The call came at 4am. The voice was hoarse and feral. It was the way Luke often sounded when spiralling out of control. His father gripped the phone blearily.
"Dad, I've got bad news. I'm in the locked ward and ... you remember Stevie, that nice charge nurse? I ripped out his eye."
"God," his father said, jerking awake, "what ...?" The phone went dead.
The middle-aged couple in their bedroom scrambled for light switches and spectacles. A quick, frightened exchange: in 20 years of being sectioned, Luke had never been violent. His father dialled the hospital and asked for the IPCU - intensive psychiatric care unit. "No, Mr Drummond, Luke's not here. And nor's Stevie. He's on holiday."
His father called Luke's wife, Kath, waking her up. She hadn't heard anything either, but sounded shaky. The day before, Luke had swaggered into their flat with some papers, demanding that she countersign an agreement that would allow him to reopen his nightclub. She had refused: DJing often triggered a manic episode. Kath was the one unqualified blessing in Luke's life. She put up with him as long as he obeyed her basic rule: never walk out. But this time Luke had gone wild, packed a bag and left.
A day later, and still nobody had heard from Luke. His psychiatrist, Dr Boyle, seemed unconcerned. Yes, he'd been showing signs of hypomania - mild manic symptoms - but nothing serious. Somehow, Luke had managed to buy a car, and had been driving it, probably without road tax. But Dr Boyle said that he'd reprimanded him for this, and Luke had agreed to stop driving. It was a flagrant lie. After 15 years of treating him for bipolar disorder, Dr Boyle could still be manipulated by Luke's ability to disguise his manic persona.
This left Luke's wife and family suspended in a mental-health limbo. They knew he was high and getting higher. He'd been trying to open bank accounts, on behalf of a "friend" who had a bag of cash. Kath thought it was drug money. In the past, Luke had often pulled off the feat of talking bank managers into giving him business accounts for his club, running up tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt, which his family would struggle to cover.
Bank managers are similar to psychiatrists in one respect: they view family members who try to intervene as potential infringements to their clients' confidentiality. It had taken Luke's father years to persuade the banks to listen to his warnings. It was harder to persuade psychiatrists to do the same.
The government is proposing a rewrite of the 1983 Mental Health Act, granting greater powers to psychiatrists to enforce treatment and lock up patients. This opens up a two-way dispute between liberal groups fighting for patient rights and authoritarian ones demanding greater powers to protect the public. Neither side in the argument is particularly interested in what relatives of patients think. Families are a nuisance. They don't represent either the rights of the individual or the interests of the public. Who's to say they aren't manipulating the system - either to force relatives into hospital when they shouldn't be there, or to get them out when they should?
Luke's wife and parents just had to wait it out until he did something sufficiently dangerous - crash the car, get arrested for laundering drug money or start a fight. Then Luke himself called, fuming and demanding money. What was all the fuss? The story about Stevie's eye? That was just a joke.
His father arranged to meet him at his regular cafe, where the manager was getting nervous because Luke had been frightening off customers. "I look at you, Dad," Luke said, "and I can't believe how normal and boring you are. If I get my club going, I'll make more money than you could even dream of. But it's not about the money. I don't serve Mammon; I serve God. So, what do you want?"
"I want you to say sorry to Kath. And I want you to take yourself to hospital."
With lightning speed and terrifying strength, Luke grabbed his father by the lapels and crushed him against a wall. "I'm not going to punch you," Luke bellowed. "I'm not going to punch you!"
For the mental health services, a threat of violence is the trigger to action. Within 10 minutes of the call, the police had arrived and Luke was carted off to hospital under a section. He started in an open ward, but there was some kind of altercation in the hospital chapel and he was transferred to the locked ward. When Kath rang up to find out what had happened, the psychiatrist on duty would give her no details. She probably wouldn't understand; she was just his wife.
· Names and details have been changed.
