Opening up the asylum

When Sectioned by John O’Donoghue landed in the Disability Now office the Editor scratched his chin and thought: “Who do I know who’s mental and Irish?” Kelly Mullan had a jar with the author and discussed labels

John O’Donoghue first got his foot in the revolving door of the mental health system when he was sectioned in 1975 aged 16. He spent the next 14 years rebounding round a circuit of psychiatric hospitals, sheltered housing, homeless hostels and squats.

In his autobiography, Sectioned, O’Donoghue recalls the power relations at work on the ward and how alternatively desperate and absurd some situations appeared to him as a bright 16 year old thrown into an adult world: “[Group] Therapy is becoming like a mad cabaret turn...Only a stunning performance is going to get any attention…The Indian woman is manic. She used to be one of their own, a psychiatrist, privy to secrets, theirs and ours… a mad shrink is worse than a bent copper, and this woman’s madness is a sign that even our doctors are mortal, like us can crack and go crazy.”

Such shrewd observations allow his publishers to sell Sectioned as “a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest of our time”.

O’Donoghue was born in London to Irish parents and he has an ear for dialogue to delight the diaspora – or as he calls us: “the Murphia”.

He beams broadly when his autobiography is compared to Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes.

But it’s not just the themes of poverty and immigration that remind me of McCourt’s memoir; it’s the poignant story of O’Donoghue’s guilt-ridden relationship with his mother.

Sectioned recalls the break-up of his loving family home when he was 14 and the decision that haunted him: “When my father died, I stayed off school to look after my mother…She took to wandering the roads and was soon taken into hospital. The social worker asked me if I wanted to be fostered and I said yes.”

He wanted to “emigrate to the middle class, get help with the homework, get qualifications and swing back for my mother”. His aspirations didn’t work out in time to rescue his mother. There’s acute regret but no self-pity.

He says: “I didn’t want to write a ‘misery memoir’. I wanted to put my story in a social context.”

For O’Donoghue the personal is political. He attributes the problems he faced as much to macro as to micro factors: “Manic depression? The victim of circumstance? A casualty of Thatcherism?”

Sectioned knits together the fabric of his zigzag life, weaving a social history of the erstwhile asylum system, threaded through with a seam of black humour. O’Donoghue is ambivalent about the old asylums and about the plethora of labels he’s picked up on his way through them: disabled, bipolar, survivor and chippy working class oik.

“I identify with the disability movement, as that’s about campaigning for rights and raising awareness, but I don’t like labelling. The only label I like is ‘survivor’. It came out of America and says ‘we didn’t ask to be incarcerated but we survived it’. I like that.

“I’m chippy about the label of disability: I don’t want a diagnosis to define me, to be my destiny. Chippy is one of the words that’s been thrown at me. It’s the kind of word that middle class English people use about belligerent oiks like me, who feel a deep sense of injustice about many things. So I am chippy, though never fishy and it’s being chippy that gets me through.

“I think I’ll go on resisting labels to the grave. They all sound like put-downs, an excuse for some big bad nutter to do away with you: come in Mr Hitler and the Eugenicists! In a couple of generations, if we’re not careful, people like us will be genetically modified out of existence.”

Perhaps O’Donoghue wrestles with labels because his love of words has been vital for his survival. He says: “Poetry was as much of a place of refuge as anywhere. It was an imaginative place I could go. I could work things out. I could be something else.”

When asked if there’s a link between bipolar disorder and creativity he says: “It’s something I wouldn’t want to be without. My creativity lies with my personality. The great thing about my life now is that I can go to those places and come back. All the publicity around the book launch is slightly illusory. I had some ‘phenomena’, a few delusional experiences. I tell my wife and we try to manage it. Before, I’d have been moored there. Now because of my wife and through writing I’ve found a resilience.”

O’Donoghue is critical of the medical approach to mental illness, arguing that the old asylum system allowed time and space for recovery: “Drugs are not the panacea that practitioners think they are. Getting well was mostly a process that always seems to take a long time.

“I’m very much against electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). When practitioners don’t know what else to do, ECT is the treatment of last resort. To me it was Pavlovian. I wanted to stay there in the asylum, where it was safe and secure, and ECT was the deterrent: ‘Stay here and this is what we’ll do to you.’

“A lot else about the regime was very good: the sense of routine, occupational therapy, even the food was good back in those days.

“At their best, asylums offered a removal from stresses and strains, a chance to recharge, and the grounds were part of that: there was something healing in those grounds. Now they’re all converted into yuppie flats. Friern is now Princess Park where Ashley Cole met whats-her-name Cole.

“It was like the dissolution of the monasteries. Enoch Powell was behind it. The cost was a burden on the NHS and the long-stay thing was very sad: there were people in there since the 20s and 30s.”

Thatcher’s eviction from Downing Street coincided with O’Donoghue’s exit from the mental health system when in true triumph-over-tragedy style he broke the cycle and came in from the fringes of society. He says: “I came up through the asylums and then another set of institutions: the universities. They’ve got a lot in common: grounds/campuses, something to do everyday, meals, a collegiate system and camaraderie.”

These days O’Donoghue is a lecturer in creative writing and lives in Brighton with his wife and four children. He feels reverberations from his experiences in the 80s in the current economic crisis: “What we’re facing now is the end of Thatcherism. We had the repeal of clause four in the Labour party and now banks are being nationalised: something odd is going on.

“If Barack Obama doesn’t represent a return to idealism I don’t know who does. Why shouldn’t we want the best for each other? In a capitalist system we’ll always have inequality: ‘We’re all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.’”

Sectioned does follow the pattern of the inspiring-tale–of-triumph-over-tragedy, but O’Donoghue’s gift for spinning compelling yarns lifts this material out of the suffering-saga-tag remainders bin. Sectioned should be compulsory reading for anyone working in the mental health system: they’ll laugh, they’ll cry, they’ll think twice before using ECT.

• Sectioned: A Life Interrupted; publisher: John Murray; ISBN-10: 1848540132; £12.99