In 2008, after his first child was born and before he was due to get married, Tom Lee began to unravel. It was as if, he explains in his fragile and unforgettable memoir, ‘some internal switch had been clicked or shorted, leaving my body and mind in a state of unrelenting and unsolvable emergency’.
The breakdown began in his body: tight headache, nausea, a stiffness in his hands so extreme he couldn’t hold a pen. Welts erupted on the surface of his skin; he ate only bananas, one half at a time. The discarded halves blackened around the house. He was unable to work or sleep; but these early weeks were what he calls the ‘phoney war, the pre-tremors of a coming earthquake’. Diagnosed by his GP with ‘acute anxiety’, he was prescribed the antidepressant Citalopram, which takes three or four weeks to kick in.
Meanwhile, a friend suggested he try a benzodiazepine tranquilliser called Ativan, which helps with anxiety. When it first came on the market in 1977 it was advertised by a rising sun bursting out from behind a dark mountain: ‘Now it can be yours: the Ativan experience.’ This sunburst was exactly how it felt. Tom rose from his bed, went to the kitchen and ate a sandwich. ‘I felt mellow, but not dozy – alert, clear-headed, my thoughts no longer running into and climbing on top of one another.’ The effect recalls Thomas De Quincey’s discovery of opium: ‘Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket.’ The Citalopram, meanwhile, did nothing, and the GP warned against Ativan, which Tom continued to source from his friend and take on the sly, as though it were a Class A drug.
When does a breakdown begin? Tom’s collapse in 2008 was preceded by tremors at university and again in his twenties, when he thought he had chronic fatigue syndrome. In 2005 his newly retired father was himself diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and spent the next five years in a wheelchair. Tom’s father had been in a wheelchair before, when, aged 28, he had a breakdown himself and was admitted to Severalls, the local psychiatric hospital, where he had insulin therapy, the latest quack treatment. This was six years before Tom was born. His mother’s breakdown, however, occurred when he was nine. She too was sent to Severalls. After her discharge she took the first of two overdoses. Tom’s parents went in and out of the building like figures in an Alpine weather house.
The doctor warned against Ativan, which Tom continued to take on the sly, as though it were a Class A drug
The Bullet is about family inheritance, mental health care in the post-asylum period and, specifically, the mysterious Edwardian institution set in 300 acres on the outskirts of Colchester. Every town has its ‘loony bin’, the House of Horrors that children joke about and teenagers break into with bottles of cider. Severalls, which once boasted the longest corridor in Europe (The Bullet contains a lot of estate agent-speak), has now been demolished and replaced by Kingswood Heath, ‘a stunning collection of one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom homes, set in an exceptional parkland environment’. A banner outside the ‘luxury’ development reads: ‘Helping dreams become reality.’
Unable to tour the hospital itself, Tom arranges to see the show homes and so poses as a yuppie in order to seem credible. On his first trip he is taken by a chilly agent called Alice to view a £460,000 four-bedroom property called ‘The Orford’, for which he is required to wear specially provided slippers. The compulsion to take a train from London to tour an aspirational starter home on the site where his parents disappeared when they lost their minds is so bizarre that Tom can hardly explain it to himself, let alone to his wife, and so he keeps these trips a secret. The precision with which he prepares for them, however, and the detail in which they are described, suggest a state near to hypnosis.
The GP who prescribed the Citalopram which didn’t work is the extent of the professional help Tom received when he was no longer able to function. It is the most any of us can expect – that is, if we get as far as seeing a doctor – and he is glad not to have been sucked into the system or banged up in a psych ward. But being warned against Ativan, which made it possible for him to sleep, eat, get back to work and be with his family, became a further, and unnecessary, motor for his anxiety. Why was it not prescribed to him? Opium was the hero of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Ativan is the hero of The Bullet. A strip should be included in every sale of this book.
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