When Thinking Replaces Fear

visited a mental hospital to make a television documentary. Here he describes how his attitude to mental illness underwent a radical change as a result of working with the patients There are to most people certain aspects of life which they never really think about. When these subjects are mentioned in their presence the brain operates like a tumbler lock. Click, click, click?the trigger-words operate the mechanism, and up come the images formed by half-truth, propaganda, prejudice, fear. Unscrupulous men have known since the world began how to exploit this human capacity for substituting inaccurate impressions for real thinking. 'Mental hospital' was one of these subjects to me, so that when television director John Gibson rang me to say he wanted to make a documentary film inside such an institution and would I help him, I felt a vague apprehension which hardened into real uneasiness when he later suggested a modus operandi. This was that I should meet a group of patients, help them to write a short play and rehearse them in it for performance before the cameras. I wasn't expect-Mother on the other days of the week, but I did wonder how much real communication would be possible and what kind of play we could produce and show to the viewing audience, that wasn't a grotesque charade of mental disorder. All this embarrasses me now. It would have embarrassed me more at the time, had I not kept most of it to myself and found myself playing the role of the semi-initiated man in quelling similar doubt and uneasiness in the technicians, when we met to get to know one another before shooting started. One thing which I knew, and which they quickly came to know, was that we could rely on John Gibson's judgement and integrity. We were there to do as honest a job as we could, and we intended neither to violate anyone's dignity nor disturb their privacy (which didn't protect us from being accused of voyeurism by one newspaper reviewer when the programme was eventually shown). It is the more sensational aspects of mental disorder which are beloved of scriptwriters and form the fodder for countless films, books and television plays. The loose-lipped, vacant-eyed member of a local family, varying in the degree of his idiocy, is a feature of many working class childhoods. He turns up in Alan Sillitoe's The Decline and Fall …