‘The Mason Line’: An eye-opening experience
By Independent columnist Paul Nicholas Mason
I had a profoundly unsettling experience when I was 28 years old.
I’d just been given a full-time teaching contract at a prestigious independent school – and with only an Honours B.A. and no B.Ed., I was reinventing the wheel every night. My first wife and I had a 15-month-old, and we had just bought our first home.
Psychologists tell us that’s a fearsome combination of stresses.
Preparing lessons, marking papers, tracking 14 advisees, coaching my debating team and helping with the baby meant I rarely made it to bed before 2 a.m. – and that was when little Rachael usually woke up. I rarely got more than four hours sleep, more often three-and-a-half hours.
So my doctor prescribed “a mild sedative” known as “Halcion.” I took it gratefully.
The first night, I felt odd, which he’d warned me was possible. The second, I found it very hard to focus. The third, a Saturday, I came up from my basement study, sat on the living-room floor, put my arms around my knees, and gazed at my skin. It appeared to be crawling. The walls appeared to be closing in.
And I don’t mean that figuratively: My skin literally seemed to be crawling, the walls to be literally closing in.
I went to the emergency department around 3 a.m., and a psychiatric nurse admitted me to the hospital’s psychiatric facility. My roommate was an older fellow I’ll call Walter, who sat up when I came in and began yelling at the top of his voice: “Nuk, nuk, nuk!” And so it went for the next few hours.
My situation was delicate. I’d received my contract only months before, and private schools found it easy to dismiss teachers who failed to perform. So I negotiated to stay nights at the hospital, leaving to teach at 7 a.m. I returned home after school, helped with the baby, ate dinner, worked until 10:30 p.m., then went back to the hospital, finishing my marking under the watchful eye of nurses, who continued to give me Halcion.
After roughly six weeks I was allowed home – not a great deal better, to be honest – but fortified with anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds.
Skip ahead several years. I was watching the CBC National News when the anchor revealed that Halcion had been banned in the U.K. and Denmark because it caused psychotic episodes or hallucinations in two to three per cent of those who took it.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of that experience, and I wonder to this day to what degree it affected my body chemistry. It hasn’t stopped me from taking other medications since – which, given the depredations of cancer, is just as well – but it has made me anxious whenever I take a new drug, and I read the cautions very carefully.
Putting aside the trauma, I’m a little grateful to have spent time in a psychiatric ward. I saw firsthand the small kindnesses patients showed each other, and the patience of psychiatric nurses in the face of some patients urinating or defecating in the halls.
And I learned what it is to feel confused, vulnerable and almost hopeless – and unsure whether I would ever feel sane and whole again.
Paul Mason is a voice-, film- and television-actor, and the author of six novels, most recently To Our Graves and Sackville House.
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