Peter Greville 14.7.1930 – 4.10.2012

Peter Greville, Photographer, Drummer, Granpa

 

 

The following piece was originally written by Janie Greville as her contribution to the Conference for World Mental Health Day held at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, on 10.10.2012.

“I would like to use this opportunity to say a few words about Hope and Communication in the course of our lives – and in the lives, particularly, of those journeying within the medical health and care services.

In my years of experience as a person suffering a diagnosis of a ‘severe and enduring mental illness’ and suffering distress related to such labelling, I have had reason to focus on the concepts of Hope and Communication in the provision of Mental Health Services. It has only been the experience of accompanying and watching my father suffer and then die, however, that has opened my eyes to the pivotal role that these two dimensions of care play in health care as a whole.

My father was unexpectedly bereaved seven years ago. Perhaps had anyone noticed he had lost his wife and was running mad with grief a more humane approach to him would have produced a happier – and indeed cheaper – outcome for all concerned.

Sadly, in consequence of a health crisis some thirty five years earlier, his abandonment terrors, his separation anxieties, his intensely anxious and agitated response to loss (a double loss, as his small much beloved dog died soon afterwards), his loneliness, his loss of raison d’être as his wife and dog’s carer – were all misinterpreted and  medicalised.

The unfortunate, not to say tragic, outcome of this error led to my father spending the last six and a half years of his life locked up in a psychiatric hospital, bewildered by his imprisonment, effectively gagged by his label, rendered  powerless in almost every regard and frankly.

He simply didn’t receive the compassionate care and support he needed to acknowledge and deal with his devastated feelings in relation to the loss of his wife.

Yet – every member of staff I met had moving humane love for my father; his care was far from devoid of tenderness and kindness. It was simply that no one had the lenses to see the appropriate context. So much got lost in translation that my father may as well have been speaking Japanese – indeed, at least if he had been talking Japanese a translator could have been called!

These reflections follow ten days of acute concern over my father’s physical health before he died with unexpected rapidity following what could be regarded as a small but significant treatment error. Interestingly, since losing his ‘Nth’ tribunal in February this year, and losing hope along with it, he lost his physical voice. My aunt and I spoke to the staff and were consistently reassured that his whispering wasn’t grounded in physical causes. He never got beyond a whisper again.

He was diagnosed with advanced and terminal cancer of the lungs and throat on 28^th September and died quietly in the nearby general hospital a week later.

Presumably the death certificate will mention throat and lung.

What killed my father, however, I suggest, was such a prolonged and unalleviated period of voicelessness, powerlessness and most of all, growing hopelessness that he simply no longer wanted to live.  Cancer was merely the vehicle for his escape, its specific placing the poetic expression of his unmet needs.

NB This was written on Monday 8th October in a wave of grief and shock over my father’s death. I shall probably reflect upon and extend it in due course. For now, however, it contains much that I think whilst omitting much additional qualification and additional layering that would alter some of its impressions.