Parochial Views

It was Mad Trevor's birthday last week and as he wouldn't have done anything to mark it otherwise I thought it was time to invite him over for lunch. He was really enthusiastic. The day came and I called to remind him, but got no answer. I carried on getting no answer, and eventually put the pork sausages I wouldn't otherwise have bought into the freezer. The following day I called round at the flat and found the front door wide open. Trevor himself was fast asleep in bed. I left a note on the cooker where I'd be sure he'd see it. I still haven't been able to get him on the phone. 

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Esme and Molly are Roman Catholics, really, but come to our service. Esme also attends the Roman Catholic mass but Molly only makes it to ours. Over coffee after the service I came to sit next to them. 'The Catholic service is too early for me, I can't manage it', said Molly, 'This one is the next best thing.' 'I told you not to say that!!' hissed Esme. In fact, given that I was right in front of them both, it was the second statement that struck me as more careless than the first.

That Doesn't Make Any Sense

Trevor has been quiet for quite some time: his delusions haven't been of the kind I can do anything about, and I have stopped arguing with him as there is no point. They are so deep-rooted and such a part of him that there is no dislodging them even as they upset him. But just over the last couple of weeks he has been complaining about the Adversary's activities again.

Trevor: I'm experiencing supernatural events. I keep levitating.

Me: When does this happen? Are you sitting watching the TV and then lift up out of your seat?

Trevor: It's when I'm lying on my bed. [clue: this means he's asleep].

Me: Has anyone ever seen this happen to you?

Trevor: Leeeet meee thiiiiink ....

Me: I think you'd probably remember if anyone else had been there.

- As indeed any potential observer would have done. Trevor wants to be exorcised, but I reminded him that I can't do that without referring to the Diocesan Advisor on Deliverance, and I have taken him to three of those over the years and none of them have deemed exorcism a necessary step to take. He accepted that without complaining, for now.

In the afternoon it was Church Club. The story was Gideon, and taking a cue from the episode of the fleece my theme was experiments. For some years when I've told this story I've taken a pair of tarnished copper coins into school and, during storytime, put one in a jar of vinegar until the end of the session to show how the vinegar cleans it. I sat down to do this yesterday and Disaster! found no bottle of vinegar in my bag|: I was convinced I'd brought it. I apologised to the children. 'There's some vinegar at the bottom of the toy box!' cried Bryony brightly. The toy box sits at the side of the hall, full of foam rubber balls and the like and the children had all been playing with them while we got ready for storytime; it seemed prima facie most unlikely that the school would be storing vinegar in it. I went to investigate, surrounded by a crowd of excited children, and, sure enough, right at the bottom, was a bottle of vinegar.

For a moment, I admit, I was bewildered. All my expectations, which seemed so reasonable, were confounded and I could not work out any reason why the school would want to have vinegar around other than in the canteen, let alone hide it in the hall under a mountain of foam rubber balls and rings. But this was only a moment: I realised it was my bottle of vinegar, which must have fallen out of my bag thanks to the children rummaging around, and found its way to the bottom. This was a relief, or I might have had to concede that perhaps Trevor had been levitating after all.

Nitty If Not Gritty

One of the reasons I had for starting this blog, many years ago now, was to describe something of the reality of parish life from a priest’s point of view. I was prompted, especially, by a blog started by someone I was at theological college with and which, I realised, told the reader absolutely nothing apart from which feast day was coming up and how glorious and wonderful everything was. Not long after I began my own, that erstwhile colleague’s stopped with an announcement that he had joined the Roman observance and was leaving his parish. Not a hint of anything untoward had appeared beforehand, nothing that suggested his state of mind or even gave any insight into the life of the parish he looked after. It seemed so – forgive me – fake.

Sometimes, I know, trying to deal with reality means a reality that’s a bit granular, and also grappling with the minutiae of my own reactions to things, in the hope that some of it might be enlightening. That was uppermost in my mind yesterday. Putting up the lanterns for Pentecost (as we had last year) was a bit fiddly on Saturday, and I thought I had a way of making it easier next year, but arrived at church yesterday morning to find that Rick had already removed the lanterns. He'd intended to be helpful but had done it – to summarise – in such a way that caused more problems than if he’d left them alone. After doing assembly at the school, and then returning to the church to tidy up, I went out to the newly-established Community Store with Greg the churchwarden to meet the volunteers and hear about their work, and then got back home to an-almost-immediately ringing phone. It was Harriet, whose Parkinson’s has advanced to the point where I, at least, often find it very hard to work out what she’s telling me over the phone, when the conversation has ended, or distinguishing whether she’s talking to her carer rather than me. A face-to-face conversation isn’t straightforward, but it removes a lot of these problems so yet again I set out yet again on the bicycle so I could speak to her in person (and going virtually anywhere from my house means a steep journey uphill when I return home). I’d just put the spoon in my bowl of lunchtime salad when the phone rang again – it was a gentleman whose pastoral needs I’d been alerted to by a parishioner and whose door I’d put a note through a few days ago.

Now all of these are perfectly normal and not particularly stressful events, even added together. Yet I was a bit shaken by my inability to respond very well. I didn’t snap at Rick, but my inarticulacy in response – I just couldn’t think what to say – told its own story. All morning, in fact, it rather felt that my brain was in fragments, and I don’t mean scintillating and glittery ones. It was as much as I could do to marshal any coherent thoughts at all. At the Community Store I asked a question of the staff and realised as I did so that my sentence was getting so tangled that it would be very hard to answer (and so it turned out). Realising I had no option but to go and see Harriet almost reduced me to tears. Anything I hadn’t actually planned to say presented an almost insuperable mental challenge.

This may be simply tiredness. I have a bad habit of recovering from having a lot of things to do that make demands on my social or mental resources by building in more down time than is sensible, setting unreasonable targets for the non-work as well as the work day, and getting to bed much too late as a result. And that’s what the life of this parish priest, at least, is like for the moment! Will more sleep really be the solution?

Sun and Clouds

The weather for John and Felicity’s wedding was unexpectedly sunny: they deserved it, as they came to sign all the paperwork no less than three years ago, and had to wait all this time because of pandemic delays. While I was in the vestry thinking that my cotta was so creased I really ought to run the iron over it, I checked my phone and found a message from church member Elaine. ‘Rest in peace Annabel’, it said, ‘they found her’. 

Annabel had been missing since the day before, and unlike Bill, the search for her didn’t end as we wanted. Deeply unhappy over recent months and increasingly lost, Annabel had been engulfed by sadness and it defeated her. All the good she might have done is gone and we will mourn that as well as the loss of what she was. The last time I’d spoken to her had been for the parish newspaper, talking about the series of children’s fantasy books she’d just begun to publish as she left her teaching job to pursue new avenues, it seemed then. Now I wonder what the families who bought those books and have them on their shelves, excited by a work whose author’s name they knew, will do with them. What will parents say to their children? How will Annabel’s family, and all her friends at school, absorb her loss? 

 And then there are the questions that are unanswerable but you can’t help asking: what must her last thoughts have been? Were they despairing? Did she imagine herself unloved, or did the knowledge of being loved just make no difference to a soul in such darkness? Could she have taken any comfort from dying outside among trees and birds? ‘Could any of us have said anything? Could we have made a difference?’ asked Elaine on the phone. From a Christian point of view, we can at least say Annabel knows the truth now, about herself, and about what we felt. 

She was the very opposite of isolated, socially, even if she was shut off within her own sorrow, and although we are, rightly, encouraged to speak up about our mental health struggles, she did and yet didn’t make it through. Survival seems so arbitrary. 

One former colleague of Annabel’s was at the 8am mass this morning and another congregant mentioned her to me on the way out. As I came home after the main service and the Annual Church Meeting (‘People say Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, when we know it’s the APCM’, I told them), a neighbour called to me on the hill. How could she tell her five-year-old that Annabel wouldn’t be coming to give her lessons anymore, she asked? It’s another question with no easy answer, but how she planned to do it seemed about right to me. I offered the thought that very small children are usually quite matter-of-fact about death because they don’t necessarily understand it, and may have more searching questions later. 

This is not the first suicide in the parish in my twelve years, and certainly not the only dramatic death. About 18 months ago someone I knew well was murdered in a very public way, and for legal reasons that case has never been reported in the media or officially referred to at all, but we all know it happened. It’s part of a community’s human scar tissue – and in fact we do well not to forget, but to be kind to our most tender souls, in the hope that, perhaps, we might help keep them alive.

As If You Need Reminding

Three items of pastoral news came my way yesterday. Christine, who I shorthand 'the dog lady', lost her latest and, she has always maintained, final boxer dog. Her life has been organised around him and without him she is bereft. She isn't in a condition to talk about it. I am not a lover of animals but interacting with her over a dozen years has shown me how intense people's relationship with them can be. To others made uncomfortable by grief, Christine's intensity can seem exaggerated and unnecessary. But to love something is ennobling.

Before setting out to take Trevor some groceries, I thought I ought to make a call and selected Sarah from the congregation, who I haven't spoken to for a while. It turns out she had been diagnosed with depression and had a bad reaction to the prescribed medication. She still sounded jumpy and uncomfortable. 'I don't suppose you anticipated the conversation going that way', she suggested, accurately.

I had a message from a mother of three small girls two of whom are former Infants School Church Clubbers. She was treated for cancer a year ago and thought all was well; it isn't, it's inoperable. What can they have told the children. 

Regularly I commit myself to greater seriousness and dedication, but it's easy to let this drift. I suppose what I ought to do is faff about less, stop re-reading my own words, set myself realistic daily tasks and not tell myself that I won't do something because I haven't got the energy. Energy can always be dredged up, and it's not doing things that I regret. Time seems to pass with ever greater urgency and my great fear is that I won't have made the best use of it. 'Live lightly and intensely', a colleague said to me, which seems a helpful formula.

Success! For Someone

I haven't told you about Trevor for a long while. This is because he was in hospital for quite some time, as it turned out - the middle of October to the middle of January, in fact. When he came out he was much, much quieter than he had been before. He still had social problems and money worries to battle with, but his delusions and hallucinations had all but disappeared. He could even interrogate his obsessive impulses. He ended up buying three new keyboards on eBay, with the thought that he could cannibalise them for parts and make some wonderful single new keyboard, but halfway through the process actually realised this was daft - not early enough to save his money, apparently, but at least he realised it. He went through one wobble when he wasn't talking to the mental health team, but now seems to be seeing them again. All that serious examination of the possibility that there might be something supernatural happening to him (even if it wasn't what he thought it might be), all that anxiety and irritation, resolved into nothing, by finally getting his medication right and consistent. The Devil, in this case, vanquished by a combination of plant-derived pills and injections. All those manifestations and utterances, the product of a bizarre and awry psychology.

'If anything, the Devil is in the effect he has on you,' the last Deliverance Advisor Trevor consulted told me. The mental convulsions and contortions I've gone through over the years when I entertained the idea that God might, just perhaps, be trying to tell me something through Trevor, certainly did me no good. I wonder whether I should write it all down for the instruction of my brothers and sisters ... Well, write it somewhere else. 

Conversation Piece

The Antisocial Behaviour Officer from the local police sits with a mug of tea in the church office and discusses the action which is finally being taken against some of the troublesome youngsters in the area. 'You might think it's quite draconian,' he warns, and that's what 'banning from every railway station in England and Wales' does sound like, but it seems that some of them have been travelling far and wide to spread disturbance, not just here. He's an affable ex-Met officer.

Sally the church office manager tells me her dad is in hospital and his dementia has suddenly advanced. The family aren't sure what's going to happen, and she sees no alternative but to vary her working hours until things become clearer.

In the entrance area to the church, I find a young woman reading a Bible. Tearfully she explains how radically her life has gone wrong since I baptised her children seven years ago (I recognised their names rather than her). To me she seems articulate and caring, but she can only see negativity and 'evil' within herself, and thoughts of suicide grapple her and pull her downwards. She's frightened. She will try to come to a service.

After Evening Prayer I sit with a teenage boy in the church. He has quite severe anxiety attacks from time to time. He describes horrible visions of a hellish landscape which assault him occasionally, and something more positive - a sapphire-eyed white stag that stands in the snow, regarding him, and who has appeared when he's been really desperate. A version of God, perhaps, something pure and strong. 

No Way Out

A day going past without a phone call, or several, from Trevor would normally be a welcome bonus, but a run of such days started to arouse my suspicions. I tried to call him and heard the phone being picked up and then put down; a second call later in the day went entirely unanswered. The day after, I had a call from a social worker saying Trevor had refused to let in the mental health Home Treatment Team for nearly a week. In his only conversation with the doctors he'd claimed that God had cured him and that he no longer needed treatment, a belief somewhat belied by the complaints from his neighbours that he was shouting and screaming at night. He would probably be sectioned, she said.

This was indeed what happened, and Trevor was taken to the mental health inpatient unit at St Peter's Hospital in Chertsey, where I went to see him on Saturday. The wind and rain battered the buildings making the setting seem even more bleak than it would otherwise be. Trevor's brother was there, in the middle of cancelling one of Trevor's phones (he has had two, draining his limited resources along with the three TV sets and multiple pianos and keyboards, for a long time). I hadn't seen Trevor for over a month: he is unkempt and haggard, not looking at all like someone who has undergone a miraculous healing. He was calm enough, but is now completely lost within his paranoiac world: every sound was turned into someone making horrible accusations against him, he maintained that one of his longstanding enemies from years and years ago had come to the unit to have sex with one of the staff in the shower, that a well-known US TV evangelist had been there 'to break the spell', and that 'the witches' had 'murdered me by stabbing me six thousand times and God had to bring me back from the dead'. He couldn't talk about anything else. 

You may remember that a couple of years ago I facilitated, against the rules, a series of encounters between Trevor and Martin, who believed he could help him. I would have been delighted had this actually resulted in anything, but in fact it went depressingly along the lines I had predicted to myself: a set of long, inconclusive meetings during which Trevor shook and shouted and tried to make himself sick as he knows that this is what demoniacs do, culminating in failure to achieve anything and the would-be exorcist blaming his patient. Martin conceded that all Trevor's manifestations were assumed rather than 'real', but his convoluted diagnosis was that 'he has a demon that makes it look as though he doesn't and is just pretending', and that 'he doesn't really want to be delivered ... Trevor and his demon are like a pair of elderly sisters who live together, always complaining about the other but never doing anything about it. As soon as anyone drives the spirit out of him, he invites it back in again'. In fact, buried within this nonsense is what I think is a truth, which is that Trevor has become so committed to aspects of his paranoid narrative - to the idea that God has made certain promises to him - that he can't escape it. But that's not quite the same as self-induced demonic possession. 

Martin simply abandoned contact with Trevor and now doesn't refer to him; to be fair, he had some professional issues to deal with, but his neglect did involve absolutely not doing things he said he would do. It was the same story with the third Diocesan Deliverance Adviser I got to come and see Trevor: he'd discovered there was a new one and begged me to set up an encounter. We had one meeting; I and the priest agreed that there was nothing supernatural going on with Trevor's situation. The advisor said he would arrange another session with Trevor to go through things with him, but never did. 

So we now have a soul who seems entirely trapped. 'He'll be here a long time', Trevor's brother told me, though the doctors were uncommunicative. I am not sure that I could have done much different over the last ten years, but it's been a learning experience. I only wish Trevor could have learned something, too.

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.

An Ill Wind

Trevor: I've been farting for most of the day.
Me: Why do you want to tell me that?
Trevor: (after a silence) I want to drive the Devil out of my body.
Me: Well, you won't be able to fart him out.
Trevor: What did you say?
Me: I said, you won't be able to fart the Devil out of your body.
Trevor: I can't hear you. I'll turn the relaxation sounds off. What did you say?
Me: I said, you can't fart the Devil out.
Trevor: No, I'm still deaf.
Me: Never mind. Look, what was it you said? You said you'd been doing something all day. What did you say you'd been doing? I thought you said 'farting', but that struck me as a bit weird.
Trevor: I didn't say I'd been breaking wind. I said I'd been sleeping about.
Me: But it was one word, and it sounded like 'farting', and then when I asked why you told me, you said you'd been trying to drive the Devil out of your body.
Trevor: I don't remember what I said.

All Human Life is Here

Annabelle came bouncing into Church Club at the Infants School with a paper towel. It turned out to contain a small worm. Called Timmy. 'How long have you had this?' I asked Annabelle. 'Since the morning,' she beamed. I said I thought Timmy would probably prefer more worm-friendly surroundings but as Annabelle clearly wasn't going to return him to the wild just because I said so, I found a plastic sample pot in the science supply box, and we scooped some dirt from the trough in the playground, and put Timmy in that. His relief was obvious. Meanwhile Sam ran up displaying two splodges of red pen on his palms. 'I'm bleeding!!' he announced. Moments later Ruby had done the same, only she had managed to cover her hands with red felt tip. She kept asking permission to go to the toilet to scrub it off and eventually succeeded, returning with her hands only slightly less red than they'd been with the pen on them. Lauren (q.v.) was asked about this by Jade.
Jade: Why did Ruby do that?
Lauren: She was copying Sam. [very seriously] I don't think anyone should copy Sam.
. . . . . . . . . . .

Trevor has been thoroughly troublesome lately. His delusions have been ever more definite and he's been very annoyed indeed, on and off, with me, God, and the world in general.
Trevor: It's Terry who's been cursing me. He's the one who's responsible for all my problems. 
Me: But your problems started before you met Terry.
Trevor: That's because he can do psychic readings with his cards, he told me. He could see that he would meet me in the future and that God had promised I would marry [the actress he's obsessed with] and he wanted her for himself, so he cursed me in the past so that he could have her in the future. And he had sex with her by magic. But it's all right because even though I can't have [Ms X] Jesus and the Devil have come to an agreement that I will have four wives in compensation.
Me: I think you need to tell the Deliverance Advisor all this ...
Trevor: Mr Stribley [his other great enemy] has murdered Pam [a neighbour of Trevor's parents who's been in a care home for a couple of years]. I called down the fire of God on him. If he gets burned up by God, the police won't prosecute me for it, will they?
Me: No, Trevor, the police definitely won't prosecute you for burning up Mr Stribley. But why did he murder Pam? What did he stand to gain?
Trevor: That's just what he does. He's murdered so many people. All those poor people on that aeroplane that vanished from Malaysia, he did that.
. . . . . . . . . . .

I was sat with Rick our verger saying Morning Prayer, slightly disturbed by a persistent sawing noise from outside. I assumed it was Jack, who is often about on Saturday morning tidying in the churchyard and doing odd jobs. But what could he be up to?

Once we were done, I went outside to say hello. I found not Jack but a man I've seen around the village but never spoken to before. He was sawing laminated flooring panels on the benches in the churchyard. He doesn't speak English that well. 'These for my house,' he explained. 'No table. Is all right?'

I was too nonplussed to disagree. Of course it was. It was only afterwards I found he'd managed to saw shavings off the benches as well as his floorboards. I suppose we are, in this, providing a service to the community. I should tell the diocesan newspaper.

Digital Simulation

'I and God have been making a paradox', Trevor told me on the phone, a sign that we were into science-fiction mode this morning. One of his abiding delusions is that screens of all kinds, whether TVs, computers or phones, can create portals to other dimensions or in fact generate other realities wholesale. This wouldn't matter, as Trevor sitting in his flat playing multiple copies of old movies like The Robe in the belief that he's multiplying God in order to sort his problems out doesn't harm anyone; were it not for the fact that it stops him doing anything that actually would improve his life. Rituals like this are also part of his anxiety structure, his belief that God needs him to carry out certain acts in order to combat evil, especially evil as it relates to himself: 'I have to repair God's throne, God's cross has been condemned.' It doesn't do him any good.

I try to reassure him that God's power is eternal and can't be added to or reduced, and that playing videos doesn't affect it one way or the other. 'We live in a digital simulation, Dr Chuck Missler says so,' Trevor insists, 'it's in the Bible.' I say that I can't think of anywhere the Bible talks along those lines. 'It is, there's a hidden code. You don't know, you haven't studied it. You only know the replacement theology of the Church of England.' There have been occasions when Trevor has declared that 'When I am on my throne in heaven I will condemn the replacement theology,' but we don't get that far this time.

The late Chuck Missler is one of Trevor's favourite evangelists. I suspect he wasn't quite the nutcase he may appear to have been, despite having written a book arguing that alien encounters are in fact meetings with demons. In fact a lot of what Dr Missler wrote was intended to be quite speculative rather than a presentation of hard fact. I suspect his articles and statements about the illusory nature of reality fall into that category: he's taking a set of deductions about the indeterminacy of subatomic physics and using it to argue the utter dependence of the world on God, and incidentally to undermine human beings' confidence about what they think they know: attacking science with a few bits of science. It's a bit a of cheap trick, I think, but even Chuck Missler can't have imagined that a schizophrenic man in a flat in Hornington would have used his ideas to justify playing videos to create alternate universes. I suppose it would be churlish to blame him.

Stress Points

Between Christmas and New Year, Mad Trevor went to A&E at the Royal Surrey Hospital. He had a very low-level, if painful, medical problem which anyone else would have lived with, but because he has essentially a child's impulsiveness and lack of perspective which magnifies any misfortune into a cosmic calamity (I am not exaggerating) and any pain into the worst suffering anyone has ever had, he had to have something done about it. It would have taken a while to see his GP, so he took himself to the hospital. Once there, and seen by a nurse, he was told it would then take a few hours before he could consult a doctor who might attend to him; he was besieged by his usual obsessional and paranoid thoughts which made sitting in a waiting room absolutely impossible, so he came home without any treatment, and had to live with his problem the way an average person might have done anyway.

I don't know whether poor Trevor's visit to A&E would have made it into the figures, figures which show the NHS straining to meet its targets and obligations. He does reveal some interesting themes, though. I remember a few months ago talking about the state of the health service to a local GP who was barely able to conceal his resentment at the resources being poured into general hospitals rather than the lower tiers of healthcare where they might prevent patients having to get as far as hospital. Trevor needed to see a GP, or someone at a GP practice, rather than go to hospital. He needs to have his mental illnesses treated more imaginatively than by a kaleidoscope of drugs which are all more or less ineffective. He needs, perhaps most of all, to have people around him, perhaps even in some sort of residential setting, who can respond to his obsessional thinking and remind him of what's reasonable and sensible, to introduce the degree of perspective which he isn't capable of providing for himself. Along the lines of the support workers the local council used to provide for a couple of years, who took him out for coffee and shopping and helped him tidy his flat; until the council decided they couldn't fund that anymore, and he had to pay for them himself with money he hasn't got, partly because the mental disabilities the support workers were intended to alleviate mean he can't manage his money in the first place.

Put more resources into those aspects of health and social care and it would go some way to alleviating the pressure on acute health care. I'm hearing some voices on the radio today suggesting this, but I doubt it will happen. Instead more money, if more money there is to be, will be directed towards hospitals, towards the aspects of health care that TV dramas are made about, and more and more patient time will inevitably be sucked towards them. The stress points will simply become more and more sore if that happens. 

Three Episodes of Unreason

On Wednesday, we had celebrated communion at Widelake House, the local care home. Arthur usually plays the piano on these occasions and I give him a lift home. While doing this he was in the back seat of the car – I’d already dropped someone else off who usually occupies the front passenger seat. And chatting in his customary light tone which was not all that easy to hear. I suddenly realised I was automatically tapping the volume control of my car radio to turn him up.

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

Later, Trevor called.

Trevor: Someone’s doing bread.

Me: Er, what do you mean?

Trevor: Someone’s doing bread.

Me: Yes, I heard you, but I don’t understand. Explain it to me.

Trevor: Someone is eating bread so that I will go back into Satan.

Me: No, I still don’t really get it. How can eating bread make you ‘go back into Satan’, whatever that means?

Trevor: Satan can bless and curse his people and the occult meet and eat holy bread like we do in church so that things will happen, and they’re doing it to make me go to Hell.

Me: How do you know this is happening?

Trevor (as though I’m an idiot): I can smell bread!!

. . . . . . . . . . 

Later still, it was the after-school club at the infants’ school. I was sat at the table with Lauren, who has a philosophical turn of mind for a five-year-old.

Lauren: You know everything because you’re a vicar.

Me: Oh, I don’t think I know everything.

Lauren: What don’t you know?

Me: Well, I don’t know what I don’t know. If I knew what I don’t know, I would know it and it wouldn’t be what I don’t know. 

Lauren: That doesn’t make any sense.

And Soothe Awhile the Harrassed Mind

In the torrential rain of Saturday lunchtime I was called down to the church to speak to someone. This is sufficiently unusual, and the voice on the phone sounded sufficiently disturbed, for me to be slightly nervous and take my big umbrella with me not so much to shelter from the rain as to provide some means of self-defence should it become necessary.

Of course it wasn't: he wanted me to see a friend, a lady living in the village who suffers from schizophrenia. I visited, picked my way through the chaos of the flat, listened, prayed and laid my hands on her head, and promised to write to the GP and the Community Mental Health Team. That was about all I could do, and it always feels very limited.

Nobody knows precisely where schizophrenia comes from, though there are all sorts of theories. The voices people with it hear are very often hostile, critical and vicious, attacking the sufferer with their own fears and sense of unworthiness. Often (though of course not always) they seem to be linked with real critical voices people have got all too used to hearing from others, especially from parents and family. Whether the voices are demonic, as some Christians would assert, I'm not sure: schizophrenia dissolves the boundaries between the self and the world outside the mind, meaning the sufferer hears thoughts (the kind of thoughts that flit through all our minds) as external manifestations, so in dealing with it you are instantly propelled into an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of deception and never quite sure what you're dealing with. Either way, the first step in combatting these horrible mental insinuations is to insist on the absolute love of God for the individual, and their worth to him, regardless of what they may have been told in the past. 

Yesterday I met the lady concerned who seemed astonishingly better: almost 'clothed and in her right mind', as it says in the Bible story. I suppose I ought not to be surprised that praying actually had a positive result (of course it may only be temporary, but it's still something), but you do get used to being completely impotent.

Trevor, on the other hand, continues to be a problem. In this lady's case, religion could come in from the outside, as it were, into her situation and supply something solid and objective to reinforce her sense of worth and self; in his, religion is built into the structure of his delusional thinking. It's part of the sickness and it's hard to see far it can help with the cure.

Support Network

Fortified by theme parks and new friendships, Cylene the Goth has been doing better of late than for a long while, but she still has her moments. At one of them, recently, music came to her aid - or Spotify's algorithms did, pointing her towards 'Bravery' by Assemblage23. 'I'm really, really pleased that there are as many songs like this as there are in the Goth/industrial scene,' she wrote in Another Place. 'I always do love proudly boasting how for a bunch of "scary satanic rejects" we've got good manners and are very good at supporting each other without judgement'. 

The song itself isn't to my taste, but for anyone with mental health issues simply having those issues acknowledged without criticism by someone else, whether you know them or whether they're at a distance, is a step towards change. Of course the mental health 'system' is naturally dedicated to healing, but too often the sense its users get is that they are being judged and criticised by people whose insights into their condition are clinical and analytic rather than sympathetic, and that there's an unspoken verdict that they're not trying hard enough to be normal. Acceptance by one's peers is very different. 

As if it needed stating again, Cylene's experience suggests how the Goth world can function as a place of healing and support rather than exacerbating and exploiting people's negative tendencies as those outside it often assume. Back in the days when our friend Karla was the organiser of the London Goth Meetup, the introductory blurb on the group's webpage warned that new members would not find misery and introspection there and if that was what they were looking for, they might try elsewhere. I know what she was getting at, trying to combat the image of Goths that too many outsiders have; but a place of sanctuary, and growth, is exactly what many damaged souls find in it. 

Washing of Hands

I share this because of my interest in mental health - I have lots of crazy friends, and may well be crazy myself at some point, who knows. 

Poor Cylene has been going through a hard patch recently, and her anxieties have brought her a variety of dramatic and baroque hallucinations. Artist though she may be, these are not at all easy to deal with and she would sooner not have them.

She tried to call her GP and after 90 minutes trying and failing to get through called her mental health team instead. The MHT recently discharged her, not because she was well, but because she’d been through their offered programme of therapy and that was it. It is in their interest to discharge patients because they are no longer a drain on time and resources, regardless of how far they are towards a cure and what sense ‘cure’ may make in their particular case. The MHT refused to speak to her. ‘We discharged you, you’re not our responsibility, talk to your GP’.

So Cylene again attempted to call her GP and finally got through. ‘I’ll try to contact your prescribing psychiatrist and call you back’, the GP said. When Cylene got that call, two hours later, it began with the doctor ranting for fifteen minutes about the behaviour of the MHT. ‘They refused to speak to me,’ she said. ‘I said, I’m not a random member of the public, I’m a health professional enquiring about one of my patients who you have also treated and who is presenting with psychotic symptoms. It would really help me to speak to her psychiatrist. They simply just kept saying that you’d been discharged and weren’t their responsibility any more. In the absence of consulting your psychiatrist, all we can advise is that you take another 25mg of your current antipsychotic.’

‘So I said thank you, as I knew that’s all she could do’, sighed Cylene. ‘But I’m already taking 300mg, I don’t see what another 25 will do. If I could get more than 2 hours’ sleep a night it would help.’

Keep Them Waiting

A few days ago I mentioned my friend Cylene's problems. They haven't finished yet. 

Cylene went to see her GP who ordered an 'urgent' visit from the Community Mental Health Team, a visit which was scheduled for a week later (not my definition of 'urgent', but there you are). Cylene puts little faith in the mental health system, but every visit from professionals at least provides the chance that somebody might listen and offer some sort of appropriate help. The GP seems to know what she's doing, anyway.

An hour and a half before the appointment, the CMHT phoned to say they wouldn't be coming after all. They'd discovered that Cylene should be under the care of the Personality Disorder Intensive Treatment Team, based at Richmond Hospital, and that PDITT were positively insisting that the CMHT not be involved in her case. 

That was on Wednesday 16th, already, remember, a week after Cylene's GP requested an urgent appointment for her. Since then she has heard nothing from anyone. I asked her whether she'd tried to make contact with anyone - the GP, CMHT, or PDITT itself. She replied, via a set of texts.

'No, I haven't decided if I want to in order to get somewhere or if I want to see how long they drag this out so I can be justifiably the biggest bitch ever to PDITT. Either way, my nonstop 24/7 every minute of every day rage towards them has made me just slightly less suicidal. Admittedly, it's been swapped for homicidal, but that's fine.'

We agreed that probably wasn't a deliberate therapeutic strategy.