The British Journal of Developmental Disabilities                            

Vol. 44, Part 2, JULY 1998, No. 87,  136-139

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POINTS OF VIEW                 

BY THE BY: SONIA

Sonia is sixty-one and healthy. Fresh faced with fewer crows' feet than many women half her age. Dark brown springy hair. Always smartly turned out. Warm, direct, she speaks rapidly, smiles a lot. So what's special about her? In her opinion, nothing out of the ordinary. We disagree. We feel she is one of the most remarkable people we have met. Few know of her. Even if you make it to the end of this story you still won't know. Content enough to tell us about her family life, particularly about her son, John, and happy enough that we write it up, her one condition was that we use false names. Which is a pity. But, then, Sonia wants to stay anonymous.

The essence of the story is Sonia's strength of spirit against mountainous odds over a long period of time.

We begin with an article entitled "When the threat of insanity lurks on your doorstep" by Peter Dobbie in the Mail on Sunday (8 February 1998). Dobbie tells of a friend, a heavily pregnant woman who will with her husband moved into one of a row of semi-detached Victorian cottages in an English town, unaware that a paranoid schizophrenic man, sectioned three times under the Mental Health Act, lived alone next door. For days on end, weeks even, the couple heard nothing of him through the wall. No footsteps, heavy or furtive. No television. No radio. No clank of saucepans. No voices. Then probably hallucinating, he would erupt on to the street and threaten violence, "shouting to the skies". He wrote unintelligible warnings on his windows about the devil, told Dobbie's friend he was "the son of the supreme commander" and was protected from all evil. No wonder the terrified lady was trying to "save her sanity from his madness".

All the same, there is a wall between the couple and the demented soul next door. Sonia did not have even this meagre protection; there was dangerous insanity in her house and dangerous insanity on the doorstep.

At the age of seventeen Sonia married into a family which, unknown to her, was genetically booby-trapped. It's worth spending a minute or two on Figure 1.

Number 5 is Sonia's husband. A man with a schizophrenic illness and with a history of both alcohol abuse and physical aggression, he has several times been treated in a psychiatric hospital. There were three daughters, one of whom died in infancy. John is the only boy, born in 1970. He has a dual diagnosis, mild learning disability and psychosis. Like his father, he can be aggressive. he is a patient in this hospital.

One of Mr. Slater's sisters had a severe mental illness. Two of John's cousins committed suicide and a third died in mysterious circumstances. Other family members have a history of alcohol abuse. Chance has also been cruel. One of Sonia's grandchildren, a boy, was knocked down by a car and suffered head injuries which resulted in a "personality change" and impaired intellect. A nephew was shot dead at the age of twenty. Only months ago a brother-in-law of one of her daughters was shot in the neck and head - long term sequelae are likely to include deafness and impaired mobility.

Figure 1

The Slater Family: Father's Side

1. Epileptic
2. Heart Attack
3. Mentally Ill; Long-term psychiatric care; lobotomy; very aggressive
4. Alcoholic
5. Alcoholic; schizophrenia; several admission to psychiatric hospital; aggressive
6. Cancer
7. Left the country years ago - nil known

The insanity on Sonia's doorstep, not nearly as bad now as in the 1970s, was the civil strife. In those days, the Slater family lived at a particularly dangerous point on the "peace line" (a grotesque misnomer) in Belfast. Sonia is utterly convinced that the frequent rioting, fighting, injuries and deaths in the neighbourhood significantly exacerbated, if not directly caused, the mental problems of her husband and son. By a quirk of fate, and for reasons we need not go into, she has suffered at both Protestant and Catholic hands. Whether that explains her almost benign, stoical views about both camps, we don't know. Maybe she was always immune to the toxic bigotry virus. In relating incidents, she did not once sketch on the background of the local street troubles and would not be drawn on it.

Families living in poor, sprawling estates on the mainland fear hooliganism, vandalism, robbery and muggings. They wait for a brick to smash through their window. Then, perhaps, the sound of a Beavis and Butthead snigger and of footsteps running away. They are afraid, especially if they are elderly or disabled, to go out in twilight or in dark. Dopeheads living from fix to fix do not worry unduly how they raise the money they need each day. We do not for one minute play down the nature of the severity of these community fears. But we do stress that Belfast street fears of the awful 1970s were on a different plane. The Slater family, like many others, was afraid their home would be torched. They were afraid of the bullets of murder gangs. They were afraid of bombs.

Sonia recalls cold twinges of apprehension on seeing an unfamiliar car glide past her; a stranger gazing at her house from across the street; a parcel on her doorstep; muffled figures at night walking quickly and silently from pool to pool of street lights. there were murder threats: screamed at her during tribal conflict; whispered to her as she walked to the shops; phoned to her from the ether in the small hours by voices steeped in hate.

At about this time, still in the early to mid 1970s, she began to realise that there was more to her husband's aggressive behaviour than drink. Even when sober he was increasingly erratic and unpredictable. With a good head and practical hands he could do any job in the building trade; brick laying, plastering, joinery, plumbing, wiring, painting and decorating. getting a job was easy. Holding it was becoming more difficult. He could not concentrate. He was preoccupied with bizarre ideas. At home he was undependable. He was not interested in the children. Then came his first admission to a psychiatric hospital where schizophrenia was diagnosed. It was also dawning on Sonia that John, their son, was slow in developing. For help she turned to her daughters and to this day is grateful for all their support and encouragement.

One night when Sonia and John were in the house on their own, two hooded men burst in, brandishing guns. They had come, they said, to put a bullet through her husband's head. After a while, persuaded that she was telling the truth, they left, but threatened to return. Mr. Slater was in a local shebeen. On returning home he "wrecked all round him", something he did frequently. As Sonia told us more than once, she feared for his safety when he was out, feared for herself when he was in. On another occasion, during rioting, tear gas canisters went off near her front door - she was convinced she and the children would choke to death.

However, the two incidents which Sonia believes most affected the family, especially John, were still to come. Late one night, sensing something was amiss, Sonia rose from her bed and went downstairs, there to find that her husband had slashed his wrists and cut his throat. He was rushed to hospital and survived. In the other incident, Sonia and John were caught up in street fighting and saw a man being shot dead and several others badly injured. John was to talk about these events for long afterwards.

John attended a school for "slow learners", then moved to what is now the equivalent of an SLD school. Sonia claims that because of the insanity within and without the house, John reversed day and night - he slept for long periods while at school, stayed stubbornly awake at night. An enthusiastic member of local youth clubs, he was awarded a trophy by one for good attendance. In other respects too, he seems to have been a typical youngster: when conditions allowed he played in the street with other children and was well liked; he developed a keen interests in pop music and followed the evanescent fortunes of the Top Ten; he liked trendy clothes. At the age of sixteen, however, he became increasingly solitary and aggressive. Following a somewhat bizarre incident in which he tried to strangle himself and drank paint, he was admitted to our hospital. On recovering, he went to live in a hostel in the community and fared well for quite a long time. But his condition deteriorated and he was re-admitted to hospital.

The picture at present is this. Mr. Slater still needs in-patient treatment from time to time - he was last discharged from hospital some eighteen months ago. When in the family home he lives the life the life of a recluse in his room on the first floor. Living in the community, certainly, but not part of it. Neither benefiting from it, nor contributing to it. He rarely ventures out. Often he sleeps through the day, paces through the night, chain-smoking. Sonia accepts that, in one sense, he has stabilised, pro tem at least, on his drug regime. He is not physically aggressive. He has stopped drinking. For this much she is very grateful. But she is bewildered by what she sees as a profound change in her husband, from irrepressible tearaway to silent, agitated anchorite.

She recognises more quickly than any professional the tell-tale signs of deterioration in her husband. Apparently, his eyes start wandering, he appears confused, his pace to the end of the room and back quickens. Sometimes "it takes the ambulance and the RUC to get him into hospital".  Drugs "keep the lid on him", but every now and again "he boils over".

In our hospital John has over the last year or more also tried to retreat to his room. To shut everybody out, including his mother. Sonia visits him three times a week (covering more than ninety miles in all), bringing with her music tapes, books, magazines - all the things he once greatly prized. On particularly bad days he refused to leave his room to see her, grabbed the bags from her hand when she appeared at his door, told her to leave immediately. As often as not, he smashed and tore the presents. When she tried to reason with him, to help him open the presents, he retaliated by kicking her. He also went for staff.

Getting him to walk the few steps to the toilet and shower areas is often difficult. At least twice a day, weather permitting, he is taken to the ward courtyard so that staff can clean his room. Agitated and impatient he circles the yard endlessly in a rolling walk, banging on windows and demanding to return to his room. At present we are carrying out a simple behavioural programme to encourage him to leave the ward for increasingly long periods of time - minutes to start with, now nearly an hour each time. Touch wood, it's going alright at the moment.

Not to make too gooey a point of it, Sonia dotes on her son. She realises, of course, that there are striking similarities between his behaviour and that of her husband. But she fondly remembers John's "good days" when he lived at home and later in a hostel, when he went on holidays, telephoned her, asked about the family, bought them presents. She is convinced, and who can gainsay her, that the good days will return.

So that Mr. Slater can have his cigarettes, meals and clothes, and that John can have his thrice-weekly presents, Sonia works long hours. She provides home help for about a dozen elderly people. She owns a small shop, helps out behind the counter. Because of the inherent instability of the husband's side of the family, she has for many years played a prominent part in their times of crisis and aftermath. However, she is reticent about her role there, preferring to talk about, and to help, John. She is coming up from Belfast to see him this afternoon at four o'clock. We like talking to Sonia Slater for the somewhat selfish reason that our own problems shrivel up and disappear.

By way of a postscript, each of us wants to add our own personal comments.

Lorraine: I expected that at points in her story Sonia would falter, let her eyes mist over, ask how God could possibly have allowed her to be put under such incredible pressure. For my part I thought I would hear her out, with sympathy, empathy and courtesy. There wasn't a trace of self-pity in Sonia. She didn't falter. She smiled a lot and rattled on. It was me, the professional, who cried after she'd gone.

DNM: I'm bout five times as old as Lorraine and I've seen it all. Naturally, I didn't break. I just swallowed and swallowed till my throat hurt.

We would like to thank Margaret McKeen, Mary Drain and Edna Clarke for all their help in preparing this script.

D N MacKay and Lorraine Erwin
Muckamore Abbey Hospital,  Co. Antrim.