10

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

WHEN YOU GROW up in the sort of community I am describing, you cannot help but be affected by it on many levels, some of them obvious and others much subtler. The biggest impact is on your emotional life, specifically emotional stress, which plays a significant role in shaping how people think, feel and behave. The existence of emotional stress, how it affects us and what we do to manage it throughout our lives, is one of the most overlooked aspects of the poverty experience. Yet stress is often the engine room that fuels the lifestyle choices and behaviours that can lead to poor diet, addictions, mental health issues and chronic health conditions. People spend their whole lives trying to kick bad habits they know are killing them but fail because they have no insight into the role stress plays in sabotaging their good intentions.

It seems bizarre that we would ever attempt to draw conclusions about the behaviour of people in deprived communities, let alone legislate for it, without allowing for the context of stress and how that in itself is a causal factor in comfort eating, smoking, gambling, binge drinking, substance misuse and various cultures of aggression and violence. To those of you with no real insight into lower class life, these tropes may seem hard to fathom. I find them unfathomable and I’ve nearly done them all to death. But for people who live their lives constrained by emotional stress, anxiety or dread, such activities, while destructive in the long term, offer a brief emotional reprieve – and an illusion of control – which, when under the duress of psychological strain, creates urges, impulses and compulsions that become hard to resist. Everybody experiences stress, regardless of class, and I really can’t stress this point enough. I’m not trying to minimise or dismiss the stress people from higher class backgrounds experience, nor am I saying middle class people don’t suffer from stress-related problems and illnesses. But the degree to which stress inhibits our progress, harms our health and social mobility and shapes our social attitudes and values, is disproportionately high among the working classes. This must be acknowledged.

Stress in a positive setting can be a catalyst for action, a motivator; or a temporary state of discomfort. But for those living in poor social conditions, perhaps growing up in subcultures of aggression or abuse, stress is all-consuming; it’s the soup everyone is swimming in all the time. Stress is the lens through which all of life is viewed. There’s no specific medical definition of stress. In simple terms, stress is a physical response to psychological or emotional strain. The body believes it’s under attack and alters its physiological configuration to deal with the imminent threat. This process happens automatically, outwith the realm of self-awareness, as hormones and chemicals are released to prepare it for physical action. The stress response is primitive, so even though the things we get stressed about have changed over thousands of years, our basic physical response remains the same; blood is pumped to muscles and we become adrenalised, which impairs our normal decision-making processes. Stress also changes the way the body stores energy and when stress levels are heightened, fat is stored around the gut to be used once the threat dissipates. But if you live in conditions of constant strain of the sort associated with poverty, you are always in a state of hypervigilance both mentally and physically. Stress begins to alter your physiological state.

My first real insight into this destructive emotional state, and its impact on my mind and body, came when I began attending the Notre Dame Centre in the West End of Glasgow. The Notre Dame Centre was founded in 1931 in response to the demands of parents, educators and other professionals to address the complex needs of children and young people experiencing emotional and psychological distress. Sessions lasted no more than an hour but seemed to fly in much faster. I’d arrive at the door and be greeted by a friendly, warm-hearted woman named Moira. Like the school dinner ladies, I always got the sense that she was happy to see me and we’d often resume previous conversations once I was signed in. She would congratulate me on my activities (outwith my counselling) which had come to her attention: recent media appearances, occurring with increasing frequency, in which I was invited on radio to talk about poverty. Now I had two reasons to be in the West End and was making something of a habit of being on this side of town.

In the waiting area the radio played chart music and kids, either with family members or support workers, passed the time thumbing through lifestyle magazines. But this didn’t feel like a typical doctor’s surgery. It was a little more unpredictable. Sometimes you’d see adults, presumably professionals, trailing kids around the building, often engaged in negotiation with them. Other times you would hear shouting or banging from the next room, or see someone running out of the building, upset. These occasions were not regular, but when they did occur there was a sense that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Staff were used to this kind of environment and dealing with traumatised children with complex mental health problems was obviously part of their job description. In the reception room, I’d sit, tapping my toe, waiting to be called by my psychologist, Marilyn. The session usually took place in a quiet, dimly lit room on the first floor of the building. Marilyn was of average height with short brown hair that curled up at her shoulders. She was bright-eyed and had a good sense of humour, and I immediately felt comfortable the first time we met. If I recall correctly, my auntie attended the first session with me, but thereafter I went to the Notre Dame Centre alone.

The first problem she wanted to help me get to the bottom of was why I felt so angry. She asked me to describe where in my body this anger resided and what, if any, physical sensations accompanied it. Without hesitation, I placed my right hand on my chest and described it unambiguously as a ‘ball of fire’. For me, 2001 was a very difficult year and life at home became unliveable. My dad and I were not on speaking terms, so I was surprised when he called me, early in March. It was a brief phone call, fraught with tension, in which he informed me that my mum was unwell and had been hospitalised. It was difficult to glean any more information from him due to the strained nature of our relationship. The miscommunication was worsened by the fact my mother was a compulsive liar, often concocting mystery illnesses and dramas to explain her unreliability. On the rare occasion that she did call to speak to us, she was inebriated and eventually I simply refused to talk to her. As I got older my attitude towards her softened slightly, thanks to my dad encouraging me to speak to her, which I’d often refuse to do, and tried to convince my siblings to follow suit. Shortly before I was invited to leave the family home, she made a surprise call. For the first time in years, she sounded sober.

Funnily enough, I was in my dad’s room, writing and recording a song about her. She seemed interested in what I was doing, which for me was a rare treat as I’d never experienced that quality of interaction with her. She even asked me questions about the song. I told her I didn’t want to give it away but that I would let her hear it once it was finished. The track was a story about growing up around her drinking, but written with empathy and forgiveness. For me, beginning to see her as a sick person, as opposed to a bad one, was a breakthrough. I’d spent so many years of my childhood cursing her name, even wishing death upon her, that to finally make peace with her alcoholism filled me with hope that we could salvage a relationship. In truth, I dreamed of helping her recover. But by the end of the month she was dead.

Because of the confusion around her condition and the strained relationship between me and my father, we were denied the opportunity to visit her in hospital. We were later told this was because she was in such a delirious state, with advanced cirrhosis of the liver, that she wouldn’t have recognised us. That was little consolation. Personally, I’d rather have seen her, distressing as that may have been, if only to lay eyes on her one last time before she passed. As her son this was my right, and to be denied the chance to hold my own mother’s hand before she died was extremely upsetting.

This made me angry.

Marilyn, intuitive to my needs, taught me how to manage powerful emotions like anger when they surfaced and rather than seek to avoid them. She encouraged me to face them as and when they arose. She helped lend context to the emotional disturbances that would engulf and disorientate me, offering me insight into their origin and reminding me that I need not identify with every thought that popped into my head – especially the ones about taking my own life. I continued to attend the Notre Dame Centre and, as well as learning techniques to cope with my emotions, I also began having flashbacks and memories from much earlier in my childhood. Some were vague and difficult to verify, like being dangled out of a window by my legs late at night. My time with Marilyn became a journey into my own subconscious, where I’d discover many things I’d spend the following decade drinking to forget.

One memory involved being sent out by my mum, during a gale-force storm, to get cigarettes from her mother (my other granny), who lived across from the high flats in low-level accommodation. I remember telling her that I was scared to go outside because of the storm. The next thing I recall is being at the foot of the building, which was a wind trap even in moderate weather, and peering around the corner to see parked cars tilting slightly as the gale got beneath them. Still, I had no choice but to run the errand, so I braved the storm and stepped out into the wide-open space between the two buildings. But as I walked forward, the wind started to get under me too. It was frightening to feel such a force behind me and I was scared that I was going to get hurt, yet I had no choice but to keep going. My mistake was to try and run, hoping to get it over quicker, which led to me being blown off my feet and rolling along the concrete. When I came to a stop, my jacket torn, I turned to the tower block my mum lived in, gesturing for help, only to see her and her boyfriend looking out, laughing at me. For years this painful memory had concealed itself in some dark corner of my brain. Suddenly my conscious mind was flooding with bits and pieces of events, or fullblown flashbacks such as the one just described. Bits and pieces of memories that felt like dreams began fighting their way into my waking mind, bringing with them difficult questions and deep emotional disturbances.

Another flashback involved our old dog, Kelly, who was killed by a motorbike. Later that night my dad had buried her at the bottom of the garden. My mother was devastated. The next day, having spent the night drinking, she was drunk and inconsolable. She emerged from upstairs, incoherent, staggered around the living room and then proceeded to the back garden where, to our absolute horror, she attempted to dig Kelly up with her bare hands. She turned, her arms outstretched, begging me to help, before plunging her long fingers back into the dirt as neighbours stared on in disbelief. Who knows how I could have forgotten such a thing? Then again, when you consider how shocking something like that is to read, imagine what it was like to witness. There are some things a young mind simply cannot process and memories like these are sent directly to storage to be accessed at a later date.

It soon became clear that my psychological state was not merely a direct result of my mother’s sudden passing, but of everything that occurred prior to her death. I continued to see Marilyn, on and off, for a year. In 2002, she referred me to the Firestation Project: a service which offered ‘housing support for young, vulnerable adults aged 16–25 years, who are or have been homeless or are at risk of homelessness’. My housing status was precarious: living between friends and family members and, increasingly, with my new girlfriend – though our relationship was already showing signs of dysfunction. Marilyn believed the Firestation Project would give me an opportunity to focus on the emotional difficulties I was facing. Without the threat of homelessness hanging over my head, I’d be better able to address the issues that were emerging around my early years and how those experiences were beginning to shape me as an adult.

Marilyn had a fundamental influence on the direction of my life, one that remains to this day. Without her intervention, I doubt whether I would have developed the self-awareness to zoom out of my disordered thinking and see my stress in a broader context. Not only did she provide me with insight and practical tools, like meditation, to help me understand and regulate my emotions, but she also became a much needed source of continuity in the chaos of my life. She, along with my gran, was someone I could depend on and trust. Despite my increasing unreliability, I rarely missed appointments with Marilyn and always felt lifted and energised following our sessions. If I’m honest, I grew very fond of her. I felt she was in my corner. I felt supported, heard and understood by her. With Marilyn, I felt a nurturing human connection which seemed to quieten my stress and anxiety, and the isolating or disruptive urges they would trigger in me. However, while I attribute much of this crucial intervention to Marilyn, the fact is that she was a professional, employed by an organisation set up to provide a public service.

But whereas before I had only accessed public services in times of need, now, on the verge of becoming homeless, I was about to start living in one.