Locked in the psych ward

“I had to get out of there because it was making me worse.”

The thing about mental illness is that you always think you’ve hit rock bottom only to find that it’s neither a rock, nor anywhere near the bottom.

There are always deeper dimensions further below. No one knows where the real bottom is. No one has come back from there.

For Martyn Vallis¹, this became clear during the stifling summer of 2022. He was driving home from work one day and just felt he couldn’t go on any longer.

“I was suicidal,” he recalls of this particular low point. “I just wanted to drive the car off the road.” Years of drinking and diagnoses and daily meds had built to the point where he no longer felt safe with himself.

Somehow, he managed to get the car back home, to his partner and two small children. A local mental health team visited and said he really should be in hospital. That’s when things got worse.

“As they walked me in to the ward, the doors were locked behind me,” Martyn told me this week. "There was this massive communal area with patients just sitting around staring at a telly locked in a glass case.

“I’ve never been to a prison, but it was exactly how I imagine prison to be.”

From the moment he was admitted, he was desperate to leave. Rock bottom fell through the floor.

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Martyn was 30 before he had any clear notion that there was any such thing as mental ill health. He thought everyone felt the way that he did - anxious, low self-esteem, crying in private, putting on a mask of bravado so no one knew of the cold dread he often felt. After all, he was a working-class man from a working-class neighbourhood. And. Men. Must. Be. Strong.

Martyn is very strong, for all that he has endured. A childhood bruised by casual violence. One parent with an undiagnosed mental health condition, the other prepared to use their fists. A sexual infidelity that the young boy witnessed. He quickly learned coping strategies.

“I smoked marijuana like it was cigarettes. As a teenager I’d get up and have a joint on the way to work at 5am. I was stoned for four or five years. I then started doing cocaine and binge drinking til I blacked out. Since I gave up drinking, I’ve used credit cards, got into debt and also sugar as well.

“I’ve been told I have an addictive personality.”

In 2012 he sought help, was started on antidepressants, took time off work - a whole year. Changed pills, increased dosages. Waited months for referrals.

“At one point, I saw a different GP, the practice mental health specialist,” he says. “She told me to ‘man up’ and get a grip on myself or I could end up going to a mental hospital, and you don’t really want that.”

It was brutally unhelpful - but prophetic.

Different diagnoses followed, each more perplexing than the last: depression, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder (a pejorative term that seems to insult people who are very unwell - for more, read this piece I did with my colleague Sarah Johnson back in 2020).

Martyn’s huge mood swings did not even out. He became desperate. He would casually eye up ways to take his life - a bottle of pills, a load-bearing beam at the office. At one point he swallowed (and regurgitated) some over-the-counter medication in a half-hearted suicide attempt. (Note: this is a very bad way to try to end your life. It won’t work. You will just damage your organs. Instead, do please call the Samaritans on 116 123. They are brilliant).

And so to hospital, where patients were left to their own devices during endless empty daylight hours, some openly suicidal or paranoid, others verbally or even physically violent to staff, or each other. The ward sweltered as time sulked. Martyn found it unbearable.

“We had rabbit therapy once a week…” Martyn Vallis

I won’t name the facility because I haven’t seen it myself. The staff may well be doing their best in impossible circumstances. But on its NHS website, there are a lot of one-star reviews. One from 2023 was titled “Returning psychiatry to Victorian times and methods,” and added: “All that’s missing is the padding”.

“You get up, have your blood pressure taken, and then are left to do whatever for the rest of the day,” Martyn says. “Watch telly, lie in your room, play pingpong, … watch telly, lie in your room…” Unlike private psychiatric wards which offer a timetable of therapies to keep patients occupied, many NHS wards do not have the capacity.

“We had rabbit therapy once a week,” Martyn recalls. “And 15 minutes of mindfulness. After that it was literally fend for yourself.”

“I had to get out of there because it was making me worse.”

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Martyn was discharged after almost four weeks. Since then, he has had periods of feeling better, but it continues up and down. His partner heroically looked after him and their two children through some of the toughest years, but they recently separated. (“We are still good friends.”) A spell on a private psychiatric ward helped him to understand his disorder a lot better.

“I’m still trying to find my way,” he says. He completed a six-month course in dialectic behavioural therapy (DBT), a programme designed to offer coping strategies for people facing strong emotional currents. “It helped me understand what is going on.”

He meditates, takes ice baths, does one-to-one therapy once a week and has become a vegan. He still takes antidepressants, but is unsure if they make a difference. He is learning to be a mindfulness instructor, and hopes that will help others achieve greater serenity.

“The mind is the most important thing,” he says. “People spend hundreds or thousands of pounds going to the gym and getting fit, but no one works on their mind. You just need 10 minutes a day.”

For Martyn, recovery is a process, not a destination. Like rock bottom, it is unhinged, with no fixed locus, no neat milestone that you reach, move on from, forget about.

“I will try and put it behind me but you've also got to accept it,” he says.

“The pain will always be there, it's just whether you feel it or not.”

Until next week

1. Martyn asked me to use his real name because he wants to speak openly so as to confront the stigma that still haunts people with mental ill health.