talk about it - and then what?
on the way we can talk about our mental health now, those who cannot, and what to do when talking about it feels like it's falling short
In 2014 the UK charity Mind launched the first ‘Time to Talk’ day, encouraging families, friends and workplaces to talk about mental health. I was in my third year of music school and programmed a recital with pieces written by composers who succumbed to mental health issues, Wolf, Schumann, Mussorgsky etc. I was encouraged against making my reason for the programming explicit, because it would make people uncomfortable and it said too much about the state of my own mental health.
I understand the second point now, but not in the way they meant at the time. Until I was 25 my ‘process’ was unleashing my unregulated central nervous system onto the stage. At least this way I was getting praised for my pain rather than just having to deal with it. Transforming my psychosis, depression, self-injury, alcoholism and eating disorders into highly skilled and polished performances that teetered on (and eventually fell into) complete mental collapse when the applause stopped working wasn’t appropriate for a young person, but not because I chose this survival mechanism - rather that I saw it as the only option, and there was no structure for anyone to intervene and help me.
My motive for the recital was to show how ordinary it was to struggle, and how common it was in the arts. None of the pieces I programmed were miserable, they were of varying sound words and poetic themes - to prove that people who struggle are often thirsting for life, contain everything a human has, see the world differently, and are seekers of beauty. To me, that was as important as the fact that they were as unsupported and unnecessarily tortured as the people I studied with now, the future composers and performers that one day would sit at the uncomfortable axis of being vulnerable to life-threatening mental health crises and exquisite artistic output.
It was also a dedication to all the people I loved, who felt it, and talked about it. They saved my life.
I did the recital, it did make people uncomfortable (I perhaps said ‘syphilitic insanity’ too many times) and no one really wanted to talk about mental health afterwards. You just didn’t really talk about mental health back then, which is still astonishing to me. Only 11 years have passed and we’ve managed to change the mental health discussion from something that happened in quiet, shameful places to talking about what therapy modality you’re trying as casually as discussing your favourite brand of running shoe.
I will prefix this by saying, I run in recovery circles and most of my friends are people who have experienced a rock-bottom that necessitated them to address their issues directly, and have had access to do so. I live in a major city, with resources and I am terminally online. My observation that we talk about things now is from that position, and I want to acknowledge that it is not universal. In the town I am from, 1 in 4 people live in poverty, so seeing someone to talk about your mental health is simply not an option, and counselors, psychiatrists and psychologists aren’t rushing to set up practices there. For most, you are simply too busy to be mentally ill, you have to go to work (which is probably why I slotted my mental illness and my work-life into the same place for so long).