Writing Like Mad

continued

She describes it now as "a breakdown. A very, very bad one. I think specific diagnoses can be quite dangerous. Once you put a label on someone — paranoia, schizophrenia — you stop understanding and start making assumptions. You can't direct it into boxes. Two different doctors might give you two different diagnoses. It's not as if you can do an x-ray and say, `Oh yes, it's this or that.'"

The years that followed were a nightmare mix of hospital stays and daily attendance at a hospital like the Dorothy Fish, "a very destructive place to be. There was no sort of real therapy. The system is so much about power. There's an extreme division. Any kind of competence or confidence in the patient is a threat and will be stamped out."

Allan had written for the Guardian and had two unpublished novels. But when she called herself a writer, that was taken as a symptom of her instability. She talks about it now without rancour, even smiling at the thought.

"They never asked me what my novels were about, though that could have been a great shortcut into what was going on in my head. They set up a creative writing group and wouldn't let me take part because it would feed my delusion. They said, `You can do woodwork.' Why would I want to make a table?"

A character in Poppy Shakespeare makes "that many tables you couldn't give them away," N relates, "but she never got bored 'cause she couldn't remember she'd ever made one before."

That loss of memory is the worst thing about her illness, Allan says. "There are huge periods that I can't remember at all. Here I was, 10 years older and I'd look at my friends and their lives had moved on. They'd married, they'd got kids.

"The medication takes your memory away. The more the treatment doesn't work, the more they up the medication. I was walking like a puppet, shuffling along. You see someone like that in the street, it's not mental illness that's making them like that, it's medication."

Truth, as always, can be stranger than fiction.

"I thought I was writing a satire," she says. "But every week I'd open the paper and there'd be something else they were writing about that I thought I'd made up and was outrageous."

The hospital in Poppy Shakespeare has a residential high-rise where the worse the patients' mental state, the higher up they're confined. "I was telling this to a nurse. She said, `That's what we used to do ...' Well, people used to think Nineteen Eighty-Four was far-fetched."

Even after her novel was accepted by a British publisher, Allan was still seriously ill.

"I had some manic episodes," she says. "They're fun to start with but very soon they're not fun at all. It's very frightening. It's a tightrope and you know sooner or later you're going to fall off. I spent the entire book advance in two days flat on. ... I don't know. And then I was in hospital for five months.

"I still take medication and see my social worker every week. But things are very different. I would never say I'm never going into hospital again but I don't think I'd ever end up in the place that I was. You go through something like that and ... well, I've learned a lot. I also know your personal world can change. There's no line where on one side you're well, on the other you're ill. If there was a line, I'm certainly on the well side."

She understands how and why some mental patients, like N, become manipulative. "Her treatment is not giving her anything she needs to prepare her for the world outside. If all somebody focuses on is your problems, everything else falls away and that's all you are. You're in there and you have nothing else at all so you're not going to give it up. There is a community, for all you bicker and fight among yourselves. Day patients could be very funny ... humorous-funny. To lose that and be cast out into this desert, the world outside. ..."

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Allan has another novel in the works "about lying, the paradox that often when someone lies they reveal more of the truth.

"The truth can be whatever is useful. Proof of madness, proof of sanity. ... How do you prove something isn't there? What you perceive and what I perceive can be so, so different. So much is in the eyes of the beholder."

Who is mad? Who is sane? Who decides? She knows enough not to have an answer.

Last updated: 5/06

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