Let’s go fucking Mental. – Fourth Mental Update

“Let’s go fucking Mental.

Let’s go fucking Mental.

Let’s go fucking Mental.”

Is a chant I’ve heard groups of beer fuelled white men sing before… I think I was on the train to Glasgow, which is odd as some of the UK’s radical mental health practice originates from the Asylums of 50’s Glasgow, with it’s awareness of notions of having a break through rather than a breakdown.

Anyhows, these blokes on the train where perhaps making an unconscious link, or it was nothing more than a coincidence in my own mind. You won’t want to go mental, would you? Not even if you’d got sucked into the warped logic that a mental illness is a ticket to great creativity.

It’s two weeks since the Mental showcase for the Samuel Beckett theatre award finished, we didn’t win. But it went well, better than I imagined I would be able to do. And I didn’t collapse into a pit of complete inability. It was hard though, and very exposing, naturally. Upon thinking it through I was able to roughly carve the audience into three different responses or groups.

1 – People with current or past experience of living with a mental illness seemed to be fired up by it, almost rejoiceful. I wasn’t expecting this, but it makes a lot of sense. Times of acute mental illness can be very isolating and when you’re able to make a connection with somebody else’s experience this can be truly wonderful.

2 – People with some experience of mental illness, having had a friend go through it or something similar. Perhaps this group found it the hardest, returning to a time they felt up able or unable to help or just baffled by what was going on. Or perhaps seeing something in detail that before had felt like a train rushing by.

3 – People who sat through the showcase looking like rabbit’s in the headlights. I overheard things like ‘I didn’t know things like that still happened’… Bless.

There were no doubt other responses as well.

I think it works though, and I think it’s worth continuing to try and finish it. I may have to change the way I work on it, take it slow and steady, give myself a little more time. But that’s doable. I hope to finish the show by late summer next year (2013) and will be doing a further developed version at In Between Time in February next year.