Left on the mental health dump.

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday August 29, 2002 18:47 by Ozwald

The events of the following article are all true. The names and locations in the article have been modified so as ensure the privacy of the person/s involved. This could be happening to a person in your city/town/village or worse someone you know.

Sean suffers from schizophrenia, a mental illness which affects hundreds in Ireland. He has been in and out of “mental” institutions for most of his life. His stories of these institutions are tragic, frightening and barbaric. Lets start with Sean’s story. Sean comes from a large family, he has a sister and brother who also suffer from schizophrenia and other acute “mental” illness’, he has no leaving certificate due to the fact that the situation which his family have been in has always been what one would call dire straits. For this reason Sean left the family home early and has been moved around quite a lot since. Sean has spent most of his adult life in a local “mental” institution where he has received “treatment” for his “mental” illness. This “treatment” he recalls involved the pumping of unknown drugs into his body, being held down by mental health nurses while these drugs were forcibly injected into his body despite this being against his will. Sean says “ The institution which I have been in so many times is packed, yet there are only beds for 29 people in the “mental” health ward”. The doctor at the head of the ward claims she would “need the entire hospital for the amount of people calling to the mental health ward”.

Over the last few weeks Sean’s life has been thrown into upheaval. Due to the fact that the mental health “institution” which has been his home/prison for most of his adult life is packed he can never stay for too long and to make matters worse if his illness kicks in and he “misbehaves” he is out immediately. Sean’s mother is in her late 60’s early 70’s, she is a widow, with no income but the income she gets from renting rooms in her house to lodgers. She is Sean’s only next of kin, she being of bad health is meant to look after her son when the hospital kicks him out and yet they cannot get along. For this reason Sean has been living in a caravan sold to him by members of the local travelling community. He has been living in this caravan for the last year and lately the Guardi have been hassling him and threatening to take the caravan off of him under the new public order acts which both activists and travellers have been up in arms about. For this reason Sean moved his caravan to the side of the river away from the town centre. There he has been living for the last 2-3 months with a makeshift wall built around it by the local UDC (because according to them its an eyesore to a local tourist amenity). Sean is an outcast in a town of 20,000-30,000 people.

Due to the fact that he has no sanitation or money Sean has had to live in the same clothes he had the day he was kicked out of the local “mental” institution. His only means of keeping himself is by washing the clothes he wears in the local river. The caravan he lives in is run down and damp and along with his damp clothes has caused him several health problems. The latest was when he got pneumonia from sleeping in the his damp clothes in his damp bed in his damp caravan through the recent bad Irish weather. Sean’s mother found him lying in a pool of vomit, unconscious and freezing cold. He was in a coma and was rushed to the local general hospital where he spent the last three-four weeks on a life support machine in intensive care. Sean has since pulled away from the brink and was well enough to tell us his story. But his problems don’t end there. The hospital has decided to discharge him a.s.a.p. whether or not he has a home to go to. The simple fact is he doesn’t. He will be forced to go back to the caravan he has been living in for the last year to possibly fall ill again. His mother is unable to take him in because they don’t get along with each other and she fears losing her lodgers who are the only source of income she has. She has gone to the local paper, who unfortunately have failed to print anything about his treatment despite this happening to him.

Sean and his mother don’t blame the doctors at the local hospital though they cannot forget the sort of things they have seen in the “mental” institution like his sister being forced to take drugs in the same manner which he was despite the fact that she was pregnant at the time. She miscarried as a direct result of the drugs she was forced to take. Sean understands that these doctors have very little resources and are in a very extreme situation but he cannot understand why he cant have a house, apartment, flat something. For him every day is a struggle. Not a struggle to make ends meat, he cannot even do that, but a struggle to stay alive in a world that has outcasted him all because of one word, schizophrenia.