If symptoms persist.. .
I WAS ON duty at the prison last week- end. All was calm and quiet: as I inspect- ed the kitchens (I'm still not quite sure what for), a rapist offered me the apple crumble for which he is famous through- out D wing. Just about edible when it leaves the kitchen, the crumble arrives in the wing as appetising as a ragout of old socks. As the French ask of good Scots porridge, 'Does one eat it, or has one eaten it?'
There were only two patients for me to see, so different yet so similar. The first, Bill, was a petty criminal whom the courts finally lost patience with and sent down for a long time. Apart from house- breaking, Bill has one interest in life: swallowing razor-blades. If he has done it once, he has done it a hundred times. I've given up asking why: he always says, 'If I knew that, doctor, I'd stop.' This, of course, is the central misconception of psychotherapy, a misconception which has filtered its way down into the under- world.
Of late, Bill has developed a new interest: pushing wires through his abdominal wall into what we doctors call his guts. There is now a suppurating fis- tula whose characteristics I shall not describe, except to say that they are aes- thetically unpleasing.
It is amazing how Bill can find a wire to push into himself, even when placed in a cell completely devoid of metal of any kind. I'm beginning to suspect the other prisoners smuggle wires to him: there's a black market for everything on the in.
Then there was Fred, a failed murder- er. Fred had come to the conclusion that everything was the fault of the orforities, and had therefore written to his former probation officer threatening — in almost Magwitchian terms — to kill him on his release from prison.
The governor asked me to do some- thing about Fred. I had a copy of the let- ter he had written before me, and it was enough to make one's blood curdle. (I refer, of course, to the orthography.)
'You, you basterd, did my hed in wen I was vunrable.' I confess that at this point I thought of the Vunrable Bede, who died in Jarrow in AD 776. Fred wrote that he would cut the probation officer's throat, but if he went to the police with the letter he would die a far more horri- ble death, by a means sure and lingering, but otherwise unspecified.
Among other allegations in the letter, Fred asserted that the probation officer had so done his head in that he had been reduced to swallowing razor-blades.
`How could he have done that?' I asked.
'Well, he's an orfority, isn't he?'
What wonderful totalitarians we British would make, I mused as I wrote my recommendation to the governor that Fred be prosecuted for uttering a threat to kill, contrary to some Act or other. How eager we are to ascribe our behaviour to others! I glanced in Fred's medical notes. The last entry was, 'Still has difficulty in making relationships.'
Theodore Dalrymple
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