The Retreat

Bless the National Health Service and the good that it does for the people of the UK but for me the 18 or so hours I spent in St Lukes hospital just added to the hell I was going through!

The ward I was in was full of mental patients that I found impossible to cope with. My bed was next to a man's who laid on it all of the time and just stared into space. His hair and nails were uncut to a such a point that he looked more like an animal.

Other patients were rambling on about Satan or continually trying to scrounge cigarettes - my confusion and paranoia increased by the minute. 

When my wife arrived I immediately begged her to get me admitted to a private hospital as I was a member of a Personal Health Scheme via my work. She said that she would do her best and then had to leave as visiting time was over. So I spent a horrendous night in the house of surrealism (or so it seemed at the time).

The next morning arrived and my wife turned up with my sister-in-law and told me that she had arranged for me to be admitted to a private clinic in York but that I had to be taken there as soon as possible. And so I was driven to The Retreat - affluent, depressives social club in York where I was to spend 6 weeks getting my head back together.

The Retreat is part of a larger hospital but the majority of the building is given over to National Health psycho's of whom I only met one - The Right Honourable ***** ****** ****** *****, The 3rd Baron of ********! And he was because I checked it out a couple of years later.

My time in York was very peaceful which proved to be the major factor in my recuperation.
I did get to see a psychiatrist for 15 minutes every weekday but these sessions proved to be totally useless. It is my humble opinion that The Retreat was a special club for the bored upper class! The psychiatrists were purely there so that the patients had someone to talk to.
Yet I did see one club member with serious depressive problems. This lady was a doctor in her thirties and she had agreed to have a few thousand volts shot through her head!
I can still remember the screams followed by the sight of an empty-minded individual being wheeled away from the treatment room in a wheelchair. Wow!

In the six weeks I was there I found that the most useful people to talk to were the other patients and a male nurse who covered the night shift.
We had many interesting conversations late into the night while we waited for the sleeping pills to take effect.

The other major factors in my recovery from despair was the peace and tranquillity that The Retreat offered.

It gave me the opportunity to calm down and take stock of my life. I had reached rock bottom and this gave me the time to pick myself up and start to climb back to normality. I have not been the same again though as you will read in this account.
And so after the six weeks elapsed I returned to the real world and my family.