Stigma, Mental Illness and Poetry

[Lucy Clouting]

Poet in the City held the Stigma, Mental Illness and Poetry event in partnership with the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the charity ok2b on April 29, 2008. Julia Neuberger chaired a fascinating and moving evening of poetry and discussion at the Society of Chemical Industry. She spoke of the dramatic transformations she had witnessed in people suffering from mental illness after they had had the opportunity to create or appreciate art. She also expressed her passionate belief in the healing power of poetry.

Selima Hill’s brave and poignant candour about her personal experiences of living with the stigma that surrounds mental illness entranced the audience. She described how she takes refuge in writing poetry and feels safe expressing thoughts and feelings in the medium that she finds difficult to talk about to close friends and family. Alas, Selima defiantly told us that she ‘doesn’t do email’, so we may not hear directly from her in this web forum although I hope to post some thoughts on her behalf if at all possible.
She read a selection of her own poetry, including two poems from her forthcoming collection Nylon.

Blake Morrison explored ‘bibliotherapy’ – how reading literature can have a therapeutic, cathartic effect: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,2235404,00.html
He said he had, at times, written to cope with pain or grief and quoted Ted Hughes’ observation that poetry was ultimately ‘the voice of pain’. He read from the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Empson and Wendy Cope and also recited three of his own poems. One of these, Meningococcus, touched upon the devastating experience of losing a child. His own son had survived meningitis, but Morrison imagined the inevitable, overwhelming grief of a mother whose child had contracted the disease too early on in the 20th century, so had thus been unable to benefit from subsequent advances in medicine.

Lisa Appignanesi eloquently posited that the stigma attached to madness is quite mad in itself, as we have all had glimpses of madness or at least the irrational. She argued that we all dream, experience the rage of others (and of ourselves) or perhaps feel that the dead will not let us go. Sanity is perhaps a far more nebulous concept than we choose to acknowledge and every era has its own very prescriptive set of rules as to how to be mad, as Appignanesi explores in her current book, Mad , Bad and Sad: A History of the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the present.
She read poetry by Charles Lamb, Emily Dickinson, Charles Baudelaire, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell.

John Hegley rather aptly read his own ‘Mental Health Poem’ and also one from ‘Homeless Diamonds’, an anthology of poems by homeless people, put together by the charity St Mungo’s.
He entertained the audience with two of his songs, including ‘Eddie don’t like furniture’ about a man with an extreme aversion to ... furniture, and he described how after he performed this song in front of a class of schoolchildren, they had precociously diagnosed Eddie with OCD. He went on to pursue the theme of how enlightened children are when it comes to avoiding the adult trap of stigmatising those suffering from mental illness.

Julia Neuberger picked up on Lisa Appiginanesi's comments about the New England set (Plath, Sexton, Lowell et al) by pointing out how the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts had been influenced by the poetry of its former patients, to the extent that it altered the way it ran the institution.

That's far too much from me now, so let's open up the discussion.

What can be done to raise awareness of the therapeutic qualities of the poetry?

Do you have any thoughts about the complex relationship between 'madness' and creativity?

How can poetry illuminate our understanding of the commonality of our experiences of despair and distress?

How can humorous and joyful poetry inspire and soothe people too?

How can writing poetry be cathartic?

[Wendy French]

I work at the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School in South London. I run weekly writing sessions for young people who have been admitted to this psychiatric hospital at a crucial time in their young lives. The hope and comfort that reading and writing poetry brings to these young people must never be under-estimated. To read a well known poet who may have had similar problems brings a realisation that good can come out of bad experience and illness and this in turn can bring recognition. A young person will also realise that s/he is not suffering alone. Other people have been through similar experiences and survived and are not afraid to write about it and tell people.
When a student first enters my group s/he may be in the grip of hallucinations or psychosis. But students always want to write down words and join in. These words may not make sense or have any connection with the session but the need to communicate is vital at this time. Gradually over time the student will become more in tune with reality and then the words make sense. This is when true creativity becomes apparent. I have had the privilege to work with some very gifted youngsters who view the world in a way.
We have been fortunate to receive two grants to publish two poetry books from some of these students and the joy they have experienced at seeing their words in print is very moving. They want others to read their work and to pass on the message that although they have been in hospital they have something important and entertaining to say.
Poetry whether written or read is an essential art to help us understand ourselves and others better.
We have to raise the profile of the words of the mentally ill in order to erase the stigma.
It is only through events such as the one on Tuesday that this will begin to happen.
Wendy French

[maggie sawkins]

I've recently taken part in the Poet in the City Project at City Girls School in Portsmouth. The following is adapted from part of a talk I prepared for one of the sessions:

When I was a teenager I used to be thrown into a panic whenever anyone greeted me with the question: 'How are you?' I never knew what to say. I didn't know what to say because I didn't know how I was. I just knew that something wasn't right inside. One of the poems that I've kept from my teenage years is this one - I wrote it one day as I was sitting by the sea next to Clarence Pier:

Borderland

Sitting out on the borderland
I'm a pebble on the shore
I'm a night without a whisper
I'm a room without a door.

But the stars are in my pocket
and the moon is in my head
I'm a book of many poems
that's afraid of being read.

Through this series of images I was using metaphor to say the unsayable: I was lonely, and the reason I was lonely (though I wasn't aware of it at the time) was because I was unable to express myself through the normal channel of speech. About a year after I'd written this poem I got into a spot of trouble and was sent to see a psychotherapist to find out what was wrong. During our second meeting the doctor said he couldn't help me if I wouldn't speak to him. I didn't go back after that, but I did continue to write poems. Writing helps us to discover how we are because it leads us into our secret places, and best of all, it's free.

Maggie Sawkins

[Steve Bucknell]

Maggie, Really liked the poem.

[Jaycee]

Thanks for this informative posting Lucy. I was very sorry not to be able to attend this particular one, of all the Poet in the City events, but delighted that it was so very well subscribed and hope that a follow-up event results directly from it.

I am interested to read the variety of views on poetry (and other art forms) as cathartic. My experience is the 'other side of the moon'.

I found as a young person that literature and poetry sparked a reaction which I experienced as malign and destabilising, and have had to wait until very much later in life to be able to engage with the rawest forms of both media without being swept away by them and lost. I can never be sure whether that fear of loss of the self was real or not but the route I consciously chose through life was deeply grounded in the perceived reality of my immediate surroundings - people, animals, garden, landscape, work - and it is only now as I rapidly approach retirement age that I am engaging with poetry, literature and more particularly my own creativity without the sense that I am going to be devastated.

I am usually very relaxed about engaging in discussion on the Net, but the vulnerability I feel over the topic makes me very wary of posting as myself, for which I apologise. I will watch the board with interest to see what else emerges and hope that the topic is returned to.

Jaycee

[penny]

I am really enjoying this thread. My teenage grand daughter has some mental health issues, and she and I are in correspondence about it. Interesting that although we normally email, she prefers that - in this case - we write letters in the old fashioned way. I especially enjoyed Maggie's post, and have copied it to my grand daughter, because it is so eloquent on the value of writing. My own teenage years were troubled, too, and I am certain that what saved me was writing: letters, poems but most of all my journal. I am not qualified to discuss my grand daughter's mental health issues with her, but I am qualified to discuss the value of writing things down. And then writing it all again in a different way, with a different approach: comic, poetic, melodramatic, re-working everything and learning more every time. This process is life long, of course. Thanks to everyone who has posted in this thread

[maggie sawkins]

I hope it all works out for your grand daughter, Penny.
Maggiex

[Aidan Dun]

Naturally I agree with Lisa Appignanesi: troubled human experience crystallized through heightened language is redemptive. But I’m also of the opinion that such a state cannot even remotely be the same as the consciousness that supervenes when vast systems of visionary information are transmitted into prophetic poetry. Paradise Lost cannot be described as the therapeutic literature of recovery. Such tragic supernatural epic ‘angel-song’ is clearly designed to propel us through unimaginable cosmic leaps of understanding. Milton's intention is to resolve philosophical and metaphysical problems of a higher order. Similarly, William Blake was not struggling with agnostic neurosis when he sat down to write his Prophetic Books, but instead, through meditation and prayer, in rapturous intensity, he was temporarily (from the point-of-view of this world) translating himself into other strata of reality in order to receive transmissions and truths which could then be passed on to humanity via writings.

To access these levels Blake and Milton invoked divine madness, called down upon themselves lightning-bolts of illumination, trespassed in irrationality, while others, like Rimbaud, and to an extent, Yeats, (the modern hermeticist of English letters, though he perhaps was more scholar than pure seer) made similar perilous journeys in search of the vision of glory.

I am not denigrating in any way the valid literature of recovery. I don't intend to set up an opposition between this form of writing and the literature of discovery. I am perhaps speculating that discovery cannot begin until recovery has taken place.

I certainly enjoyed the moment towards the end of Stigma when Selima Hill leapt to her feet and offered a final passionate contribution to the debate. I shall look out for her ‘Gloria.’

[masterlock1]

As someone who double-majored in philosophy and psychology (U.S.) I find the idea of "bibliotherapy" fascinating. I can see how immersing one's self in a fictional, literary world might actually help relieve certain types of mental distress, including mental disorders. And it (the therapeutic effect) may be as much metaphysical as it is physical in nature. More than anything, I think it provides an alternate inner space in which to temporarily reside, a place where one's demons are nowhere to be found.

[rochel35]

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