I am 83, and my life seems to have been mostly happy. But after a year at art college, I sort of disintegrated and was sent to a mental hospital after I had tried to kill myself several times. My best explanation is that life was too difficult and painful. But why?
In the hospital I had 15 electric shock treatments. After the first one I didn’t recognise my mum. I had a blinding headache, and the fear of never waking up was strong. I was given antipsychotic drugs and sedatives. I caused a lot of worry to my parents, but I couldn’t “pull myself together”. Looking back, I see myself as a caring person who helped the confused and unhappy ladies who were locked away in that massive old mental hospital, where, in a way, I felt at home.
Afterwards, I decided to go to Italy, where I recovered gradually and stopped the medication. I started teaching English and enjoyed it.
Since then, I have lived a full and in many ways successful life. But the question is, what happened to me?
People make seemingly random decisions all the time, but when we look back they had more purpose than they seemed to and were often informed by our environment. You were courageous, and still are for writing to me and thinking about this difficult time in your life, which must have been traumatic. And like all trauma, it’s stuck in your memory as snapshots, which you are now trying to make sense of.
Trauma memories aren’t laid down like regular memories in the brain. You can learn more about this by listening to the podcast I did on this subject with Dr Joanne Stubley, a consultant medical psychotherapist who leads the trauma service for adults at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust in England. I showed her your letter and we were both curious about what led up to your breakdown. Mental health issues were not always dealt with well in the early 1960s, and the landscape back then was, as Stubley describes it: “power-based and misogynistic”. Things aren’t perfect now, but there’s certainly more understanding.
We also wondered what was happening around that time for you? What led to life being so difficult? Young people don’t have breakdowns and attempt suicide in a vacuum.
“You showed great resilience moving to Italy,” said Stubley. “You had the capacity to get yourself up and away [from a place where difficult things happened] to live a life where you were giving to others, teaching English.”
Even in the psychiatric hospital, you said you were looking after others. No wonder you’re thinking, “What about me? Who was thinking of me?” It’s not unusual to have these questions as we age and realise we have more years behind us than ahead. “You seem to have great courage and capacity to ask yourself these questions,” said Stubley. “That sense you have of, ‘What happened to me? What really went on here?’ is impressive.”
One of the hallmarks of trauma is feeling alone in a situation, of being disempowered. A way to process it is to understand what happened. I wondered if you might try to find out if any of your medical notes from this time still exist.
Stubley also suggested “starting to have conversations. It doesn’t have to be formal therapy. It could be with a good friend, a counsellor, anyone who would be able to offer you the space to explore and tell your life story so you may get more of an understanding of it. Are there any relatives alive from that time who you could talk to?”
I thought it was interesting you made a geographical move, and to a place where English isn’t routinely spoken. You really left your old self behind, but now it’s time to integrate the two. You might also find this Guardian article interesting.
• Every week, Annalisa Barbieri addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa, please send your problem to ask.annalisa@theguardian.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions. The latest series of Annalisa’s podcast is available here.
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