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The Department Of Lost Voices
Broadcast on Radio National's
Radio Eye at 2.00pm, Saturday October 19, 2002
Warning. This website contains content
that some may find offensive. It contains strong language and descriptions
of violence and sexual assault and is appropriate only for a mature
audience.
"Care in the community" was the catchcry
when governments moved people out of mental institutions. But the
concept has failed dismally. This program reveals that those suffering
mental illness increasingly fall foul of the law, often for minor
offences, and end up behind bars.
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of The Department Of LostVoices
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In 'The Department of Lost Voices' you hear
many voices that have rarely, if ever been heard on radio. This
is the story of how schizophrenia, with its terrifying delusions
and paranoias is being "treated" - increasingly with a
spell behind the bars of a police or prison cell.
The Department of Lost Voices: Transcript
Music, prison doors locking, unlocking.
Sounds of a beating ...
News report:
7th June, 2002: Man Fights for Life After Cell Bashing
by Jason Bartlett
Mother of Robert Manning, beaten man:
With his schizophrenia he was in at the crisis unit which, you'd
think, they were safe up there but ...
Department of Corrections statement:
Firstly, the Department views the assault on inmate Manning as very
tragic and very serious.
... continuation of news report:
A man jailed for a minor breach of an Apprehended Violence Order
is fighting for his life after being bashed by a cell mate.
Relatives of Robert Manning:
"They say, well it's better to have him in jail, off the streets,
where he's safe ..."
"He's a bit of a loner ..."
"Robert was a very quiet boy ..."
"He had a lot of injuries on his head. I'd say what this guy
has done is actually bashed his head into the wall."
Mother of Robert Manning: If he would
have got bashed out on the street, well, I could sort of accept
that, you know, thinking he's probably been drunk, he's probably
annoyed someone and he's probably deserved it; but not just the
way ... I think its cowardly, callous, what they've done.
... continuation of news report:
Manning, from Charlestown, Newcastle, has not recovered consciousness
since the bashing on Wednesday.
Department of Corrections statement:
An inmate suspected of being involved has been moved to another
maximum security facility in New South Wales.
Narration: It's estimated that one percent
of Australians have schizophrenia. Many of us end up in jail or
a police cell at some stage of our lives. Exactly how many, nobody
knows. You can't see schizophrenia, it's inside our heads, and it
is not always diagnosed. Sometimes you have it and you don't know
you have it, sometimes you have it and the authorities don't know
you have it, or apparently don't want to know. In most jails, the
facilities for the mentally ill are virtually non-existent and,
let's face it, many who don't have schizophrenia aren't really sure
what it is.
The word comes from The Greek schizo - "split",
phrenia - "mind". It describes the split between reality
and unreality for the person who has schizophrenia, but everybody's
experience of the condition is different.
Radio Eye: The Department of Lost Voices.
Matthew Talbot hostel interviewee, Ray:
I don't know what it's classified as but I'm given an injection.
I go off. Um, I think it's usually the answer to the epilepsy.
Radio Eye: Right.
Ray: I don't know the names of the classifications.
Radio Eye: It's not schizophrenia?
Ray: No. It's not schizophrenia: it's
a type of schizophrenia. I hear voices and that.
Radio Eye: What do they say?
Ray: Sometimes to kill themselves. Other
times, different things.
Narration: If you have it and you don't
know what it's all about, it's like searching through the darkness
for a light. It's pretty hard to do that because you're actually
finding yourself, at the same time as losing yourself in other aspects.
The medication is meant to help you, and yet it has side-effects;
so, it's like, if you seek help, you're bound to lose in other areas
of your life.
Matthew Talbot hostel interviewee, David:
When I was younger, I used to receive messages to my mind about
how come I was such a skinny little runt, you know. I was alright.
I'm not bad ... I used to receive messages from space creatures
I used to see.
Radio Eye: Space creatures?
David: Yeah. Aliens.
Radio Eye: But it was serious at the
time?
David: Yeah. (laughs) It was at the time.
Yes, it was. And they were talking to me like plain people, like
you speaking English. They just asked me where I was from, you know.
Am I alright?
Simon Champ essay extract: In Eastern
religion there's a metaphor that says one can't step in the same
river twice, just as there is, in a sense, a new river changing
from moment to moment, so the flow of perceptions, thoughts and
quality of being that is the experience of schizophrenia is in constant
flux, evolving and never quite the same. There may be patterns to
my delusions and remissions, common forms, but each time I'm psychotic
the delusions change, perhaps informed by the real events of my
life. At times, it seems to have currents and seasons but I've learned
it has no rules. I have learned there is no one strategy for minimising
the impact of the illness.
Matthew Talbot hostel interviewee, John:
When I was around about seventeen, going on eighteen, I'd just tried
to join the army. That wasn't successful. I was encouraged to come
back the following year but it wasn't to turn out that way. I suffered
a nervous break down a few months after trying to join the army
and then, later that year, I moved out of home.
Failing to join the army induced a sort of spy
network around me - maybe the CIA or ASIO - I mean, it was pretty
extreme at the time but I was young and a little naive. I just didn't
know who to trust. I got sick. I got paranoid. I had to leave the
place I was living at and I was basically on the street. My mind
was racing - it's part of the symptoms of thought disorder for a
schizophrenic. It's where you don't trust anyone - you have a thought
where there's a conspiracy happening, that people are out to get
you, and it's pretty easy to think you've got to escape the situation
and get away from it, as far as possible.
At that point I moved up to the mountains and
lived like a wild-man, in the sense that I threw away my clothes
and attempted to live in a natural perspective. I was drinking water
from a stream; I wasn't eating, although I did try to eat some berries.
Yes, I was surviving just by lighting a fire in a fireplace just
to keep myself warm, and that was pretty extreme because there were
some very cold nights, you know, and, basically, I was naked: I
had no clothes, no shoes, and I stood out. So (laughs) somebody
called the police and the police arrived, which is fair enough,
really.
Matthew Talbot hostel interviewee, Peter
#1:
Things have a double-meaning. You know, sometimes someone's only
got to say the wrong thing and I think someone's going to attack
me or something's going to happen, or ... you know, I don't take
anything lightly, I think everything happens for a reason, you know.
Narration: Jails aren't the only place
that have become dumping grounds for the mentally ill. Hostels for
the homeless like the Matthew Talbot in Sydney have become the new
unofficial mental hospitals. When they are released from jail, many
people with mental illnesses head for the hostels simply because
there is nowhere else to go.
Matthew Talbot hostel worker: At least
seventy-five percent have some form of psychiatric illness, you
know, obsessive-compulsive disorders. In that though, there's also
schizophrenia, manic-depressive. They classify obsessive-compulsive
disorders; they can also classify drug and alcohol as a mental disorder,
as an obsessive-compulsive disorder. But, yes, we have a large percentage
of mentally ill people that end up here because there's nowhere,
really, for them to go.
Simon Champ essay extract: For me, schizophrenia
really interrupted the relationship that I had enjoyed with myself
prior to the illness. My sense of being in the world, my thought
processes and, indeed, the very way my senses perceived the world
would go through involuntary changes and I was plunged, at times,
into a confused and frightening world ruled by my own paranoias
and delusions. With my first psychotic episodes came many questions
that have stayed with me, in one form or another for all these years.
I think, sometimes, professionals underestimate the psychological
dislocation caused by even a single psychotic episode.
Matthew Talbot hostel interviewee, Peter
#2 : Well, a lot of things sort of led up to it. There were
instances that happened to me. For example, I was involved in a
car accident with a drug dealer ... and his brother was in the bikie
Bandito gang ... and in 1984 there was the Milperra massacre - a
bikie war between The Comancheros and Banditos ... and because I
had this car accident and didn't pay any excess, I thought the bikies
might come after me.
I'd actually seen them in the pub as well: on
one occasion they pulled out a knife and were showing it to people.
So I had a fear of bikies to begin with and then, to have some dealings
with people who were associated with bikies led to fear, acute fear,
and then, when I became psychotic, out of touch with reality (one
of the symptoms of schizophrenia is paranoia and delusions), my
delusion and paranoia became [that] I thought the bikies might kill
me or my girlfriend.
So I actually left Sydney because of this fear,
and went up the north coast. I couldn't get a lift straight away
so I started walking in the general direction and I ended up walking
barefoot from Grafton to Casino, which took three days, cross-country.
Radio Eye: And then what?
Peter s #2:
I walked past a person's property and there was a Ford LTD parked
out the front and the window was wound down ... and I looked under
the mat and there were the keys. So I got in the car, drove off
(I was lost, I didn't know where I was). I got the car bogged -
because it had been raining previously - when I went on to a property
to do a U-turn, so I left the car there and the next thing I know,
I came into contact with the police and they picked me up and charged
me for stealing a car.
Peter #1: I've had dreams, you know.
I've experienced telepathy and been possessed by evil spirits and
all that sort of stuff ... and I've been raped by evil spirits in
cells. All sorts of stuff has happened to me. I get angry about
it because, maybe, I could have made something out of my life, maybe
I could have changed, changed things back then and maybe I would
have been a better man or maybe I would have been a richer man at
least, you know?
Radio Eye: How long've you been living
on the streets?
Pete #1: Since 1994.
Radio Eye: What sort of places do you
live in?
Peter #1: Matthew Talbot, Edward Eagar,
Foster House, Campbell House, um ... sleeping around all the churches,
sleeping in back yards, in toilets.
Radio Eye: This is The Department of
Lost Voices, a Radio Eye feature here on Radio National.
Mathew Talbot hostel worker: I've got
a really sad one, you know. He was a country boy, he had mental
illness, he got caught in a small country town, doing a lot of crime
and everything, and got put into Long Bay, right? He'd been in there
two-and-a-half years and, when it came time for the release, they
just let him out. They didn't help him with his money, with his
social security, they didn't find him anywhere to go. They just
let him out and he didn't know anything about Sydney, right?
So he ended up in the lane; he doesn't talk
to anybody, he's not on meds because they've let him out of jail
without meds, right? So he sits there until somebody finally says
"Mate, what're you doing?" He's quite disjointed by that
time because he's been on no medication, so we find out he's been
in Long Bay, we get him to the clinic, we get his records sent.
He's back in jail now too ... but he's a lost soul, really.
Mother of Robert Manning, bashed inmate:
When Robert went to jail, I think, oh, you know, they get bashed
... you get all sorts in there ... but then, when I heard he was
in the crisis part I thought well, that's good, he's there and he's
getting fed, and he's OK.
Narration: Chris Maynard, the mother
of Robert Manning, who was bashed unconscious by a fellow prisoner
in Cessnock jail.
Simon Champ essay extract: Symptoms of
a mental illness frighten our colleagues and family, so the contents
of delusions are still rarely shared or explored. The domination
of bio-chemical theories of illnesses like schizophrenia has further
stifled discussion about the often frightening contents of psychotic
episodes.
We are so often encouraged to repress the fear
we feel from our symptoms, or have the whole experience lost to
the mental fog of high doses of medication. I found I needed to
talk about the contents of delusions to dissipate the fear they
held for me
Matthew Talbot hostel interviewee, Andrew:
Living on the street, running around with a hatefull attitude, in
foolish ways doing foolish things, wanting to get locked up, to
see what jail was all about.
Radio Eye: You wanted to?
Andrew: Yeah, I wanted to see what jail
was all about.
John: Well, the second time was far more
serious. I went to Cairns on a holiday; you know; to escape everything,
leave it all behind and really establish my own roots there. When
I arrived there, everything was cool, the weather was beautiful.
I really loved the place, it was gorgeous.
But after a week or two I was running out of
money and eventually that sort of caught up with me because the
police picked me up for vagrancy. Yeah, I was picked up and I was
taken to a watch-house where I was put in a cell. And then, after
that, I was put in an exercise yard and I was out there for a while
on my own, pretty scared about what was going to happen to me; would
I go to jail, everything like that. One of the police guys came
out, I think he was a detective or something, anyway, he approached
me and I hit him in the face, and then ...
Radio Eye: Why did you hit him?
John: Well, I was paranoid. I thought
he was coming out to sort of attack me. I thought that was the last
stand and that was it. It was something I had to do. He sort of
got me in a vice grip from behind me and then threw me in a padded
cell. It was fairly intimidating as to their procedure, and then
I just waited in the cell for at least six or seven days, maybe
even ten days. I mean, that's just fuel to the fire, really.
Peter #1: I've been in jail maybe thirteen
or fourteen times. I first went to jail in 1985, December '85, and
I went to minimum security where I met a mate who looked after me
for a while.
Radio Eye: What was that for?
Peter #1: That was for break and
enters. I suppose you could say, in jail terms, that I was weak,
you know what I mean - I was naive, you know when people are having
goes at you, you know what I mean ... and you know when you've been
got. People gee you up and tell you stories, you know; you don't
know whether they're telling you the truth or not, whether they're
lying, you know? They create the illusion. Oh, it was pretty scary
for me. I was just a kid, you know. In the C.I.P. in 1985.
Radio Eye: At Long Bay?
Peter #1: At Long Bay, yeah. You know,
a few blokes came up, I introduced myself. [They] said to me ...
you know, I know now I was looked after, you know what I mean, they
might have been hard and cruel to me, but they probably did what
they thought was best, you know ... what they thought was necessary
for me to grow and change.
Radio Eye: Who did that?
Pete #1: The crims.
Radio Eye: So, what did they do for you?
Peter #1: Made me into a hard man.
Peter #2: I came up with a plan to get
away from the other prisoners because I was fearful of what might
happen to me. I started climbing the fences in the jail, and then
the prison officers told me to come down and I wouldn't come down.
I remember one of them trying to grab my leg. I kicked back at him
and eventually I came down and they realised I was mentally ill
and should be taken to the prison hospital.
Andrew: All those young juvenile days,
[it] was large amounts of home brew at the boys' home. Most of my
car thieving days were done as a juvenile, and stuff like that,
and break and steals.
Radio Eye: And where were you living
then?
Andrew: On the streets.
Radio Eye: From aged 14??
Andrew: Yeah.
Radio Eye: You left your family?
Andrew: Oh, I got tossed out at three
in the morning. They said "Get out and don't come back."
A friend of mine, he ... I had to leave the house and survive by
myself.
Radio Eye: Why did they toss you out?
Andrew: Because I was ripping them off
to buy drugs: marijuana and speed, the odd taste of heroin. And
they knew I had no money to get it (coughs). To get money to buy
drugs I had to take up sexual favours with other people that I used
to meet in the park.
Ray: In jail there's a lot of violence
over drugs. There's stabbings ... you've just got to watch yourself.
Peter #1: You just get this burning desire
to use ... to use heroin, and you can't stop it, you know; I mean,
nothing, you don't care about any consequences or police or anything.
You don't care about what you do to people or how you hurt people
or anything like that, until you get your shot in your arm, you
know?
Andrew: I then went to East Maitland
Jail that afternoon at six o'clock. I was put in a cell with three
other people and then all hell let loose. Well, one person wanted
me to give him head jobs, another person wanted a root ...
Radio Eye: This was the first day in
jail?
Andrew: Yeah.
Radio Eye: How old were you?
Andrew: Twenty. Twenty years of age.
And they stood over me for sex and then they turned round to me
[and said] "you'll do the same thing every night or until you
leave and go somewhere else ... we're going to be having sex with
you."
Radio Eye: How long did that go on for?
Andrew: Two or three hours every night
of the week. They were bigger than me and more wiser and played
a better game. Well, at first they said, 'have we got a start?'
When they say that to you, it means no-one shares; to let that person
give you a head or take it up the arse. And it's either punch-on
(if it's punch-on with one person you don't know whether two or
three other people are going to jump into it and overpower you and
hurt you) or you try and walk away from the person and more come
into the crowd and hold you still. And then they rape you.
Matthew Talbot hostel worker: Normal
society believes that when a schizophrenic is in delusion or acting
out then they don't remember what's happening, and so a lot of abuse
was perpetuated on them when they went to jail, when they were in
institutions, and it was just thought that if they did speak about
it, 'oh, they're mad, you know, they'll tell you anything'.
Andrew: I think I went a bit funny in
the head.
Radio Eye: As a result of the ..?
Andrew: Of the rape charge: that I could
have the people charged with if I wanted to take it back to court.
Radio Eye: Did you?
Andrew: No. I didn't take it to court.
All the inmates at Goulburn Jail talked us out of it.
Peter #1: I was trained ... you
know, I used to do two or three hundred push-ups a day, plus chin-ups
and sit-ups and all that sort of stuff, and I was given the opportunity
to fight but I chose not to because I was sick. I was afraid, I'll
give them that. It was through fear and a bit of sickness, too,
you know what I mean? It's either "kill you or you kill them",
you know what I mean? That's the attitude you've got to get in your
head. I've had a broken jaw three times myself, been stabbed in
the guts with a kitchen knife, and that. Um, had a slipped disk
in my back. Had a broken ankle, broken all my knuckles, broken my
thumbs twice, broken every finger in my hands, you know what I mean?
Some people say I got off lightly. Ha, ha ... yeah.
Simon Champ essay extract: Many men who
experience mental illness feel emasculated in some way, in their
own eyes and those of their peers. I believe that this sense of
emasculation because of mental illness can be a factor not usually
considered as contributing to many young male suicides.
Andrew: There was a young bloke, he was
eighteen. He hung himself in his cell on his sheets, and everyone
was talking about it for about two hours on the next day that that
happened and, uh, life went on after that. He just couldn't handle
prison. You know, too young to be in there. Eighteen, you really
don't know ... I mean, you're old enough to die for your country
but I don't think you're old enough to be kind of, like, put in
a filthy cell, to be kind of, like ... I don't know, he might have
had mental illness, he might not have. They don't know why he did
it.
Ray: When I wasn't working and when I
was locked up, I done most of my time in the cell: watched TV or
... well, I can't read as such ... listened to the radio, or just
meditated for a while. When I first went to jail, I went to jail
in Queensland and jail was hard then. You didn't have TVs, you didn't
even have a toilet in your cell. You had buckets that you had to
use as toilets. But that time I went to jail for killing somebody.
I'm a naughty boy but he deserved it. He raped my ten year-old sister
so I blew him away.
Radio Eye: How long did you get?
Ray: Five years, manslaughter. It was
good in a way, because everybody in the pub knew me and they all
vouched for me ... and I suppose there's got to be jails. If there
wasn't jail, where would they keep all the bad people: the Murphy
brothers and The Granny Killer? Half of the ones that are in jail
shouldn't be in jail, right? But half of the ones that are in jail
deserve to be in jail. You've got to look at it this way: some of
the crimes that people do are pretty horrendous.
Peter #1: You're supposed to grow and
change, fucking rise above it and do your best to bring up your
own children, eh?
Radio Eye: Yes.
Peter #1: Time passes you by, mate. You
can't afford to ... fucking ... sit around and feel fucking sorry
for yourself. You're supposed to do your best to better your country,
aren't you?
Radio Eye: Yes.
Peter #1: Yeah, well, I hate the
fucking joint.
Radio Eye: And why do you hate it?
Peter #1: Because I have to steal to
make a living.
Radio Eye: And why do you have to steal
to make a living?
Peter #1: Because I've got no
other way of fucking doing it. I'm too old to do panel beating any
more. I've gone around and asked for tons of jobs ... but I've still
gone around and asked panel places and they've just fucking ignored
me.
Matthew Talbot hostel interviewee, David:
I live over at Matthew Talbot at the moment. That's for homeless
people.
Radio Eye: Are there a lot of people
who were in jail now living in the Matthew Talbot?
David: Well, a lot of people who come
out of jail come to the Matthew Talbot, yes, but the Matthew Talbot's
alright by me. I don't mind it here. I'm only waiting to get my
own place. I've already applied and I'm just waiting for the reply
back for it. Because I was hoping to hear back from my missus but
it doesn't look like she's going to take me back because she hasn't
come to pick me up. So ... I'm not going to wait forever.
I've never told ... that I've had schizophrenia,
you know?
Radio Eye: What, you mean it's safer
to keep quiet about it?
David: Yeah. It's safe to keep quiet
about it and not tell anyone. Half the people in this place could
have the same disorder, you know. If they don't know you've got
it, so how're they going to find out if they've got it, you know?
Peter #1: I'm Peter ... nine or ten years
out of sixteen years, I've spent ten years in prison; and that's
why I'm so angry and resentful ... because my country's just done
nothing to me but just lock me up and done nothing to help me, you
know what I mean? That's how I feel about it. Maybe I'm sick, maybe
I've got schizophrenia, maybe I haven't; maybe I'm just an angry,
resentful cunt, you know? Who knows the difference? And may God
have mercy on my soul, mate.
Simon champ essay extract: Often, when
I met aged people who'd experienced schizophrenia, their lives seemed
depressing, lacking fulfilment. They hardly offered me inspiration.
It was only later that I realised that, rather than seeing the long-term
effects of illness, more often I was witnessing the effects of attitudes
towards that illness. In their impoverished lifestyles and lives,
I was seeing not what medics explained as a kind of burnout from
schizophrenia, but the degradation of spirit by poverty, neglect,
stigma, over-medication, institutionalisation, and lack of opportunity.
At first, I didn't understand that, and the
memories of older patients I had seen in hospital and met in boarding-houses
depressed and frightened me. If that was my future, I did not want
to live, but I was still afraid of death. It seemed, at times, that
Earth had become my purgatory.
Sydney Morning Herald, 7th June, 2002:
Man Fights for Life After Cell Bashing.
Robert Manning's mother: When they rang
up and said that Robert had been assaulted, I didn't realise how
bad it was.
Radio Eye: What did they say?
Robert Manning's mother: Well, they rang
me and said that he'd had an accident. Then they said that he'd
been assaulted, and they said 'Oh, it's not good'. And when we went
out to the hospital, I just freaked out. He didn't even look like
him. And now he's in the coma, he can't wake up. You just don't
know what he's gone through when he's had this bashing, and he's
probably, you know ..."
Another family member: Nobody knows what
he went through in jail anyway. He's not the kind of person that
would really open up ...
Robert Manning's mother: No. They said
that all the police workers spoke highly of him, could see that
he was no problem or anything like that.
Another family member: "Yes. You
don't know what he's been subjected to, what he's witnessed, what
he's seen ..."
Radio Eye: On Radio National, this
is the Radio Eye feature, The Department of Lost Voices, with readings
from Simon Champ's essay, A Most Precious Thread. Our thanks for
their assistance to The Schizophrenia Fellowship of New South Wales,
and staff and residents at the Matthew Talbot Hostel in Wooloomooloo.
Sound engineering on this program by Phillip Ulman and Steven Tilly.
The producer was Nick Franklin, I'm John MacDannell.
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Other Related Links
Schizophrenia
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Oi: Society of Australian Cinema Inc
screens a Crime and Punishment program on 26 November 2002. Oi screens
Australian films to its members on the fourth Tuesday of every month
from 7pm at the Robert Webster Building, UNSW, Sydney.
Coming up: "Life" by Lawrence Johnston (1995).
The story of HIV positive inmates in an Australian prison.
"Breaker Morant" by Bruce Beresford (1979). Australian's
under trial by the British Army during the Boer War.
"Mick (Why Can't they Be Like We Were?)". A short film
by Phillip Noyce (1976).
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