I turned my back on the sea
and the sea in turn ignored
me. The sky weeps and beneath
this pallid mask a smile cracks
desert dry and brings just as much
arid death as the world can muster
Waiting for my valentine
Crow like and magical she appeared,
holding in her fallen, folded wings
the key to my prison cell. The jailer
beguiled released us both from the
icy loneliness of incomprehension.
new from anutie
Creativity ‘closely entwined with mental illness’
Novelist Virginia Woolf killed herselfCreativity is often part of a mental illness, with writers particularly susceptible, according to a study of more than a million people.
Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found.
They were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves.
The dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder.
“It is important that we do not romanticise people with mental health problems, who are too often portrayed as struggling creative geniuses”
Beth Murphy The mental health charity Mind
As a group, those in the creative professions were no more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than other people.
But they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reports.
Lead researcher Dr Simon Kyaga said the findings suggested disorders should be viewed in a new light and that certain traits might be beneficial or desirable.
For example, the restrictive and intense interests of someone with autism and the manic drive of a person with bipolar disorder might provide the necessary focus and determination for genius and creativity.
Similarly, the disordered thoughts associated with schizophrenia might spark the all-important originality element of a masterpiece.
Troubled minds
- Novelist Virginia Woolf, who wrote A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse, had depression and drowned herself
- Fairytale author Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid, had depression
- US author and journalist Ernest Hemingway, who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, had depression and killed himself with a shotgun
- Author and playwright Graham Greene, who wrote the novel Brighton Rock, had bipolar disorder
Dr Kyaga said: “If one takes the view that certain phenomena associated with the patient’s illness are beneficial, it opens the way for a new approach to treatment.
“In that case, the doctor and patient must come to an agreement on what is to be treated, and at what cost.
“In psychiatry and medicine generally there has been a tradition to see the disease in black-and-white terms and to endeavour to treat the patient by removing everything regarded as morbid.”
Beth Murphy, head of information at Mind, said bipolar disorder personality traits could be beneficial to those in creative professions, but it may also be that people with bipolar disorder are more attracted to professions where they can use their creative skills.
“It is important that we do not romanticise people with mental health problems, who are too often portrayed as struggling creative geniuses.
“We know that one in four people will be diagnosed with a mental health problem this year and that these individuals will come from a range of different backgrounds, professions and walks of live. Our main concern is that they get the information and support that they need and deserve.”
Creativity ‘closely entwined with mental illness’
Novelist Virginia Woolf killed herselfCreativity is often part of a mental illness, with writers particularly susceptible, according to a study of more than a million people.
Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found.
They were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves.
The dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
It is important that we do not romanticise people with mental health problems, who are too often portrayed as struggling creative geniuses”
Beth Murphy The mental health charity Mind
As a group, those in the creative professions were no more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than other people.
But they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reports.
Lead researcher Dr Simon Kyaga said the findings suggested disorders should be viewed in a new light and that certain traits might be beneficial or desirable.
For example, the restrictive and intense interests of someone with autism and the manic drive of a person with bipolar disorder might provide the necessary focus and determination for genius and creativity.
Similarly, the disordered thoughts associated with schizophrenia might spark the all-important originality element of a masterpiece.
Continue reading the main story
Troubled minds
- Novelist Virginia Woolf, who wrote A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse, had depression and drowned herself
- Fairytale author Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid, had depression
- US author and journalist Ernest Hemingway, who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, had depression and killed himself with a shotgun
- Author and playwright Graham Greene, who wrote the novel Brighton Rock, had bipolar disorder
Dr Kyaga said: “If one takes the view that certain phenomena associated with the patient’s illness are beneficial, it opens the way for a new approach to treatment.
“In that case, the doctor and patient must come to an agreement on what is to be treated, and at what cost.
“In psychiatry and medicine generally there has been a tradition to see the disease in black-and-white terms and to endeavour to treat the patient by removing everything regarded as morbid.”
Beth Murphy, head of information at Mind, said bipolar disorder personality traits could be beneficial to those in creative professions, but it may also be that people with bipolar disorder are more attracted to professions where they can use their creative skills.
“It is important that we do not romanticise people with mental health problems, who are too often portrayed as struggling creative geniuses.
“We know that one in four people will be diagnosed with a mental health problem this year and that these individuals will come from a range of different backgrounds, professions and walks of live. Our main concern is that they get the information and support that they need and deserve.”
Interesting stuff.
A brief history of psychedelic psychiatry
In the 1950s a group of pioneering psychiatrists showed that hallucinogenic drugs had therapeutic potential, but the research was halted as part of the backlash against the hippy counterculture.
On 5th May, 1953, the novelist Aldous Huxley dissolved four-tenths of a gram of mescaline in a glass of water, drank it, then sat back and waited for the drug to take effect. Huxley took the drug in his California home under the direct supervision of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, to whom Huxley had volunteered himself as “a willing and eager guinea pig”.
Osmond was one of a small group of psychiatrists who pioneered the use of LSD as a treatment for alcoholism and various mental disorders in the early 1950s. He coined the term psychedelic, meaning ‘mind manifesting’ and although his research into the therapeutic potential of LSD produced promising initial results, it was halted during the 1960s for social and political reasons.
Born in Surrey in 1917, Osmond studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital, London. He served in the navy as a ship’s psychiatrist during World War II, and afterwards worked in the psychiatric unit at St. George’s Hospital, London, where he became a senior registrar. While at St. George’s, Osmond and his colleague John Smythies learned about Albert Hoffman’s discovery of LSD at the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company in Bazel, Switzerland.
Osmond and Smythies started their own investigation into the properties of hallucinogens and observed that mescaline produced effects similar to the symptoms of schizophrenia, and that its chemical structure was very similar to that of the hormone and neurotransmitter adrenaline. This led them to postulate that schizophrenia was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, but these ideas were not favourably received by their colleagues.
In 1951 Osmond took a post as deputy director of psychiatry at the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada and moved there with his family. Within a year, he began collaborating on experiments using LSD with Albert Hoffer. Osmond tried LSD himself and concluded that the drug could produce profound changes in consciousness. Osmond and Hoffer also recruited volunteers to take LSD and theorised that the drug was capable of inducing a new level of self-awareness which may have enormous therapeutic potential.
In 1953, they began giving LSD to their patients, starting with some of those diagnosed with alcoholism. Their first study involved two alcoholic patients, each of whom was given a single 200-microgram dose of the drug. One of them stopped drinking immediately after the experiment, whereas the other stopped 6 months later.
Several years later, a colleague named Colin Smith treated another 24 patients with LSD, and subsequently reported that 12 of them had either “improved” or “well improved” as a result of the treatment. “The impression was gained that the drugs are a useful adjunct to psychotherapy,” Smith wrote in a 1958 paper describing the study. “The results appear sufficiently encouraging to merit more extensive, and preferably controlled, trials.”
Osmond and Hoffer were encouraged, and continued to administer the drug to alcoholics. By the end of the 1960s, they had treated approximately 2,000 patients. They claimed that the Saskatchewan trials consistently produced the same results – their studies seemed to show that a single, large dose of LSD could be an effective treatment for alcoholism, and reported that between 40 and 45% of their patients given the drug had not experienced a relapse after a year.
At around the same time, another psychiatrist was carrying out similar experiments in the U.K. Ronald Sandison was born in Shetland and won a scholarship to study medicine at King’s College Hospital. In 1951, he accepted a consultant’s post at Powick Hospital near Worcester, but upon taking the position found the establishment to be overcrowded and decrepit, with patients being subjected to electroshock treatment and lobotomies.
Sandison introduced the use of psychotherapy, and other forms of therapy involving art and music. In 1952, he visited Switzerland where he also met Albert Hoffman, and was introduced to the idea of using LSD in the clinic. He returned to the U.K. with 100 vials of the drug – which Sandoz had by then named ‘Delysid’ – and, after discussing the matter with his colleagues, began treating patients with it (in addition to psychotherapy) towards the end of 1952.
Sandison and his colleagues obtained results similar to those of the Saskatchewan trials. In 1954 they reported that “as a result of LSD therapy, 14 patients recovered (av. Of 10.4 treatments)… 1 was greatly improved (3 treatments), 6 were moderately improved (av. of 2 treatments) and 2 not improved (av. of 5 treatments).”
These results drew great interest from the international mass media, and as a result, Sandison opened the world’s first purpose-built LSD therapy clinic the following year. The unit, located on the grounds of Powick Hospital, accommodated up to 5 patients who could receive LSD therapy simultaneously. Each was given their own room, equipped with a chair, sofa, and record player. Patients also came together to discuss their experiences in daily group sessions. (This backfired later, however: In 2002, the National Health Service agreed to pay a total of £195,000 in an out-of-court settlement to 43 of Sandison’s former patients.)
Meanwhile in Canada Osmond’s form of LSD therapy was endorsed by the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and the director of Saskatchewan’s Bureau on Alcoholism. LSD therapy peaked in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was widely considered to be “the next big thing” in psychiatry, which could supersede electroconvulsive therapy and psychosurgery. At one point, it was popular among Hollywood superstars such as Cary Grant.
Two forms of LSD therapy became popular. One, called psychedelic therapy, was based on Osmond and Hoffer’s work, and involved a single large dose of LSD alongside psychotherapy. Osmond and Hoffer believed that hallucinogens are beneficial therapeutically because of their ability to make patients view their condition from a fresh perspective.
The other, called psycholytic therapy, was based on Sandison’s regime of several smaller doses, increasing in size, as a adjunct to psychoanalysis. Sandison’s clinical observations led him to believe that LSD can aid psychotherapy by inducing dream-like hallucinations that reflected the patient’s unconscious mind and enabling them to relive long-lost memories.
Between the years of 1950 and 1965, some 40,000 patients had been prescribed one form of LSD therapy or another as treatment for neurosis, schizophrenia, and psychopathy. It was even prescribed to children with autism. Research into the potential therapeutic effects of LSD and other hallucinogens had produced over 1,000 scientific papers and six international conferences. But many of these early studies weren’t particularly robust, lacking control groups, for example, and likely suffered from what researchers call publication bias, whereby negative data are excluded from the final analyses.
Even so, the preliminary findings seemed to warrant further research into the therapeutic benefits of hallucinogenic drugs. The research soon came to an abrupt halt, however, mostly for political reasons. In 1962, the U.S. Congress passed new drug safety regulations, and the Food and Drug Administration designated LSD as an experimental drug and began to clamp down on research into its effects. The following year, LSD hit the streets in the form of liquid soaked onto sugar cubes; its popularity grew quickly and the hippy counterculture was in full swing by the summer of 1967.
The One Emotion That Really Hurts Your Brain
New research reveals the fearsome impact of humiliation.
Being told you’re wrong when you’re wrong may make you a more knowledgeable person, but not necessarily a happier one. Even if you’re not the kind of person who needs to have the last word in a debate, you may still feel a sting when someone else points out your errors. The pain can be particularly sharp if you’ve got an audience—reminding you perhaps of stumbling over a new word while reading aloud to your fellow third graders, being shown to be incorrect when others are in earshot can make you feel embarrassed and humiliated.
Johan Larson/Shutterstock
Even some of our closest friends and loved ones can be brutal and insensitive when faced with our errors. They gleefully point out your mistake in pronouncing a difficult word (bringing back those childhood memories) or shout, “I told you so!” to anyone within earshot. Depending on the thickness of your skin, you may dismiss the entire episode, but it’s more likely you’ll retreat sulkily into the corner, wishing you could just disappear altogether. Culture also plays a role in determining people’s responses to humiliation: In some societies, saving face is valued above all else, and to be proven wrong constitutes a significant violation.
Being told you’re wrong doesn’t have to involve humiliation. Your kinder and gentler friends and family will point out a mistake tactfully, perhaps in a private moment when no one else is nearby. If you’ve put the forks on the right instead of the left of the plate while setting the table, a genteel older relative may take you aside and correct you quietly, or may just make the swap for you when you’re out of the room. If the mistake is one that could create problems for you down the road, this person might instruct you in the right way to handle the situation to prevent you from subsequent embarrassment.
So being corrected doesn’t always have to mean you’re humiliated. However, if you’re being corrected in a way that causes you to feel shame, it’s unlikely that you’ll feel that good about yourself, regardless of your cultural background. Taken to the extreme, instilling humiliation in a victim is a basic tactic of torturers, prison guards, and certain kinds of domestic abusers. Even in the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, when the “guards” were ordinary college students, humiliation became a part of the drill. Similarly, from the playground to the workplace, bullies seem to revel in the opportunity to humiliate targets, particularly when there’s an audience to impress.
Humiliation is defined as the emotion you feel when your status is lowered in front of others. You may feel annoyed with yourself when you make a mistake or fail to know an answer, but unless others are around to witness it, that’s all you’ll feel. You generally need someone else on hand in order to feel humiliated by mistakes.
As you may recognize from your own experience, then, humiliation is a highly negative emotional state. Surprisingly, it’s one that is studied relatively infrequently in the field of psychology. Other negative emotions—anger, anxiety, jealousy, and fear—are more likely to be the subject of lab investigations, perhaps because addressing them has such obvious practical implications: Anger is bad for your health; anxiety can impair your performance; jealousy can lead to relationship conflict; fear can set the stage for developing a phobia. Humiliation is unpleasant, but at least on the surface, may not seem to have as many consequences.
However, given the central role of humiliation in victimization, it seems worthwhile to investigate its potential effects.
Psychologists Marte Otten and Kai Jonas of the University of Amsterdam decided to peer into the brains of participants while they were exposed to various emotion-inducing scenarios. They compared the electroencephalograms (EEGs) of participants who were led to feel angry, happy, or humiliated. The humiliation scenario took the following form: “You see your internet date at the arranged location. Your date takes one look at you, turns around, and quickly walks away.” I think we can all agree that this scenario is one that could make you feel humiliated.
Otten and Jonas were able to measure their participants’ responses in terms of whether their brains registered a negative affect and how intense this affect was. Comparing the three conditions, they concluded that the participants’ responses to humiliation were both more negative than to anger, and more intense than to happiness.
From this pioneering study, we can see that your brain doesn’t like being humiliated. You not only feel badly, but the degree to which your brain is activated is more pronounced than with other emotion-inducing conditions.
It’s perhaps expected that being brought down in status in front of others will cause you to feel badly. But if you’re the one causing the humiliation, you’re exacting far more hurt than you may realize. If that’s the goal you’re hoping to achieve, your method is working. However, if you think you’re “helping” friends or family members by pointing out their mistakes or in some other way bringing them down a notch, you’re probably wrong. There are kinder and gentler ways to impart corrective messages to those we care about, want to teach, or otherwise want to help. Making sure your criticism or teaching is presented in a way that preserves the other person’s self-respect is the most basic way to avoid causing humiliation.
Turning the tables, how can you manage your own feelings of humiliation when someone else proves you wrong? Elsewhere, I’ve discussed how to handle criticism. Dealing with humiliation is similar, but because it is an emotional state, it is particularly important for you to manage your negative feelings.
As with all emotions, handling humiliation depends on how you construe the situation. According to cognitive theories of emotion, the way you feel is a direct function of the way you think. Hamlet said it best: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” If your skin isn’t that thick, and you hate being shown wrong in front of others, you might benefit from taking a look at the thoughts you feel while in the situation. If humiliation is an emotion that follows from feeling loss of status, perhaps you should redefine the situation to de-emphasize the status piece of the equation.
It’s possible that a friend, loved one, or teacher just wants to help prevent you from making the same mistake again, and so the slight in status is only an imagined one. Redefining the situation to deemphasize the loss of status will ease the pain considerably. However, even if the other person or people have more ominous motives, you can still benefit. By not allowing yourself to feel a loss of dignity, self-respect, or position, you’ll be detracting from their pleasure in watching you squirm. It’s possible that, like the learning process of extinction, their aversive behaviors will eventually diminish.
In either case, if you feel justifiably aggrieved, there are ways you can seek recourse: If it’s an innocent misunderstanding between friends, take a page from the kinder-and-gentler playbook and speak to the person privately, with just the two of you present. If your rights are truly being violated, though, you may need to take the problem to others who can help rectify the situation.
Humiliation comes in a variety of forms, from being rejected to being publicly shamed for a mistake you made. By understanding its connection to your brain’s reactions, you can better cope with, and perhaps avoid, this negative emotion’s intense pain.
They Live among us.
Artists with Bipolar Disorder, Schizoaffective Disorder
Bipolar Type, Schizophrenia and Mental Illness
Millions of people including many artists, writers and musicians with bipolar disorder (BPD), also known as manic-depressive illness, have a brain disorder which causes abnormal shifts in mood, energy and the ability to function. Everyone experiences ups and downs in life but the symptoms of bipolar disorder are extreme swings in mood from deep depression and thoughts of suicide, to elation, exuberance and feelings of grandeur. In some cases (bipolar II) these individuals are unaware of the shifts in mood and changes in their personality. People with bipolar disorder often experience difficulty maintaining close relationships, perform poorly in school, and have trouble keeping a job. Compounding these problems addiction to drugs and alcohol is very common among people with bipolar disorder. Furthermore perceiving life through both depression and mania causes confusion and distortions of reality. Because of the many negative effects bipolar disorder has on an individual and the stress an individual feels caused by cycling through mania and depression he or she may resort to risky behaviors, self medication or suicide to end their suffering.
According to the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), 5.7 million American adults or about 2.6 percent of the population in any given year have bipolar disorder. Typically bipolar disorder develops in adolescence or early adulthood. Some people show symptoms during childhood however many individuals especially children are misdiagnosed and suffer for many years before being properly diagnosed and treated.
Bipolar Disorder and Creativity
“Men have called me mad but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence–whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought–from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.”— Edgar Allan Poe. The condition known as madness has a long and complex history and for centuries has been the subject of poets, painters, philosophers, and physicians. Aristotle linked madness to one’s character, claiming that “no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness” and Seneca declared that “there is no great genius without a tincture of madness.” Göethe took a dimmer view of the human condition, stating that “we do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution for the universe.”
There have been a handful of studies presumed to support the idea that there is an intrinsic connection between bipolar disorder and creativity. Andreasen[1,2] carried out interviews with 30 Writers-in-Residence at the University of Iowa. Jamison[3]studied a British group of 47 prize winning artists and writers. Ludwig[4] investigated individual biographies of 1004 persons reviewed in the New York Times from 1960-1990. And there have been others each indicating a link between bipolar disorder and creativity, however, some have been suspect and criticized for faulty methodology.
The artist with bipolar disorder may not have a monopoly on innovation and creativity, nevertheless, some of the most unique and original art, music, and literature has been created by people suffering from this disease. More research needs to be conducted on bipolar disorder creativity and cognition specifically as it relates to psychopathology.
Mental Disorders in America
Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.[1] When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people.[2] Even though mental disorders are widespread in the population, the main burden of illness is concentrated in a much smaller proportion — about 6 percent, or 1 in 17 — who suffer from a serious mental illness. [1] In addition, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and Canada for ages 15-44.3 Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time. Nearly half (45 percent) of those with any mental disorder meet criteria for 2 or more disorders, with severity strongly related to comorbidity. [1]
1. Kessler RC, Chiu WT, Demler O, Walters EE. Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of twelve-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R). Archives of General Psychiatry, 2005 Jun;62(6):617-27.
2. U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates by Demographic Characteristics. Table 2: Annual Estimates of the Population by Selected Age Groups and Sex for the United States: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2004 (NC-EST2004-02) Source: Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau Release Date: June 9, 2005. http://www.census.gov/popest/national/asrh/
3. The World Health Organization. The World Health Report 2004: Changing History, Annex Table 3: Burden of disease in DALYs by cause, sex, and mortality stratum in WHO regions, estimates for 2002. Geneva: WHO, 2004.
http://www.who.int/whr/2004/annex/topic/en/annex_3_en.pdf
The following are a few highly creative individuals with bipolar disorder: Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, Charles Mingus, Gustav Mahler, Paul Gauguin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollack and Vincent van Gogh. Many are a part of our popular culture such as Ozzy Osbourne[5], Jean-Claude Van Damme[6], Axl Rose[7], Sinéad O’Conner[8], Jack Irons[9], Linda Hamilton[10], Peter Gabriel[11] and Kurt Cobain[12] to name a few.
Notes
1. Andreasen NC: Creativity and mental illness: Prevalence rates in writers and their
first degree relatives. American Journal of Psychiatry 144:1288–1292, 1987.
2. Andreasen NC, Canter A: The creative writer: Psychiatric symptoms and family
history. Comprehensive Psychiatry 15:123–131, 1974.
3. Jamison KR: Mood disorders and patterns of creativity in British writers and artists.
Psychiatry 52:125–133, 1989.
4. Ludwig AM: The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy. New York, Guilford Press, 1995.
5. Ozzy Osbourne, singer. Lead singer of Black Sabbath and his self-titled band. Cited in VH1’s “Heavy: The History of Metal” in 2006.
6. Australian Woman’s Day magazine, January 30 2006
7. Here Today… Gone To Hell! | Articles > The world according to W. Axl Rose by Del James
8. Sinead O’Connor to Oprah: I feel for Britney – CNN.com
9. Apter, Jeff (2004-11-23). “Fornication: The Red Hot Chili Peppers Story”. Omnibus Press. pp. 134. ISBN 1-84449-381-4.
10. Linda Hamilton says she has bipolar disorder – More news and other features – MSNBC.com
11. Famous People with Bipolar Disorder
12. Interview: Kurt Cobain’s Cousin on Youth Suicide | AHealthyMe.com
The politics of mental health
The politics of mental health
Last month, four MPs bravely told the world about their own mental health issues in an effort to reduce the stigma. They talk about what happened next
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- The Guardian, Sunday 29 July 2012 20.00 BST
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‘Whether if affects how people view me, I do not know. And frankly I do not care’ … Kevan Jones, MP. Photograph: Mark Pinder
Charles Walker starts to sit down next to me, rises and pulls up another seat. “Let’s have this fourth chair here,” he says, and pulls it up between us. I think he is joking. But he isn’t: without the fourth chair it would be very hard for him to do this interview, maybe impossible.
A week before we meet, the Conservative MP stood up in the House of Commons TV cameras and the Hansard scribes who record Parliament’s proceedings,and talked about living with obsessive compulsive disorder for more than three decades. “I am delighted to say that I have been a practising fruitcake for 31 years,” he began. “On occasions it is manageable and on occasions it becomes quite difficult. It takes one to some quite dark places.”
One of the most obvious manifestations of his condition is his compulsion to do everything in fours: wash his hands, switch lights on and off, go in and out of a room. “My wife and children often say I resemble an extra from Riverdance as I bounce in and out, switching lights off four times.”
Walker is a compelling orator and his speech was full of poignant detail and humour. But as we chat it becomes obvious that he is painfully serious about that fourth chair. “You train yourself not to give in to it, but it’s agony: it’s like fingernails …” he trails off, the image of the chalkboard left hanging.
Walker was speaking at a debate on mental health in the House of Commons one slack Thursday afternoon, when few reporters were watching carefully. But somewhere between fellow MP and former Labour defence minister Kevan Jones putting down his notes and admitting for the first time in public that he had a history of serious depression, and Walker explaining that he leaves crisp packets lying around because he can’t face having to wash his hands multiple times, the outside world began to listen.
Two more Tory MPs also spoke: former GP Sarah Wollaston, who has experienced depression, postnatal depression and severe anxiety attacks, and ex-City banker Andrea Leadsom, who has also gone through postnatal depression. The subject #mentalhealthdebate soon began trending on Twitter. Many of the responses echoed my own: admiration and thanks for what the MPs had done from those with their own mental health issues – in my case clinical depression and anxiety.
The purpose of the debate, tabled and led by Conservative MP Nicky Morgan, was to raise the profile of mental health as an issue, and address the stigma and isolation felt by the vast majority of patients. Morgan opened with some statistics: one in four people will experience a mental health problem at some point in their life; it is the largest cause of disability and accounts for 23% of the “disease burden” on the NHS, yet only 11% of its budget is spent treating it. And despite all that, the general topic of mental health had not been debated in the main chamber for at least four years. “Just imagine if this were a physical health condition,” she added. It is hard to imagine there would be so little attention.
During the next couple of hours MPs raised important issues: advocates accompanying mental health patients when they discuss their treatment with professionals, Criminal Records Bureau checks, funding, cuts to social services and complaints about assessments of whether they are fit to work. Tory MP Gavin Barwell talked about his new private bill, supported by all parties, that will remove laws that institutionally discriminate against people who have had serious mental health problems – for example, barring them from being jurors. Health ministers, Conservative Simon Burns and Lib Dem Paul Burstow, noted some concerns, and individual MPs no doubt plan to keep campaigning on the other points they raised in the debate, until they succeed or retire.
But if the afternoon has any lasting impact on those with mental health concerns, it will be because of the unsentimental but unsparing personal stories of those four MPs. And I wondered how these courageous people felt afterwards: did they wake up full of regret the next morning or in the following days? How did their family, colleagues, friends and constituents react? “Whether it affects how people view me, I do not know,” Jones said. “And frankly I do not care because if it helps other people who have depression or who have suffered from it in the past, then good.”
Once we are both seated next to the two empty chairs, and start talking, Walker points out his local newspaper, the Cheshunt & Waltham Mercury. The front page headline is: “‘Fruitcake’ MP praised for bravery.” Does he regret using the word? “Absolutely not,” he says. “I have been involved in mental health for the best part of seven years: part of the problem is people are terrified of it and they shouldn’t be. That’s why I thought it was important to show a lightness of touch.
“Since it’s talking about my own condition, I can talk about it how I like. If we didn’t laugh in my own home about my own particular manic phases, life would be so much more difficult.”
Walker and Jones both spoke of guilt driving them to speak out, and of feeling like frauds if they did not. “Actually, I felt better for it,” says Jones when we meet later. Once the emotional high of the debate had subsided, however, did they regret what they had done? “Yes,” admits Jones, “but the response afterwards shows it was the right thing to do.” Walker says he had “little twinges” when he saw the Mercury, but says that strikingly his health was good in the days afterwards: if he had made a big mistake, the stress would have manifested itself in stronger symptoms. “This is my driving passion and I hope it’s given me more credibility to talk about it, and more of a platform,” he adds.
Aweek after the debate, the four MPs between them have had more than 1,000 emails, letters and phone calls. Many colleagues have thanked them: among 650 MPs, there must be more than four who have personal experiences of mental health – especially given that politics attracts driven people who have to live under the stress of constant scrutiny and frequent criticism. Others will know of it through parents and siblings, sons and daughters, partners and friends.
Most of the responses, though, are from ordinary people: MPs see many who are struggling with mental health problems at their weekly surgeries. The debate seems to have have encouraged them to open up, or simply thank the MPS for “helping make it OK”.
Jones tells me about a woman he met in his North Durham constituency. “In her late 50s to early 60s, a middle-class lady came up to me and said she’d had depression for 10 years, and was an alcoholic for seven. She said: ‘What you have said has given me strength.’ If I’d passed her, I’d never have guessed. If you walk down the street, you can’t tell who has mental health issues.”
The hidden nature of most mental illness is a large part of the problem: it is ubiquitous, yet those who admit to their condition feel that they are treated differently, isolated or even ostracised. Or fear they will be.
Research by Time to Change, a charity tackling the stigma surrounding mental illnesses, suggests four out of five people with mental health problems experience stigma and discrimination, and half of those said it happened every day, every week or every month. This stops a great many from socialising, looking for or returning to work, or having a relationship. Perhaps the most powerful testimony was from the 35% of respondents who said stigma had “made them give up on their ambitions, hopes and dreams for their life”, and one in four who said it had “made them want to give up on life”.
Even before she spoke out in parliament, Wollaston had been more open than most with patients and constituents about her experiences of postnatal depression and panic attacks, perhaps because of her background as a GP. By contrast, Walker had only told one person in politics about his illness since being elected MP for Broxbourne in 2005, and Jones, an MP since 2001, had not even told most of his family. “I come from a very traditional background: my father was a miner, and I was a full-time trade union official, so we don’t talk about these things,” he says.
There are other more common pressures though. “You don’t want to be defined as a ‘mental health person’,” continues Jones. “Also you have this fear about what is perceived as a weakness: will it affect people’s views of you, but also make you vulnerable? Actually my depression has made me stronger.”
In her speech, Wollaston spoke about how “at the happiest time of my life” after the birth of one of her three children, she was sometimes left feeling “your family would be better off without you”.
“I am absolutely sure,” she said, “that my own experiences of depression and recovery – recovery is very important – caused me to become a much more sympathetic doctor, and I hope that it made me a more sympathetic and understanding MP, able to recognise the issues in others and respond to them appropriately.”
By speaking out, the MPs all hope to help others by showing the world that most – not all, they stress, but many – people with mental health experiences can lead interesting and fulfilling lives when they have had help controlling and dealing with their issues. As well as having had early careers, getting elected and campaigning for mental health charities among other causes, all four MPs have made their mark on politics. Jones was a minister of defence for one of the world’s military superpowers; Walker last year won the Spectator’s speech of the year award for his intervention in the debate about a referendum on the European Union: “If not now, when?”. Wollaston became the first Conservative prospective MP selected, not by the usual route of a panel of local party loyalists, but through an “open primary”, in which every registered voter in the Totnes constituency could vote for who they wanted as their Tory candidate, and she more than doubled the party’s majority in 2010; while Leadsom is one of the party’s most active thinkers, already strongly tipped to be promoted into government. They follow in a dignified tradition, begun in recent memory by the Norwegian prime minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik, who took time off the country’s top job for depression in 1998.
“A lot of people will be saying: ‘If MPs can talk about it, maybe I can start being a bit more open,'” says Walker.
May 2005/6/7/8/9/10/11/12/13/14/15
I wouldn’t recommend it though….it bloody hurts when you fail.
Through early morning fog I see
visions of the things to be
the pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see…
visions of the things to be
the pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see…
That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.
I try to find a way to make
all our little joys relate
without that ever-present hate
but now I know that it’s too late, and…
The game of life is hard to play
I’m gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I’ll someday lay
so this is all I have to say.
The only way to win is cheat
And lay it down before I’m beat
and to another give my seat
for that’s the only painless feat.
The sword of time will pierce our skins
It doesn’t hurt when it begins
But as it works its way on in
The pain grows stronger…watch it grin, but…
A brave man once requested me
to answer questions that are key
‘is it to be or not to be’
and I replied ‘oh why ask me?’
‘Cause suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.
…and you can do the same thing if you choose.
windcurrents 