Description

By Zekria Ibrahimi

ISBN: 978-1-84991-299-0
Published: 2010
Pages: 64
Key Themes: play, script, schizophrenia, fantasy

Description

This is a play about fantasy and reality, about how the so- called delusions of a psychiatric patient can seem superior to the harshness of a community treatment order. The community treatment order is a recent alteration in the Mental Health Act, and allows medication to be imposed on a patient in the community.

The protagonist, Mary, believes that she is a Moon traveller, an extraterrestrial explorer, even as she is being tied down by a community treatment order. She is locked into a cruel struggle with her community psychiatric nurse, Louise.

In the end, Mary cannot escape from her medication, from clopixol, from the depot injection. There is no magical solution that will allow her to evade the community treatment order.

For the truth is that the ‘mental health services’ are dangerously cynical, and are as barren, as hostile to life, as the surface of the Moon…

About the Author

Zekria Ibrahimi (born in 1959) is defined by his schizophrenia. It first hit him long ago, in his late teens. He is fifty one years old now, grey and frail, almost a pensioner, and he does not always want to remember how, as an adolescent in the late 1970’s, he suddenly became afraid of everything surrounding him, and, worst of all, of himself. He would run around the countryside and knock at the doors of strangers because he feared the apocalypse was pursuing him … He would pick up rubbish outside in alleys and streets and hoard it in his not very palatial lodgings … He was always wandering away from home, searching for … what would never be found again … the straight route, the level way … He was a tramp, freezing during the nights in public toilets where he had various unsavoury insects as company on the cold concrete …

There were years of pain when his schizophrenia became almost his only companion- albeit a sadistic one, punishing him even as he hugged it. Perhaps, to echo both R. D. Laing and Emily Dickinson, it is the entire globe, it is general society, that is truly insane. Schizophrenics simply burrow all too deeply under the surface. They reach the very core of the savage reality in us all. Most varnish over the anarchic truth within through the superficial sham paraded as ‘civilization’. Schizophrenics prefer to be uncomfortably honest barbarians.

Eventually, after much psychotic shouting on Hammersmith Broadway, the hapless Zekria was confined at the Charing Cross unit in the West London Mental Health Trust. Following the unsafe unstable freedom of his schizophrenia, came the restrictions of Section 3. He would not have survived without the multi- racial compassion of the individual doctors and nurses in Charing Cross. Yet the overall SYSTEM remains an ogre of rules and restraints, and the INSTITUTION of psychiatry can be as cold and vicious as in the days of lobotomy and insulin shock.

Now he is elderly, but still he muses about being locked up, drugged up, about how, with schizophrenia, the treatment can be worse than the disease…

Book Extract

Synopsis:

(The stage has only two women. They are both standing. One is young, black, with jeans and a sweater. She looks clean and demure, though she is not dressed particularly smartly. The other has the drab skirt and the drab face of middle age. These are two ordinary people, but involved in an act that is, in its way, extraordinary- the delivery of a depot anti- psychotic injection. This is an interaction between a psychiatric nurse and a psychiatric patient in the community. Community is the all too appropriate word here, for this is a play about a community treatment order. The patient is Mary, who turns round to grimace at the audience. The nurse is Louise, white, in her mid- fifties.