His visits pan out exactly the same every single day. He talks, I don’t. Yesterday he told me if I carry on refusing my meds they will have no choice but to force me to take them. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen. I’m a grown man. I should be able to make my own damn decisions. What difference does it make to their lives if I’m here or not? If anything, they should be grateful for the extra bed. No point wasting it, wasting their time, the government’s money, on someone who doesn’t fucking want it.
“Nurse Marie tells me you ate some breakfast this morning. That’s great.”
Patronising bastard.
“What made you start eating?”
“I was hungry.” Fucktard.
Peter pulls up the chair next to my bed and sits down. “Talking, too? I’m honoured.”
What the fuck? Aren’t you supposed to mollycoddle me and ask about my feelings?
“So, how are you feeling today?”
Here we go. “Fine.” Why am I talking? Shut the hell up.
“Now that’s not strictly true, is it?”
“What?”
“I’ve been doing this job for seven years. Training for even longer. In my experience, people who feel fine don’t try and take their own life.”
I can’t believe I’m here, listening to this shit. It was all supposed to end.
“So you’ve eaten, you’ve spoken, how about you take your meds for me?”
“There’s no point.”
“Why do you think that?”
Seriously. Stop talking, James. Stop talking, now. “They don’t work.”
“They do.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Why not? How do they make you feel?”
“Like a robot. A useless robot.” I don’t want to talk to him. He’s just such a sarcastic arsehole I can’t seem to help myself.
“Okay, answer this honestly. Did you decide they make you feel like a robot while you were taking them, or after you stopped?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Answer it.”
Huffing in frustration, I drag myself into a sitting position, dangling my legs off the edge of the bed. For the first time, I take in his appearance. He’s wearing beige slacks and a white shirt with a lanyard hanging round his neck. He can’t be much older than me, but he dresses like a grandfather. “After. I didn’t notice while I was taking them because, like I said, I was a fucking robot.”
I stopped taking them after my father died because I needed to. Suddenly, I was faced with a huge responsibility and a workload I wouldn’t have been able to deal with without the extra energy, longer waking hours.
“Or maybe you didn’t notice because while you were medicated you really did feel fine, as opposed to the pretend fine you’re feeling now.”
“You’re wasting your time. Talking therapy doesn’t work either.”
“Well it won’t…if you don’t talk.”
Go fuck yourself.
“Your brother has been by again today.”
“I don’t want-”
“And Theo is outside.”
Theodore. His name makes my chest ache and my stomach swell with guilt. It’s the first emotion I’ve felt since I got here and I don’t like it. The only way I can fight those feelings, is with anger. “I don’t want to see him.”
He needs to forget about me, dammit!
“Why not? He cares about you, as does your brother.”
“They shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I cause them pain. They worry about me and they shouldn’t. I’m not worth it.”
My mental illness, my problems… they’re infectious. They don’t just affect me, they spread to other people, people I care about. It feels selfish to carry on living, to keep the pain of being close to me in their hearts.
“So you think they’re stupid?”
“What? No! Of course not.”
“But they waste their time caring about someone who isn’t worth it. Doesn’t sound too clever to me.”
“Stop it,” I spit, shaking my head in an effort to unscramble my thoughts. “You’re twisting my words.”
Where’s the distant, note-taking, fake-sympathising professional I’m used to dealing with? Is this guy even qualified?
“James,” he says, his voice low and serious. “If I’d come in here and started asking generic questions from a list, looking down my nose at you while scribbling down my thoughts, would you have answered me?”
Umm…
“I might not do things the conventional way, I might not pussyfoot around and relay everything I learned in the textbooks, but I am qualified and I can help you. You just need to let me.”
Hmm, well that’s different. It almost sounds like he’s asking for my permission rather than ramming diagnoses and medications down my throat. I also can’t help wondering if he has some kind of magical mind-reading powers.
“It never goes away. The sadness. This feeling that I’m broken.” I stare at the floor as I talk. Telling him anything at all is hard enough. I’ve already spilled more information about myself than I ever have before to a professional and I don’t have the courage to watch his reaction as I do.
“Even when I feel great, it’s still there, taunting me, telling me it’ll come back.”
“You say it tells you. Is it a voice? A voice that’s not yours?”
“No, no. It’s not a nutjob kind of voice.” I realise that probably isn’t appropriate terminology when I’m stuck in a psychiatric ward and apologise immediately. “Sorry, I just mean…They’re my own thoughts. You know, how you silently talk to yourself? They’re my own thoughts talking to me. I’m not hearing voices. Am I making sense?”
“Perfect sense. So in your mind the depression makes you broken?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you are. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t care about you. Value you. More importantly, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t value yourself.”
“You don’t understand what I’m trying to say. I can’t be fixed.”
I was born this way. I’ve been struggling with this darkness, this emptiness, for as long as I can remember.
“Neither can a three-legged puppy, but you can bet your backside someone will love it.”
“That’s not the same and you know it.”
“I’ll tell you what I know so far. I know two men ask about you every day, desperate to see you. They care about you, and no sane human being becomes emotionally attached to a robot, as you referred to yourself earlier. So, James, I think you’re lying to me. I think you’re not telling me about the real you, the James those men care so much about. Why is that?”