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DEFENDER ADVENTURES IN SCHIZOPHRENIA by Richard M Clements ‘One million people commit suicide every year’ The World Health Organization All rights reserved, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any means, electronic, mechanical, or photocopying, documentary, film, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. Published by: Chipmunkapublishing PO Box 6872 Brentwood Essex CM13 1ZT United Kingdom http://www.chipmunkapublishing.com Proof-read by Zahira Araguete Copyright © 2007 Richard M Clements 1 AUTHOR’S NOTICE The multi-talented author, artist, and filmmaker Clive Barker is the innocent focus of my story. The memoir is entitled: “Defender: adventures in Schizophrenia,” and portrays the extended reality crises of mental breakdowns. Outlandish and fantastical, this disorder often has a role model within a berserk and intricate background. The celebrated Mr Barker was the fulcrum of my own. I believed him to be the ‘evil one’ – the unknowing antagonist – in a reality that was dangerous only to myself. I could share it with no one else, and I could not choose or voluntarily create any part of this story. “Defender” features a phantom telepathy with celebrities. Hearing ‘voices’ is a symptom of the illness but I was afflicted with other psychoses long before I first heard any of that horror. This is the whole story, written from my perspective. Within these pages there is no connection to common accepted reality. It isn’t fiction yet reads as a memoir unique to myself that has no facts in it either – gun- less shootings, victimless murders, sunless dawns. I would like to stress that Defender is entirely about mental illness and I’m sorry to anyone, particularly Mr Barker, who may be offended by his or her portrayal within it. While continuing my course of psychiatric drugs this book has been a cathartic self-therapy. By the time I began re-drafting it I was feeling very well. “Defender: adventures in Schizophrenia” may educate and entertain many people, but writing it also opened a door through which I have passed. In comparison to my apocalyptic beliefs of years gone by our sensual world is safe and my place within it is nothing as terrible as it had once seemed. Again, I apologise to anybody I have defamed in this writing but through it I am finding myself a whole person being made welcome, at last, in the Real World. RICHARD x 2 3 CHAPTER ONE: 1969 - 1988 This is a memoir from the battlefield of the psyche. It is a hazardous environment. The choices made there can be as pivotal as facing down a firearm in the Material Plane. You might think the gun to be far more lethal than the gibbering ghosts and wisps of its custodian’s mind, yet blood is spilt in the killer’s imagination long before his finger slips through the trigger guard. Mental afflictions can carry people to places equally bleak, yet their weapon of choice is almost always aimed at themselves. Suicidal courageousness, that impression of a final act of ‘gallantry’ is a dire illusion. Schizophrenia (psychotic episodes of self-harming, paranoia, perception, hallucinations, “voices”, personality, and other disorders) affects 1% of us. That is over 10,000 sufferers living in London alone, and, like the landing craft pouring out young lads onto the bloody beach at Omaha, schizophrenia is up there at the Front and is still little understood. Assuming a sick person volunteers for treatment at all finding suitable medication to aid recovery is experimental. It takes patience – hence a sufferer in a hospital is usually termed a “patient”. When the right medication is prescribed it can save and alter lives yet even an accurate drug, if used for too long or at too high a dosage, can induce physical difficulties. Years ago three of my hospital friends were accidentally over-dosed with the ‘common neuroleptic’ drug Haliperidol. One young woman had to have her spleen removed. An elder woman is wracked still to this day by continuous muscular spasms. And Jason, who I met in 1990, was overpowered so badly he bit out his tongue. He was only sixteen at the time. The worst and weirdest symptom of schizophrenia is the phantom ‘telepathy’ of voices. They exhibit independent personalities; can use accents previously unknown, express in languages you’ve never heard before, come obsessed with death, opinionated, often hallucinated, and swear rotten. They can accompany psychotic beliefs rarely discussed and 4 they can talk to you even when you are asleep. And there may be no escape without help. My theory is that ‘voices’ are examples of broken consciousness induced by mental or cerebral damage, through such as drugs, mental abuse or head-injuries. They are shrapnel of the mind that poach independent neural nets of the brain and start talking. So the sufferer’s mind becomes like a train running off down the track without anybody real in the driving seat while the psychiatrists try to safely de-rail it before it knocks anyone over. For myself, I’ve chosen to continue taking the new ‘A Typical’ anti-psychotic drug Closapine because it has given me happiness beyond all expectations. I am thirty-four years old with brown eyes that are dark, and deep. I’ve been taking a small handful of these tablets for four years and it is working. I won’t refuse it in the foreseeable future but it seems that in comparison to the time span of my conflict I’ve been well for a short time only. Time and again sensitive and gentle, often creative, people are dragged down into places as close to Hell as any living person can languish in. Some psychiatric terms I’ve found degrading: ‘liquid cosh’, ‘mental illness’, ‘pin-down’, ‘tribunal’, ‘catchment’s area’, and ‘restraint room’ – all is jargon that never helped anyone. Extreme over-dose is rare and the medicated path, though sometimes subject to side-affects that confusingly need to be dealt with by other, further medications, does promise a real chance at freedom. The unmedicated path is like a spiral stairway leading down to a dreadful yet perhaps familiar existence of demons and angels, alien conspiracies, love and hate. If the sufferer is blessed, or lucky, they may come back. It is possible to migrate beyond merely existing and throw away the crutches of defensive inventiveness. Be discharged from the microcosm of ward life into the macrocosm of the world and return to the sensual moments of life. And the longer stayed out of hospital the less chance there is of going back. When this story launches into the telling of my experiences as though fact it will actually refer little to the effects of drug 5 treatment because I secretly rejected most of it. I chucked out the pills, as many as I could, rebelling against involuntary treatment under Sections of the Mental Health Act (1983). With the exceptions of being occasionally forced to take it and being reduced into a wreck of a man, I have ‘palmed’ hundreds of them. A pill in the hand is worth less than two in the bushes. I used to say: “Drugs got me into this mess and they won’t get me out,” I said but I didn’t really believe that. The circumstances of my becoming a Defender of the Earth had been on the cards since we came down from the trees. It always was going to happen, an inevitability proved by a million thoughts, a thousand co-incidences. And when this ‘latency’ was realised, as a war the medium of telepathy became its own verifier. So I threw out the pills, not able to be understood, believed, or helped. In this memoir I present truthful events as accurately as I can from the angle of a unique reality. It will be told from the history within, from the first person perspective of a victim becoming a warrior. A reader become familiar with this method might use logic to find poor continuity, gaps, and loopholes in the text but I wasn’t a logical man. It begins as all of us do: as a child. Except that my childhood was damaged and terrible, and I didn’t know it. I had a privileged upbringing, lucky if you bare in mind the horrors of being a broadcaster of telepathy since being a toddler. I was raised on a muddy island called Mersea. The house where we grew up, my two sisters and I, is a mysterious place. There are exposed beams, paintings, and varnished wood. Dusty silver shines through diamond pane windows in the dining room. There are enigmatic ornaments and loose carpets under threat of occasional sparks from the lounge fireplace. Ivy climbs up outside but not Poison Ivy. It is a beautiful place indeed; yet, often, I didn’t sleep well there. My earliest memory is of being carried out into the garden on a warm summer night in 1969. I remember it from a divorced 6 perspective, a glimpse of myself as an infant in the arms of my Godfather, Uncle Keith. He showed me the Moon and “moon” became my first word: not Mummy or Daddy but “moon”. The Enemy heard my childish thoughts and baby instincts (non-telepaths are known as “Naturals”) and since one day I was to become the so-called ‘Second Coming’, I suffered years of cruel manipulations beneath the shadow of Anti-Christ figure Clive Barker. He was brought up on his own Mersey, in the city of Liverpool sixteen years before me and he brought together a unit of some of the world’s most terrible men.

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