In the psychiatric ward

 

When I was twenty-one, I found a job in a psychiatric hospital. I worked there for two years as an auxiliary nurse. Auxiliary was the lowest rank in the hierarchy. Lower than that you’re just ill! I am still thinking of the people I met there… Let me introduce them to you.

 

 Mauricette was about thirty years old but she looked sixteen, the age she was trapped by schizophrenia. She wore that kind of dull clothing you wear when you’re an inmate in a psychiatric hospital, she wore socks but no shoes, she had shoulder length dark and untidy hair and she was perpetually possessed by acute anger. She spent her days walking to and fro in the doorways or turning round the tables- always anticlockwise. Her fists clenched, she was churning out an unceasing string of the angriest and crudest words… Her anger is my anger.

 

One day Mauricette stood in front of me in the middle of the path, hands joined over her head, on one leg as if practising a yoga stance called “the tree” She glanced and at me and barked: “I am a Christmas tree, you turn me on!” I looked at her and replied: “Mauricette, it’s not Christmas, it’s soon Easter!” She replied: “Shut your fucking mouth, I am the one in charge in here!” she dropped the stance and resumed her speed- walking to the other end of the corridor… 

When I declare my love that way I am rarely understood. It’s a shame; it’s a beautiful way.

Sometimes she stared right into my eyes; she was an ocean of aggression. I used to hold her gaze…. It was a challenge, a bit of a game for me but it was also a way to get in touch. 

It happened once, only once. I took her in my arms, to help her cross the yard. The ground was wet, she wore socks… I held her like a child, she cuddled up in my arms with a happy smile… and I let her go on the other side… 

 

 

 

One day a new resident arrived. She was a beautiful Granny with long white hair falling in two plaits… Her name was Philomene. She came from a retirement home. She had lost her mind long ago and the reason she was now admitted in the psychiatric hospital was that she had become incontinent. The retirement home didn’t want her anymore.



Philomene did not talk. She looked intensely lost. In the retirement home they used to tie her to the radiators. We found this unacceptable, and we let her roam about freely, but she was annoying. She kept trying to grasp people’s arms in a perpetual quest for connection and support… She even tried to cling to Mauricette! Mauricette swung round sharply and sent her off violently: “What do you want?”


Philomene was extremely surprised, she lost her balance, hit the wall and fell onto her bum! We hurried to her rescue; she was ok, aghast but she was always aghast anyway. We sat her at a table, gave her some fruit juice, we stroked her hair… She was fine, but ten minutes later she was dead.




It was a cold winter; it was dark outside; we laid her on a bed. Her skin had turned yellow. Nobody said anything to Mauricette. She was howling in the doorways… Whoooo……





The time I spent working there had a huge impact on me.

 

Mentally-ill people, like poets maybe, are in contact with another side of reality, a side that “normal” people manage to suppress...

Under the social fabric, under the masks of appearances, under the earthy crust, there is magma. Magma is stronger.
Earthquakes, volcanoes and madness will always erupt wherever the fabric is weaker. The rigidity of our prejudices, our moral principles, and our theories will always be beaten by madness…

 

 Yvonne was Bipolar with a capital B. When she was depressed, she would sit all day long on a plastic chair in the doorway… She would stay there for months. We forced her to go to bed at night and get up in the morning. Her head was falling down on her chest, her back had no strength, and her legs stayed the position they fell in when she collapsed on the chair… She was heavily empty, she was immensely sad…

 When she was somehow stabilized, she was an upper-class lady on the brink of third age. She was very knowledgeable. Once she gave us a little lecture about the different varieties of champagne which astonished us.

 When she was “up” she couldn’t keep her clothes on. She ran about in the ward in a state of extreme agitation, sending her clothes away, pissing and shitting on her way to nowhere without even noticing… I remember following Yvonne with a scoop, a bucket and a mop… She had to be locked up in a room and would tear up the mattress into small pieces… 

 

 When she would be down again, squashed by sadness and shame on her chair, she would remember everything…

 It happened that the psychiatrists found out a particular dosage of medicines that seemed to prove effective. Yvonne’s moods were much more even than they used to be, for months. A christening was planned in her family a few months ahead, it was agreed that Yvonne would temporarily leave the hospital to join the family celebration the weekend it was planned. Yvonne was really looking forward to it.

 

 Unfortunately, as the time was drawing closer, expectation and anxiety were growing more and more compelling… Another manic crisis broke out in the weeks before the family gathering. The emotions were too strong…

“Stop, Madam, stop!” 

 

Raymond was an old chap, not very tall with a kind of friendly bulldog face and shining white hair. He looked perpetually satisfied, except when it was time to get into the bathtub, against his will, and have a shower aimed at his calves and the rest of his anatomy. 

 

He begged with his irresistibly friendly voice, it was too hot, it was too cold, it was too… wet basically. But he had to be kept clean.

 

He was a marine officer in the past…

It was always entertaining to have a little chat with Raymond, who spent his days, like the ten or fifteen elders of the wing, sitting on a chair along the wall of the dining room.

 

“Hello Raymond, how are you? What have you been up to? Aren’t you bored?” And he answered: “Oh no, I am not bored. I go to the cinema and to the restaurant… I like walking; I walk a lot you see…” 

 

One day, I was doing a round; checking everything was OK in the rooms I had a glimpse of Raymond masturbating with focused conviction. I discreetly sneaked away, thinking: Enjoy my friend!" 

 

I’m sure she was beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

When I saw Roland for the first time, he was walking nervously to and fro in the ward. He was speaking out loud into a walkie-talkie without batteries. 

 

 He was nineteen years old. He had a nice kid's face; he was tall and slender. He asked me to open the door. A helicopter was waiting for him in the yard; he had to join his regiment that belonged to the 114th Panzer division. He had to go fight in Lebanon. If he couldn’t go, he would be considered a deserter and could be shot for that. It was extremely important… 

 

I could almost see the helicopter but opening the door was out of the question. He had been sectioned: He had been legally labelled “dangerous to himself or others”. Under this status he couldn’t go outside, not even into the enclosed courtyard.



Roland believed he was a kind of hero in the military prevented from performing his duty… a couple of injections later, he had become another self, a friendly young man with a good sense of humour. He was always looking for his friend Francis.

 

 Have you seen Francis? Where is Francis? A nurse once answered to him “He’s in his shirt!” It was a way to say that we are not an information agency. "Oh! replied Roland, I am looking for shirts then!" He could be witty. 

 

 However, he would get indignant if it was suggested that he should cut his nails himself, or trust a nurse to do this. Only his mother could perform such a task! He was nineteen!

 

Warrior, get you nails done and jump into this helicopter! 

 

 

 

 

 

Maria was a little grandmother with great eyes, bent forward and sticking her tongue in and out all the time.

 

Her tune was: “oh there will be nothing left for me… Will there be a little bit left for me? Oh no there will be nothing for me…” 

 

She used to lurk around the kitchen long before the time when the van would deliver the containers… We answered: “Yes Maria, there will be enough for everybody, don’t worry, you’ll get your share!”

 

 She looked surprised, she was silenced for a few seconds and then she started again…” Oh no, there will not be anything left for me…” – “Now that’s enough Maria, get out of the kitchen, we have to close the door, we’ll open it again at twelve when the food is there!” – “Oh no oh no oh no…” Maria went away, rubbing her anxieties between her hands… 

 

You’ve guessed I am sure: once the food was served… Maria couldn’t stay put on her chair in front of her plate. She kept wandering between the tables, claiming “Oh, there is nothing left for me”

 

 Every now and then, a member of the staff brought her back to her seat. She ate like a bird and flew away…

 

 

 

Alan had a big jaw that wouldn’t give much work to a caricaturist, and a naive but inquisitive, astonished and suspicious way to look at people. He was twenty-nine and he was heavily epileptic.

 

I liked him. We spent hours together in the workshop on the other side of the yard. Alan decided he wanted to make string art pictures. 

 

 Alan was extremely anxious about failing. I had to be there, looking over his shoulder, checking nail after nail whether what he was doing was right. Is this it? Yes Alan, it is… Is this it? Yes... and so on, gesture after gesture, for hours…


 I felt how he felt, I know how anxieties can cloud the simplest operations with a veil of uncertainty, I admired his determination… If I left him for a little while, he went wrong. I knew that it was not on purpose… I never felt the urge of using hurtful words such as “Can’t you use your brain for a change, it’s not that complicated for God’s sake!” When I was tired, I just said I was...


 After five or six month he was able to cope all by himself provided I was not far just in case he would need me. He achieved a few string art pictures without help at all. He was so proud, and so was I!


 One day, Alan came back from a walk outside of the hospital, he was allowed to, and he came back with a tin can of cassoulet. A cassoulet is a kind of sausage and bean stew. It was 4 pm, and in France, you don’t eat at 4 pm.

 Furthermore, a cassoulet is definitely to be eaten warm....


 Alan wanted an opener to eat his cassoulet cold and directly from the tin. I had absolutely no reason to refuse whatsoever. It was his cassoulet. I gave Alan the opener.


 Bad luck, a nurse arrived. She was the kind of person who believes that things have to be done the way they are supposed to be done, just because that’s how things are supposed to be.



 She started to waste Alan’s pleasure by calling him a pig… I don’t remember what Alan’s answer was, but it did not please her… She went on showering him with spiteful comments to which Alan answered back with exasperation…

 

 ” You’re disgusting! 

 

  "And you, you’re disgusting to, have you seen your face?” 

 

Eventually she told him that talking that way to a member of staff was utterly unacceptable and he had to go with her to the infirmary to get his injection done. That is, the injection that is done in case of disruptive behaviour and sends the person who gets it sleeping for two days.



They went, there was a noise and the nurse came out of the infirmary with a black eye and quite hysterical. She went to call for help. I went with Alan in the kitchen. As a member of staff, I couldn’t tell him he was right! I offered him a cigarette instead and he got the message...



As a disciplinary measure he would be forbidden from leaving the wing for six months, which implied not being able to go to the workshop on the other side of the yard. As for the nurse she would stay on sick leave for a about a year.



 The so-called normal people may eat their food warm with all the right mannerism and at the relevant time, I prefer those who know how to enjoy cold beans and sausages directly from the tin regardless of the time.

 

 

 

 

 In shapeless overalls, she was lighting a cigarette with the butt of the other. She had beautiful dark eyes and hair, a pretty well shaped body and a defiant attitude. She was French, her parents were from Algeria. She was a Kabyle.

 She was bipolar. In depressive mode, she could be so squashed that a cigarette could burn all by itself between her fingers; a long chimney of ash would rise above her motionless hand until the ember burned her…  But when she wasn’t depressed… I was impressed!

Beauty has such a power!

 

 However, it didn’t occur to me to enjoy more than a bit of conversation every now and then. She was mad, she was an inmate. I was an auxiliary nurse. We were in a psychiatric hospital. There was a dividing line.

 

After one year working in the ward, I had started the training to become a nurse. However, I had some questions… Do we really help? Giving aways pills, getting them quiet and freeze their evolution? Is that helping?  How about listening and understanding? Would I settle in the cuckoos’ nest for my living?

I resigned. And then, I started to dream.


 If life is not a fairy tale as people say, that’s only because we haven’t got the guts to live it like a fairy tale! Life is a fairy tale and, in this tale, people have been cursed. They believe in a bunch of illusions that they called reason!

 I was mad. I was 22. My new dream sounded like this:


 "Once upon a time there was a Kabyle princess locked up in a psychiatric unit. Nearby was a young man.  He believed that he could be a hero… "


I went to the wing and I brought my Berber princess back to my flat, determined to cure her with love and love only.

 Once home we started to make love. Would you abduct a consenting Berber princess and not make love to her? However, the way she behaved… huh… her body language seemed to mean:

 

“I shall lie down on my back and evaluate the performance!”

I hate taking exams. I couldn’t do much...

 She started to insult me…

 
I believed in love… I may not have understood everything about mad princesses.

 She would stay at my flat for about two weeks, showering me with insults. I had a theory, a simple, simplistic theory. The evil, the pain had to get out of her, and for this to be possible, I had to be there to take it in.

 I listened to her; I applied myself to feeling whatever she wanted to make me feel. And it was harsh…When I put on music, my choice was obviously the worst, the most insensitive and disconnected choice ever, but if I was asking her to choose it was even worse not being able to take such decisions… Every single word I would say, every detail, everything I could do or not do, every silence would be evidence of my stupidity, of my worthlessness …  I felt what she was passing on to me, because that was what she was feeling inside. I did my best not to defend myself…

 One day we were both sitting at the table drinking coffee. We kept silent. I could physically feel the state of tension that was stretching my mind to a point where I was afraid it could get torn apart… Instinctively, to hold on I was concentrating on Jesus’ name. I was just thinking, with intensity “Jesus, Jesus…” My mouth was shut but she heard. She suddenly turned round, looked everywhere and asked in a harsh tone: “Who is talking about Jesus here?” She saw nobody but me, silent, she softened a bit and said: “Yes, sometimes I hear voices …”

 Sometimes she hallucinated. She saw a fish turning around above her head. She often talked in a strange metaphorical and cryptic way…

One evening, night was falling and she put on every single light in the flat. She kept going about, singing or whistling out of tune. It was actually worse than out of tune. She was making noises, shaking drawers, and slamming doors… She asked me “Do you know what it means when someone puts the lights on?”

  She went on with zombies. “Zombies do exist, you’re going to see one, you’ll run yes you’ll run, just wait a little bit…”

 She was terrifying. Not that I’d ever thought about zombies or feared to meet some, but the intensity of the rage and contempt in her voice was like seeing zombies… She kept on and on…

 

 I had read Castaneda. I remembered a piece of advice given by the old sorcerer to his apprentice: “Find your place of power” I had elected the tip of my bed. I was thinking… As long as I am sitting there, I am protected. It helped me. She actually didn’t approach me…

 And I’ve seen the Devil.

 Suddenly the way she was moving wasn’t her way of moving anymore. The sound of her voice wasn’t the sound of her voice anymore. Another being was there, moving this body. I immediately thought it was the Devil. It was just dancing, moving, making sounds there, for a few moments, seconds or minutes I can’t say…


Towards dawn she put off the lights and told me: “When someone puts the lights on, that means that they have something to share”


 Then she left the flat. I had never locked the door. I didn’t try to hold her back. I had a feeling I’d done everything I could. The firemen would find her and bring her back to the hospital…

 I felt drained and peaceful. I went for a chat at a friend’s…

A few days later, I would come across a book on the ethnology shelves in a bookshop… The author was Aissa Ouitis and the title, Possession magic and prophecy in Algeria. It was a PhD thesis by someone who belonged to this culture. In the book I spotted her case. It was not a curse; it was not the bad eye… The use of cryptic metaphors, the unpredictability of her behaviour, it was as clear as a well: It was a case of possession by a jinn. I had seen jinn!

I knew very little of Muslim beliefs. However, reading this book, it appeared that the right cure for Srira might have been a ritual exorcism with readings of the Koran and possibly balls of cotton set on fire pushed up her nostrils: a way exorcists use to burn a jinn who does not easily accept to leave the body of a person they possess. Well, I don’t know.

  I spent a few months in a kind of exhilarated state before going for the worst bout of depression of my life.

 

I would spend at least one year in a state of mental disintegration and many more years to slowly conquer a state of emotional balance. I don’t attribute my difficulties to this episode, which was, I think, mostly a trigger – the straw that broke the camel’s back. But hey, I learned a lot in the process!
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For the astrology, I don't remember the exact date when this story happened - It was around May 1984. 

 On the first of May there was a New Moon at 10-degree Taurus opposing my Sun-Neptune conjunction. Saturn, a main player in my natal chart, was transiting over my natal Sun. It was time for a powerful confrontation with reality! Neptune, at one-degree Capricorn, was squaring my natal Moon, and Pluto, at zero degree Scorpio, was squaring my natal Jupiter.