Karen

I started going out with Karen when I was seventeen and we were together for only six months. I can't remember where I met her although I do remember that, although I was very fond of her at the beginning, by the end I was just using her house as a place to stay away from home - it was just the two of us there since her mother would spend her time at her boyfriend's.

I am surprised that we were together. Karen was a pretty, shy, insecure, homely and unimaginative girl. She lived on the rough Oxmoor Estate since her parents had split up, something which embarrassed her, and she was always explaining that she was used to living in a 'posh' house. She was addicted to tedious Australian television soap operas and I was forever having to sit through episodes. One day, after a couple of weeks of wanting to tell her that we were not suited, I took the opportunity of expanding the plot line of the edition of Home And Away that we had just watched to express my feelings. She could not believe that so-and-so and so-and-so had just split up but I explained that so-and-so felt the same way that I did.

At first she thought I was joking, then she started screaming, then she tried to hit me a few times and then she ran to the kitchen, shouting that she would take her life with a kitchen knife. I chased her, grabbed her, we fought over the knife for a while, she squirmed free and ran to the toilet, locking herself in.

"I'm going to overdose on pills" she announced, sobbing. I knew that it wasn't sincere and said so to her, I told her that she was just living her life as though it were a soap opera, and then I told the 999 operator too. I had to telephone an ambulance just in case because Karen had claimed that she had cut her wrists, although I knew that she probably had not. She had not.

Her bluff had been called when they announced, on the hospital bed, that they would pump her stomach. You could tell from the look on her face that she hadn't counted on that. I suppose that Karen maintained that she had swallowed pills, although it was proved not to have been the case, so as not to lose face.

A while later and a registrar consultant psychiatrist took me to one side. She expressed her desire to section Karen and have her placed in Broadmoor Hospital. I lived near Broadmoor, in Bracknell, around the age of ten. Occasionally a siren would sound to alert the local population to the escape of a potentially dangerous patient. I thought that the place was in existence to house the criminally insane but, the psychiatrist explained, there was a low security, a 'normal', wing there also. I told her that she was crazy to want to follow such a course of action, it would ruin Karen's life, Karen was impressionable and would act the role of mental patient so well that she would become one, and, besides, the whole thing had been a charade. The young psychiatrist listened to what I had to say and rejected it, declaring Karen to be a neurotic and a danger to herself and others.

I went to my car and retrieved some psychology tests that I had set Karen only a couple of days earlier. In my A level class we had been discussing Eysenk's personality test where each question relates to one of three axis; extroversion, psychoticism and neuroticism. I showed the psychiatrist the four tests that Karen had completed, scoring very low with respect to neuroticism (and the other two traits also) and this actually swayed her opinion and Karen did not visit Broadmoor but returned home instead.

I would later hear first hand what life in Broadmoor was like when I met Mad Bob but that is another story :)