Writer and academic Tom Lee grew up on the outskirts of Colchester, not far from Severalls, a psychiatric hospital that was both the butt of local jokes and the source of subterranean dread and rumour: opened in 1913 as the Second Essex County Lunatic Asylum as part of the Victorian-Edwardian drive to reform what we would now call mental health services across England, Severalls was, after all, considered the repository of society’s untouchables, the mad, the unmanageable. But the divide between the well and the unwell is far from impermeable: at different points in their lives, both of Lee’s parents had been inmates in Severalls. When Lee himself suffers a catastrophic breakdown in his thirties – acute, then chronic, anxiety attacks – he finds himself drawn to the site, now being bulldozed into a high-end housing development, as a way into some understanding of both his family history and the evolving medical approach to mental health provision. The result is The Bullet: a personal and political history of madness and its (lack of) treatment.
The subject matter is heavy, but Lee’s treatment of it makes for an extremely engaging read: his consecutive chapters loosely alternate family history with a careful exploration of the history of both the asylum as an institution per se, and the treatments doled out within its walls, as well as that of the material specifics of Severalls’ particular story, as illustrated in part by his parents’ respective experiences. That is, he explores the legal, philosophical and medical trajectories of mental health care across the UK and further afield, with Severalls acting as a fulcrum for the conversation. A clear antecedent, of course, is Foucault’s 1961 classic, Madness and Civilisation; like the French philosopher, Lee too is interested in what our attitudes to so-called lunacy tell us about society at large and those who purport to lead and shape that society. But the personal history embedded within the text gives this exploration an immediacy and poignancy that works like Foucault’s cannot accommodate; Lee’s generational account of the state of being unwell sits alongside a socio-medical report in such a way as to bring to life both the utopian concerns of mental health innovators and reformers, and the often dystopian reality of how these various reforms were instantiated in real-life hospitals. The tone of the book, then, is less sociological or philosophical, and more akin to the type of long-form lyric journalism we’ve seen done so well in recent years by the likes of Mark O’Connell; Lee marries his analysis of local psychiatric history with a series of vivid accounts of anxiety, depression and mania.
Readers with any close knowledge or experience of mental health crises will find much to empathise with in The Bullet: Lee’s frank exploration of problematic medication strategies and the continuing societal stigmatisation of long-term dependency on anti-depressants, for example, is strikingly powerful in its honesty. It’s also a good one for those of us who despair of the Conservative/conservative drive for development to the detriment of care, mutual aid and state-funded welfare systems: Severall’s redevelopment as a top-end housing estate, with the site’s history mostly elided, is indicative of the long-term stalling of the state’s responsibility towards those who most need long-term support in favour of those who buy into the myth of social mobility. As Lee is at pains to note: anyone might end up in a psychiatric ward; mental well-being is not to be taken for granted. But, of course, care is always available to those who can pay for it; everyone else (Lee, his parents, and maybe, one day, his children) remain at the mercy of a system still wedded to sweeping madness – and all its other guises – under the carpet.
Any Cop?: A moving and significant volume; highly recommended.
Valerie O’Riordan
Bookmunch 