem within a class society.
But in
any case it is clear that there must be ways of dealing with violent
behaviour. But I do think the significance of this problem is
mis-represented. The violence in our society is predominantly the violence
of the sane, rich and powerful. It is the person who evicts squatters who
is violent not the squatter. The lawyers, politicians who plan to make
squatting illegal who are vicious not the squatter who seeks shelter. Drug
companies make fortunes from poisoning our nervous systems with psychiatric
drugs with the full support of the law, but you smoke a pleasant and
harmless drug like cannabis the police break up your home and haul you
before the courts. Who are the psychopaths?
Do you think that people with
physical disorders should be treated in hospitals?
Andrew Only if there is
a treatment that is effective and hospital is the appropriate place.
The
problem as to whether a particular condition is the result of an organic
impairment is irrelevant unless there is something that can be done about
it in hospital. Very few physical disorders, such as physical handicap, are
treatable in the sense that a physical illness is treatable - at least for
the present. If there is no treatment the person should not be in hospital
and what is really important is how that person is treated by
others-whether he is receiving treatment or not. Everybody is the same - we
all want to be and need to be treated as human beings.
Val: We had an old lady here who was classified as suffering from
senile
dementia. She needed watching so she didn't burn her clothes by going to
close to the fire, or fall down the stairs. But we tried to talk to her and
after a while she became far more lucid and started to do things for
herself, which the doctor who had been looking after her claimed was
impossible. Like having a bath or helping with the washing-up. What happens
at the moment is that these people become institutionalised rather than
being supported in their own attempts to deal with their own difficulties.
Andrew: Social workers who have visited us freak out at the idea
that
someone should be living in a normal household if they suspect "organic
basis".
Val: Hospitals are just full of people who don't really need to be
there,
they've
just nowhere else to go-like old people
with no family.
But it isn't it true that families
are quite eager to get rid of their
slightly dotty grandparents? Don't people
want people who behave strangely locked away?
Andrew: There's very little help for people who want to keep an
elderly
relative as part of the family. Society's structure is such that old people
aren't seen as being useful in any way so they're not wanted. There's no
work for them to do, no social centres for them to go to. They are treated
as a pain in the neck by society outside the family. So along comes the
doctor when the family is at breaking point and tells them that hospital's
the best place for granddad. Society creates the problems, it expects the
family to solve them and when the family cracks it provides a rubbish bin
to drop one of the members into to make it better for the others.
Do you think drugs can ever be useful?
Andrew: Yes, but only if the patient is
free to choose whether to take them or not. He or she must be told about
the drugs first-especially the side effects.
Austin: Half the patients in
hospital try to avoid taking their pills, that's why there's so much
supervision and policing, so that patients get what they "need", even if
they don't want it.
Joan: You see the only person who knows how you feel,
is you, so you've got every right to refuse treatment, if it doesn't make
you feel better. Which is after all the aim of treatment, isn't it?
Andrew: Treatment strikes are one of the forms of action that
patients have taken.
Joan: Of course some patients want the treatment - and they
shouldn't be prevented from having it . It's rather different to strike in
a
factory, where is collective action, everybody taking the same action.
Andrew The problem is that in these situations they find what they
call
the "ringleaders" and either give them Largactil injections or discharge
them. Trevor Hodgkin at Longrove was threatened with never being let out of
hospital, ever, then we were told he'd been discharged. But recently we
heard from him - he'd been sent to Broadmoor.
Val: What's happening to many
people who end up in hospital is that they're behaviour is logical enough,
they're just operating on not enough facts, or the wrong ones. So why give
them drugs which only make them more confused and less aware of what's
going on?
What changes are you fighting for at the moment-could you tell us
something about what happened at Hackney Hospital?
Andrew: Our main activities as a
local group have been to do with the local bin in Hackney, where Joan,
Brendan and others have been patients.
Patients there and some of us, tried to hold a meeting there, but it was
broken up by a nurse and the M.P.U. was banned in the hospital. We carried
on in a clandestine way with backroom meetings, continual rows, putting
posters up which were torn down and so on.
Eventually patients forced the hospital to permit M.P.U. meetings. There
was a meeting with staff at which a doctor said "the trouble with you is
that you're better organised than we are". They weren't prepared to admit
publicly that patients were not permitted to meet together inside the
hospital, so they gave in. But the first chairman of the hospital branch
was given an extra dose of Largactil immediately after the victory and his
successor was offered a place at the Henderson which she took.
That's how they deal with dissenters - discharge you or knock you out with
injections. If you are working class they say any kind of dissention means
you're getting worse, so they increase medication, put you in another ward
or even transfer you. If you're middle class they say you must be getting
better and discharge you!
Then they painted all the furniture in the room we used to meet in without
warning, so we had to use another room. Then they made the day of the
M.P.U. meeting a day when the patients had to attend a compulsory hospital
meeting. We should have kept on fighting, in fact the group has started
meeting again.
What sort of changes would you like to see in the way of treatment
centres?
Andrew: It isn't a matter of "treatment". The problem isn't a
medical
one - It's a problem of frustrated human needs. These needs should be met
generally, not just for people labelled "mentally ill".
Apart from housing
and income what needs are you thinking of?
Andrew: Well, the need for a social life. Loneliness is a major
problem and
there should be far more community facilities for single people, old
people...everyone. We need more day nurseries. We need full employment, a
breakdown of the division between manual and mental labour so that work can
be interesting, workers' control of industry.
Again and again we find ourselves coming up against the problem of
accommodation -people can never choose where they live because space is at
such a premium.
Joan: When patients are discharged, they very often have
nowhere to go. Horton Hospital gives them their fare to the station and a
£1 note. Even if you do have a bedsit-who wants that, with no
prospect for
a decent job, possibly not knowing anyone else in the neighbourhood. Anyone
would crack up in that situation.
Many people would agree that the atrocities you have been talking about
go
on, but only in rare cases, in a few hospitals and most hospitals are
humane and less restrictive.
Andrew: Okay, so some hospitals are better
than others, but I still disagree with what goes on there. By "good"
hospitals people often mean those with group therapy,instead of physical
treatment. It isn't so much better though-what often happens is that
doctors are directing the other patients to attack certain behaviour.
Anyway
what's the point of having all that insight if you've nowhere to live, no
money, and no prospects?
The places that offer therapy are very selective, they only take young
people with high I.Q.'s.
Can people who are working in the hospitals do anything useful?
Andrew: Well, what they need to do is to stop worrying about the
patients
and look at themselves. People who work in hospitals are so locked into the
idea of being do-gooders, that they never look at what they're actually
doing to their patients. They could become associate members and distribute
literature we print but its almost impossible to take more independent
action without being fired.
I believe you're having problems with finding
accommodation at the moment?
Andrew: Yes, that's true. The Mayola Road house
is being repossessed by the G.L.C. to be knocked down to build a school in
the
area. We're involved in a campaign at the moment to persuade the G.L.C. to
extend our notice by at least six months.
Lately, social workers in the borough have been sending ex-mental patients
to us to find accommodation. We think that if they do this they should also
provide financial support so we can run the Union more efficiently, as well
as permanent accommodation for our households.
If people want to help, letters in support can be sent to us at 37 Mayola
Road, London E.5 and we'll forward them on to the council.
Hackney M.P.U. Meetings - every Saturday at 2.00 p.m. at 37 Mayola Road,
London E.5 MPU
Publications - available from Mayola Road.
Declaration of Intent - MPU stickers for putting up in hospitals - MPU
Directory of Psychiatric Drugs - new edition ; Side effects leaflet ;
"Don't be kept in hospital for the rest of your life", a sheet for pinning
on hospital notice boards on how to apply to Mental Health Tribunals;
"Mental Patients Union" - a list of groups. M.S. Please send some loose
stamps to cover postage - not S.A.E. MPU exists on donations so give if you
can afford it. Details of membership and associate membership also
available. Membership is open to patients and ex-patients, associate
membership to sympathetic non-patients.
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