How I Rescued My Brain (3 page)

I'm puzzled by how quickly yesterday went. Anna says we arrived at the hospital about eight in the morning and she left at four in the afternoon. She came back around six, after the hospital had called and told her that I was trying to leave. She brought with her a change of clothes and a toothbrush. Yet I have no memory of her coming back. I tell her that yesterday seemed only an hour long.

Amelia and Anna are keen to watch the semifinal of a reality cooking show our family's been following. We snuggle into my bed, propping ourselves up with pillows, and look at the television hanging from the ceiling.

‘I've worked out what today is,' I say, pleased with myself. Earlier I'd seen a newspaper lying around and caught sight of the date, and I'd been rehearsing the information ever since.

‘What?' Anna says.

‘It's your birthday, isn't it?'

She nods.

‘Happy birthday, darling. We'll do something when I get out.'

She smiles faintly.

IT'S DARK WHEN
we arrive home. The house is quiet and cool. Amelia goes straight to bed. The other two kids are away. With cups of hot Ecco, Anna and I sit down at the dining-room table.

‘What happened yesterday?' I ask her.

‘I got up in the morning, and you were wandering around the house. You had your business jacket on — that's the first thing I thought strange. And you asked, in a sort of dreamy monotone, “Anna, what am I supposed to be doing?” I said, “You're taking Emma and her friend Tina to camp after breakfast.” A few minutes later, you asked me the same question. You were white and your skin was icy. I sat you down at the table with a heat pack around your neck.'

‘I don't know if it was a dream,' I say, ‘but were we in the Tarago and I … vomited? Does that make sense?'

‘Yes. I wanted to get you to hospital straightaway. On the road to Lismore, you let down the window and almost threw yourself out while you vomited. We were doing one hundred kilometres an hour. I grabbed your shirt. I think you would've ended up on the road if I hadn't.'

I'm amazed.

IT'S LATE. THE
only sound in the house is Anna as she goes about doing things. I settle into bed, into the silence, with the darkness closing around me. My body lets go, muscle by muscle, and sinks into the mattress.

Then, the pieces of the puzzle begin to join and a picture emerges: I've finally lost it. I've had a mental breakdown.

BEFORE

1

JUST OVER THREE
years earlier, in May 2006, I had turned up to the local outdoor swimming pool on a regular Monday. I came after work each Monday and Wednesday, for the adults' swim squad.

The complex, comprising a fifty-metre pool and a toddler pool, plus a spectator stand, picnic tables, and a lawn, sat on the land's edge, with only a strip of car park between it and a seawall of rocks, which spilled onto the sand. A salmon-coloured sunset had already begun. At this time of year, it would grow in size and intensity during the swimming session, and arch over us so that we could look up at it — as we always did, grateful to live in such a beautiful place.

We were a group of varying swimming ability, having in common the desire to stay fit: a fifty–fifty mix of men and women, most over thirty years old; teachers, health professionals, businesspeople, retirees. If we didn't do this together, the invisible string that pulled us to these sessions would be gone, and we'd lapse into our individual, lackadaisical swimming efforts.

The session began with warm-up laps. After that, we stood in the shallow end, bantering with our coach, our faces turned up to him — trying to delay his next set of instructions, to give our bodies a break and allow our breathing to ease. We still had the hard work ahead of us. The squad lasted an hour, and we regularly did 2.5 kilometres, pushed to make times and distances beyond anything we'd achieve on our own. I liked this. And I liked being told what to do, not to have to think: a contrast to my workday.

Twelve years earlier, at the age of thirty-six, I had started in private practice as a clinical psychologist in Sydney. It was a stark difference from being employed: no morning and afternoon tea breaks, no collegial chats or regular meetings. I was on my own, and I had to make it work financially. Making it work meant seeing one client after another, writing report after report, all day. I also wanted to prove to myself that I could do what my training and experience had prepared me for, without a superior looking over my shoulder and without the smothering bureaucracy of the health and corrective-services departments I had worked for previously.

Private practice meant doing the unfamiliar: signing an office lease, paying for secretarial support and marketing, business networking. It also meant versatility: offering a range of psychological services, some of which drew on knowledge I had not used since my training. I put in five to six days a week getting the practice established, this schedule only easing after Anna and I had our first daughter, Ashley.

One thing I hadn't anticipated needing to learn was how to change mental gears: to go from a work mindset to being an ordinary bloke, a husband and a father. When I walked through the door each evening, I was still mentally and emotionally with my clients. But eventually I worked out a routine: after calling out ‘I'm home', I'd change out of my suit and tie into casual clothes, and lie on the bed with my eyes closed for twenty minutes. After this, I was able to walk into the domestic reaches of our house as a husband and a father, the mental-health professional's uniform left hanging in the wardrobe.

After Ashley was born, we settled in a small country town fifteen minutes' drive to the beach. It was two hours from Anna's family: close but not too close. We had sought a less congested life, a place near the coast with a strong sense of community — somewhere safe to raise our daughter and the other children we hoped would come along. We were both confident that we could make a go of it
.
I completed locums with the local-area health service before deciding to set up again in private practice. But this time, I did it with two colleagues; I didn't want to be on my own.

So, as I swam in my lane that Monday evening, feeling the draw of the current from the swimmer before me, I could sense my mind unshackling from the mental fetters of the day. The physicality of swimming drew my concentration to each stroke, each breath, and to becoming synched with my body's rhythm.

After the session was over, we shared a few jokes to the background rhythms of the djembe drummers on the seawall before splintering off. I walked back to my car with Ian, my work colleague, catching up on news before we each headed home.

As I drove, I had hunger in my belly. I was fatigued but buzzing, my mind unclenched. I was ready for home.

THE NEXT MORNING,
the routine began again. I was running late. Before I left the house, I pulled out the client files I would need that day. I was due to see an ex-nurse who suffered from chronic pain, sustained after an injury at her hospital. I liked working with her because managing chronic pain required addressing the mind and the body; it was an area in which relaxation therapy and hypnotherapy, methods I enjoyed using, were helpful.

I'd also taken up neuropsychological testing again, having done little since my practice in Sydney. I liked the intellectual challenge of these complex assessments. They required less emotional involvement — something, I'd noticed recently, I was drawing away from. Today I would need to read through the extensive reports for a young man who had suffered a brain injury following a high-speed car accident, in preparation for testing him on Wednesday. I'd also be finalising a report on a social worker; she had been stabbed by a mother whose children had been taken away from her. After several unsuccessful attempts to return to work, she was now seeking financial compensation.

When I arrived at the office, there was the usual bustle in reception. Elaine, the practice manager, was presiding over the arrival of clients and patients in her coaxing and cheerful way. In the tearoom, the kettle had already boiled for the day's first cups of tea. This was where the three partners in our practice — Ian, general psychiatrist; Peter, child and adolescent psychologist; and me, clinical and forensic psychologist — gathered each morning.

Tuesday was Ian's day for seeing patients for medication and psychiatric review. His turnover was high; he would see individuals for fifteen to thirty minutes for most of the day, generating by far the most coming-and-going among the three of us. His patients ranged from the manifestly normal to the eccentric, and, sometimes, the definitely odd.

Pete's office was next to mine. He worked with troubled adolescents and their foster carers. Every now and then I would hear muffled voices arguing, and Pete, in his low, calm tones, soothing them.

Although it was sunny, with the cool of the autumn nights it was cold inside my consulting room. Otherwise, everything was as usual: two green Ikea tub chairs; a glass-topped coffee table with a box of tissues and a Balinese
statue
; the grubby whiteboard on the wall to my left; and the writing desk and filing cabinet below the window. Our neighbouring property was a nursing home. Today, the pleading, high-pitched cry of ‘Nurse, nurse' — it was only ever this word — had not yet started up. It came from what I imagined was a female resident with dementia, her shrunken world just metres away. Her cries usually reached a crescendo until finally (I surmised) she got a response, and all went quiet.

I typically saw a mix of psychotherapy clients, for one-hour sessions, and individuals for forensic assessments, which took ninety minutes. My first appointment this morning was with a woman in her late thirties.

Rachel had a hangdog look: long black hair without sheen hung by her face, and her eyes seemed to say, ‘I don't want to be here, doing this.' She was applying for victim's compensation, and had most likely told her story many times to others. I'd read through an extensive file of documents in preparation for the assessment.

At first she was reluctant to answer my questions, but once she got going, she couldn't seem to stop. She told me how, as a child, she'd been minded by a trusted member of her small seaside community one day a week, and each time he had sexually abused her. She had accepted it as normal. This went on for years.

As she spoke, I imagined a blond brick building and saw a genial family man in his forties, with a ruddy face and a slight paunch. He was a friend of her uncle's, with whom she lived, her mother having deserted her and her father dead. Rachel later learnt that her uncle was aware of the abuse and condoned it.

I noticed sensations of disgust germinating in my body.

She said that she was not allowed to play with other children. And although her schoolteachers had suspicions that something was not right at home, they took no action.

Was that a pain in my heart? No, I must have been imagining it.

She told me that she would run away from home, returning when she became hungry. The punishments — emotional and physical — administered by her uncle became progressively more gruesome. As her story became more graphic, I was drawn into her world, as if I was there with her, watching in horror. The stabs of pain in my heart became more insistent; I wasn't imagining them. I didn't think it was a heart attack but something else, like an emotional wounding; her words were playing with my insides like a bull tossing a matador. ‘Stop, stop!' I wanted to shout. But I couldn't stop her; she'd been let down by too many people in the past.

By now, thirty minutes into our interview, she was enlivened, describing one incident after another; they burst forth like spray from a water main. She described more heartbreaking incidents that occurred in her teenage years. Bad luck seemed to follow her wherever she ended up.

It was two and a half hours before we were done and she left. I had enough for my report; I wouldn't need to see her again. As she walked out the door, I wondered how she would fare. I got the impression that she didn't realise how heavily her past weighed upon her.

That night, I dreamt of my three daughters going through the ordeals that Rachel had faced, and imagined other bad things happening to them. I woke in fright and sat up in bed.
It's not really happening
, I told myself.
You're at home. It's 2006. The girls are safe in bed. You're dreaming it.

Was Rachel's story the worst case of childhood abuse I had come across? Maybe. But I'd heard so many bad stories over twenty years. How could I say which was the worst?

Something hadn't been right with me since the summer holidays in January. I hadn't bounced back after Christmas with my usual enthusiasm for work. Now I wondered if my physical response to Rachel's story was telling me something.

MY REGULAR YOGA
teacher, Flo, was hosting a weeklong yoga retreat in June. I decided to go. If I took some time out, I might find some answers to my malaise.

The retreat was held in an elevated wooden house nestled in rainforest, with an airy yoga space. After the first morning's yoga session, we all sat in a circle on the floor and spoke about why we had come. The themes were similar: stress, worry, grief, wanting to slow down, physical illness.