Out of Sight

There is some point not using the real names of places and people that appear in this blog, but there’s no disguising Farnham Road Hospital, the specialist psychiatric establishment in Guildford. A few years ago it had a spanking new wing added to its forbidding Victorian frontage, an area I hadn’t seen until I went to visit Mandy a few months ago. It’s even more labyrinthine than standard medical hospitals, notwithstanding the sloping white walkways and gaily-coloured art, and I’m not convinced the signage makes sense. I keep making mistakes whenever I go there, anyway (though that, in itself, is not proof!).

Some years ago when my sister-in-the-Spirit Cylene had a couple of difficult episodes, I visited her several times in a similar, though not as new, hospital in Kingston. We spent most of our time in the ‘garden’, a tall concrete-walled enclosure with some ragged plants just about surviving in raised beds, protected from pigeon incursions by a net high, high above, so that Cylene could smoke. The garden at Farnham Road serves the same purpose, though it has no net and is genuinely outside the ward as opposed to just pretending. When the new wing opened, it was probably bright and appealing, but I doubt the architects’ sketches took account of the piles of cigarette stubs that would gather over time.

Hospitals are not my favourite places to be anyway, but psychiatric ones have their own discomfort. Most of the time in Farnham Road, I experience an un-calm quiet. There is a TV on but nobody watching it much, not surprisingly, and not a lot of conversation; perhaps the inmates have said everything they want to say to each other. Occasionally I hear bits and pieces of a row between someone and the staff. I attract a bit of peculiar attention, being a priest: some of the patients have, let’s say, non-mainstream religious views.

Mandy has been here for months now, although she’s reached the point where she’s allowed pretty much to come and go as she pleases. She’s not been discharged, though. Remember how different this is from hospitals that deal with disorders of the body rather than the mind: in those, patients are nowadays hustled out as quickly as possible. Despite the terrible lack of bed-space in psychiatric wards, they have the opposite impetus, and patients must instead prove they are ready to leave, like prisoners. An acute episode can stretch into weeks, months. You are incarcerated with a bunch of mad people, from whom you cannot escape, in a space which is deliberately under-stimulating, under the authority of professionals who, by the very nature of mental illnesses, can’t inform you when you will be well enough to leave, or how exactly they’re going to be able to tell. I’m not suggesting there is anything clinically wrong with this; only that it can in and of itself hardly have a beneficial effect on a person’s mental state. As Mandy and I agreed, if you aren’t crazy when you arrive, you might well be by the time you leave.

When I call in on parishioners in the Royal Surrey, as often as not they have other visitors, and there are almost always people talking to friends or relatives in the beds around. At Farnham Road, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a visitor who doesn’t have a professional reason for being there. People with ongoing psychiatric illnesses have almost certainly worn out the patience of those who’ve cared for them, if anyone much ever did, and lack of care is often what helps to take them there. Their absence from the outside world can come as a relief to those who remain in it. Or perhaps the healthy are just afraid to come here.

I do not know how I would hold up under those circumstances. If you, gentle reader, ever know someone whose mind breaks and who finds themselves so detained, conquer whatever doubts you may have, and visit them. Brave those quiet white corridors. You won’t catch anything. You may have to listen to angry and incoherent speech, to irrational complaints which will make you wonder why you bothered. But it won’t hurt you. Hard though it is and discouraging it might seem to be, you’ll be letting the light in, just a crack.