A Journey with Schizophrenia - One Woman’s Story

By Elisabeth Scott

Chapter 1 - Introduction

Have you ever feared you were going mad? Or that you were mad, and it was vitally important that nobody should notice? It’s a common experience, almost universal. The difference for me was that I was right.

When I got together the courage to explain something of my inner world, I found that the professionals I was talking to fully shared my fears. Now that is scary. Rather than reassurance on the lines of “oh, well, everyone has that” instead I got “oh, I see, well that must be difficult for you”.

That is what a diagnosis is. An official way of saying – “Not like me. Other”. Psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses of all stripes, even aides and volunteers all desire the herd safety of “us, here” while you, of course as the Other, are by definition “over there. Outside.”



One ward on which I spent undesired time had a huge, safety glass window separating the staff offices from the patient areas. It provided those within with an excellent view of the zoo, but it also gave the patients access to the private lives of the staff. Seeing them there, young women like me, sharing biscuits, arguing over whose turn to make the coffee, planning their night out or debating holiday dreams, was tantalisingly cruel. I could have been part of those happy chats. Really.

Unlike most mental patients, I spent quite a lot of time on the inside, as one of “us”, in the course of my work. The provision of occupational health and safety advice crosses the spectrum of British commercial and industrial activities, and without any particular plan, I found myself drawn into the public sector, social care and housing. In the course of my work, I often found myself in the Manager’s office at a care home or hostel, making enquiries with spurious innocence on matters I understood deeply from the sharp end.

I loved my work, and it provided me with most of my social needs outside my family. I thoroughly enjoyed those cosy chats over a shared cigarette, or catch ups a year on from the last visit. I made friends and exchanged kisses, jokes and smiles. Almost. The barriers never quite came down. When the client made other arrangements, or I passed their work to another consultant, there was never any keeping in touch. Those nascent relationships somehow never passed from the workplace into the personal sphere.

This was how I kept my lives separate. Most of my career, I both ran and worked for my own company, employing others some but not all of that time. This provided welcome flexibility. Many a professional was bewildered as to how someone with my severity of mental illness could keep a job. The flexibility of working for myself is part of the answer. There is more to it though. Although I would often have enough insight to plan empty periods in my work schedule, I would also do a lot of masking, if that is the right word.  Somehow, I could maintain a work persona, which I could hold together, if slightly wobbly, even in severe psychosis. However ill I might be, if you were to trigger a work response, it would probably be sensible and coherent.

I met a long term client at a large empty building destined to be their new offices. My contact was a woman of similar age with whom I had always got on well and who I would describe as a friend. We walked the building, discussing fire plans, forthcoming alterations, planned layout etc, and I noted signs of workmen at work in the shape of tools and materials, although the workmen themselves had made themselves scarce. Often a side effect of a visit from the bosses. As I leant to see the view from a window, I noted a stanley knife on the windowsill. Quick glance back at the client showed her engrossed in her copy of the plans, and without ceremony, the stanley knife went into my jacket pocket. I gave a sigh of relief. At last some easing of the bitter aching was on the horizon.

That particular client was always generous in the matter of accommodation for their consultants, and I was being put up by them in a very superior hotel in central London. Eating solo in their nice restaurant could be an ordeal, although one I was quite used to. My usual approach was to share dinner with an engrossing novel on my Kindle. On this occasion, though, I wanted company, I wanted to chat. Somehow, I needed to fend off the Bad Feeling until I could address it properly in privacy. Not a friend or relative in the world would enjoy the kind of chat I wanted, so I rang my mental health team’s crisis line. I didn’t know the young man whose job that night involved talking to me, and I never met him afterwards. He was fine company, and we joked and giggled. I said nothing that would have given him significant cause for concern, and even if he had wondered, I was well outside his team’s area of operations.

On the way back to my room, I collected a handful of free razors available on request should a guest have forgotten such a travel essential. Naturally, they were safety razors, but with a little judicious violence, the blade can be extracted.

I cut and cut. Not deeply – that was not an occasion to be memorialised by a scar and a handful of stitches. Not with suicidal intent. That was the force I fended off as I worked intently on writing messages of deep significance across my limbs and torso in blood. It passed the night. Come 5am, I visited the hotel leisure pool, buying a costume and swimming to the point of exhaustion. Even then, my body was covered in deep bloody scratches, causing stares as the other early customers trickled in. With my clothes on, I looked just a little wild eyed and tired, nothing of note, and I walked to work across central London and by 9am, I was laughing and joking with my client friends.

Despite this incident and others, I was not a regular self harmer. When I first seriously cut, I did so with genuine suicidal intent. I was 12, in my first year at boarding school, when my headmistress, the flamboyant and fiery Bronwyn Lloyd Williams, killed herself. Her technique of choice had been to apply a cut throat razor to her arms and legs as she lay naked in a warm bath. Quite the scandal of course, but I was deeply impressed. So elegant, so classical – and so successful. When I first applied a scalpel to my wrist, it never occurred to me that I would survive. Her rationale had been a cancer diagnosis. Mine I never cared to share.

I first played at self harm in my last couple of years at boarding school. I took tiny overdoses – three paracetamol rather than two, or an entire tube of the homeopathic remedies our school doctor was fond of. Then I’d scare myself contemplating dying in my sleep and then feel oddly disappointed when I woke up fine.

School behind me, I was living in Cambridge whilst trying to pick up an extra couple of A levels. Biology was my preferred area of study, and I had hopes of it featuring for me in university level study. I managed to borrow a good microscope, and to equip myself with a few basic instruments, and would spend happy hours in my bedsit, exploring. As I taught myself basic microscopic anatomy with the help of a couple of slides and a scalpel, I would be quite absorbed. I can say that harm resulting from my taking an artery wall cross section to examine did not enter my conscious mind, although clearly, my subconscious was already stalking me with murderous intent.

I was not an attractive child. My mother tried not to be unkind. “You look nice when you smile” she offered. I was not the little girl of anyone’s dreams. Skinny to the extreme, permanently scowling and recoiling violently from any hint of femininity, it would be ludicrous to imagine dressing me in frills and curling my hair. At the same time, I was not particularly sporty; more clumsy and awkward. My mother religiously signed me up for dance classes, which I quite enjoyed, but looking back, I cringe as to how badly I must have danced.

Years later, at boarding school, we learnt classical Greek dance – barefoot and attired in short silk tunics with matching knickers. One at a time, we went leaping gazelle like across our gym, in my case, causing such hilarity to the other girls as to halt the class in disarray.

Aged perhaps seven, I was becoming more conscious of my appearance, and making comparisons with media images, descriptions in books, and other children I knew. The mirror returned an image so far removed from these ideals that I was rather bewildered. Back to my mother, unfailing fount of wisdom. “Mum, do I have large eyes?” I enquired hopefully. She looked me over. “No,” she responded briskly “I’d say they were rather small.”. Remarkably, none of the books that came my way in my voracious reading featured a heroine with “rather small” eyes.

I was somewhat more successful in the academic side of prep school life than in such social opportunities as it offered. My limitless reading meant that both spelling and grammar came effortlessly. I never so much as glanced at my list of spellings to learn, as I always knew them all anyway. My big sister wanted to know why I was not learning my spellings, and took the dispute to mother. “If you don’t do your homework, you’ll never be clever.” threatened the sister. “I don’t care, I don’t want to be clever.” I informed her. Mother was harassed. “Well you’re certainly not pretty, so you’d better be clever.” She retorted. End of argument. I still didn’t look at my spellings. Instead, I retreated to process newly acquired facts. Prettiness was not an option, and the alternative was to be clever. I was in no way upset.

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