Who is talking here, why should ‘being myself’ be thought of as a state of ‘extreme poverty’ and what on earth is the Investigation and the Verdict? These words come from the autobiography of Janet Frame (2001, first published in 1984). Janet was an aspiring writer who also acquired a less satisfactory label, a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia, in New Zealand in 1945. She came within a whisker of receiving a leucotomy in 1951, only receiving a reprieve at the last moment from Dr Blake Palmer, the physician superintendent at the hospital, when he noticed she had been awarded a national prize for her first book. ‘I've decided you should stay as you are’, he said, ‘I don't want you changed’. She left hospital and went on a long search to find out whether the diagnosis she announced to her family, half with pride, half with fear, ‘I've got Shizzophreenier’, was true and what were its implications. This took her, not unsurprisingly at that time, to the psychiatric Mecca, the Maudsley Hospital in London, where she was assessed in great depth (the Investigation) and its conclusions given to her by Sir Aubrey Lewis (the Verdict). He concluded that she had never had schizophrenia and should never have been admitted to a mental hospital.

‘The extreme poverty of being myself’ came from the consequence of this revelation. ‘The loss was great’, she wrote, ‘at first, the truth seemed to be more terrifying than the lie. Schizophrenia, as a psychosis, had been an accomplishment, removing ordinary responsibility from the sufferer. I was bereaved. I was ashamed.