In Denial: A Relapse Story

Sheila Buckland was a hero: the collage of old feminist magazines she had as wall art said so. Directly facing the front door as a visitor made their way in, a floor-to-ceiling collage of magazines announced that this flat belonged to none other than Sheila Buckland, the first woman to egg a leading British scientist. The story there was an old one to Rachel but Sheila enjoyed telling it and retelling regardless. But, in order to comprehend it, one must understand the history of the so-called ‘relapse’.

It was 1981, Britain was in a deep recession under Margaret Thatcher and, in the United States, Ronald Reagan had just been inaugurated as President. It was a dark time to be poor, to be a woman, to be anything other than a rich white man. But, there were still murmurs of hope, hangovers from the equality and liberation movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, and rapid changes in the family unit on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, one random day in the summer of 1981, the world first experienced the phenomenon of ‘Late Onset Neurological Regression’.

LONER Syndrome seemed to come about all at once, taking the world over within 24 hours. One in every hundred women was affected, it was estimated, and the number rapidly grew as the weeks went on. It was as if the brains of millions of women across the globe had been shut off, like the lights of their intellects had been dimmed. The man who named the phenomenon was one Dr Henry Gale, a British scientist based in Oxford, and soon it was his face on every news publication in the world as every society on Earth struggled to come to terms with the mental regression of their female population. Not all were affected, of course, but the fear soon spread that women carried some terrible virus and were passing it on from person-to-person. So came the curfews and the quarantines, the restrictions on women’s freedom to travel and work, and the panic that such heavy-handed measures made inevitable. By the end of the summer, however, Dr Gale (aided by a team of geneticists and neurologists) had come to the conclusion that it was not a viral disease but a genetic mutation that laid dormant in practically all woman. Gale soon became the expert, naming the syndrome, and appearing on every news programme across the globe in a bid to rally the world’s efforts to research the phenomenon. Many believed their female loved ones and friends had been doomed to face the rest of their lives in babyish ignorance, but Gale was the first to officially announce a recovery from the syndrome the following year.

Everyone can remember where they were on the day that Lucy Millan, a 25 year old Scottish nurse who’d been treated at Dr Gale’s specialised care facility for the previous year and a half, spoke to the process entirely independently. It was a miracle and Gale was the miracle worker, or so the press dubbed him. After that, more women started to awaken from their state of mental infantilism just as they had been before: mature, independent, and competent. It was soon declared to be a transient state, which reassured those whose families still struggled with caring for their infantilised relatives. At some point, late found to be no longer than 5 years and no shorter than 9 months, all women who suffered the effects of LONER Syndrome would simply return to normal.

Society at-large, however, could never return to what it had been before. As the Eighties wore on, one-in-twenty women would soon come to experience neurological regression and that came with tectonic shifts in the worlds of work, social policy, and economics. Women were dropping out of the workforce to be cared for as babies, leaving vacancies open only to men, and soon young women entering the workforce came to realise that few companies would even take the risk of hiring a woman if she could one day turn into an overgrown toddler at work. The financial and reputations risks for businesses pushed many women to retreat from the world of work to the world of the home, reversing many of the liberationist gains of the previous decades. Many prominent women were pushed out of public life and conservative men of power and influence talked openly about “baby-brained bimbos” being a drag on the health system. Colloquially, going “baby-brained” was the most popular term (especially among men) for the condition.

It was amidst this bleak new world of social conservatism and female infantilisation that Sheila Buckland, armed with a handful of chicken eggs, barraged Dr Henry Gale. For, as any student of recent history would know, the militant feminist movement stood their ground whilst all around them women’s lives were shifting back to babyhood. Sheila made her mark during these fractious days with an assault on the very man who claimed he was helping women. On the 22nd April 1983, Sheila Buckland ran up to Dr Henry Gale at a press conference in Oxford and threw an egg straight in his face. Images of his face dripping with yolk and albumen while this 20 year old woman was wrestled to the crowd went all around the world - for a bit. Soon, the antics of Buckland and her ‘Women’s Anti-Regression Movement’ (WARM) grew tired and the press moved on to other matters, while Dr Gale was undeterred and opened up his Progressive Mind Institute in the spring of 1985. The rest of the decade saw WARM splinter as some members regressed, others gave up militancy as a tactic, and even more simply returned to their families to help care for their regressed relatives. Sheila refused to do any such thing and kept fighting, going deeper down what would later be called the “femspiracy” rabbit hole: where underground feminist magazines purported that LONER Syndrome was a biological weapon used by conservative men to destroy women’s autonomy.

In 1991, the Progressive Mind Institute published the seminal report Relapse: The Full Facts. It caused a huge shift in the language around regression - now called “relapsing” - and established a new social and scientific consensus. It outlined the basic facts around LONER Syndrome: that it could only occur once, that it occurred naturally and randomly at any time between sexual maturation and the menopause, and that it could not be cured by treating the affected women as adults. In fact, Dr Henry Gale wrote that it was paramount to the emotional and mental wellbeing of the relapsed to treat them entirely as infants, stimulate their brains as though they were infants, and ensure that they had the full babyhood experience. It was, as he made incredibly clear, the only way to ensure a full recovery once the relapse was over.

“The end of the relapse is a delicate matter and is informed by the treatment that the subject experienced while relapsed. If the subject was mistreated, forced into adult situations, or insufficiently stimulated during their period of relapse, then the recovery period will be much longer and far less effective in returning your loved one, friend, or colleague to their pre-relapse selves,” Henry Gale wrote. “To take one extreme example who came to us post-relapse, we had an American woman in her early 30s who had relapsed for almost two years from November 1986 to September 1988. Six months later, she came to the Progressive Mind Institute seeking help for a whole host of post-relapse conditions, including but not limited to: transient dyspraxia, transient dyscalculia, nighttime bedwetting, social anxiety, and a thumbsucking compulsion. She was supposedly recovered and absolutely mentally competent when we spoke in-person, and yet these side effects persisted. What I learned through discussion with her and her husband, who had been her guardian during her relapse, was that she had been consistently given responsibilities and expectations inappropriate for her mental age. She was dressed in her adult clothing and spoken to as if she was an adult. She was banned from watching children’s television, playing with children’s toys, or even coming into contact with other relapsers. This was all done in a misguided attempt to remedy her condition, which had caused significant distress to the family, and was not dissimilar to other cases I had seen across Britain, the Americas, and Western Europe. What little we could do to help the woman involved many intense sessions of psychotherapy, retraining her in the proper usage of the toilet, and anti-anxiety medication, and in the end it was decided that she was well enough to return home despite the persistence of the occasional thumbsucking compulsion. What it proved to me was that the relapsed state can form a kind of ‘second infancy’ where the psychological plasticity of one’s youth returns and we must take care not to traumatise the mind of the regressed”.

Dr Gale was certainly an technical expert in his field, but his language was couched in a sincerity and care that heightened his status amongst the majority of women. Those who opposed him were viewed as spiteful cranks, unwilling to adapt to the changes in women’s biology and resentful of a man - rather than a woman - being the one to lead the fight for their dignity. “If the facts as presented here are taken seriously by the wider population,” the report stated in its concluding paragraph, “then there should now be a definitive end to the stigma surrounding the relapse. Indeed, it is as much a part of any woman’s life as puberty or the menopause and should be understood in a similar manner”.

He was elevated further in public life and Sheila Buckland, now caring for her infant daughter, could only sit on the sidelines and seethe. The Nineties saw women claw back some independence and whole new industries grew up around the recommendations of the Progressive Mind Institute. Adult daycares, relapse specialist babysitters, colourful baby garments for adults, dummies and nappies and all the paraphernalia one could imagine: and this was just the beginning. Then came relapse insurance to protect women against loss of income when they relapsed, certification of previous relapsing to prove that a woman would not do so again, regression guardianships, and a whole range of new legal protections for relapsed women. It was a brave new world shorn of the bleakness of the 1980s and the initial shock of the relapse. For most people, life continued on with the relapse taken as a mere bump in the road; for Sheila, she made a career out of being the token militant still going, writing newspaper columns and books decrying the “new subjugation”. She sold well and had a following of old radicals who wouldn’t put down the torch, alongside a massive readership of teenage girls anxious about entering adulthood with the prospect of relapsing hanging over their heads like the sword of Damocles. It was they who paid for Sheila’s Kensington flat and her expensive collage wall of magazine clippings dubbing her a hero of women’s liberation.

“Rachel! Is that you?!” Sheila called out from the living room. Footsteps quickened and Rachel stepped forth to see her mother rounding the corner of the hallway. She was dressed in a loose-fitting navy cardigan over a collarless blouse and her grey hair tied up high. Scanning Rachel up and down, she was - by the look on her face - quite unsure of what to make of her daughter’s attire: a pair of tan corduroys, canvas lace-ups, and a slightly too tight turtleneck in brown. “You look like a school librarian.”

“Thanks, mum.” Rachel rolled her eyes and stepped forward again, before stopping at the jab of her mother’s finger to her chest.

“Shoes off first. Also, not to sound like a spoiled brat, but I don’t see a card or a present.”

“I’m really sorry, I told Adam to sort out the present but…” Rachel showed her empty hands with feigned embarrassment. Her mother pulled her finger back and gave Rachel a quizzical look, like a detective mentally interrogating a particularly strange suspect.

“Typical man, just typical.” Sheila’s eyes lit up. “I don’t know what you see in that man, I really don’t. They’re all the same deep down, you know?”

Rachel had gotten away with it for now, mentally thanking Adam for his willingness to be a scapegoat. Perhaps men were not all the same deep down?