Rufus is a maverick psychologist who thinks there’s nothing wrong with hearing voices…
 

Ruth is a junior doctor hearing a voice telling her to kill Rufus…

 




 

 

 

Most doctors would say Ruth is a danger to herself and others, and have her sectioned.

Rufus is different. He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with hearing voices.

Rufus May is one of the most controversial doctors working in the NHS today.

He thinks all mental hospitals should be shut down, there’s no such thing as
schizophrenia and medication destroys lives.

He says we should learn to love mad people. He does.

He was mad himself once.

 

 


 

 

To protect Ruth’s identity an actor is used to tell her story and some details have been changed.

Everything you see with Ruth is based on original transcripts, recorded over twelve months.

Everything else is documentary footage, filmed as it happened.

 

 

Ruth RUTH WILSON    casting directors CROWLEY & POOLE      first assistant director MELANIE HESELTINE    art director DANIELA FAGGIO    costume designer IAIN MACAULAY   sound recordist MARY MILTON    production designer MATTHEW BUTTON    line producer NICK WADE    composer MAX DE WARDENER    camera JOHANN PERRY     film editor DAVID G. HILL    executive producers JANE FEATHERSTONE  KAREN WILSON    produced & directed by LEO REGAN

 

 

 

Guardian Unlimited TV & radio Nancy Banks-Smith


Television tends to hit you with a wrecking ball on Mondays. If they spread the misery out a bit, we could bear it better. Last night it was wall-to-wall madness.

The Doctor Who Hears Voices (Channel 4) was a true and terrifying story. When a junior doctor began to hear a voice telling her to kill herself and others, she turned to Rufus May, who had himself been diagnosed as schizophrenic as a teenager. He is now a clinical psychologist in the NHS and he talked her, walked her and even swam her through it, using his own experience instead of medication.

Rufus was his own manic self. The doctor was played by Ruth Wilson like a wild animal who might at any moment dash under a truck. Producer/director Leo Regan was a persistent and, sometimes, horrified gooseberry. And there was a fourth person, the voice, which wanted them all dead. The documentary and dramatised sections fitted together like clasped hands.

Ruth told her hospital she was suicidal and was immediately suspended. If she had she told them about the voice, she would have never worked as a doctor again. The most disturbing aspect of the film for me was the argument that mental illness is such a stigma, the mentally ill should conceal it at all costs. Even a traditional psychiatrist, the sort who wears a suit, said, "We tell them to shut up about it." Rufus himself would never have become a psychologist if he had admitted to his schizophrenia.

He is still, if not disturbed, disturbing, with galvanic gestures, dislocated language and a loud laugh which, he says, he cultivated deliberately in a mental hospital. The sort of person with whom you would hesitate to share a table at an all-night cafe. At times he and Ruth seemed to be mirroring each other, and Leo, hovering helplessly, said, "I'm beginning to worry about both of them."

Ruth conned her way through her first assessment and I commend her interview technique to you: "Shoulders back, good eye contact and, when they ask how you are, say 'Fine, how are you?'" But her progress was uneven and, once, she simply vanished. Leo said, "I know Rufus is thinking she may have killed herself. But he refuses to discuss it." Reluctantly and eventually, Rufus said, "By talking about it to camera I'm incriminating myself." However, Ruth reappeared and they worked out that the voice represented someone who had bullied her at school. The whole frightening switchback was sweetened with the sight of seas and trees and streams.

Ruth's final assessment at her hospital ("A whiff of the truth and her career is over") was successful, and Leo met her three months later, charming and composed, during a coffee break. She still heard the voice and treated it like a sleeping dog. "He's not the problem. If people find out, that would be the problem. I don't want to be disrespectful to him. We're in this together."

Rufus, too, gave the devil his due: "She's become a very strong person, resisting you. So, thanks!"

Questions buzz around your head like hornets. I am sure Ruth will be an unusually perceptive and empathetic doctor. With a bit of luck, not mine.

 

 

 

TELEGRAPH.co.uk

Last night on television:
The Doctor Who Hears Voices (C4)

 By James Walton

The Doctor Who Hears Voices (C4) re-introduced us to that quaint old figure so popular in the 1960s: the maverick psychologist. In this case, he was Dr Rufus May, who doesn’t believe schizophrenia exists, thinks there’s nothing wrong with madness anyway, and regards psychiatric drugs as a plot to keep the mentally ill in their place.

Last night we followed his work with “Ruth”, a hospital doctor suspended from her job after telling her bosses that she felt suicidal (although not that the suicide was being urged by a voice in her head which sometimes counselled murder too). For reasons that became obvious, the programme was keen to protect Ruth’s real identity – which meant she was played by an actress (Ruth Wilson) with May enthusiastically tackling the role of himself.

At first it looked as if we were in for the straightforward tale of a lone hero taking on the dark forces of the medical establishment. Fortunately, though, the result turned out to be much more complicated and interesting than that.

For one thing, May’s heroic status increasingly came into question. As a teenager, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia himself and still resented the way he’d been treated. Nor was it entirely clear he’d ever been cured – especially when he reacted to moments of crisis by laughing a lot.

Meanwhile, Ruth’s condition was getting worse. Without her medication, she decided that she was being followed by cars with her initials in their number plates. Even so, May stuck to his basic plan: that she should tell her hospital’s assessment board she was taking the drugs and generally feeling fine.

But then, just as you were ready to write him off completely, May did achieve some sort of progress – and not only because Ruth managed to fool the board and is now a doctor again. She still hears the voice, but apparently realises that she doesn’t have to do what it says. She can even speak of it quite fondly as a kind of exasperating old friend.

The programme definitely didn’t leave more orthodox methods looking like a great conspiracy – or May’s looking like the way forward in all cases. Nonetheless, by raising the possibility that some people with serious mental illness might be able to function pretty well, it did remind us that the long debate about how best to treat (let alone cure) madness is far from over.

 

 The Independant on Sunday

A dialogue with myself

When Ruth began hearing voices, she turned to a controversial drug-free therapy programme. Now, her story is told in a powerful TV film, says Jeremy Laurance
 

Ruth is a junior doctor like any other, facing daily decisions of life and death. More than a year ago, she became depressed and suicidal, was put on medication and suspended from her job. What she didn't tell her employers was that she had begun to hear voices. She thought she was going mad.

Most mental health specialists would at that point have said Ruth should be admitted to psychiatric hospital and treated with drugs, forcibly if necessary. Hearing voices is regarded as a key delusion that marks out the insane from the sane. But she feared that if that happened she might never be allowed to practise medicine again.

Instead, she consulted Rufus May, a clinical psychologist with the Bradford District Care Trust, who has become something of a celebrity in the mental health world for his radical approach to treatment. He agreed to treat her privately (waiving his fee) because she was from outside the trust area. She stopped her medication and together they began a six-month course of therapy, which included a mock fight in the street, getting half drowned in a stream, chatting in a tree and a visit to May's home.

Her therapy, and its conclusion, was minutely documented and has been recreated for a Channel 4 film, The Doctor Who Hears Voices, to be shown next week. An actress plays Ruth. The result is an extraordinary drama-documentary with a powerful performance by Ruth Wilson, known for her Bafta-nominated role in Jane Eyre.

The film challenges our notions of mental health and how to treat it. May doesn't think Ruth is mentally ill and rejects the idea of treating her with powerful antipsychotic drugs. Instead, he teaches her to talk back to the voices in her head, with the aim of identifying and getting a grip on them and ultimately coming to control them. The voices are abusive or derogatory – "You are a worthless piece of shit" gives a flavour. It's scary stuff; at one point Ruth reveals that she is convinced that a fish tank on the ward is controlling patients' heartbeats.

Would anyone be comfortable having a doctor who suffers such delusions in charge of their care? Or their child's? Watching the film, you have to wonder. Ruth has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and told she will be on drugs for the rest of her life – but Rufus May is convinced that she will make a good and safe doctor without them.

It is a high-risk strategy, which few psychiatrists would be comfortable pursuing. May has his doubts when Ruth goes missing for several days and he wonders if she's committed suicide. About 1,200 people with mental problems take their own lives each year, and another 50 kill someone else, many of them while not taking their medication.

May is no stranger to the risks. For a decade, he has run self-help groups for voice-hearers, where he supports a drug-free approach to treatment. He's softly spoken, thoughtful, yet he has a cheerfulness that disarms patients and professionals alike. (His trust has asked him to contribute a blog to its website, recognising his popularity with mental patients.)

He is himself a "recovered schizophrenic", diagnosed at 18, treated with drugs and told his problems would be lifelong. Having found a way back to health, he is committed to guiding others on the same journey and has become a leading advocate of drug-free psychiatry. At one point in the film he urges Ruth: "You can recover. Too many people have been lost. We don't want to lose you."

His nemesis in the film is orthodox psychiatry, represented by Trevor Turner, a consultant at Homerton hospital in east London. He is one of few conventional psychiatrists prepared to engage in this debate. Turner agrees that supporting patients to manage their voices is helpful – but it is not enough, he says. "No doctor would dream of saying, 'I am just going to treat the voices.' If I assessed there was a risk – and in this case 'Ruth' was talking about suicide and hearing voices and was out on the streets – I would definitely have taken action to protect her. If there was no other way, I would have battered down the door and taken her into hospital."

After a series of crises, Ruth finally has a breakthrough and is back on the road to recovery. The closing scene shows her sitting in a car outside the (disguised) hospital where she is back at work. May asks her if she is competent as a doctor. "Yes," she says. "He [the voice] is not the problem – it's if people find out, that would be a problem. The power balance has shifted."

Leo Regan, the director, who spent a year shadowing May, said his aim was to "challenge people's preconceptions about mental illness" rather than to promote one approach over another. "I think the debate between Trevor and Rufus raises some important questions and will provoke people to think a bit more deeply about how we treat people who hear voices."

Today, Ruth is still well and working. May insists that she would have fallen apart if she had lost her career. It was a high-risk strategy – some would say foolhardy – yet it apparently succeeded.

Rufus May's presence in the mental health system is a necessary irritant, a constant reminder that orthodox psychiatry needs to be more consumer-focused. But one cannot help fearing for the consequences if he pushes his approach too far.