Antidote in the arts to stigma of mental illness

Growing up watching MTV in the early and mid-1990s left its mark on me. First, it left me with the long since outmoded idea that MTV could be reasonably relied upon to play music videos; second, that changing the world didn’t need to be dull.

MTV exposed the teenage me to the most enthralling of social campaigns.

From the cerebral “free your mind and the rest will follow” adverts to the slick “if you are going to do this . . . you’d better do this” safe sex ads, we were enticed rather than instructed to do the right, good or healthy thing.

No such campaigns existed back then for mental health. Who would have thought that our own minds could scare us more than Aids or Slobodan Milosevic combined?

But they did. And they do.

In the many years that have passed since my 1990s couch potato days, I have witnessed little or no change to the level of terror with which we approach mental health as a social issue or as a human right.

When it comes to mental health we hide behind doctors, who in turn hide behind desks that hide behind walls.

When we began First Fortnight back in January 2010, the goal was to energise the mental health sector with a fresh approach. We wanted to create a space in the calendar where mental health as an issue could be heard through the noise.

We organised events that used the arts to illuminate the diverse ways in which mental health can be seen to affect the world.

We also knew that what we developed needed to be repeatable, familiar and ritualistic, hence the decision to host the festival in the first two weeks of January every year.

Patience and repetition

When your goal is to change social attitudes you need to be prepared to do the same things over again, say the same things over again and be patient with how the outcome evolves. You must also bear in mind the necessary challenge in finding new and interesting conversation starters, points of abrasion, pictures, sounds and smells.

When you want people to keep talking about the same thing you have to give them different reasons to do that.

Mental health awareness is not our goal. In truth, it’s not a goal worth having. We have never wanted people to become more aware of mental health problems, to have a greater knowledge of the pathology of a group of illnesses broadly categorised as psychiatric.

Instead, we want to raise people’s awareness of how silent they are when the issue of mental health is brought up; to acknowledge how afraid they are to discuss it and come to understand how clumsy, underdeveloped and stilted the national “conversation” on mental health truly is.

We challenge the prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory actions that maintain the social stigma of mental ill health and we do this by inviting an audience to meet this challenge in themselves by redesigning their year’s beginning into a themed arts and social experience: a mental health arts festival.

Love and pain

How many of us, when we think of love, remember the dictionary definition of it? Or when we think of pain try and remember the symptoms listed on the back of a pack of Ibuprofen?

The arts bring us closer to the world by taking us briefly away from it. Art is not for ornamentation or distraction, but for provocation and inspiration.

The area of mental health promotion needed the arts more than it ever knew and will need the arts in the future if we are to continue to reduce the stigma of experiencing a mental health problem.

Mental health problems and the arts both dwell in the peculiar and idiosyncratic aspects of the human condition; the messy, unkempt parts of us that we bundle into the cupboard when we hear someone coming.

For two weeks at the beginning of every year you are invited to enjoy theatre, visual arts, poetry, music, spoken word, dance and film. There are worse ways to begin your new beginning.

J P Swaine is co-founder of First Fortnight, a two-week mental health arts festival aimed at challenging mental health stigma. Its programme of events gets under way on January 1st and runs in Dublin and selected venues nationwide. Details at firstfortnight.ie