MIND MOVES:Learning that humour is a key to survival, writes TONY BATES
IN THE PAST five years I have witnessed an opening up of the public discourse on mental health that I never imagined could happen. Service users are speaking out about their experiences. They have exposed the shameful practices whereby they were warehoused in large institutions, over-medicated and forgotten by all of us. They have spoken about their struggles to make sense of pain and confusion in their lives and how poorly served they were by those who looked at them with eyes that held no hope of recovery.
These survivors have shown us the power within all of us to recover and live full lives when we are treated with respect and listened to by people who don’t give up on us. They have asked that we see them as people, and not as labels; people like you and me who face the terror of existence everyday and try to live our lives to the fullest extend that we can.
When our formative years are filled with love and opportunity, this challenge is easier for us. When those years are marred by neglect, abuse and sorrows of all kinds, this struggle becomes a lot more difficult. It takes time, patient listening and heaps of encouragement to weave together the broken pieces of such a life and emerge with an identity that feels real.
I worked in a psychiatric service where people landed when they lost their way in that struggle. I remember a man who said to me, “It must be so boring to have to listen to depressed people day after day in your job”.
He was so wrong. I was paid for years to listen, and be part of conversations that were painful but liberating. Conversations that kept them and me alive.
I learned a lot about what it takes to be human from these encounters. I learned about how fragile we all are and how important is it to have a boundary that protects us from others. The people I encountered had a heightened sensitivity to the world around them. They lacked the thick skin that enabled others to ride out everyday setbacks and sorrows. They couldn’t hide their distress as well as many of us do. Too often we wrote them off as “mad” and failed to see that for them, their suffering was real and affected them deeply.
I learned from them that humour is a key to survival. This world of ours can be a crazy place where what is taken for “normality” is dishonesty, betrayal, greed and discrimination. The people I met lacked the capacity to live up to these standards and were judged by the world around them to be weak. But they saw through so much nonsense. We had many serious conversations, but there were also many moments of laughter when we saw through what was happening all around us.
I have learned how the problems we experience can open us up to new depths in ourselves. That a mental health crisis is both a mental and a spiritual emergency where questions about what really matters become clearer to us. If we can learn to be with ourselves when we are in the throes of a “mental breakdown”, if we can learn to listen to what it is telling us about our life, we can find a way to listen to our inner voice and to trust who we are.
For the majority of us, the hardest call we will ever make is to reach for help when we, or someone we love, loses their way. You need to be well connected to navigate the system of care we have, and there are very few people in the know about how to locate a trustworthy service and a competent professional. It is critical that as we open up the conversation about mental health, we also open up clear pathways to support for anyone who hits a wall in their lives.
The way we relate to people we deem to be different, to be “mad”, is the measure of our compassion and our maturity as a society. These people mirror to us the fears and uncertainties that baffle and unsettle all of us. If we can work together to ensure that the basics of kindness and respect are available to every person who falls into darkness, we will all be the better for it. We can learn from them to live with the richness, complexity and the depths of our own inner lives.
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health, headstrong.ie