Poppy Shakespeare Book

A tragi-comic satire on the mental health system in this country that pulls no punches. If you are going to write about mental health and mental illness you'd better not be an outsider writing about what you haven't experienced. Clare Allan is not an outsider, not at all. She spent ten years inside a variety of the mental health institutions of the 1990s and has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. In an interview she lists some of the things she has been diagnosed with:
"..paranoid psychosis, psychotic depression, developing schizophrenia, manic depression, major psychotic disorder and borderline personality - a list which she claims was "about as much use as covering a parcel with 'fragile' stickers.""
The lists of medication Allan has been on is equally impressive, including medications to counteract the effects of other medications. She explains the humour in the book by saying that:
"It was just a case of doing the patients justice. The longer I stayed there the more I realised how people use humour to cope with completely desperate situations."
The novel itself revolves around the Dorothy Fish hospital, and especially the day care units, whose attendees live in the run down council estates surrounding it. The story is told by N, who is tasked to show round a newcomer called Poppy Shakespeare. Unlike most of the denizens of the hospital Poppy is insistent that she is sane and does not want to be there. However she needs legal aid to help her prove she is sane and to get legal aid she has to be on "MAD money" (the term Allan uses for welfare benefits and she creates a complex system of assessment) and to get "MAD money you need to have a mental illness. This is the catch 22 the novel revolves around.
One of the characteristics of the book is N's narrative voice, it does not conform to any linguistic rules and punctuation and grammar are also casualties of N's distinctive train of thought. She starts the novel:
"I'm not being funny but you can't blame me for what happened. All I done was try and help Poppy out"
At a monthly assessment N is asked a question:
"Do you find it hard to make decisions? I seen the trap straight off: if I said I strongly agreed they could say I was lying on account of I just made one, and if I said I disagreed they could say there were nothing the matter. So in the end I gone with neither agree nor disagree."
Those who attend the day centre are called "dribblers". The sane are known as "sniffs" and full time residents who live on the higher floors of the hospital are known as "flops". The supporting characters can appear cartoonlike because of the names Allan gives them: Middle Class Michael, Astrid Arsewipe, Slasher Sue (so-named because of her self-harming), Brian the Butcher, Verna the Vomit (bulimic), Marta the coffin (so depressed that, "hearses used to toot her as they gone past down the street") and so on. This is close to the bone and would be unacceptable from the so-called normal but Allan pulls it off and her insights into the systems and its inhabitants make the novel terribly sad as well as funny. All of those involved with Dorothy Fish are desperate to stay there and not be discharged because it is the only life they know. However we are in the 1990s and there is a drive to improve outcomes and improve the system and so discharges begin to happen and those discharged are cast out with no support and often disintegrate. This I know to be true as in my work I still come across ex residents of some of these institutions. They are invariably socially isolated, often self-neglecting and have been totally abandoned by the state which is no longer interested in them.
This isn't a novel looking for sympathy for the mentally ill, it isn't a memoir or autobiography, but it is a satire on mental health policy. N is a spectacularly unreliable narrator, but she has some insight into her life and that of her friend Poppy. It illustrates many of the concerns of the recovery movement. It is easy to get sidetracked by the language but the message is a powerful one. As the quote from Chekov at the beginning says:
'Since prisons and madhouses exist, why, somebody is bound to sit in them'