High Security Hospitals: Janet's been in for 22 years. If she admits she's mad, they'll let her out

Janet Cresswell, like other patients held in Broadmoor, is not allowed glass in case she harms herself. On her 71st birthday this year, the writer had to use a plastic chamber pot to display the bouquet of freesias and carnations from her daughter.

For 22 years, she has lived amid child killers and serial murderers. Ms Cresswell has killed no one. She was sent to Broadmoor after taking a vegetable knife to her psychiatrist's buttocks; a serious crime but not one that would normally carry a life sentence.

Ms Cresswell's name does not appear on the hospital's list of patients deemed eligible for transfer to a bed in a medium secure unit. She refuses to go under the supervision of a Home Office psychiatrist. She refuses because, she says, she is not mad.

In a case reminiscent of Catch 22, as long as she insists she is not a dangerous psychiatric case, she will be detained as a potentially threatening mental case.

When this newspaper highlighted her case two years ago, Ms Cresswell was receiving neither medication nor psychotherapy. However, just days after the story was published, the grandmother was taken to the intensive care wing at Broadmoor and forced to take anti-psychotic medication against her will.

Since then, her privileges and those of other patients have gradually been eroded, beginning with a Home Office ban on patients in secure hospitals owning computers, a draconian measure imposed after male inmates at Ashworth hospital on Merseyside were found downloading internet pornography.

Before her word processor was confiscated, Ms Cresswell wrote letters, essays and a play, The One Sided Wall, which was performed at London's Bush Theatre. She won the Arthur Koestler prize for an essay on the history of Bedlam, the notorious lunatic asylum.

Until recently, one of Ms Cresswell's favourite hobbies was bowls. When Broadmoor officials decided that men and women could not mix socially, her matches on the hospital's bowling green came to an abrupt end.

In letters to mental health campaign groups, the hospital authorities have justified Ms Cresswell's continued incarceration by telling them she is suffering from "classic symptoms of a major mental illness".

Independent medical experts disagree. Professor Alec Jenner, a retired professor of psychiatry at Sheffield University, who has corresponded with Ms Cresswell, says she is "quite harmless". Her flaw, he says, is that she is stubborn.

"If she had played ball with the authorities then she could have been released a long time ago," he said. "I can't see any need for her to be staying there. But neither side is prepared to compromise enough for her to be released."

Until a compromise is reached, her daughter Jane, a nurse, must tell her teenage grandchildren that Broadmoor is their grandmother's home.

"They just want people to rebel and then have a reason for keeping them in there," she said. "I've tried everything but I'm banging my head against a brick wall.

"It is so awful that I do not take my children. They are doing exams. I don't want them to have stress. They speak to her on the phone and they just know that is where she lives."

At Christmas in 2000, Ms Cresswell tried to commit suicide by hoarding her pills, but her daughter was not officially informed. Instead, she found out from night staff at Broadmoor.

"It's going from bad to worse," Ms Johnson said. "I got friendly with one of the nurses who had left the hospital. She told me someone had written a report to say my mother had smashed up the kitchen, but the nurses refused to sign it because it was untrue.

"They have to have a reason for keeping her in there."

The Independent on Sunday approached Broadmoor for a comment on Ms Cresswell's plight but the hospital refused to give one. "We are unable to comment on individual cases," said a spokeswoman.

The poetry of privation

WHAT NEXT ?

people were dumped and stuck in the bin

Found they couldn't get out so kicked up a din

'Can't stand that' said the minders,

And found other jobs – like scouts for odd bobs.

So the minders' minders got grim.

They searched through their statute books

For old tricks with new looks,

The crooks.

Try this and try that,

How tiresome of people to see through old hat.

Trying, tribunal, tri's three and bin all.

No, not Triad, tribunal, try gooning for all, annually.

Shut everyone away, but make them all play.

And when they're tired of the game turn away.

Shut away.

When tiredness wins out,

It's the time to get out

And start up the game a new way.

Janet Cresswell

Broadmoor Special Hospital

Leading voices call for change

Erin Pizzey, founder of the first women's refuge:

"Unless you are prepared to grovel to the authorities you are punished. If she [Janet Cresswell] had been assessed today, she would never have been sent to Broadmoor. I hope they see sense and let her out. I had a breakdown for three months; if you're a woman people say you're mad."

Joan Bakewell, writer and broadcaster:

"We need people to be rehabilitated but prisons do not rehabilitate people."

Baroness Kennedy QC, human rights campaigner:

"Mental health provisions in this country are simply not good enough. Unless people have champions on the outside it is very, very hard to get their cases properly examined. We also need to re-examine certain cases in light of developments in psychiatry."

Lorraine Kelly, television presenter:

"I really welcome this campaign. Mental health seems to be at the bottom of a very long list of priorities. I would like to see more money being spent on trying to get patients out of these special hospitals. It would actually save the Government expense, but more importantly it would give people with mental illness a far greater quality of life."

Jonathan Thompson and Sophie Goodchild