A true story:

With kind permission – a testament to the spirit of D.

Lets say you have an accident and lose half your body functions; you sustain severe brain damage
(but not enough for you to be oblivious to what’s going on) and have to relearn how to talk, shave,
walk (if you can) and discover who the hell you are. Well, the health service’s “responsibility of
care” might fork out for a short while for you to recoup enough to do some of those things. Then,
when you’re just about progressing from nightmare to a semi-functional, semi-stable reality, in this
strange place full of strangers, nowhere near your home and family, the health budget will be
rescinded and they will find that their responsibility of care has been fulfilled. You have brain
damage, not a mental illness. The ball is now batted to social services. You are the ball. So, off to a
residential home you go because that is all social services can afford. No physiotherapy, no nursing
or intensive support, but you can smoke outside, if you can get out there and you can have a
television and radio. Resources don’t stretch to you having any privacy, so, you have to share all
your ablutions and indignities in a room with a complete stranger, amongst all these new complete
strangers, in a place even farther away from your family and your local authority, which can now
wash its hands of you. Nobody wants to wash your hands or cut your nails and who are they
anyway? Your long-term memory recovers sufficiently to remind you, you used to be a different
person, so what the fuck happened to you? Naturally, you can’t stand this prison cell, but you
overhear someone say they have no legal responsibility to lock you in, so in the middle of the night,
(when there’s no one around that can drag you back), you trash the crap you’ve been lumbered with
and make your bid for freedom. Of course, since the physiotherapy stopped helping you on your feet
you have to piss in the street, from your chair, using your one good hand. And so the cycle of
escape, recapture, sectioning, being banged up in a police cell, eventual release and becoming an
increasingly ungrateful burden on your hosts ensues.
Eventually, because you are regularly exposing yourself, so you’re now considered a danger
to yourself and others, they lock you away in a secure mental ward and take your cigarettes off you.
If you behave yourself like an unquestioning child, after a few months, maybe years, they might let
you out into the twenty-four by twenty-four foot high-walled uncultivated courtyard, for a little
fresh air and to walk around in circles, since you are a circular peg in a square hole. You cannot
smoke. It’s in the hospital grounds. By now, this whole process has stretched over five years and
you live to stare up at a piece of sky between blinded windows. You can self-harm but you mustn’t
be suicidal. That’s why you cannot have a lethal weapon like a radio, television, tie or shoelaces, but
don’t despair because they will let your nails grow to three inches and your hair grow long enough
for you to hang yourself, if gouging your throat and wrists doesn’t work. You have no right to be
angry against all these professionals and experts who are prepared to hold you illegally to fulfil their
‘duty of care’ for you, or your new neighbours, who want a piece of you. So, you fight silently with
yourself, decaying tooth and curly nail, to not vent this to anyone, because you know you don’t
belong there. You’d rather disappear and live in a tent in the middle of nowhere than be such a
burden.
Don’t give up though, because they have consulted all parties and done psychiatric
assessments and they agree you don’t belong there. Your reactions are circumstantial, not mental,
but if you kick off you’ll never get out. The only policy of resentment, integrity and protest you can
adopt is silence. At last… everybody else can relax.
Relief of all relief – an angel of mercy! One of your siblings, with experience in caring, is
willing to uproot from a different part of the same country to care for you at home, if the council
will supply a suitable accommodation near your family. Sorry… computer says no. The council
cannot provide a home because your relative comes from outside their jurisdiction.
Ah! No matter! The place you originally woke up in and became accustomed to and got to
know the staff and progressed rapidly at tells the present regime, they never had a problem with you
and would have you back immediately. And there’s a limited place available! What’s more… it’s
cheaper than the care you’ve been receiving since the ball was ping-ponged from the PCT to social
services to another PCT! Woopeeee!
Sorry… computer says no. Local social services still don’t have to cough up the budget for
that, so they won’t. The ball will have to be batted to the PCT who cut the funding in the first place.
Robinson Crusoe confined to a wheelchair in a dangerous imposing unsanitary environment without
cigarettes, television or even a radio – you will stay until one of the PCTs drops the ball and the
other picks it up.

D - an unseen twenty-first century First-World Nelson Mandela.

___

Yes, its national paranoia everyone. Every man for himself because we’re all just numbers.
Better play the numbers game than end up a splinter in a splinter-group. Better discriminate, be
prejudicial, or where will you end up? Are we progressing? We make big noises about equality but
we encourage discriminatory mentality through issues surrounding gender, race, ethnicity, class
distinction and financial status. Now, if we feel that way about things we can all see around us,
something so obvious, what about the way we stigmatise people with problems that are not so
visible, such as mental-health?

“The Nazi’s catalogued and profited from everything they stripped from
the Jews – they numbered it, down to the last hair of their head and shirt
off their back. They tattooed their number on their skin. They were not
people but numbers. Mere numbers. Capitalism and consumerism does
exactly that to every individual now living.”