Since I’ve been working with the mentalists, I often get people asking me what it’s like at the project, probably having some image in their head of a third sector Bedlam, with residents foaming at the mouth, drugged-up, shackled-up and hallucinating purple dragons and daemons.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Overall, it’s been pretty settled since I’ve been there (eight months and counting), although my definition of ‘settled behaviour’ may now be slightly more flexible than the average person’s.

But for a long time I’ve held the view that we’re probably one resident / staff member away from chaos, so delicate is the psychological ecostructure at the project.

Last week SGH made her return after more than eight months on an acute inpatient ward, probably only slightly less manic than when she went in. She was admitted after an incident involving a taxi, where she may well have grabbed the wheel, and her intention may well have been to crash it, and there may well have been a member of staff in the back seat (as part of SGH’s updated risk management plan, members of staff no longer ride in taxis with her).

SGH received a diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder around thirty years ago, and since that time has probably spent half of her life on inpatient wards. She rapidly cycles between periods of mania and depression, even while on high doses of medication.

The majority of the residents at the project have received a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and tend to lack energy and motivation (part of the ‘negative’ symptomatology of schizophrenia), but this is not something SGH could be accused of.

A conversation with her (and I use the word ‘conversation’ quite loosely here) is like
getting a one-woman rendition of the Eastenders omnibus inside five minutes.

Her conversations don’t go off in tangents, they jack-knife. Her internal editor has left his post and allowed the copy boys to go all purple prose with her stream of consciousness.

As I’m new to SGH, I’m a novelty, and she’s still trying to measure me up. She approached me towards the end of quite a fraught shift last week and asked me how I got the job. After politely listening to my response for ten seconds, apropos of nothing, she hurtled into the following tale:

“I was fifteen, no, sixteen, working in the factory at the time, really pretty n’ everything, and this electrician came up to me and asked me for a drink, wasn’t into any of that, was only sixteen, no, fifteen, but he asks me for a drink and I think ‘ooh, maybe, maybe’, but I was only sixteen, no, fifteen, at the time, prettiest girl in the factory, and this electrician asked me to come out for a drink, and I was only fifteen, no sixteen, at the time, and I didn’t do anything of that, but he asked me out to go to for a drink, and all the other girls in the factory were jealous of me, really jealous, cos’ I was so pretty, prettiest girl of all the factory, and he’d gone and asked me out, and they were so jealous, and they wanted to get a knife and SLIT MY GUTS OUT!”.

And to think I used to spend my working day sitting next to somebody who would say nothing all day (apart from the occasional report of eating a crab paste sandwich the previous evening).