Читать книгу Plunge Hill: A Case Study - J.M. McVulpin - Страница 9

Editor’s Preface

The lesson, such as it is, to be gleaned from what you are about to read is a stark one: beware fiction.

Bridget Shipley’s pathology was hidden, a bud that bloomed in darkness. While she diligently performed her administrative duties at Plunge Hill Hospital, she sank deeper and deeper into the quagmire of her own particular disorder – a disorder unnoticed by those around her, and tragically untreated by those who were best placed to help. Late last year, she took her own life. The gruesome and violent circumstances of her death have been widely reported and the prurient reader may consult the articles published in the gutter press for more detail at their own risk. I will not reproduce them here.

In the immediate aftermath of Bridget’s suicide, I heard rumours concerning a number of papers she’d left behind: letters, a diary, and handfuls of postcards. I confess that my initial sympathy swiftly gave way to professional intrigue: I imagined that these documents, if they existed, would provide a rare, direct insight into the flowering of a mania few professionals find themselves in a position to study. I immediately determined to locate them and construct a kind of case study from them. Bridget’s landlady, and later on, her parents, both supplied me with the material I asked for. You hold in your hands now the case study that resulted from my work.

It feels appropriate, while I detain you with these prefatory remarks, to stress that I did not know Bridget Shipley personally. This may surprise the reader, but any functioning hospital is like a heart, its chambers and ventricles sealed and separated from one another yet working in a co-ordinated and greater harmony. I cannot be expected to know precisely what takes place in the surgical theatres, the kitchens and the laundry rooms. I have never inspected the maternity wards and the dark art of gynaecology remains a mystery to me. My own ‘ventricle’, so to speak, affords a lofty view down the hill towards Plunge Hill itself, the small, charming village by which our hospital is – or was, I suppose I should say – fortunate enough to be located, and, as such, I have, during my time here, been provided with nothing in the way of direct insight into the workings of the typing pool, where Bridget spent her final weeks. Although she was not my patient, the Hippocratic Oath lead me to conceive of the notion of letting her papers lie unedited, hidden and unknown – as her suffering was during her life – as something tantamount to a kind of professional neglect on my part.

There is a further motivation for the present case study. News of Bridget’s tragic end – her body found in most vivid and unfortunate circumstances in the well-tended grounds of the hospital – could not escape my attention. I also became aware – in common with you, dear reader – of the fabrications and speculations about her final weeks. I feared – as did Dr Kapoor, my colleague and friend – that these stories not only slandered Bridget’s name, causing unnecessary pain to her suffering parents, but risked doing damage to the greater mission of Plunge Hill Hospital itself. I trust the reader will encounter in the present volume a curative to such salacious nonsense. Although, of course, in many ways it is now too late.

To return to my opening words of warning – beware fiction – it behoves me to expand. Many years of clinical experience have taught me this: manic and deluded patients, the ones who project their squalid obsessions onto the everyday, carve paranoid fantasises from unremarkable interactions and weave extravagant conspiracy theories from happenstance, who accuse those around them of the very lunacy from which they themselves suffer – well, frequently they can seem very credible. It is crucial to remember that. Freud reminds us, ‘from error to error, one discovers the entire truth,’ and my aim here is to present the web of Bridget’s errors so that we may advance together upon a more rarefied strain of truth: the intricate mechanics of a mangled mind.

Thus the case study in question is presented to you in the guise of a collage of reticulated documents which, assessed collectively, reveal a young woman traumatised by unresolved guilt and grief. They may assist us in developing therapeutic treatments and preventative measures in the future, perhaps. The ground-breaking form of this paper – presenting the patient almost entirely in her own words – has perhaps been the reason several less intellectually courageous editors have been unwilling to publish it. To the dusty, timid minds at Psychological Methods, The Clinical Psychology Review, Focus on Psychiatry and The Couch – many of whom I have been assured are esteemed Eden Book Society subscribers of long standing – I say this: read on for a taste of a brave new direction of our profession. Consider this slim volume my Grand Rounds – with young Bridget herself as present for questions as she is able to be.

Bridget Shipley – ‘Brix’ to her friends – was led tragically astray by her delusions of Plunge Hill, and yet this village is a place of peace and delight. I shall be sad to leave. Indeed, this tragedy has been a wide-ranging one, young Bridget’s death having ripple-like effects on almost everyone who made their home here, myself included.

The air is fresh and healthful around here, even in spite of the intrusive clouds of dust, propelled through the building’s interior by the wholesale removal of equipment and furniture which is currently taking place. Tradesmen are noisily packing up and taking away everything – I can hear them now in the corridor beyond my office door, voices and movement, a metal trolley clanging as boxes are piled onto it – yet when I open my window and breathe in deeply I cannot help but feel at ease, a sense that I am safe, here in my allotted upper ventricle of the hospital, no matter what may come. The end of Plunge Hill may be at hand, but the gardens are in fine fettle, and the rhododendrons are coming into bloom after their lengthy winter dormancy. My nanny always said their blossoms smelled like blood and honey. The frenzy and urgency of their fertility is invigorating.

J.M. McVulpin

Consultant Psychiatrist

Plunge Hill Hospital, Spring 1972