Dave's Progress. Chapter 110: The Poet and the Psychiatrist.

One of the first questions I asked when coming into mental health services was, if there is no such thing as "normal", why is anyone locked away in a psychiatric institution? It is only the concept of apparent "normality" which results in its binary opposite, "madness". So, despite the protests of those in practice who continually suggested to me that there was no such thing as "normal", I could not get over the fact, and the glaring contradiction, that psychiatric services would want us all to lead a "normal" life. It also seemed to me that creative people, often a little eccentric in their ways, may come into conflict with mental health services simply because of the way they are. What would happen, I wondered, were, for example, William Blake to walk through the door of my local residential unit, a man so fuelled by imagination that, in his writings, he seemed to create an entire world. Would it be possible that the "normalising" processes of psychiatric practice may harm, damage or even destroy such a person's talent?

William Blake, Visionary Poet.

In two recent articles these questions were approached. In the first, "Poetry, the creative process and mental illness", by Alex Hudson (BBC News), it was shown that in a recent study by psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, poets were 20 times more likely to end up in an asylum than the general population. The study took the incidence of mood disorder, suicide and institutionalisation among major British and Irish poets between 1600 and 1800 as its basis. Even Wordsworth, to return to Blake for a second, is said to have remarked, on the latter's passing, "Alas, he was mad, the poor fellow." Furthermore, the article suggested that other studies had found that brain patterns in artists at work were similar to those of "schizophrenics" and that creative graduates share more personality traits with bipolar patients than less creative ones.
Could it be, then, that the mind of the creative person and the institution of psychiatry inevitably clash? Is creativity itself in opposition to the processes of mental health practice? The article quotes psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon, who says, "creativity is certainly about not being constrained by rules or accepting the restrictions society places on us". In my experience, and in contrast to this, psychiatric practice seems to be all about getting people to adhere to rules and making them behave in socially accepted ways. Is it any wonder, then, that creative people, who perhaps break with conformity, are more likely to end up being treated for some mental disorder? Indeed, Fitzgibbon goes on to say, "of course the more people break the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as mentally ill."
Like a lot of people, I felt, in my own experience of being treated for a mental illness, that some of my creativity had been lost in the process. Also like a lot of people, I somewhat resented that treatment upon its initiation. Coming down from an episode of illness was almost like coming down from some kind of not altogether unpleasant drug, and I often felt that some important part of myself was being annihilated. The phrase "don't take away my demons because you'll take away my angels too", which I used as a title for one of my blogs in which I described this process, often came to my mind. Indeed, the poet Luke Wright suggests in the article that " a lot of creativity comes from a conflict somewhere in your mind". In its worst form, perhaps psychiatry can iron out such conflict, destroy creativity, serving only to pacify, sedate or render conforming.
I understand that modern psychiatric practice would attempt to avoid such things, but in a second article, Diana Rose, co-director of the Service User Research Enterprise (SURE) at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, suggests that "normalisation" is still  a process at work today and that it is a source of stigma to many service users. She states:
"...we are often seen as a bundle of deficits: cognitive deficits, emotional deficits and behavioural deficits. These, according to mental health professionals are to be "corrected" with rehabilitation techniques which will normalise the person...this can make the recipient of these techniques feel completely inadequate. We are in need of "correction"."
So, the process of normalisation would still appear to be in use, and it just might be possible, that in "correcting" our deficits, psychiatry also unwittingly dallies with that which need not be a "deficit", but resolutely a positive attribute.
But, whatever I may think, the question of what is "normal" is going to remain a vexed one for psychiatry and one which it cannot any longer avoid with simple platitudes. It seems, also, that care must be taken to avoid dismantling, instead of building on, the creative talents of service users.
Anyway, as an aside from all this mental health talk, I thought I would just print a random picture of a Koala Bear here, just to demonstrate that, at last, I have got to grips with putting pictures into my blog.

The Lovable, Cuddly Koala Bear.

 See you next time.