Not In My Perfect Mind

Terry and Yvonne Connors were living a perfectly normal life, with a normal nuclear family of one daughter and one son, in a normal three-bedroom house in a quiet village in the east of England.

That is … until the day their 18-year-old son Ben refused to go to work, for no apparent reason. It was the day that turned their normal life upside down. The day that meant life would never be the same again. Never.

Ben was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. Paranoid schizophrenia. And no one would look at him in the same way again. Even though, beneath it all, he was the same, easy-going, lovable Ben.

This is the story of how they coped. How they had to cope.

Terry wrote it partly as catharsis; partly to help those normal families who, day in and day out, suddenly find themselves in the same, bewildering, frightening position.

And to tell the world: paranoid schizophrenics are not dangerous lunatics, but normal people with an illness.

And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind

– King Lear, Act IV, Scene 7

Not In My

Perfect Mind

Terry Connors

Huck Books

Published in 2013 by Huck Books at Smashwords

Copyright  Huck Books 2013

The author has asserted his moral rights

Smashwords ISBN 978-1310844072

Paperback ISBN 978-1482751741

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Smashwords Edition Licence Notes

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The names of the people and most of the places in this book have been changed to provide anonymity for Ben, but the story is a true one.

My thanks go, above all, to the mental health doctors and nurses who finally gave us our son back.

I would also like to thank Yvonne, who encouraged me to get this book finished, and Frank Rawlins of Huck Books for his help, advice, and final editing.

– Terry Connors (2013)

One

It was a day that would change our lives forever.

It was a Friday. Great! – I like Fridays. Mondays back to the grind. Tuesdays almost as bad – always more traffic for some reason. Wednesdays seeing some daylight. Thursdays not so bad, on top of the workload. Fridays – Fridays are okay. The weekend is nigh.

We lived in a village on the Rutland-Lincolnshire border and were pretty much like millions of others in our workday habits, routines, and feelings. I was a senior manager for a large engineering firm, my wife Yvonne a deputy head at a primary school in Stoneforth, daughter Jane following in mum’s footsteps in her first teaching job in Buckinghamshire, and son Ben starting at the bottom at my firm.

I liked my job – it was the commuting I hated: a 40-mile drive each way from home to Leicester. I had been doing it for a number of years now so had got into a fairly passable routine, but Ben had complicated matters slightly of late.

He had given up his job in a nearby hotel, in which he was doing well, because he didn’t like the unsocial hours, and having just turned eighteen, being able to socialise with mates was an important part of life, so I didn’t really blame him. I had managed to find him a job at my own company, starting at the bottom, of course, but he didn’t seem to mind that. He had never been afraid of hard, physical work.

Sometimes he travelled to work with me but sometimes used his own car, especially on a Friday, as he finished earlier. I usually got him up in the morning because I always had a dislike of being late for work and hoped that Ben would have the same commitment to the job; and normally this worked well.

I would see him quite often at work and, after the first week, I couldn’t help but have a word with his manager to see how Ben was doing. The general report was good but his manager did say that he was fairly withdrawn and didn’t appear to mix with his peers very much. It was easy to put this down to a minor lack confidence.

All in all, we were a pretty average nuclear family trying to get along in the world.

Until Friday, October 22, 1999.

Two

It was time for both of us to be getting on the road but Ben was sitting at the top of the stairs, making very little effort to get himself ready for work.

‘Come on, Ben, we’ve got to get moving,’ I shouted up to him.

‘I’m not going,’ he shouted back. He was half dressed, sitting on the top step with his head bowed, rocking back and forth.

‘Why ever not?’ I remonstrated. ‘It’s Friday, last day of the week and all that, and it’s a short day. You can’t laze around here all day, Ben. Do you think we go out to work all day just so you can do nothing? You’re letting me and yourself down. You’re not feeling ill so what’s the problem?’

I turned away, angry with him. Ben got up from the step, picked up a towel, and put it over his head.

Yvonne had come out of our bedroom to see what was happening.

‘Look, I’ve got to go or I’ll be late,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with him. I’ll tell his boss he’s sick.’

An hour’s driving gave me plenty of time to ponder on what had happened, and perhaps why, but nothing untoward sprang to mind.

Ben had just turned 18 when I found him the job, and he seemed to be getting on all right. He has an easy charm and gets on well with people; altogether a popular lad. He’s tall, like me, with brown hair, blue eyes, and the clearest whites around them that you’ve ever seen. He takes after me for his size, standing just over six feet, and after his petite mother for his colouring. But his temperament has always been his own.

Yvonne and I are both fairly ‘go-ahead’ and ‘get things done’ type of people; Ben is so laid back he’s almost horizontal. But we always knew he thought about things more deeply than he was given credit for. A classic still-waters-run-deep personality.

Over the previous couple of years Ben had not shown a great deal of drive or motivation, but then how many teenagers did? He had got a job at a local hotel, at first just doing the dishes and then progressed to being a waiter, which he appeared to enjoy. He got on well with the management and I was under the impression that they thought highly of him. The downside, of course, was the hours. Split shifts, late shifts, early shifts; not the kind of work pattern that a young man who liked clubbing was going to put up with for very long. His new job was a bit boring, as it always is when you start at the bottom, but it would start to stretch him as he moved up the ladder.

I was back in work mode. And as soon as I arrived, I saw Ben’s line manager and explained that he was ill.

The day passed as every other day had done. As every Friday did. Busy but enjoyable. Making sure everything was sorted, tied up; making sure there were no major outstanding problems that would niggle away at me over the weekend. I hardly gave Ben a thought all day.

I arrived home that evening tired but satisfied, the morning’s fracas but a dim memory, only to be greeted by an anxious Yvonne.

‘I didn’t go to school,’ she said. ‘I’ve been at home with Ben all day and there’s something very wrong with him. He won’t eat, he’s talking to himself, and he’s just lying on his bed all the time. I can’t seem to get through to him. I think I better take him to the doctor. Now.’

Fridays would never be the same again. Nor would any other day.

On a national scale, newspapers would probably have called it Black Friday.

We know it as the day when our comfortable existence changed forever.

I’m not a great one for running to the doctor every time the slightest thing goes wrong so I nodded my head non-comittally. I went up the stairs to see Ben. He was lying on his bed watching his TV, totally expressionless.

‘How you feeling, then?’

No reply

‘Are you hungry?’

No reply.

‘I told your boss that you were ill this morning so that’s not a problem.’

No reply.

Yvonne came in. ‘Will you come to the doctor’s with me, Ben?’ she asked.

A long pause and then a nod of the head. Ben got off the bed and went down the stairs. We both followed.

‘You get yourself something to eat while I take him to the doc’s,’ said Yvonne. ‘I’ll ask to be seen straight away because I haven’t got an appointment.’

We got Ben into the car and they drove off.

I don’t really know what was going through my mind at the time; was he having a breakdown? I’d never known anybody who had had one so I didn’t know what to look for. Was he just being particularly awkward? Surely that was too simple. Like most people, I’d never had any experience of anyone with a mental problem so I had no idea what it was all about.

That was soon to change.

I got myself something to eat and tried to watch the TV but I found it impossible to settle. I wandered around the house like a lost sheep, turning things over and over in my mind, but the more I thought about it, the less sense I could make of it.

A couple of hours went by before the door opened and Yvonne walked in.

‘Hi, how did you get on?’ I asked.

I paused, looking past her, expecting Ben to be following, but he wasn’t.

‘Where’s Ben?’

‘He’s not coming home tonight.’ Yvonne gulped. I could see the tears well up in her eyes and trickle down her cheeks. I folded my arms around her.

‘Whatever’s the matter?’

‘It was terrible,’ she sobbed. ’It all came tumbling out when we got into the doctor’s. The television has been talking to him, he’s constantly hearing voices in his head which he holds conversations with, he says he’s got a chip in his head, the neighbours are saying bad things about him all the time. The doctor was very good with him, asking him lots of questions about his feelings and sensations. Then he asked him whether he ever thought about doing away with himself, and he answered that he did. It was awful.’

I was at a total loss to understand what was going on.

‘So what’s happened to Ben – where is he now?’

‘He’s been admitted to a resource centre just off Dunston Road. It’s a crisis centre for people who are mentally unstable. He’s there for seventy-two hours for assessment.’

Uh? A resource centre – resource for what? Mentally unstable, thoughts of suicide … this was right off my radar.

‘Can we see him?’ I asked.

‘Not until tomorrow. They need to settle him down.’

I made cups of tea, my usual panacea for bad times, and we sat down and started to talk. How could this suddenly happen? Were there no warning signs? Was it our fault? Would he be okay?

As we talked we started to remember odd things that had occurred in the past few months that, in themselves, didn’t seem important. But now …

The fact that he didn’t seem to go into the nearby town any more; a few months ago he was always in the town, clubbing and pubbing despite his age. His answer was that there was a gang in the town that were out to get him, but he never really explained why, despite a few prompts. Knowing that he had a lot of friends in town, I hadn’t given this much credence. He also spent hours lying on his bed watching MTV, didn’t really join in family life, and seemed withdrawn.

Ben had always appeared to be slightly out of step with his contemporaries. When the fashion was for long hair, he had his short. When the fashion was tight shirts, his had to be baggy. I had put all this down to the ‘teenage years’ and his own individuality but now … could it have a more sinister association?

All sorts of things tumbled through my head. I remembered the obsession he had with counting when he was seven or eight. He would sit in front of the TV constantly counting to ten in a whisper. We thought it amusing at the time, but was that the first sign of something unusual going on?

We soon realised that the more we talked about it and tried to analyse it, the more sinister the most innocent of actions became. We gave up