Agnes's Jacket by Gail A. Hornstein

Author:Gail A. Hornstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

15

Train Tracks

June 2003

I’m sitting in a crowded London restaurant, expecting a friend to join me at any moment. Waiters rush about trying to get people’s orders before lunchtime is over. K. is late—very unlike her. I make every excuse I can think of to hold the table, but after an hour, I reluctantly start to gather up my things and prepare to leave.

Then suddenly K. is there, white-faced and trembling. “Someone threw themselves onto the tracks at my Tube station,” she says. “All the trains had to be stopped in both directions until the body could be removed.”

I freeze. K.’s station is Highgate, three blocks from the home of Helen Chadwick, my voice-hearing contact. “Do you know if it was a man or a woman?” I ask. “No,” K. says. “They didn’t tell us anything about who it was.”

I’d seen Helen a day earlier. She’d come to my office for the third of our talks. She seemed more subdued than the other times we’d met. At one point, when I asked what the voices had been saying recently, Helen told me that the taunting woman kept yelling, “Jump! Just jump!” as she stood on the platform waiting for a train. “I was so frightened I had to leave the station,” she’d said, her voice trembling.

K. and I manage to get lunch in the now-empty restaurant. Over soggy salads, we talk about research ethics. She’s a sociologist who’s done a lot of intensive interviews with difficult subjects in her own work. “Who are we to enter people’s lives for a few hours, witness their anguish, and then retreat to our desks to turn their stories into material for our books?” she muses.

I want to be a different kind of psychologist. I’m not a neutral “gatherer of data” like colleagues who think of themselves as natural scientists. But I’m also not a partisan, supporting only one side. I want there to be real debates about mental illness, not just ideological grandstanding.

Plunging into the Hearing Voices Network and the whole psychiatric survivor movement has turned out to be a lot more intense than ordinary research. Hearing people’s wrenching stories and witnessing their continued suffering (often made worse by the mental health system) dissolves much of the distance that would be present in the typical social science interview. These people aren’t “participants” in a study I’m conducting. They’ve chosen to tell me deeply personal things, and I’m struggling to find a way to share what I’ve learned from them.

I can’t answer K.’s question, and I can’t explain my complicated feelings about people like Helen. My mind keeps flashing to what she and two other people told me about voices leading them onto train tracks.

One was Rufus May, who’d almost been hit by an oncoming train. He hadn’t been trying to commit suicide. He felt hopeless and degraded by the bullying of staff on the psychiatric ward where he was then a patient, and one day, he managed to escape. In a confused, vulnerable state, he wandered off to a nearby town and then to the rail station.

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