When she conducts training sessions with police or ambulance officers, Janey Antoniou makes them listen to a soundtrack of babbling, jeering voices while she asks questions such as, "What's your postcode?" Most muddle their replies, and even experienced professionals sometimes tear off their earphones, visibly disturbed. Then she'll ask, "How long do you think you could hear all that and live a normal life?"
The point of the exercise is to help officers handle schizophrenics intelligently; and the experience Janey replicates is her own. She hears voices all the time, sometimes whispering, sometimes yelling. They are not merely an exaggeration of the interior mental chatter most of us live with: "The voices I hear come through my ears," she says, "they're not like thoughts."
Since her early 20s, she has lived with six or seven distinct characters; even now, as a 50-year-old scientist and mental health consultant, she can't bear to describe them precisely (though she does liken one to the tortured figure of Caliban in Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books). "They're so horrible," she says. "If I start describing them, I start listening. And then you'll lose me."
Janey had her first brush with mental illness aged seven, when she became overwhelmed by a despair she recalls clearly as being the same as a clinical, adult depression. It returned in her mid-teens, when she was a bell-ringer for her local church in Reading, and she tried to hang herself from one of the ropes while the choir sang, "Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee..." She was stopped when the tower captain stumbled on her by chance; the incident was hushed up.
Her parents scarcely noticed what was happening. Her father was consumed by his work as a particle physicist at Aldermaston, the headquarters of the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment, and the family was raised under the injunctions of the Official Secrets Act. If there was a feature of her upbringing Janey feels contributed to the development - though not the cause - of her illness, it was the way discussion of private, personal matters wasn't countenanced.
The psychiatrists she saw, at home and university, variously misdiagnosed her, partly because they were never around long enough to observe her properly and partly because Janey didn't know how to admit to her experiences. Qualifying as a molecular biologist from Sussex University, she married a fellow scientist and worked with him in America for three relatively happy years, then returned to lab work at Northwick Park hospital in London. It was here that she suddenly saw a little black devil in the coffee room. Hurling a cup at it in terror, it was as if the cover of her schizophrenic symptoms had been blown.
The visual hallucinations Janey has endured have been easier to handle - more fleeting and changeable. But the voices have remained fixed, belonging to some deeper mental structure, like an unacknowledged government department. The insults and commands she has heard have been powerful enough to make her jump off Westminster Bridge into the Thames, walk down railway lines, and attempt suicide several times. Yet it was only after a slip of the tongue in her late 20s, when she told a close friend what "they" had said, that it occurred to Janey she should mention the voices to a psychiatrist. Why had it taken her so long?
"You don't talk about it," she says. "That was my explanation. They didn't officially exist."
Janey may in the past have filtered her experience through the secret realm of her father's work, but it would be impossible to see him as the cause - to reduce to mere psychology the fusion of auditory and cognitive functions represented by her voices. Once she had acknowledged them, she received a diagnosis of schizophrenia and, for her, this has meant excluding the possibility of children. "I am a geneticist, after all," she says. "I know the statistics, and I wouldn't put anyone else through this."
Nevertheless, she does sometimes wonder if there might be psychological resolutions to a neuro-chemical drama. The Hearing Voices Network, for example, persuades schizophrenics to listen to their voices and argue them out. "It might be worth it in the long- term," Janey says, "but it might also send me mad. I'm too afraid to do it. Wouldn't you be?"
Her method of coping is to dampen the voices with medication and refuse to engage - except, with extraordinary eloquence, in the work she does to help other people understand. And she still sings in a choir, even though pieces such as Elgar's Dream Of Gerontius can unleash her all-too-real demons. "It may make me break down," she says, "but I love it."
At this, her face knots up briefly, as she wills them to go away.
