Monsters in the Mind: 'It is time to stop seeing people this way'

In facing the truths about mental illness, often people find it a challenge to see beyond the surface, to go deeper. Those with serious mental illnesses, for example psychosis, are not simply marked as ‘different’ or ‘unusual’ but also responsible for their mental collapses or failures.

Sadly, those subject to overwhelming psychosis who enact terrible crimes against others are often depicted as ‘monsters’, with no consideration for how their mental state has impacted their perception of reality, and indeed morality.

This seems to be the case with the recent and calamitous life of Valdo Calocane who killed three people and seriously injured others in Nottingham. Left without sufficient interagency care and support, a victim of his own mind, he has subsequently been viewed as a monster.

It is high time that we stop viewing people who are subject to ‘minds that are not their own’ as monsters but rather as people who need consistent, properly funded, specialist help.

People do not choose to have paranoid schizophrenia. In a state of illness, they do not choose to believe the delusions they have about the world around them. They do not wilfully create command hallucinations that tell them what to do as in, for example, killing others.

Thankfully, I have never experienced the torment of psychosis. If we just consider for a moment what it might be like to be subject to frightening and threatening delusions (firmly held false beliefs) about reality, such as being caught up in the work of MI5, or hearing voices that command our actions, I wonder how any of us might fare.

In our society, accountability for the actions of people remains predominantly with the individuals themselves. No wonder, we don’t seem to move on as a nation in tackling the many failing points across the board that afflict us, not merely those related to adverse events due to mental illness.

Sometimes research papers are not enough to engage with difficult and painful ideas that we face around mental health. This is where fiction comes in as our best resource for voicing and exploring human consciousness.

In my new novel, The Wonders of Doctor Bent, I bring together two areas of expertise: mental health and literature. The worlds of Jason Hemp, an English lecturer, and Dr Bent, the unlikely Medical Director of high-security psychiatric hospital Foston Hall, come together in a dark tale of murder, revenge and abandonment. Attempting to track down his twin brother’s killer, Jason finds his life unravelling in unexpected and frightening ways, whilst visionary Dr Bent attempts to reform Foston Hall into a more humane, less prisonlike place of comfort, all while facing his own mental health challenges.

Doctor Bent was inspired as a counter to the bias in society against people with serious mental health conditions who can prove a grave risk to the public and themselves if not carefully supported. We see such individuals in the context of their isolation and torment, we see how the monsters in the ‘minds that are not their own’ can quickly flourish and maximize victimhood. The balance between treatment and punishment can be difficult to achieve when things go horribly wrong. But to progress as a society, we need to face the fact that our default position for accountability is narrow and often far from humane.

We need to address the significant challenges that people can face in their lives and the power of creativity to turn things around and afford more humane environments. The lives of people we choose to call monsters are often products of our indifference and abandonment, subject to the play of agencies not properly funded or collaborative.

The Wonders of Doctor Bent is available at Amazon, WHSmith, Foyles, Waterstones, Cranthorpe Millner, and all good bookshops.