As a society, we like to think we’ve come some way in our treatment of, and attitudes to, mental health.  We look in horror at the Victorian model, priding ourselves on our humanity because we no longer lock the mentally ill away for life, and refrain from driving chisels into their frontal lobes.  And yet, the situation remains far from perfect.  Psychiatric patients remain misunderstood, marginalised and, in certain circumstances, mocked.  As such, The Locked Ward is a book of tremendous value.

Dennis O’Donnell gave up life as an English teacher to work as a psychiatric orderly in the ICPU (Intensive Psychiatric Care Unit) of a large, unnamed hospital in central Scotland.  In The Locked Ward, he tells us a series of tales from the front line of psych care.  Through a string of short chapters, some dealing with broad themes, some with the stories of individual patients, O’Donnell offers a raw and lucid account of life on the ward. 
O’Donnell’s love of English literature shines through, in both content and style.  Each chapter is headed with a pertinent epigram; most from the Bard, but also from Byron, Robert Louis Stevenson and Christopher Marlowe.  Beyond that, he has a flair for the language which enhances the emotions evoked by the content.  Moments of humour are the warmer for his prose, conflict is all the more urgent, and horror is hellishly intense. Sorrow is all the deeper, as with the following account of visitors to dementia patients -

Wives and daughters came, love and devotion firing them to it, bringing favourite sweeties and treats forgotten a lifetime ago.  And hardly a one was recognised.  Husbands and fathers looked at them as if they were the most impudent of strangers.  But still they came and sat by the shell of the man they had once known.  Though the body looked the same, the person they loved had long since left.  It was like visiting a grave.

O’Donnell is not just an eloquent narrator though; his compassion permeates the book.  He speaks fondly of many of his patients.  He spends hours chatting with Theo, a burned out hippy with a far-out charm.  He enjoys the company of Edward, a manically enthusiastic patient with a sexual frankness which earns him constant reprimands.  These are not just cases to O’Donnell, they are ill people, deserving of no more scorn for their own ailments than an amputee would for theirs.  O’Donnell also does patients the courtesy of disliking them.  Never wavering from his moral commitment to unconditional care, he doesn’t shrink from confessing his disgust at some patients, those with ugly personalities even when not distorted by their afflictions.

Of even greater value is O’Donnell’s skewering of myths about psychiatric care.  Schizophrenia is not synonymous with a predilection for violence; most victims of child sexual abuse do not go on to become abusers; depression is not merely something that can be ‘snapped out of;’ a psychiatric ward is not a hospice – while they may return more than once, patients do recover and do leave.  He also more broadly skewers the myth that a psychiatric ward is a hopeless, miserable place.  Through all the harrowing tales, O’Donnell never loses his eye for the indefatigability of the human spirit.

Overall, The Locked Ward is a superb book.  Written with an understated, earthy flair, it educates, entertains and enlightens on every page.

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