SITTING IN a pub near Oxford Circus in London, John O’Donoghue is talking of his experience of psychiatric hospitals and electric shock therapy. It is a conversation braided with loss and pain. Suddenly an elderly man approaches and shakes a collection box at our table. Instinctively we fumble for change. O’Donoghue asks: “What are you collecting for? ”
The answer comes back immeidately. “Mental health,” says the old man. There is a pause and suddenly O’Donoghue laughs aloud and leans forward to show the old man his new book, Sectioned – A Life Interrupted. “Oh, being sectioned – that’s not very nice,” the collector says. And then he moves quickly on to rattle his box at another table.
It is a measure of how far John O’Donoghue has come in his recovery from mental illness that he can laugh heartily at the irony of the encounter. There was a time he might have been considered a charity case worthy of pub collections.
His book, a memoir detailing his time in psychiatric institutions, foster care, homeless shelters and city squats throughout 1980s London is not a cheerful subject matter. He was born in east London 50 years ago, to a Monaghan mother and a father from the Kerry Gaeltacht, and both part of what he terms the “brawn drain” from post-war Ireland. He is adamant that it is not a “misery memoir”.
O’Donoghue chronicles, unsentimentally, a life spent in the social care system and his personal battle not to become a “ long-stay” patient. Outside the hospital environment was the harsh and often unsupportive environment of the free-market era.
Under English law (the Mental Health Act 1983), a patient can be sectioned – held in hospital care without their consent – when they are deemed to present a danger to themselves or others. According to the law, John O’Donoghue fitted that description for several long periods in his youth. He was sectioned five times between 1975 and 1984, the first time aged 16 after a psychotic episode.
“I’m not portraying myself as a victim and it isn’t a book about how awful psychiatric hospitals are. I’ve tried to make it less a work of confession and more a testimony. These are the people I met, and the times I’ve lived in. And I’ve also tried to place it in the context of the wider society and what was going on around me in Thatcher’s Britain. There was a climate of excess but the people I encountered were from a different world, an underclass that was experiencing a growing sense of alienation from the world of the yuppies, which is how most people remember the 1980s.”
The book is full of the colourful and often desperate characters he encountered travelling through London’s submerged world, the hostels for the homeless and squats where he encountered men like “Chopper”, “Captain”, and “Freaky Frankie”, a heroin addict. He hurtled between institutional care and street life, collecting friendships along the way – the talk in the soup queue was of where to get handouts or casual work washing dishes. For O’Donoghue and his companions, there was a camaraderie formed out of desperation. Poverty and hunger were ever present.
THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL began after the sudden death of his father when O’Donoghue was aged 14. His father worked for British Rail until the 1970s when redundancy forced him to take a job street sweeping. He was an only child.
They were a quiet family “living an undemonstrative and even mundane life in an upstairs flat in Leyton, one remove from the proper East End”, he recalls. Childhood holidays were spent in Monaghan on his cousin’s farm in Ballinode. But if his own world fell apart after his father’s fatal heart attack, his mother’s grief was cataclysmic. The image of her which O’Donoghue conjures up is harrowing, a woman who wandered the London streets, crying for her dead husband.
The 14-year-old tried to be her consoler and caretaker but eventually his mother was removed to a psychiatric hospital. He was then confronted with a painful choice. A social worker asked if he wanted to be fostered. He felt torn between the desire for a normal life, but was terrified of disloyalty to his mother.
When he opted for foster care, he felt guilty as his mother moved from psychiatric care in England to an Irish hospital for her final years. In 1978 when she died he could not afford to come and see her and the funeral took place before he got home. “I’d been working in the St Vincent de Paul,” he writes. “They said they would help. So I wrote over and told her I was coming. But their help didn’t come in time.” A friend later told him she had said: “He’ll never come.”
Throughout this time he had been in foster care, firstly in a vicarage and then with a kindly couple he calls Fred and Ivy. It was they who called the ambulance when he had his breakdown at 16 and was taken to hospital. The illness he describes is a deep and disabling melancholy, the “black dog” familiar to so many who have suffered depression.
He was prescribed the mood-stabilising drug lithium, “almost the size of an ice hockey puck”, and other drugs about which he writes with dry humour. “I have taken for instance Stelazine . . . the main problem is with its side effects. It can lock your jaw and make your joints stiff if you don’t take Kemadrine, which counteracts the effects of Stelazine. But Kemadrine has side effects too, and leaves you with a very dry mouth and a ‘spacey’ feeling.”
After his first session of Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT), a treatment still used for depression, O’Donoghue awoke to see a naked woman patient in the hallway announcing that she was the Virgin Mary. The book captures the absurdity and fear, the boredom and the moments of camaraderie that characterised his institutional life.
Nowadays you would be unlikely to find a 16-year-old on an adult ward in a forbidding asylum, he says. “These Victorian-style institutions don’t exist anymore – there’s more of an emphasis on care in the community for mental health patients. ’m not saying all these places are awful, or that I’m against medication – I’m just telling my own story.”
There were numerous spells in different hospitals, halfway houses and hostels. In 1982, he found himself at rock bottom, ending up in bed 105 at St Mungo’s hostel for the homeless in London. It was a bleak time. Unemployment had reached three million. Much of his time was spent sitting at desks, “asking strangers to help you sort your life out”. He became a “revolving door client” of the social care system.
“I had sunk so low my horizons were subterranean,” he recalls. Following an episode of shoplifting in 1987, he ended up in Pentonville Prison where Oscar Wilde found himself jailed a century before.
A MAJOR FACTOR in his rehabilitation from mental illness turned out to be his love of literature. He read Dylan Thomas and Patrick Kavanagh, and wrote his own poetry. It also became his pathway to a different life. In 1988, a care worker familiar with his work suggested he try to get into university as a mature student.
Despite his worry that he only had three O-levels and an elementary certificate in swimming, he was accepted into the highly-regarded literature course at the University of East Anglia. There he also met his wife Bernadette, a fellow student with an Irish background. They married in 1990, in St Martin’s in the Fields church at Trafalgar Square, a place where he had once queued for free pork pies and tea.
Nowadays, he lives with his wife and four children in Brighton on the south coast of England and teaches poetry and literature at several universities. He no longer takes medication and believes family support has helped him conquer his demons. Yet there is a nagging sadness when he speaks of his mother.
“After all these years I still feel I abandoned her and broke up the family. Even though I was only 14. I felt I should have been able to take care of her.”
According to Mind – the National Association for Mental Illness – one in four people in Britain have experienced mental health problems, a crisis that is set to worsen with the stress of recession. The story of John O’Donoghue’s journey could have resonance for millions.
Sectioned – A Life Interrupted by John O’Donoghue, published by John Murray, €13.99. John O’Donoghue will be speaking at the John Hume Centre at UCD on April 23