Do you feel like you were ...
In your words, "mad"?
Yeah. Somebody said, you've got to be mad to be sane.
That feels like it's over-complicating ...
That was not the question.
I'm Iman Amrani and I'm a journalist at the Guardian and I do this series called
Modern Masculinity.
In the past year, I've tried to take a little bit of an angle looking at
mental health specifically.
I think that it's easier to have conversations about things like,
depression or anxiety for example rather than some more intimidating diagnoses such as schizophrenia
or borderline personality disorder.
I've decided to speak to some men who have had these experiences
specifically been through the system, taken medication ...
Next week we'll be speaking to a writer called Derek who was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder
but this week I'm going to be
speaking to Chris from Bradford.
I was mad with the system,
what they've done to me ...
I should have been doing things I'm doing now in my early 20s.
I was never given the chance.
Now before speaking to Chris, I wanted to speak to Rufus who is a clinical psychologist who himself
had a psychotic episode when he was a teenager.
I wanted to speak to him a little bit about what his
feelings and thoughts are around mental health and what approach he thinks would be healthiest
moving forward.
Somebody said to me you've got to speak to Rufus, Rufus is in the system but
he's thinking about it slightly differently and I also was told that you, yourself, had kind
of been on a journey.
Yeah, I'm a bit obsessed.
OK, yeah, that's another way of putting it.
The positive way is to talk about this is ... I'm passionate, you know, I'm passionate about
people and their potential and that comes from my own experience, not only of being
kind of crazy but also the people I met in hospital, seeing their humanity, seeing that they
weren't that different to your eye and I kind of came along that continuum so I was quite mad and
I came out of that and appeared quite sane, you know?
Are we allowed to say mad?
I can't say mad.
Can I say mad?
Well, I guess it's how you say things as well, isn't it?
You can speak about it for yourself.
I mean, I thought I was a spy and I was actually not a spy.
OK, all right.
You know, I thought I had a special hotline to God so I was out there ...
I quite like the old words like madness because they kind of go with maddening.
So maddening used
to be a a term we would use, you know, for life so it recognises the link between life events
and mental health and that sometimes gets obscured by scientific kind of pseudoscience
that sort of says, oh it's all in the brain.
One of the things that is really kind of fascinating to me,
it's just like debate of like biology and then like it's kind of like biology and experience ...
Psychosis is in the eye of the beholder to some extent so if somebody believes they're guided
by the angel Gabriel and then you find they've got a trauma history and that explains why they
they might want to escape this world, say the angel Gabriel's helping them escape this world to heaven.
You start to see that although it seems quite out of touch reality, it's actually quite linked to
reality the person's been through a trauma history and they might need help with that.
My fear is that we still focus on the problem and we don't look at that deeper understanding of it
and try and help people with that.
The meaning of it.
I always think it's meaningful.
Do you think that there are
things that affect men who suffer from issues with mental health that maybe as a society we aren't ...
I mean, we've talked about strong emotions which women and men can both have,
so that's one thing, is like listening and talking but what about when that doesn't work or what about if men
don't want to do that?
There probably is a danger in therapies that we emphasise too much on those
feminine skills of relating and talking and the middle class approach is it's all very cognitive,
you know, we talk about things that we learn how to rationalise, problem solved but I actually think
it's visceral, you know, the emotional problems ... We need to work with the body in different ways
and I'm, you know, I'm a fan of things like yoga and meditation but a lot of working-class
men maybe won't be pro, you know, yoga's like that's for women, you know?
So we might need to work with martial arts,
so there's something about using the body more, going for walks ...
Yeah which I guess also you make me think about the medication and how I think on some medication
it might be hard to do those other things and that sometimes they could work against each other.
Medication is a tool, it's one part of the puzzle and some people find it helpful ...
But we use it in a heavy-handed way.
I think, often.
So a lot of what Rufus was saying was really, really interesting to me
and I wanted to speak to somebody who had lived experience of
the system and Rufus worked with a guy called Chris who lives in Bradford to bring down the
level of medication that he was on.
Chris age seven had a fall which resulted in a head injury which
may be linked to his mental health issues.
He also struggled a lot at school, growing up, and when he was around 20,
he was suffering with issues to do with alcoholism and was convicted of a GBH offence.
All of these things kind of factor into his story and once he was diagnosed with schizophrenia,
he was put on quite a lot of medication which he feels really impacted on the quality of life
that he was able to have.
The first time you took antipsychotic medication you were 20 years old, right?
And it sounds like there's a lot of, like, contributing factors and things
that were going on at the time.
I was definitely unstable.
And when you took that medication,
did you know much about what antipsychotic drugs were?
They told me it would make me feel bad,
he gave me it and it was that strong and they gave me tea time, I couldn't even make
it up the stairs, I remember falling asleep at the bottom of the stairs in the corridor.
As a result of taking the drugs that they'd given you?
So you've been taking ...
How long you've been taking medication in your life? – I took the antipsychotic drugs for 25 years
until I started reducing it when I was about 43.
With the help of this man, Rufus.
That's when I was living in supported housing that's when the doctor says I was doing OK.
How old were you there?
30, 33.
Rufus came to see me and he was referred to me by the
psychiatrist that was constantly giving me the antipsychotic medication and she told me if I
came off the medication, I would spend the rest of my life back in hospital.
Chris was living in supported accommodations ...
You were very angry at how you've been treated by the staff, you felt
they treated you as a second-rate citizen.
I was mad with the system, I was mad with what they've done to me,
sometimes I'd shout ...
And Rufus listened.
Did you feel like you hadn't been listened to before then?
Why would they want to listen to me?
Why would I want to listen to somebody who had no education, come from a working-class background?
They were doctors, they didn't want to listen that was the problem I had.
I mean just looking at your notes, they thought you had this problem called schizophrenia
from a young age, they didn't link it to a life problem.
So we have to permanently stop that with lifelong medication.
Schizophrenia is seen as this kind of life-debilitating
illness and so once they gave you that diagnosis they assumed that was the cause of your problems
and that the only thing they could do is keep you medicated rather than see you
as somebody who'd had a brain injury at seven, had a lot of school stress, you know, a lot of
confidence issues turned to drinking rather than understand it as a reasonable reaction to
difficult life events.
They saw you as somebody who was genetically prone to being mad and needed to
be kept medically.
But why would they think you're going to get better treating somebody like that?
I should have been doing things I'm doing now with my early 20s, I was never given the chance.
So like, looking now and looking forwards what do you want to do with the rest of your life?
I like to be content, I like an understanding that it wasn't just me
who couldn't get better.
I'm a lot older now and I can do more things ... I think I've done 12 half marathons ...
Yeah, you've got all these, you've brought them out.
People might think, you know, it's hard, you know, to do something but at least give them a chance.
That's what I like to say.
People weren't willing to give me a chance for many years
but they were wrong, I think they were wrong.
Well, why do you think it is that people like Chris, I don't think he's an isolated case,
I don't think he's an anomaly but why do you think we don't see people like Chris usually when
we're talking about mental health?
Well, we don't see people from poor working-class backgrounds
as much anyway in the media so, you know, we'll have Stephen Fry talking about
mental health, you know?
We all get tempted to try and control our moods with substances.
If i take this, it'll make me feel better.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it makes you feel worse,
and I think we need to listen more to people like Chris when it's not helping
and be a bit more adventurous but that means it's all coming together and working more
collectively, more collaboratively really because I think the doctors feel like they're out there
in the front line and if they get it wrong, they'll be in the news headlines, you know?
They'll be blamed by the coroner and the news reporter.
I can't do a single interview without somebody being like journalists, the media ...
If we make a sweeping generalisation that is maybe harder for men to talk about
some things, feelings or things that happen to them or whatever than women,
then there's a really interesting thing in there about how you can best serve men or how
men are treated a bit differently because say for example you're frustrated or you're angry
and you demonstrate that, then you might be a very unsympathetic character for people and that might
be part of what makes things difficult for people like Chris.
We're uncomfortable with strong emotion.
I mean, I've introduced boxing into the psychiatric
wards where I work and people are buying into it
several years down the line, nurses are doing it
and wanting more training in it, so we're working with that anger rather than trying to just
suppress it and they're recognising that we're only a male ward and there are lots of angry men
and they're actually getting relief from doing it and it's not making them go around hit people,
it's creating a space for that the warrior, the warrior archetype.
Do you feel like you were ...
In your words, "mad"?
Yeah. – And that now you are ...
Not "mad"?
Somebody said, you got to be mad to be sane, you know?
That feels like it's over complicated, Rufus, that was not the question.
But do you know what I mean? Do you feel like you are different?
I feel like I can navigate society
and I couldn't navigate society then that's what I want to help teach people.
How do you navigate society?
Some people might hear voices, it's OK if you can navigate society, that's fine,
but if you find you can't navigate with your inner experiences, so it's not what you experience
but how you navigate and whether you can find meaningful relationships in that.
When we're talking about mental health, we're not just talking about celebrities talking
about their experiences and a lot of the stuff that we see on TV and in these campaigns isn't
necessarily what people are going through.
A lot of these things are uncomfortable to talk about,
they're contentious, people have different opinions but we have to be able to sit down and listen to
people and to be able to see them as humans and I think that's something that Rufus does in his work
which is really, really important.
So next week we'll be speaking to Derek.
Derek is a very talented writer and he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and so we'll be
talking to him about his experience of the system which decades after Chris is a very different one.
Because the psychologist when he first came in and saw me, I mean, he was just like, I've been
doing it for about 25 years and you're the first black man I've ever seen come through here with
self-harm scars in your arms and I was like, well OK but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
They're just not coming through here.
I've been told not to say like, comment and subscribe because
that sounds dated and corny and I'm more than happy to not say that but if you want to subscribe,
like and comment you could do that.
You're laughing at that, that's a good one, isn't it?