Interview: Author Rod Maddocks on Mental Health and Selling His House

All my adult life. I remember avidly reading RD Laing’s The Divided Self on my tea breaks as a teenager in the old Nottingham Sunblest factory. RD Laing was a cult figure in the sixties and seventies. He rejected the medical model of mental illness and saw people with mental health problems as being on their own journey to find a way to a natural state of equilibrium. I was very influenced by ideas like that. In those days we believed in William Blake’s invocation that the tigers of wrath were wiser than the horses of instruction. Mental illness and drug use were merely the opening of the doors of perception into other, equally valid worlds, or so we thought.

 

Mental illness was all too often a painful affliction that ground out all vitality and joy in life. This book really describes how it was the humanity of the patients as they struggled with their problems that really taught me how to live, not the florid fantasies of delusional experience.

 

This is my most common question from the public at my readings. The orthodox view is to see evil as the absence of good, a sort of vacuum. I just think people do bad things because they enjoy it. Sadism is fun if you don’t feel guilt.

 

Maybe because we want to know about the stranger that might exist within us. My story Transference talks of the “dark angel within us, loving and hating equally.” Instead of seeing people as being socialised into evil, I see men as being hard-wired to take advantage of the weak. In that sense we are only saved because we are socialised into altruism.

 

I think ordinary people are perfectly capable of atrocity. I am an evolutionary determinist in these things. To do horrible things without conscience must have been a useful survival trait in the past. We all exist on a spectrum. You just need to cook up the right ingredients to release the genie.

 

I do think a lot about this question. Quite often when I met murderers in my work I wished that they had been swiftly dispatched by the state once they had been convicted. Execution seems to me to provide a moral limit, an ultimate sanction that is the only proper response to the mortal terror that they visited on their victims. That being said, unfortunately capital punishment tends to brutalise and degrade the people who have to enact it. That is the dilemma about the whole business as far as I am concerned, not squeamishness about the deed itself. I was born and brought up in remote places in Africa and in my twenties I lived in Texas for a while. I’ve imbibed the frontier spirit. I don’t have the usual exaggerated British respect for the rule of law. I’m at home with vengefulness. Sometimes the law won’t help you. You won’t be surprised that I’m writing a vigilante novel at the moment.

 

I wrote this book in six months in the winter after leaving work. I found myself troubled by flitting memories about my career and I also had furious dreams about the patients. So each story is wrapped around a nugget of remembered experience yet these are also oneiric tales. They just came out like that. One of my characters observes that “there is no feast without cruelty.” And that is true of this book. I hope that people with mental health problems will recognise that I’m just calling it like it is. At least I don’t try to fool them.

Contrary to what many would suspect I enjoyed the early turbulent years as did many of my colleagues. We loved the turmoil, the risks, the sense of coping with stuff that most would shrink from. However tough the job, it was balanced by the perception that the patients were having a far worse time of it. What was really heartbreaking was the slow death of optimism, as all your youthful professional hopes gradually oxidised into the sour rust of middle-aged burn-out.

 

It’s always good to feel useful. Something you don’t get much when you are a full time writer. I most liked doling out money from the office petty cash to the patients then covering up those untoward expenses from the departmental auditors by various covert means. I‘d ask myself would it be better for this person to have a month’s supply of tablets or 200 quid in the hand? My career was formed round those small moments of epiphany that the patients and I snatched from the deadening hand of the mental health system.

 

Humour bubbled up in our offices like steam from a volcanic vent. Although a tad sulphuric it was nevertheless purifying. We did not really laugh at the patients, rather we laughed at how in many ways we were a lot more screwed up than they were.

 

I became more biologically-minded as time went on. There was no question that without anti-psychotics people with serious illness were in deep trouble. Similarly the serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, the anti-depressants like the much maligned Prozac, made all the difference to lives blighted by depression and anxiety.

 

There is an abiding truth in Kesey’s description. You also find it in Erving Goffman’s Asylums. Both works show that the role of the mental institution was to fix the patient in a role vis a vis the staff in a way that tends to mortify, pathologise and negate. The style of mental health care varied over the years yet still the same rules prevailed. Nurse Ratched lived on, though now she had more subtle instruments of control.

 

A few felt that I had betrayed them and the patients. Psychiatry is really not very imaginative you see and nor are its practitioners. The best among them seemed to enjoy the fact that one of their number was trying to write an honest book. Some of the younger ones tell me that things are different now; however, I think that they may find out eventually that though the game has changed the same old forces are probably still at work.

 

Yes, I sold it in order to buy myself enough time from the day job to complete my first novel. The profit from the sale gave me a year of writing time and a precious foothold on the literary ladder. It was a good exchange, though, and I have never regretted it. I am “unwifed and unchilded” to use Philip Larkin’s words. The books will be my only markers when I am not around anymore.

 

Our mental health services are a simply mirror of the sort of society we have at any one time. So, Mr Hunt merely holds up a reflection of the times as it affects people with mental ill health. You should bear in mind that well-meaning policies are nearly as dangerous as stringent cuts. “Community care” killed off thousands of patients for example. Myriad released from hospital died of loneliness in their squalid little bedsits.

 

I write to make my feelings known to myself as much as anything. It’s odd how stuff lives inside you yet it is only half-recognised. The process of writing is often painful. Once you have mined deep down it does give you a sense of accord with the self and a certain peacefulness. It’s not long, though, before I want to scratch at the scar once more and start the process all over again.