Guest review by Graeme Fife: YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE by Dr Benji Waterhouse

"Waterhouse’s exposé of life on a very fragile front line is to be praised and read." 

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press. 

He gave the little wealth he had

To build a House for Fools and Mad:

And shew’d by one satyric Touch,

No nation wanted it so much.

On the death of Dr Swift, by Jonathan Swift

O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven.

King Lear

The old word for mental hospital was asylum (Latin form of the Greek for ‘refuge, safe haven’) and ‘loonies’ came from lunatics, those deluded people who raked at the moon’s reflection in a pond hoping to dredge up some silver, otherwise ‘moonrakers’. ‘Mentally disturbed’ is more sensitive if not so catchy.

Some time in 1903, a visitor arrived at an asylum in London and asked the official at the front desk if the clock on the wall was right. A man sweeping the floor of the entrance hall intervened: ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t be in here if it was right.’ That man was Dan Leno, celebrated music hall comedian and pantomime dame, known as ‘the King’s jester’ who had recently suffered a breakdown and was, temporarily, confined in an institution also known as a ‘bedlam’ that contraction of the Bethlehem named for St Mary near Elephant and Castle, a mental institution which charged visitors a fee to come in to watch the antics of the poor deranged inmates.

A young woman I knew in my teens used to say ‘I’m mad,’ giggling at some unconventional, frivolous, even childish thing she had just done. We may know what she meant but it’s not what she said and madness is no laughing matter. Somehow the apparent absurdity of reviewing a book, even so good a book as this, about mentally unbalanced people is a touch daft but, curiously, when I had been through a particularly stressful period for reasons needless to dilate on, reading this book uplifted me because Waterhouse is honest, compassionate and understanding and (I find) very funny. Not about the patients, no no, but in making jokes at his own expense, his failures and misreadings, and the sheer craziness of the system in which he and many others have to operate, the pressures and the impediments to efficiency, the lack of funds and facilities merely to take care of the very ill and needy.

The very words loony – which he clinically disavows – and concomitant loony bin betray our own reserve and shying away from mental illness and it’s an affliction which should give us all pause, every one of us. For that reason alone, read this book. I resist anyone telling me ‘this is funny’ because tastes differ. However, what Waterhouse does and with singular good humour – who knows how, given what his working life demands of him? -is to lay bare the plight of the many people whose reason fragments leaving them adrift and deluded by crazy ideas and with some difficulty I hold off from mentioning even one; better no spoilers, though some of the predicaments he describes stretch credibility taut to breaking.

No wonder that doctors resort to gallows humour, as do soldiers faced with imminent threat of death. Sometimes patients, too. Consider the poet Christopher Smart’s unwitting humour in the poem Jubilate Deo, possibly written inside Saint Luke’s asylum:

I will now consider my cat Jeffrey.

Waterhouse reins in, reserving his humour as a softer cushion for his continuing anguish, transferred from those he has to treat; the threat – sometimes carried out - of violence, the self-defence training which has to be part of his capabilities.

Even the Old Testament, not an obvious source of material for a stand-up comedian chimes in with the notion, in Proverbs, chapter 17, v 22: ‘A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.’ So there.

Care, consideration, cash…no such thing as a nostrum but these would all help and Waterhouse’s exposé of life on a very fragile front line is to be praised and read. We of sound mind need it and should be thankful. The weird jump-cut cinema of dreams is the most imbalance that most of us have to contend with.

You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here is published by Penguin.

More of Graeme's choices:

Thebes - the Forgotten City of Ancient Greece by Paul Cartledge

Emperor of Rome - Ruling the Ancient World by Mary Beard