WHEN CLARRY TOPPED HIMSELF, NO ONE KNEW WHY - NO ONE...

WHEN CLARRY TOPPED HIMSELF,

NO ONE KNEW WHY…

…NO ONE.

Satellite television has brought me a fascinating window on a wider world and the opportunities to observe and try to understand people from a vast range of cultures - people whom one had seen, if one saw them at all, as ‘performers’ in documentaries or devised programmes and subject to the presentation and interpretation of the programmes compilers. 

Now I can watch them completely untainted by the intervening ‘editor interpreter’.  I watch them in their own dramas, chat shows, news bulletins and a variety of presentations and versions of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’  I look at faces and expressions, moods and reactions, but ‘look’ and ‘watch’ are the two operative words, for apart from sensing the general mood of the piece I have not the slightest idea of what is being said.  When I watch Chinese television there are subtitles – but they also are in Chinese. 

I would dearly like to know what Dunia and the people whom she interviews on Abu Dhabi television are discussing, because it appears to be serious and intelligent, but apart from words that sound vaguely like ‘Iraq’ there is nothing to guide me.  Worse still is a news bulletin when the person being interviewed is speaking English, but is then being talked over and the screen has rolling subtitles all in Arabic.

The world and outlook of those who are locked into their inner voices is something like this.  They have their own transmission received inside their head that no one else can hear or comprehend, while, viewed on the screen of life that is going on outside them, they see people, faces expressions, actions, moods and reactions, and try to interpret something that is far off.

A world that is almost unreachable from within a mind and body that are often numbed by the drugs that are meant to make life more bearable (but which often are there solely to ‘contain’ them).

A world with which they find it increasingly difficult to communicate.  So difficult, that attempts to do so may be abandoned altogether, especially when the inner world can appear warm and friendly.

Is it easiest simply to abandon them to their inner world and the companions that frequent it?  An inner world that can be welcoming, friendly, comforting – an inner world that suddenly can spawn terror and threat; create immeasurable anxiety; propose devilish and obscene compacts – compacts that if accepted can bring down an even heavier rain of threat and castigation from the unseen tormentors. 

One can go on and on in seemingly endless speculation, and offer insights and advice that may or may not have relevance to an individual – if indeed one knew that the torment was actually there behind the closed door that a life and the face fronting it have become.

It would be difficult to forget the time when my stable was being re-roofed.  Right to the fore of the action were the two Geordies – Big Derek and Brian.  They came and worked - and worked hard - for ‘readies’, and stayed until about one o’clock when they went to the King’s Head for a liquid lunch, and then possibly an afternoon fishing off the beach. 

One morning they came and they were immensely subdued - in fact, for such a big man it was odd that Derek seemed close to tears.  “Clarry’s topped his self” said Brian eventually.  Work was pointless, and they went off to the King’ Head for more appropriate solace. 

Clarry – or Clarence to give him his Sunday name – had farmed with brother Ronnie, until they had given up the farm.  But farmers never retire, and one met them here and there as they helped out on other farms - hedging, dykeing, hay-timing - or working in people’s gardens.

Clarry had retired to a cottage beside the main road and I saw him frequently as he worked around a friend’s premises.  This particular morning, his daughter had come downstairs, to a fire newly laid in the grate, a cup of tea part drunk and still warm, a sandwich half eaten, and, puzzled, had gone outside to find Clarry hanging.  And no one knew why! 

That was over ten years ago, and I don’t think anyone knows to this day.  Why?  There in his inner world something had thrown a switch – but he had not been ill that anyone knew about – certainly not mentally.  What was it that Clarry couldn’t talk to anyone about – confide - consult?

I thought of him in happier times, as, for instance, when the local Shepherds’ Meet and a meet of the Beagles had coincided, and the Brown Cow had been open all day – and Clarry hadn’t wasted a minute.  There he was, well into the evening, a huge turkey drumstick in his hand, beating time to the choruses of the hunting songs, and swaying perilously to and fro, and the picture of him swaying gently at the end of a rope is one that even now I find unbearable.

I have difficulty revisiting the time when I desperately wanted to die and escape from all that plagued my mind and the situation that I couldn’t understand but from which I frantically wanted to flee.  I wasn’t then hearing voices, but had seemingly insurmountable problems.  Why didn’t I just do it?  As I wrote earlier, it had to appear to be an accident, and I couldn’t devise one that I thought would be convincing.  Relevant to my thoughts about Clarry – I couldn’t talk to anyone, because I couldn’t put my inner agony into words. 

I vaguely remember once saying to a Consultant Psychiatrist, as I attempted to broach the subject, something such as “I wish I had a terminal illness” – thinking that that would be a way out that would not create problems for anyone.  “I suppose you want cancer” he said – and said it with a sneer; nothing else will describe his tone.  I never tried to speak to anyone about it ever again, and I have only recalled the painful times for the purpose of writing to you to help you to understand the torment in the unseen world behind the facade of a face, and a life that, seemingly, is being ‘lived’ successfully.

‘Writing to you’ – I began to write more then five years ago.  Some has come easy; some with the pain of unhappiness and disaster revisited.  I hope that it has been worthwhile in that it may help someone.  I began with the words of the diminutive Brazilian bishop, Dom Helder Camera - and cannot think of any that are more appropriate to end with.

Don’t get annoyed

If the people coming to see you,

If the people wanting to talk to you

Can’t manage to express

The uproar raging inside them.

Much more important

Than listening to the words

Is imagining the agonies

Fathoming the mystery

Listening to the silences

(And, with those words, in 2003,  I completed my Book.)

Yes.  Writing to you.  Yes, you.  It may be that you are the one to whom I was writing, whom I had in mind during all of those five years.

Chapter One bears the title “We had to destroy it to save it…”.

The ‘it’ in question was my mind.  And I had all of the material necessary to be able to write a full and minutely detailed account -  I had all of my medical notes covering a period of thirty years.

But it was only with you in mind that I could read and face the personal agonies within – and then write about them

To read and recall how, step by step, therapy after therapy, drug after drug, my life, my home, my career, my family were slowly peeled away – and then to recall how all of this had been the ‘gratuitous invention’ of ‘psychiatry. 

You see – there had been nothing wrong with me at the outset – other than uncontrollable diarrhoea – yes - uncontrollable diarrhoea.

There were times – many times – when I would have abandoned the whole project.  Even hoping that my computer would ‘crash’ and everything that I had written would be lost –

because I knew I would never start again…

And that was before I had even begun to think about writing about

 ‘Hearing Voices’ 

- which, after all, is the reason for writing in the first place.

But I always came back to you – yes, it is you again.  I used to say to myself “If I can help only one person – just one person – back to sanity, then it will have been worth it.”

And thankfully, it has been worth it!  Yes it has.  You in your various forms have emailed or written to me to tell me just what the book has meant to you.

Yes, you have been “Al….” a seafarer in the Philippines “…now you inspire me a lot.”  Or Igor in Moscow…. Monica in Mumbai who was desperately worried about the harm that anti-psychotic drugs were having upon her son.  (So many parents and carers have written as she did.)

You have been Anne-Marie who had been assailed by malign voices while in a plane returning from a very happy holiday.

 

Then again, you have been Rosey in Arizona, so worried for your son.

My heart went out to you, James, on Death Row in a gaol in Georgia, who could still find the will to write to me, in spite of a very uncertain future…

It was Steve, in Lancashire, who finally clinched it for me –

It was Steve who wrote the ‘magic’ words –

“You have saved my sanity”

So, if you are reading this and wondering what the book is all about, it is free to download on the Internet – yes, free.

Who knows – I may have written it for you.

LISTENING TO THE SILENCES

IN A WORLD OF HEARING VOICES

www.royvincent.org

ROY VINCENT

MID-SUMMER 2014