Description

By Janet Cresswell

ISBN: 978-84747-017-1
Published: 2007
Pages: 272
Key Themes: anti-psychiatry, mental health services, schizophrenia, sectioning

AS FEATURED IN ‘THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY’

Those swept into the mental health empire frequently have no understanding of what besets them and I have been no different. Although I kept a diary, all I have now relates to a few months at the end of 1990 into 1991 from which this book evolves with flashes both forward and backwards. I spent a quarter of a century at Broadmoor and for those, like I was once – unaware of what the place is about – I include this glimpse at its history and the beginnings of the empire of which Broadmoor is a small part. – Janet Cresswell

Description

Playwright and mental health detainee Janet Cresswell tells all in this amazingly revealing and often violently disturbing autobiography. Janet describes her life at the infamous Broadmoor Hospital and her humiliation and dehumanisation at the hands of psychiatric oppressors. Janet writes with great honesty, integrity and bravery. The circumstances in which Janet has found herself are completely unfair. This book reveals the true injustices behind the UK’s mental health services. Janet is a victim, this book should help others to avoid the pain and suffering that she has endured.

About the Author

Janet Cresswell was born in 1931 in Bushey, Hertfordshire, she is the only child of a research chemist father and schoolteacher mother. She was educated at Watford Grammar School, became a secretary and married and divorced an architect by whom she had a daughter. She was erroneously committed to a mental hospital, the treatment and psychological horror of the event made her both physically and mentally ill and she emerged psychologically traumatised by the experience but determined to obtain an explanation for her committal.

After her experience at the hands of the mental health services she withdrew from society, emerging only to work to earn a living, her shattered confidence was partially restored by employers treating her well but she was puzzled that psychiatrists labelled her paranoid schizophrenic and wanted her medicated for life. After treatment she experienced some precognitive voices but found no explanation for these paranormal experiences in books by Freud and Jung. Janet stabbed a psychiatrist with a vegetable knife to get him to Court to explain why she had been committed to him. As a result Janet was sent to Broadmoor, where she stayed for twenty-seven years.

In 1987 The Sunday Times printed her article in their Day in the Life series. This article was then re-published, in abridged form, in 2003 with a hundred of the best pieces over the past twenty five years. Her Play, The One-Sided Wall in 1988, directed by Nikki Johnson, was performed at the Bush Theatre and elsewhere published by Methuen in their series Plays by Women 8. Janet was transferred to an RSU Regional Secure Unit in 2003 where she remains.