WHA’S LIKE US
CREATIVITY AND STIGMA AND MENTAL ILLNESS
HUG ACTION FOR MENTAL HEALTH
29 JANUARY 2022.
Hello everyone.
Today I am not here in my work role or as a director of SPIRIT but in my role as a writer. Unfortunately, I have to start off with a denial of expertise about my knowledge of creativity and stigma.
I will of course touch on creativity but I am not remotely an authority on creativity at all or on stigma or on mental illness. Maybe that is good because we might all be able to teach each other from our own perspectives. What I say today is, of course, as always, open to challenge and disagreement and debate
This is especially so because my knowledge of the subject of creativity as opposed to stigma relied on a ten minute google search one day after I finished work; it is a sketchy, inaccurate knowledge, but it is informed by my own experience so maybe it is helpful.
My understanding of creativity is that it is about thinking differently, making new connections, finding original thoughts and that it extends way beyond the arts. Creativity is just as much about cooking a delicious meal, as painting a picture, or holding a party or carving a sculpture. It can be about telling jokes, dancing, singing or, in my case; writing.
As far as I know I am not creative, or not particularly. I lack spontaneity or energy or curiosity. I never dance or sing. I never tell jokes or hold people captive with my wit and charm.
However, my partner, Wendy, is maybe one of the most creative people I know. If we are walking with the children, she will sing the most ridiculous made up songs. If she is musing about the weekend, she may design a weird cake or set off on unique adventures. If she is idle she will scan the internet for things of interest. If she is bored she will make up skits about mental health and mental health services that make me giggle and giggle and then she will forget all about them. Her life is colourful; every moment is new and routine is something she avoids as much as she can.
My creativity is more measured! I tend to be cautious and organised and move from step to step with no great leaps. I don’t make things up; I don’t have great leaps of imagination. But even someone like me can shape and find excitement in the new and the odd.
For me, I like the shapes that flowers and ferns make. I like the drift of clouds, the sparkle on the sea and the call of the birds. I like the smell of mud and seaweed at low tide and I like to somehow bring it into some sort of life with photography and words.
It may seem the opposite of creativity but I think it is at work that I am at my most creative; when I am writing a speech or developing a report.
I read that for some people; creativity is about getting absorbed in a task to the exclusion of other stimuli. For me when I am crafting a speech and shaping the phrases I lose touch with the outside world and when I am lost in a writing a report and find myself busy including the voice of people like you and me in it; I focus so much that when I come back to the world it is as though I have been away in another realm; unaware of what is happening and dizzy to have to reconnect to the kitchen and the radio; the sleeping dog, the chattering children.
I also find it in cooking: I love to cook; I love the smells, the chopping and mixing, the colours, the gift of the food I give to those I love.
Most of all though, creativity is when I am writing from my heart and I wish I could explain it to you. There are occasions when I feel I connect to something else; my words feel like music or a river and fill me with a sense of joy and fulfilment, in contrast to those times when I type away mechanically and what arrives feels stilted and formal and mechanical and slightly dull and grey.
I had heard that rumours some of us who experience psychosis are naturally connected with the gift of creativity but my swift search of google seems to imply that our brain chemistry is similar to very creative people but that the more severe our illness is the more impaired our abilities become and that instead it is people at high risk of bipolar or schizophrenia but without the terrible symptoms who are more likely to be creative; in other words some of our brothers and sisters; people like that. I must confess I find that a bit irritating!
However I have also found out that the world of creativity is one in which people who experience distress and wild thoughts may be one in which we can sometime function well and feel at home in, so maybe that is a slightly better perspective.
I have heard that whoever we are, that creative activities tend to be good for our sense of wellbeing and let me remind you that that doesn’t mean that you have to paint a master piece, colouring a colouring book can be just as good, or working out what to make friends and family for dinner can be creative and fill you with good feelings.
The last thing I have gleaned from the internet is the value of creative therapies. I must admit I like them; not so much for the words it allows me to speak that otherwise I couldn’t speak but for the distraction it provides and sometimes the warm sense of comradeship that I have sometimes got when making pictures or cards or clay shapes in hospital with my companions.
Now to relate this to stigma and to writing.
I first got involved in creative writing when I worked here with HUG. A group of us spent many years having the great privilege of working with Moniack Mhor (Scotland’s creative writing centre.) We were taught and mentored by famous and talented writers. We spent weekends away; cooking together, talking, writing and eventually finding the courage to perform our work or make music at ceilidhs we organised and which were organised for us.
As time went by, we ran our own writing groups in hospital and in the community. We made our own publications and gave performances to each other but also to others at festivals and the like.
I had always been interested in writing and this, combined with all my writing at work, inspired me to write more and more often for pleasure.
Somehow, one day I started writing. I had no idea I was writing a book. I just found words finding themselves with the urge to write them at three in the afternoon or three in the morning, basically, whenever I was free.
After about nine weeks I had a morass of words; all heaped together, all untidy, all chaotic. I spent the next five years (with lots of help) reducing them and sorting them into some sort or order and structure, doing edit after edit and re write after re write and ended up with my memoir; START.
It is about my life over a year of compulsory treatment for schizophrenia but shifts between my thoughts of the future and the past. Maybe more than talk of mental illness it is about falling in love and finding out the joy that healthy relationships can bring. It is about learning about my family and the effect of my life on those I love and lastly, it features the natural world and the Highlands, because that is one of the places I am the happiest.
And how is this good in challenging stigma and why do we need to?
We all know that the conversation about mental illness has moved greatly since we first started challenging stigma well over twenty years ago in HUG. If you are a celebrity you almost have to come armed with a tail of breakdown and despair when appearing in the media. With covid we have to take account of our mental health and need to look after it in ways no one would have expected until recently. Go on twitter or Instagram and mental illness and mental health appears everywhere.
That is brilliant but comes with a but.
For me the but is a very big one and especially involves those of us who have less acceptable mental illnesses such as experience of psychosis or of personality disorder and also and I am not sure if I dare say this, stigma flourishes when our friends and relatives and acquaintances encounter us when we are caught in despair and the like. When they come face to face with the reality of illness.
We have done a wonderful sanitising job with mental illness; the images I tend to see tend to be of young fashionable attractive people doing a lot of smiling and, in far too many cases, talking of their recovery journey. That is needed – for people to know that not only could their next door neighbour have a mental illness is wonderful, to realise that the people they aspire to be could also have a mental illness is also wonderful – it gives rise to new and much kinder conversations.
But the mental illness I encounter is not something to aspire to, we are not slightly attractive slightly helpless people waiting to be rescued by wonderful people we are messy and confused and experience terrible things.
The people I know who have experienced horrific trauma do not just need lots of loving hugs to make it all ok and do not come forward slightly bruised by life to the adoration of others about their heroic journey in overcoming the past. They often come forward horrifically damaged and angry at life. They can hide in alcohol and drugs, and shock their friends with self harm and destruction. In fact when I say friends, far too many of the people I know do not have friends. When you have been brought up to expect abuse then it is incredibly hard to ever trust other people enough for love and friendship to be a given and unfair and sad as it is, the way we act, out of terrible experiences, is often one that leads to us being shunned and excluded.
It is grossly unfair to think that having been pretty much destroyed by the world we were born into, the effect of that damage on us can lead to us being even more damaged by the way society reacts to what that very trauma did to us.
For a long time I have felt that society has an unfulfilled obligation to those who have been harmed, if you like on its watch, and that we go nowhere very useful and can betray people by just telling such people to act responsibly and remember their DBT skills when they doubt they can live through the rest of the night.
The same applies to so many other people, with other mental health issues, I know that my suicide attempts and the times I have been hospitalised have profoundly damaged people I love dearly and, although there are a host of other reasons, imagine that my mental illness contributed to the destruction of my marriage and the fact that I have not seen my son more than twice in the last 13 years.
However much I may know and those I love know that I am not trying to harm anyone else, when I have been determined to harm myself or kill myself, it creates a pain that cannot be described when witnessed by those who would do anything they could to stop me feeling the pain I experience all too often.
I imagine all of you can think of times when our agony or our mania or our delusions have been pretty hard for other people to deal with. That does not mean we are at fault or should be shunned but it does help explain why so many of us can have such horrible lives and the fact that society does not know how to respond to this reality is just one more reason why life can feel so unjust.
Rather than just take charming photos of people like you and I smiling and dancing some impossible dream , which in itself is good, I think we need to look at what we can do with our creativity in the world of incomprehension and misunderstanding.
We all, every one of us, have a story and every story is complicated but worth telling.
Telling our story in such a way that people understand us better is my vision. Telling the story that shows we are beautiful and wonderful despite the pain we are in and despite the fact that we get drunk to drown out the past and despite the fact that we fall out with those we love because we cannot bear being rejected by other people.
I am naïve, I think creativity makes us into better people and I think it makes the people who through it come to understand us in a more honest way into better people. Creativity is a lovely way of both ripping off the mask of pretence and helping people see that even when we are ugly with our tears and our thoughts and our lack of ability to take control of our life, we are still absolutely wonderful beings, because of course, in some way, everyone is.
I will finish here – I hope over the coming months you find a multitude of ways of expressing yourselves, and I hope that some of that expression is about the smiley faces, the laughter and joy we can all bring to the world that I was so harsh about earlier. I also hope it is about beautiful flowers and entrancing conversations but most of all I hope it challenges those people, myself included who think they have a neat and perfect way of viewing and describing life with a mental illness.
Through this we learn and connect and by doing this the fear of the different and seemingly alien can become understandable, those people who may have avoided us in the street, may come up to us to welcome us in their lives and we may in turn feel some joy at being welcomed and with this prejudice and discrimination may slowly start to slip and slink away.
Thank you so much and good luck to this wonderful writing and creativity project.
(Adapted from a talk to Bipolar West Lothian)
(Photos: Hermitage park Helensburgh and Ardmore
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