Group Therapy

1 July 2007

The first time I went mad, I was eighteen years old. I was in my first year at UCLA and taking a full load of classes. I was working twenty-four hours a week on night shift at a twenty-four hour coffee shop. I found I didn't need something as mundane as sleep when there was so much out there to do. I had discovered playwriting and politics and sex. And boy, oh boy, had I discovered sex! Having been a good Catholic girl a year before, I was getting laid as often as most people shake hands, and with as much tenderness or feeling. In fact the whole thing had become no more than a wet handshake to me and, had it not been the era of Free Love, I might have been carted off on charges of Leading an Lewd and Immoral Life. I was on top of the world. I was having the time of my life. I was convinced I could do anything. And I was having a hypomanic episode.

Then came the crash. I ended up at Student Health, where they decided I was a danger to myself and referred me to the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute on campus. Who put me into Group Therapy.

At first, I wasn't amazingly keen on the idea of group therapy. It seemed like a way to economise on psychiatric care; two shrinks taking a whole bunch of patients at the same time. I wanted my own shrink! To listen to me drone on interminably about my childhood and dreams and that kind of stuff, like you saw in those films like "The Three Faces of Eve". But it was take it or leave it so I took it.

Group therapy was taken by two trainee shrinks; Alan and Dave. Alan was a research psychologist retraining as a clinical psychologist. He was intense looking with deep brown eyes that looked bovine enough to make you think he really cared. Dave was blond, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and looked the very soul of sanity. Of course, if you know anything about the kind of people who become shrinks, you'll know this could not possibly have been the case.

The group therapy room had a small circle of plastic chairs in it, and one wall was covered by a large mirror. It wasn't a mirror, of course. It was two way glass and Alan and Dave were being observed by their Professors who were also observing us. Weird, huh?

But not as weird as the group itself. There was Sasha, a woman in her late twenties who had recently been released after eight years from the Camarillo State Mental Hospital and who suffered from schizophrenia. There was Marilyn, a teenager who told us that whenever she looked into the mirror she saw a fat person. I had never heard of anorexia before and it seemed an odd thing to have as a mental health problem. There was Louis, a balding man in his late thirties who stared at his hands and wrapped his feet around the chair, and who would definitely not have been there were it not 1972. Louis's "mental health problem" was that he was gay. And there was Paul.

Paul was just about to turn twenty. He heard voices and had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Paul had done a lot of psychedelic drugs in his life, but no one thought to ask, back then, if the drugs were causing the symptoms. So he was admitted as an inpatient and given a whole lot of Stelazine, a major tranquillizer, which made his eyes glassy, his talk slow, and his limbs shaky.

All in all a freaky little group. And I loved it! Here at last was a group of people who I could relate to! Who wouldn't think I was weird! We bonded almost immediately, treating sessions like social occasions and, early on, decided that we wanted to have coffee available to make things cosier. When we were told that catering would not be possible because of bureaucratic hurdles, I brought a coffee pot, coffee, cream and sugar to the next session. The shrinks struggled for control but found themselves overwhelmed by the group dynamics. (Wonder what the Professors behind the glass thought?) Having been desperately lonely in the Outside World, group therapy became my refuge.

Paul and I became good friends through the group. He didn't get a lot of visitors, as the hospital was about seventy miles from where he lived. I was on campus all the time, so I took to visiting him every day. His was in a locked ward (which I think they all were then)and they had a pass system in operation. Level 1 meant you had to stay on the ward. Level 2 meant you could go out into the rest of the hospital even, oh thrill of thrills, to the cafeteria and have coffee. Level 3 meant you could walk around outside the hospital and Level 4 meant you could go home on a three-day pass. Paul was on Level 1, so we spent a lot of time hanging around the ward talking and playing music. He was a very fine musician.

Paul's previous psychiatrist had committed suicide, which is never a very encouraging situation when this is the person who has been trying to make you better. Paul's case was taken over by a Famous Shrink who made it clear that, because he was a Famous Shrink, he was only taking on Paul's case temporarily as he had other cases to deal with that were much more likely to get him published in academic journals. Okay, he didn't say that, but it seemed to be the subtext… Paul took what I thought was a perverse delight in being referred to a famous person.

Meanwhile, group therapy had become like an elaborate and traumatic game of strip poker. We drank the coffee I brought from home (Paul took charge of the coffee pot since he was in residence at the hospital), and bared our souls and occasionally wept and even hugged. (Not me, though. I'm not really much of a weeper or a hugger.)

Sasha finally broke down and talked of the terrible abuse she had suffered at Camarillo State Mental Hospital and the damage it had done to her and other patients there. Dave put his hands together as if in prayer in front of his face and gently challenged her to admit that the abuse she believed she had suffered was not real and only "part of her illness". Well, maybe Dave didn't believe her, but I did. Of course, having an anarchist streak in me, I'm a sucker for anything that dishes the dirt on authority. Four years later, three doctors and five other employees of Camarillo State Mental Hospital were indicted by a grand jury in California in connection with the deaths of two hospital patients, and against a background of suspicious deaths stretching back several years.

I liked Alan though. He had an incisive mind and was canny enough to know that the bond the patients felt for each other was not a conspiracy against the staff. He took my anarchist outbursts in his stride and eventually described me as an armadillo with a raw and inflamed innards. Yeah. I like to think so too.

Paul, I discovered, wrote the most amazing, witty and soulful songs, that could make you laugh one minute and cry the next. He wasn't just a guy with a guitar, he was, I realised, very special. He wrote a song for me, which I never recorded or made him write down. But I do remember this bit of it:

She has sympathy and sense,
She has calm and confidence,
Roses and a barbed wire fence,
Payments, mortgages and rents
But by and by
With the ease of gently washing tide.
She'll be fine.

I started to encourage Paul to take his music seriously. He wrote more and more stuff, his tunes and his wit and his poignant reflections on life hitting home more acutely each time.

Paul eventually got to Level 2 and we started to go out into the hospital, hitting the cafeteria and the UCLA Medical Center library. This was a favourite place for Paul because he could finally look up the side effects of all the drugs he had been put on. The last side effect listed for any drug you want to name is "Death". Even aspirin. If you don't believe me, look it up!

I had started to worry about Paul, though. He had an easy going personality that seemed all too easy to manipulate, even unwittingly. The nurses on the ward had been used to Paul being on the ward when he had been on Level 1. Now, whenever I came around so that we could go out, there always seemed to be a nurse saying Paul can you clean up your room? Paul can you take this to the pharmacy for me? Paul can you drop this off at reception? He felt he was being treated like a child, but never said anything. Anarchist that I was, I tried to school him in the ways of teenage rebellion.

"Look!" I said, "Repeat after me. I am not going to take any more of this bullshit!"

I got him to repeat it several times and occasionally he would even say to a nurse, "Would you mind if I do it later? I've got a visitor." It was a start.

By the time Paul got onto Level 3 and could walk around outside the hospital, he was in rebellious mood. He even asked me if I could bring a joint for us to smoke on my next visit. Which, in the cause of youthful rebellion, I did; and we got pleasantly and hilariously stoned. I remember that day and everything about it. It was glorious! We walked around in the sunshine, giggling like naughty school kids until it was time to go in. We found ourselves walking down a corridor and realised we were outside the group therapy room. It was empty. We went in and looked at all the empty chairs and decided to make it into a short play! We leapt from chair to chair, impersonating Alan and Dave and Louis and Sasha and Marilyn and the rest; and realised what an absurd proposition group therapy really was! We just couldn't stop laughing.

But things were to get serious all too soon. His father came for one of his rare visits and Paul couldn't wait to tell him all about his plans to take music seriously when he got out of the hospital. But his father was having none of it.

"Grow up!" he told him, "You're not going to earn a living with all that! Get a grip on yourself, for God's sake!" Paul was devastated. And no matter how much I tried to get him to say, "I am not going to take any more of this bullshit", I got no response. I was furious with him. How could he let himself be beaten down? How could he be such a wimp?

And then he went to see his Famous Shrink who told him some good news. He was going to make Paul one of his long-term patients. Just think! Paul might eventually get an article in an academic paper devoted to him! But he didn't want to be a long-term patient. He wanted to be well. And somewhere in there, his spirit broke.

We fought a lot after that. And then we drifted apart. I stopped going to group therapy. I felt better, I thought. The ritual of my separation was the collection of my coffee pot which Paul had been bringing to sessions. I never saw him again.

A year later I was working on campus at the student union cafeteria, dumping ladles full of hot chilli and soup into bowls; and I looked up and saw Sasha. She was a student now – majoring in psychology.

"Do you ever hear how Paul's doing?" I asked her.

"Didn't you hear?" she asked.

I didn't like the way she glanced away from me when I said no. I didn't like the way she paused before she spoke. Several months before, she told me, he'd taken an overdose. Then, changing his mind, he'd called an ambulance. But he had emphysema; his lungs were not good. He stopped breathing and they couldn't resuscitate him.

Paul died of an attempted suicide. He was twenty years old. And all his astonishing talent died with him. I suppose it's natural in those circumstances to wonder if you could have been there, could have done something, could have said the right thing. I certainly thought about that. And for a very long time.

Within two years, I would try to end my own life too. But, more by luck than judgment, I would survive. I would fall in love. And fall in love again. I would emigrate to Britain. And buy a dilapidated house and fix it up. And raise a son. I would become a writer. And have successes and failures, joy and grief. Paul would have none of those things.

By and by, with the ease of gently washing tide, I'd be fine.


If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.

Not Quite James Bond

22 July 2007

If there was anything my mother missed about Chicago when she moved us to California in the Fifties, she never expressed it to me. Chicago was a beautiful city of great architecture, but she seemed unmoved. It was the home of jazz. So what? And it had seasons. California only seemed to have one season. Round about January, the leaves would abruptly fall off the trees and quickly grow back before anyone noticed their embarrassing nudity. My mother, when pressed, would concede that, yes, California did not have real seasons, without the slightest sense of regret. Mainly because, in Chicago, they had real winters.

I understand that in Chicago, there are winter days that are so cold that the hairs in your nose can freeze before you walk fifty yards. This impresses me because my nose hairs have never frozen under any conditions and I am left to wonder what that feels like. And apparently in Chicago it also snows a lot.

The one thing my mother seemed to miss the least about Chicago was snow. She had had her fill of shoveling the stuff, putting chains on the car, falling on her ass on the ice, and dressing kids up in snowsuits, galoshes and mittens only for them to go out for ten minutes and want to come back in again. So, when her brother Gene offered to take my mother, my brothers, my sister and I up to the “snow mountains” to play, my mother told him she was washing her hair that year, but he was welcome to take us if he wanted. So he did. Four kids. My uncle is a saint.

It is one of my earliest memories, but I can remember getting kitted up in the Chicago snowsuit and galoshes (that I probably grew out of by the end of the day) and going off to build a snowman, have a snow fight and then want back in the car after ten minutes. (Some things, as my mother could have told Gene, never change.) I think it must have been on this trip that my brother Keith embarked on his love affair with mountains, snow and ice.

As soon as Keith got his license at the age of sixteen, the call of the wild, the proximity of mountains covered in snow and the availability of my mother’s Ford Galaxy station wagon was irresistible.

Skiing, of course, was out of the question; and was about as likely for a group of ragged kids from Bellflower as yacht racing. (In any case skiing has always seemed to me a very expensive way to break your leg. It is so much cheaper to buy a ladder and then fall off. If you borrow a ladder, it’s even cheaper.) So one day my brother brought home a four-man toboggan.

For the price of a tank of gas, we could kit ourselves up in layers of ordinary clothes and shoes, putting plastic bags around our socks to keep our feet dry (which never worked), drive up to Wrightwood and stop by the side of the road wherever we spotted a good toboggan hill, climb to the top and careen down the hill at a speed that would have made my mother, had she seen us, call a halt to the whole thing. But she wasn’t there. Obviously. Theoretically, you can steer a toboggan by lifting the curl. And theoretically you can brake it with your feet. Neither of these things are true. We ran into a lot of trees.

One evening, as we were returning from a particularly good run that we’d found that day, that required us to bail out at the bottom before we hit a road full of passing cars, there was a major hitch. It was starting to snow and a ranger, anticipating a heavy snowfall, had closed the road and there was a locked metal gate preventing us from getting out and getting home.

For some reason, this didn’t alarm me at all and I thought it would be a great adventure to sleep in the car all night. Keith was not enthusiastic about the idea. First of all, the heat in the car would run out as soon as the engine was switched off and the engine would switch off as soon as the gas ran out. And secondly, if the snow reached the tailpipe, exhaust would enter the car and we would all be found dead the next morning. Keith always had to ruin everything by being practical.

So he got out of the car and hiked down to the ranger station to get someone to come and unlock the gate. The ranger station was closed, however, so he hiked back again and had a good look at the gate.

“Well,” he drawled quietly, “I think we’re going to have to break through the gate.”

Finally! An exciting climax to the adventure. We were going to accelerate into the barrier and smash through it at great speed like in a James Bond film. Sadly, this was not what my brother had in mind. He inched up to the gate until the bumper touched it. Then he revved the engine gently until there was enough force on the padlock to break it. And we were on our way. Not quite James Bond.

I didn’t discover the meaning of the words “laconic” or “taciturn” until I bought a dictionary and I didn’t own a dictionary for a very long time. My mother-in-law once asked me how I could be a writer and not own a dictionary.

“I use short words I can spell,” I replied. (I wouldn’t mind that being written on my gravestone. I still use short words I can spell. It’s just that I also do crosswords now and, as everyone knows, you can’t do crosswords without a dictionary.)

Keith, I discovered from the dictionary, was both laconic and taciturn. He was quiet, self-contained and kept his own counsel. Another way of looking at it was that he was uncommunicative, unemotional and stubborn. That’s kind of how I looked at it as a kid anyway, particularly when I was having a tantrum at him and he just quietly went into the bathroom, closed the door in my face and locked it.

So when he announced at the age of eighteen that he had signed up for the Air Force, it came completely out of blue – or out of the Wild Blue Yonder, as it were. (Alright, I can hear you groan at that one.) I guess, with the Vietnam war escalating, he figured he’d join the service before he got drafted.

He was the first of us to leave home and it was quite a shock. The prospect of there not being seven of us living together in our house in Bellflower had not occurred to me before.

The Air Force soon realised my brother was a very smart kid and started training him intensively in electronics. My brother Steve, who knows about stuff like this, said he achieved the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in electronics in less than eighteen months. So intense was his training, in fact, that he was not given Christmas leave that first year.

We were a very close family and the idea of a Christmas without Keith was unthinkable. So my mother, my brother Steve, my sister and I boarded a Greyhound bus for the fifty-two hour journey to Biloxi Mississippi where my brother Keith was stationed.

It was a trip that could only be described as a modern reinterpretation of Dante’s journey into Hell. We were woken at three o’clock in the morning to get off and sit in a freezing terminal in San Antonio so the bus could be cleaned. Steve got food poisoning from one of the Greyhound cafes on route. And Texas just went on and on and on and on and on.

We spent Christmas in a Biloxi motel in the warm glow of a small, spindly tree decorated with paper ornaments, and had our dinner in one of the only restaurants in New Orleans that was open on Christmas Day. I had coffee for the first time to show how grown-up I now was. (I was twelve.) It was half milk and I shovelled about half a cup of sugar into it. My brother seemed subdued that day, but he didn’t talk about it. He never talked about it.

We were delighted when we heard that Keith wasn’t going to be sent to Vietnam. He was being sent to the Middle East which, to us then, was just a place where there was a lot of sand and camels. I didn’t even know there was oil there; I thought that was all in Texas.

I was never clear about what happened next. He was apparently recruited into Intelligence and was given a Secret clearance. I guess if anyone knew how to keep secrets it was my brother Keith.

Then, about a year later, my mother packed us all in the Ford Galaxy station wagon and told us we were going up to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California to visit my brother. He was in the hospital. And what I discovered when we got there was that he was in the psychiatric ward. Something had happened and my brother had snapped.

The person we visited was my brother but not my brother. He talked even more slowly than usual, when he talked at all, and his eyes looked glassy, the quick intelligence having disappeared somehow. He was drugged up to the eyeballs on Thorazine.

He was eventually given a medical discharge and came home and never talked about what happened. But there was a lot that was not right. After getting the equivalent of a college degree in electronics, Steve told me, Keith couldn’t even get past Ohm’s Law. Whatever that is. Sounds like something you’re supposed to know. Like the definition of a sentence if you get your degree in English. (That wasn’t a sentence by the way. No verb.)

He seemed to crack up on a regular basis after that, and at those times his stint in the service seemed to haunt him. He would be convinced that the CIA was after him and that the Red Chinese had broken into his house and taken things.

My brother, we later discovered, was bipolar, manic depressive as it used to be called; just like my father and like my sister who once stayed with us when her marriage was breaking up and bought a hundred pairs of panties over a period of a few days and the sheet music for about three hundred songs she was never going to sing. (Why does a classical singer need the music for the Whiffenpoof Song? “We are poor little lambs who have lost our way. Baa, baa, baa!”) By the time I was diagnosed as bipolar there was no denying that mental health was not my family’s genetic strong point.

When I brought my soon-to-be husband Richard home to meet my family many years later, I was more than a little worried what he would think. He was from a nice middle-class English family and I could only hope that my family would appear sane for a couple of weeks, or at least house-trained.

Shortly after our arrival Keith asked Richard if he’d seen John LeCarre’s spy mini-series “Smiley’s People”. Rich said that he had and then Keith asked, more quietly, if he remembered the “scene in the bank where they do the switch”. Well, he didn’t remember the “scene in the bank” but said he did because he was a polite middle-class English boy. My brother leaned over to him conspiratorially.

“That’s how they really do it,” he said.

Between my sister’s panties and my brother’s “scene in the bank” there was now no hope of convincing Rich my family was sane. He was later to discover I was a raving lunatic myself. He seems to have taken it all in his stride however and adores them. (Quite right too!)

My brothers were always close but, though I dearly loved Keith, I never knew him. He was always distant somehow and had seemed to like it that way. This grieved my mother. She really wanted us to be close.

“He’s got such a good heart,” she’d say, “He feels things very deeply.”

My brother’s love of all things icy continues to this day. He ice skates and has done competitive ice dancing all over the States. Just after my mother died, Keith fell badly on this ice, broke seven ribs and ended up in intensive care.

When he came out of the hospital something very strange started to happen. He started to talk about his life. He started to talk about his feelings. He came over to Scotland for my fiftieth birthday and we sat talking over a pint in the pub until my son phoned to ask when the hell we were coming home. He helped me through my breakdown and we talked often, one bipolar bear to another. And then one day I realised that, for the first time in fifty years, we were close.

I guess he realised, as we had to realise, that, out of the seven people who made up our household, only three of us remained; and the absence caused by my sister’s death would always cast a shadow over us. We were all we had left of the family we’d grown up with; the only ones who could remember, could understand. And we really needed each other.

I talk to my brother Keith every week now and we have commiserated as I have fought my battles with my failing career; and as he has fought his against his bouts of unemployment, his inadequate health insurance and his cancer. One night I told him I loved him. I think it was the first time.

“I love you too,” he said, also for the first time.

It was time for him to give up his secrets. Even though it was not quite James Bond.


If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.