Biography and autobiography of Valerie Argent

Valerie Argent died peacefully in her sleep in the early morning of 26th September 1991.

She was born in 1948. When most of her classmates were taking their GCE's, Valerie received a vivid education about life in a series of mental hospitals. At fourteen she was in a subnormality hospital, Essex Hall; at fifteen she was in a mental illness hospital, Belmont; and until she was eighteen she was a patient in a therapeutic community, The Ingrebourne Centre. Essex Hall and Belmont did her a great deal of harm. Ingrebourne did her a great deal of good.

Valerie's two month stay on the back ward of a subnormality hospital is difficult to explain as she had previously passed her eleven plus and her school reports speak of her as a conscientious and able student. A psychiatrist's letter says she was sent to Essex Hall because no other hospital was willing to admit her. Whilst there she behaved very much like the other patients, many of whom were described as "vegetables".

In Belmont she was treated with Electro Convulsive Therapy and drugs, and it was suggested to her that the only way she would escape from her depressions would be a brain operation (Leucotomy?). She was very tempted to accept this suggestion, but eventually decided to escape from the hospital instead.

When Valerie was seventeen she married another patient in the therapeutic community. They had a daughter and by the time Valerie died they had three grandchildren.

Between 1966 and 1969 Valerie and her husband ran bookshops and beach bookstalls in Swanage and Bournemouth. This was almost certainly the happiest period of her life. She loved the sea and the countryside. Caring for her growing child and working in the bookshops helped her to regain confidence in herself. Her home became a centre for people to meet in the evenings and somewhere that young people on holiday without money would often spend the night.

In 1970 Valerie joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), and although never a regular attender at the silent meetings, she always valued her membership. Valerie's views were unconventional, and it was often a surprise to her that Quakers accepted her, but Quakers, like her, were willing to accept and value people for what they are.

After Swanage, Valerie studied for a Social Science degree at Middlesex Polytechnic, and graduated with an upper second honours degree in 1978. She began this course in 1970 by unofficially attending lectures and seminars. She had no academic qualifications, but tutors, struck by her perceptiveness and intelligence, helped her to gain the two A levels which were then necessary to enter for the degree officially.

Valerie's placement on her degree course was with the Mental Patients Union, an organisation that she had helped to found in 1973. She and her family started the first MPU house, in Hackney. Her warmth and work helped to hold the community together for almost three years, but the experience, for her, was traumatic.

After the collapse of the Mental Patients Union, Valerie took part in a series of community care courses, run by Hackney Workers Educational Association. Her experience as an inmate of a mental handicap hospital, left her with strong feelings about the way people with learning difficulties are treated, and she was an active member of Hackney Action on Learning Difficulties when it started in 1982, as a result of one of the WEA classes. She also belonged to Hackney Mental Patients' Association and, as representative of this and the WEA, she was an active member of the City and Hackney Community Health Council from 1982 to 1988. Amongst the many issues that she raised at CHC meetings was the fact that, in Hackney, adolescents were admitted into the adult psychiatric wards.

In May 1982 Valerie was assaulted in the street and, as a result, lost the full use of her eyes for two or three years. That autumn she started a postgraduate course in the Sociology of Medicine at Bedford College. She graduated MSc in 1984, with a dissertation on the sociology of pain.

There was a great deal of pain in Valerie's life, but even in the midst of pain there was beauty and laughter. After a suicide attempt in January 1982 she wrote a poem about "the sparkle of laughter amid tears". Such an experience, she said, would outlast depression and emerge in memory like a diamond sparkling in darkness. Her diaries suggest that the stimulus for this poem was a nurse in the intensive care unit who made her and the other patients laugh.

For three years, from 1985 to 1987, Valerie was a part time lecturer in Social Sciences at Middlesex Polytechnic. Students at her funeral remembered her as a gentle teacher with infinite patience who would spend as much time with them as they needed. Many of them remained friends with her afterwards. The day before she died was spent, very happily, with two of her ex-students.

Valerie worked as a lecturer some days and attended a psychiatric day hospital on others. She was a patient at Hackney Hospital from 1984 to 1987, and then attended Shoreditch Day Centre from 1987 to her death. At both the hospital and the centre she learnt new skills and created useful and beautiful things.

Throughout her life Valerie had to cope with voices and visions that other people did not see or hear. The same perceptive passion that enabled her to draw a vase of poppies when she was virtually blind, meant that her hallucinations were horribly real. In the beginning of 1991 she believed that she was responsible for the Gulf War, and her voices told her that unless she killed herself it would never end.

A friend said that she always felt awed by the hugeness of Valerie's sense of her own destructiveness, and the suffering and horror that it caused her. If courage is conscious struggle in the face of known horror, she added, I think Valerie is perhaps the most courageous person I have known.

In one of her many moments of despair, Valerie wrote that she did not want to die broken, "a bitter thought" in people's memories. She wanted to do "just one thing well" to be remembered by. I think that one thing was her life.