It's traumatic enough to be "sectioned" once. But imagine being confined to secure units on five occasions - the first time while you're still at school.
That's what happened to John O'Donoghue between the ages of 16 and 30 as he succumbed to bipolar disorder following a succession of emotional knocks, starting with the death of his father, his mother's breakdown and his move into foster care. Along the way, he endured three doses of electroconvulsive therapy - in one instance, lapsing into such a catatonic state before the electrodes were attached that he was given the last rites.
O'Donoghue recounts these and other ordeals in Sectioned: A Life Interrupted, an alternately harrowing and blackly comic memoir of his 14-year odyssey through the mental health system. It is published this month by John Murray - the 250-year-old imprint whose early "discoveries" included Lord Byron and Jane Austen - after it narrowly pipped Granta in a tight bidding war.
Why were publishers beguiled by the book? For starters, it is crammed with picaresque vignettes. Besides his spells in asylums, O'Donoghue recalls sharing dorm space at a St Mungo's hostel in London with a hepatitis-ridden former bouncer, in his boho squatting days, and a stint on Pentonville prison's hospital wing after being caught shoplifting when his benefit claim was botched.
He describes Sectioned, half-jokingly, as a "homage to catatonia", but adds that, having set out to write a therapeutic essay, he soon realised he was addressing bigger themes - the demise of a paternalist welfare state and the dawn of a new "self-help" era, characterised by the closure of psychiatric hospitals.
"To start with, I wanted to make sense of my own experiences," O'Donoghue says. "Then I realised what had happened to me had also happened to almost everybody I knew. At one point in the 80s, nearly all my friends had trouble with jobs, housing and, in some cases, mental illness."
Sectioned, however, ends on a sunnier note. In 1988, aged 30, O'Donoghue moved out of sheltered housing into a wholly contrasting environment at the University of East Anglia, where he spent four years reading for a literature degree. Academia proved his saviour, propelling him through an MA and PhD into lecturing and a flourishing parallel career as a writer of poetry and plays.
Now 50, married with four children and settled in Brighton, his life is transformed. But he wants Sectioned to speak up for the less fortunate souls still rotating between acute wards and the streets. As he says: "There's a psychiatric merry-go-round out there. But it's neither merry nor, often, all that psychiatric."
