Closing Valkenberg hospital would involve a sacrifice by the people least able to bear it, writes Lin Sampson
Valkenberg: one alights rather than arrives on its pulsating terrain, as if on another planet. It is an eccentric place, a hovering satellite of hope and despair, dishevelled in part, but with pretty gardens that stretch down to the river, known by patients as “the waterfront”.
At 9.30am in Dr Baumann’s office the place seems sane, but there is the knowledge that all around are lives in disarray. Indeed, a cursory look from the window reveals a head clutched despairingly in a pair of hands. It turns out to be a worker taking a break from building. That has always been the problem in these places: telling the patients from the staff.
Baumann is clearly practised in the art of disguised firmness, and it does not escape notice that he gets his way by a charming slight of hand. However, the proposed closing down of Valkenberg has brought his firmness to the fore.
“One major cause of our outrage is that the closing of this hospital represents to us a massive step back, an alienation of people suffering from mental illness. Also Valkenberg must be seen in the broader context of health services in the Western Cape. The closure of the busiest and most accessible of hospitals will do irreparable harm to the non-governmental organisations in the area which form such vital links with the hospital.”
The plan is to tour the hospital and talk to patients and visiting ex-patients. Here is Marc Vervitsiotis who brings his blue eyes close to mine and whispers: “Have you ever had the torments?”
He is of Greek descent, a vivid character who suffers from severe mood swings. He trained as a hairdresser, but has spent 16 years of his 37 years in and out of Valkenberg.
For nine years Vervitsiotis never left the place. He has now been living in a Salvation Army hostel for a year and has come in specially to talk to me. He is well-built and carries a haversack bulging with books on Jesus, one of which he gives me as a parting present, signing it with a flourish.
He tells me that over the years he has tried to obliterate himself in every way known to man. Once he hurled himself at a car on the N2. He has cut his wrists and set his bed on fire.
However, today he seems very much alive. When I ask him how old he is, he says: “Thirteen snails. A snail lives for three years, so I am thirteen snails. You are probably 14 snails,” he guesses.
Vervitsiotis thinks his illness might have started when he got involved with some occultists. (I was to discover that most people pinned the onset of their illness to a specific event.) The occultists took him to the beachfront in Hermanus where he watched the full moon come up.
“It got bigger and bigger in my head and all the planets started moving at tremendous speed and I imagined everything was on top of me. It was mind-blowing,” says Vervitsiotis. It sounds like the sort of experience a few people I know would spend a couple of bob to have.
He believes Valkenberg hospital saved his life. “I feel I have spent 16 years fighting for my sanity.You know when you’re ill, everywhere is awful, but I knew I had to be here. If I wasn’t here I would have killed myself.”
He says he is now able to cope with life in a better way and has even thought about getting a girl friend. “I was married for three-and-a-half years and I never spoke once. I just wept. I didn’t know what I was weeping about but the tears were just streaming down, for the broken-ness of it. Ah, and my wife didn’t know what to do, a girl with big cheeks. She really loved me that girl.”
It is 2pm at Ward 14, acute male admissions, Baumann’s special turf. It is as strange a place as you might ever connect with, the rumbling engine room of mental illness. By the end of the day there will be 25 admissions, many of them re- admissions in what Sister Edith Smith, who has worked at Valkenberg for 16 years, calls “the revolving door” of mental illness.
There is a mural of Table Mountain on the wall and the curtains have been donated by Biggie Best. But, without wishing to be unduly cynical, the patients in Ward 14 seem a little beyond interior decorating.
A lot of people are lying on the floor like the wrangled remains of a car accident. “Hi doc,” one pipes up. A male nurse puts on Duran Duran, enough to drive anyone bats, and narcosis hovers in the air.
Outside in the garden people sleep. “I think if people are to get well it is important to be in a nice place,” Baumann says.
Strangely,Ward 14 is not a frightening place. The atmosphere is casual, almost homely. Smith says most of these people will get better – at least for a time. As I leave a man puts his arms around me and says: “Bye Di.”
Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Jesus and Nelson Mandela often feature at this hospital. At one time there were three Nelson Mandelas in one ward. But if a statue were to be erected it would probably be to Peter Stuyvesant. Smoking is an art form here.
As we move through wards, the most noticeable thing is the thesaurus of gaits – people click, slouch, clomp, scuttle along.
In the neuro-clinic Belinda Conradie (27) and Monica Mtwecu (23), both of whom have been in and out of Valkenberg for years, have arisen out of depression to launch their own amazingly vociferous resistance to the closing down of Valkenberg.
Conradie, who declares herself to be Bi- polar Two (a type of manic depression), says: “I think mental illness makes you vulnerable and open to abuse. I have decided I do not want to be a victim. I feel that as patients we have to say that this is enough. We do not want this hospital to close.
“When I came to Valkenberg a few weeks ago they could not admit me [the hospital was full], so I was referred to Lentegeur in Mitchell’s Plain, which turned out to be an acute lock-up.I know one thing for sure: if Valkenberg closed and I became severely depressed, I would not return to Lentegeur. I would rather kill myself.” This is not a threat to be taken lightly.
Mtwecu says she does not like the idea of Lentegeur. “It is too far away. My family do not like to go there. We know this place.”
In Ward 8, Marilyn recalls the days of living in Hollywood Hotel, Port Elizabeth, with Prince Charles – a union, if I am getting the gist of the conversation, that produced not one, but two sets of sextuplets.
Her friend Jacoba nudges me: “Don’t listen to a word she says.”
In a way these delusions are easiest to bear, way beyond repair, and including something many of us single women on the outside lack – your own man banged up right next to you.
Jacoba has Lionel with whom she has been going steady for 30 years.
Marilyn’s Ian is trundled in as she whispers urgently: “I am terribly in love with him.” Ian seems to be into smoking in such a serious way that even the thought of love is secondary.
As we leave Jacoba tugs my sleeve: “Please lady don’t close this hospital. It is my home.”
At the end of the day I feel overwhelmed by this tide of human intricacy. Valkenberg exists in our midst as a hospital and a symbol: “You’ll end up in Valkenberg” has ricocheted across the Western Cape for decades.
And, in fact, I did end up there for a hallucinatory few weeks with anorexia. Of course, I witnessed tragedies. There was a girl who received messages via the wall plugs and was always standing beside a three-prong.
Perhaps I was lucky, they all revived. The girl who talked to plugs became a land surveyor.
Valkenberg is a place that is a shining light for many – like Gareth Davies (35), a paranoid schizophrenic who now lives in Abri, a community-care house in Observatory.
If Davies’s medication goes awry, life can be hazardous. Only the week before he threw a dumb-bell through a TV screen. “In the beginning it was quite scary to go to a mental hospital. Now Valkenberg just over the way seems like a light I can see from here.”
At the top of the main Valkenberg building is a room where brown paper files allotted to each patient have piled up, each representing some unique set of circumstances.
Here psychosis, neurosis, murderous intent and broken-heartedness, together with splendiferous names of medication, the padded cell, the gril of shock treatment, all blend to form an intimate narrative.
There is much courage in the world, most of it never seen. However, more than anywhere else, the history of a mental institution represents the history of a place.
Valkenberg, like many good hospitals, is part of a heritage many of us would like to keep in good running order – just in case.
A cousin of mine, reading for a masters in mathematics,was recently jolted from the smoothness of suburbia into an acute psychotic phase that entailed a three month’s hospital stay, way beyond the income of his divorced mother.
On two visits to Professor Frances Ames in 1991 at Out Patients, I saw Trevor Manuel, now finance minister, sitting between two policemen, probably getting a break from prison. But still.
Although the uniqueness of the hospital has been preserved in articles and documentaries, its blend of success is as fugitive as the sudden onset of madness.
Valkenberg has doctors of a calibre you might spend your life trying to find in the national health system in Britain, and nurses – sadly many recently took a retrenchment package – who retain a sense of vocation.
Whatever is wrong with Valkenberg – and I suggest there might be quite a lot – it is certainly not a hospital without hope.
Patients who are certified, or have been in the hospital for a long time, are not allowed to have their surnames used