Free From a Safe Distance by Julia Bishop

physically, so they have difficulty walking, eating, etc.” His torch goes out.
    â€œRight. Their thought processes are slow, too. In fact if the depression is extreme, they can go into stupor – I’m not going to talk about that right now – but in that state, they must be kept under observation.”
    The face of a young woman appears in the dark: “Would ECT be the treatment of choice for someone as depressed as this?”
    â€œIt depends on the individual circumstances, but I have seen patients who have undergone a remarkable recovery with ECT. The argument against it relies mainly on the fact that we don’t know how it works. But the same could be said of many of the medications we prescribe.”
    The students murmur. Then Mr Flint speaks, his round face like a moon: “What do you think about the stigma attached to mental illness?” Click.
    â€œIf people lost their jobs every time they had a cold, they would soon protest. But that’s what it can be like for people with a mental illness. When you think that one in four people at any given time are in the throes of a mental illness, you can see how illogical stigma is – it is born of fear and ignorance.”
    The darkness lifted and he was back in the attic. Fiery red and orange lines – that’s what he used to draw on the board in his talks to represent failure, prejudice and discrimination – they were the threat.
    He wrote:-
    â€œBecause of what we the onlookers might be feeling, it is easy to miss the fear – drawn as a ragged black blob underneath the rearing colours – which a patient experiences: I knew that Vee was terrified when she began to relapse. Mental illness, the glass box round all my drawings, is not seen as a struggle in the same sense as, perhaps, a battle against cancer.
    â€œBecoming ill is all about losing control, which is not the same as giving in. Vee never gave in, but she feared losing control: her black wave. In terms of hostile environments, however, teaching was lower down the scale than what was to come. Oh yes, it was going to get worse for Vee.
    â€œThen there was guilt. Guilt was an empty sphere in the corner of this picture, which could grow and fill like a balloon, but filling with lead, not air. And what about the fear of change, represented by a jagged blue line along the bottom? Vee had had plenty of change in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of that in itself. But at Squaremile, she was to discover that change is not always for the better. I know this from what Bella has told me. And another thing: even if it is welcomed, change entails stepping into the unknown.
    â€œFinally, as a result of her experiences at Squaremile, Vee’s belief that you were not worthy of love unless you had never failed at anything, academic or emotional, seemed tobe confirmed. So there is the ‘R’ stamp in the middle, obliterating much of the drawing. Reject”.
    Vee had been afraid of becoming ill, afraid of failure and afraid of love, each a part of losing control in some sense. But at the same time, ironically, she displayed great persistence. Someone else who knew the meaning of persistence was his darling Helen.
    As he glanced along his bookshelf and saw her photo, he remembered Edinburgh. The gusty wind reminded him of the city too. Helen was doing her nurse’s training, he was a brand new consultant, he’d only been there about six months, and they used to meet in a busy café. From the start, from their first encounter in Paris, he’d felt the rightness of it. His time in Lexby with Vee faded into the background, his love for her became dormant as Helen moved into the foreground.
    Any number of things might have prevented that first meeting, and yet here she was, Helen, wanting to be with him, sitting opposite him by the window. She was talking to him, pointing things out in the street, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying