From Mad in the UK: The context of this piece is me, my own experience and only that. I approach it through a lens shaped early by my childhood visits to the large psychiatric hospital where my father worked – a place where I had no meta-position and was playfully intruding in a sanitised world of people grouped together by virtue of what were described as ‘mental illnesses’ or ‘mental handicaps’. I knew, of course, that the people I met – young and old, chatty and silent, understanding and confused, stiff and fidgety, had nothing in common with each other but I dismissed the incongruity as we do, when this is all we know.
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