In association with Toi Ora Live Art and Frozen Funds Trusts.

Twenty years ago, Peter Finlay spent time at Lake Alice, the psychiatric institution. Shortly after leaving, he wrote the story of his hospitalization and his re-entry to civilian life. There’s a police beating, medication haze, nefarious inpatient characters, strange thought-processes, and through it all, the calm voice of the writer, fully oriented to time, place and self, who explains what it was like in 1987 to come undone and get put in one of New Zealand’s most infamous psychiatric hospitals.

The Frozen Funds Trust is supporting the publication of Peter Finlay’s Blue Messiah. The Trust was established to distribute grants from a fund originating from the interest on patients’ savings whilst in psychiatric hospitals over many years. After returning money to everyone they could find, five million dollars was left. In 2008, its inaugural year, the Trust called for projects from the mental health community that would educate the public about “the legacy of institutionalization”.

In recent years, Peter Finlay has regularly attended the creative writing class at Toi Ora Live Art Trust and is now enrolled in English and writing classes at Auckland University. Toi Ora is an art centre for painters, printers, musicians, writers, and craftspeople in Grey Lynn, Auckland. It provides a space for people who use mental health services to make their art. Peter and Toi Ora approached Frozen Funds, and the result is this compelling publication.

Erwin van Asbeck
Manager
Toi Ora Live Art Trust
6 Putiki St. Grey Lynn. Auckland
09 3604171
erwin@toiora.org.nz

Toi Ora Live Art Trust
6 Putiki Street
Grey Lynn
Auckland

Monday – Friday 9am – 4pm
(09)360 4171
www.toiora.org.nz

Toi Ora Autumn 2010 Programme (click to enlarge)

Mind and Body's Jim Burdett and Taimi Allan with Tariana Turia

This award celebrates leaders who make a difference in their management of a diverse workforce, and in exemplifying Jim’s achievements the awards highlighted Mind and Body as an extraordinary company amongst the 55 nominees.

Jim Burdett, and Mind and Body’s Like Minds, Like Mine Team leader, Taimi Allan attended the awards on Thursday the 29th of October, where Mind and Body’s work was showcased in 3 categories to an audience of over 350 politicians, multi-nationals and New Zealand business leaders. An outstanding video of Mind and Body was shown, and Jim and Taimi were given an opportunity to speak.

The Hon. Tariana Turia presented the award to Jim who spoke of his passion for Mind and Body’s remarkable employees, our strengths because of, and not in spite of our experiences and made it clear that living with an experience of Mental Illness was enabling rather than disabling.

It was also a timely and incredible opportunity for Taimi, as part of her Like Minds work on countering the stigma and discrimination associated with Mental Illness, to tie in the current national Like Minds, Like Mine campaign hotspot on Employment. Taimi spoke to a captive audience of Employers on not just awareness of the discrimination people with an experience of Mental Illness face in employment but indeed, the benefits of employing and supporting such a resilient workforce.

Whilst Jim won the award last night, congratulations must go to everyone at Mind and Body for such a significant achievement.

More information can be found on the EEO website www.eeotrust.org.nz as well as published articles in the Work Life Awards publication and the November issue of “New Zealand Management” magazine.”

Te Ata, a consumer support centre, has been awarded a RETHiNK Grant for the production, printing and launch of the 2010 Breaking Barriers calendar and greeting cards. This project showcases Te Ata members’ art work. The art work reflects, and is symbolic of, the value of their experiences, and the learning that mental distress can provide. It aims to show how positive, inclusive and non-judgemental attitudes can make a difference in people’s lives.

Please help to bring this very important issue into the awareness of our community by purchasing a calendar from Te-Ata for $15 so that they may continue to support people’s Mental Health through artistic endeavour.

Calendars are available from:

West Auckland Mental Health Support Trust – Te Ata
146 Lincoln Rd, Henderson, Waitakere 0610 Ph : (09) 837 0671 Fax: (09) 837 0674

The exhibition aims to promote 2009 RETHiNK Grant recipients Toi Ora Live Arts Trust and the inspirational artworks of its members.

Howling Dog

Exhibition: 28 October to 5 November 2009
Opening: TUESDAY NIGHT, 27 October from 5pm to 7pm
Gallery hours: 9am to 9pm Monday to Thursday, 9am to 5pm Friday, 10am to 4pm Saturday

As a young woman I experienced severe moodswings and was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for several years. I slowly realised that the people who worked in the mental health system had very little in their toolkits, because they saw me through a reductionist, deficits based and pessimistic lens. I seldom felt understood or helped in the mental health system and I knew people who were deeply harmed by it.

In response to the failures of the mental health system and with a blank CV, I helped to initiate the user/survivor movement in New Zealand in the mid 1980s. I started locally, by setting up a self-help and advocacy organisation called Psychiatric Survivors in Auckland. Then I went global and became the first chair of the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, and an advisor to the United Nations and the World Health Organisation. In 2000 I was appointed as a mental health commissioner in New Zealand, and since 2007 I’ve been an international consultant in mental health.

Two of the deeper questions underlying my work have been how should we understand the phenomenon we call ‘mental illness’ and how should services and society respond to it. I’ve learnt that these two questions are inevitably linked and that we cannot create genuine change without transforming social and professional attitudes to madness. Unless people see madness as a full human experience, such as a crisis of being that value and meaning can be derived from, their responses to it will continue to marginalise and do harm.

Making Sense

In this interview I make sense of my madness from the inside by reading extracts from the first draft of my memoir. As a young adult with severe mental health problems I had a huge struggle making sense of my experience. The sense other people made of my madness didn’t make a lot of sense to me either. I was exposed to four grand theories about the origins and nature of madness and none of them worked for me.

The biological theory was far too reductionist to help me make sense of such powerful experiences. Some mental health professionals told me I had tipped over the edge because I had psychological deficiencies or there was dysfunction in my family of origin. By and large I didn’t agree with them, which irritated some of them immensely. I didn’t have the usual sociological risk factors; my early life was relatively secure and by the time I had reached the age of 18 I had banished any notions of god or spirits from my universe.

All these grand theories (biological, psychological, sociological and spiritual) have strong causal explanations for madness; they tend to view the causes and the nature of psychosis as overwhelmingly negative, which also didn’t make total sense to me.

In my search to make sense of my madness, I talked with my peers, read mad peoples’ autobiographies, anti-psychiatry, and the literature of the user/survivor movement. These all helped but I still couldn’t really fit my madness into the story of the rest of my life.

Many years later I realised that I was using the wrong tools to try and unlock the meaning in my madness. The use of tools like logic and analysis hadn’t got me far, despite my persistence. Instead, I started to apply the tools of intuition and creativity to the task of finding meaning in my experience and it worked much better.

So today I’m not giving you a robust analysis; I’m giving you an intuitively arranged set of experiences in the form of words, metaphors and images. Most of the words I will speak were originally written during or around my episodes of madness, though they have been reworked to fit a different context. Some of the extracts disclose my raw experience, while others are more reflective. Most of the images are new and were not created by me, with the exception of two drawings I did with cheap Hospital Board crayons in Occupational Therapy.

Many Stories

There are many stories about madness. For mad people the stories are of a powerful experience, for psychiatrists it is a collection of symptoms, and for families it is disturbing behaviour. For the public, the story of madness is enshrined in the dictionary and everyday language; madness is insanity, foolishness, it’s wild and uncontrollable.

Madness has been described again and again by people who have never experienced it. The mad person’s definition of madness has never made it into the dictionary or into conversation, media stories, literature or mental health discourse.

Our version of madness can even elude us. We lack a validating language to make meaning from it. Our madness stands outside in the dark, knocking on the door to meaning, struggling to get in. My own stories of my madness struggled to take shape while other people’s stories of it took instant inspiration from the dictionary, diagnostic manuals and a wider culture that completely shunned it.

Most of the stories of those who look on, seeing only snatches of madness, portray it as all bad. My story of my madness though, is fuller than the stories of those who looked on. As well as being the most intricate story, it is the only unbroken one, the only story that had a witness present from start to finish and every moment in between. That witness was me.

Existential Crisis

The first time I go mad I lie in bed for days with my door shut and the curtains drawn. I struggle to put a thought or a sentence together. I can’t talk. I can barely move. My chest burns with a dark smouldering pain, and I rasp with weak, shallow breathing.

This is the completion of my crumbling into a profound nothingness.

I discover with horror that I live in a black box. I have hidden the blackness all my life in the naïve hope that there is a grand purpose to everything. In my folly I have pasted over the walls of the black box with pleasing and colourful decorations – the false window frames with a painted in view of a grand universe, the fake pictures of a life worth living, the pretend painted-in door that leads into a promising future.

Now all the decorations have been torn down, showing the bare black boards behind them. All I have known and valued in my life is a sham – my belief in goodness, my hopes for the future, my affection for family and friends, my curiosity, my laughter. I have lied to myself and the people and the culture around me have lied with me. There is no reason to live, I say over and over to myself.

A Waking Dream

One night in my flat I’m spinning again; my thoughts are charging through me at the speed of light. I see the kitchen knives sharpened and winking on the wall magnet above the bench. Now I understand why my flatmates are looking at me strangely; they are planning to kill me with the knives. I run away in terror through the cold dark streets. My flatmate catches up with me, puffing, pleading with me to stop. He sticks his arms into the air and tells me to feel him for knives. I can’t find any. He calms me down and walks me to the hospital.

The emergency nurse puts me into a room and shuts the door. I spin around. Everything is infused with holiness. Even the chrome and the white formica glow from within. I am getting lighter and I feel my feet starting to leave the floor. It is revealed to me that I am the Virgin Mary ascending into heaven. At that moment the psychiatrist comes and I bolt from the room until a security guard catches me. The psychiatrist sends me to the mental hospital in an ambulance which winds through the dark country roads like a shining beacon, while I prepare for my ascension through the metal roof, up into the endless night sky.

The next morning I wake in the mental hospital with the sunlight shooting and splintering through the windows, as evil and deadly as a nuke. I jump over the patches of white light on the floor and head for the shadows in my light blue dressing gown. If I step onto the white patches I will be blown to bits. As I weave through the shadows I grab a nurse by the arm. ‘The sun is trying to kill me. My madness is trying to kill me. What’s going to happen to me? Will I keep going mad? It’s going to destroy my life’.

The Ecstasy

My friend is driving me through the bursting yellow hills of Marlborough. The colours are too rich, the trees too sacred, everything too infused with godliness. Looking at the world is like looking straight into the eye of the sun.

I lower my eyes and see an orange glowing on the car seat beside me. Picking it up with reverence, I hold it out in front of me. ‘The whole cosmos is beating inside this orange. I have never ever seen anything so sacred,’ I say to my friend. I cut up the orange with a pocket knife. Its insides glisten and the precious juice falls onto our fingers as we eat it.

Then I listen to Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concertos on a walkman. The music makes me dizzy with delight; it surges into the core of my being and bounces off the hills into the bright blue sky. It is so unbearably beautiful, so powerful, I can feel it almost carry me through the air.

The Agony

I wake in the middle of the night, jerking with the feeling of electric shocks going through me, every time I have a thought. I can feel my tender burning guts smoulder inside my gasping caged chest. Everything hurts. I am burning. All the life in me blazing out from the core of me is getting stuck. I can feel it trying to burn through my skin. I am almost on fire.

The presence of other people burns into me too. Their gazes beat down on me, like the hot, hot sun on a desert. I start to wither when they came near, so I lie curled up in my bed to shield myself from the jabbing gaze of the world. In the morning, the night nurses pull off my blankets; they’re rough and I can’t fight them back. I feel so vulnerable. Even the air could hurt me.

Lying curled up on my bed, the burning gets so bad I become a long piercing scream, all screaming on the inside of me and out of the pores of my skin. My screaming and my self are one. This is pure pain. I cannot bear being alive.

The Isolation

I am stuck in this twilight mood where I go down like the setting sun into a lonely black hole where there is room for only one.

A few days later in occupational therapy I draw a picture of me standing inside a glass bubble that seals me off from the world. The bubble is in night and the world is in day; I can see the world from a distance but the world cannot see me. I have no hands or feet or face, and my body is faint except for the black void of my lost self in my chest. A red umbilical cord lies broken at the bottom of the bubble. There is a rainbow behind the bubble but I can’t see it. Madness severs me cleanly like a meat cleaver. It severs me from my self. It severs me from my world. Sometimes the severing is too painful for words.

The Lost Self

I have lost my self. What is my name? I have no name. All I am is shape and weight, rapid shallow breathing, and a black space inside my head.

Later, I write that a sense of self is not an emotion or a thought or a sensation. My self is the solid core of my being. It is like an immutable dark sun that sits at the centre of things while all my fickle feelings, thoughts and sensations orbit around it. But my self goes into hiding during madness. Sometimes it slides into the great nothingness like a setting sun. Sometimes it gets trampled in the dust by all the whizzing in my body and mind.

But my self always comes back as strong as ever after my madness subsides; it reoccupies the core of me with its warm dark aura. Madness does not just extinguish me, it also renews me.

I discover this one day when I watch my flatmate weed and dig the vegetable garden. It had been lying fallow for a year. She came up to me and said ‘The soil’s good, it’s had a break’. Then I realise my madness is like the soil lying fallow. Sometimes my madness strips me bare but it is also the beginning of renewal; every time I emerge from it I feel fresh and ready to start again.

The Heroic Journey

As a child I read Ladybird books about Boadicea and Joan of Arc, brave kings and fearless missionaries. I watched ‘The Lone Ranger’ and ‘Flash Gordon’ on television and longed to be a hero like them – facing adversity, conquering evil and saving the innocent. In my mind I made up stories about saving my class mates from the burning school, running through the flames, dragging them out into the sun choking, while the nuns cheered me on. I made up other stories of saving people; the kind old priest collapsing on the far side of the school paddock with a heart attack. I ran over to him and breathed air into his mouth until he woke spluttering and full of wonder that I had saved his life. All my heroic dreams, games and stories gave me a template for my fall into madness, my relentless struggle with it and my eventual return from it.

When I went to the mental hospital for the first time I thought the nurses and psychiatrists would regard me with respect and a poetic sensitivity for my desperate crisis of being and my heroic struggle to get through it. Though I appeared schizoid and directionless to them I thought they understood that I was fighting the collapse of my self and everything I valued. I was fighting for my life. There is no shortage of myths and legends about people in my kind of predicament – St George and the dragon, forty days in the wilderness, the despair of Job, survival in the trenches. But the psychiatrist and nurses didn’t see me or anyone else in the hospital, reflected in these stories. All they saw was a sick, deluded, screwed up 21 year old who needed their control and containment.

A Minority Experience

I was told again and again that I had a serious problem that needed to be eliminated with expert help. But after a time, I started to think that my moodswings were not an illness, but a strange and inexplicable minority experience that had been captured, impounded and colonised by the psychocratic regulation of reality. Like colonised indigenous people, I had been denied what is truly mine. The psychocrats with their monopoly on knowledge and power had alienated me from my mood experience. There was no meaning in my madness; it stood outside in the dark, unable to be integrated with my ordinary, socially approved self.

How different my moodswings would have been if they were judged to be a talent rather than an illness. Or if 99% of the population had extreme moodswings instead of the 1% that do now? Society would be organised around this vast ‘normal’ labile majority. Perhaps people would even be socialised into experiencing and channelling their moodswings in acceptable ways as other universal attributes like sexuality are. And for the small stable minority maybe there would be a diagnostic category called Mood Inlability Disorder (MID) – ‘Patient is incapable of experiencing the full range of normal adult moods’.

A Friend in Madness

After several years I began to think I shouldn’t fight my madness any more. I could see that it had won again and again. Living against my madness wasn’t working. So I tried to find ways to live with it. How could I live a good life and still have periods of madness? Could I change the experience of my madness so that it was not so disabling or distressing? Would my madness recede if I tried some new ways to make some good things happen to me? No-one else had any answers to these questions and I struggled with them on my own.

I had been in a boxing ring with my madness. My opponent kept knocking me down. I kept getting up and slugging it out, trying different tactics, trying to duck the punches, trying to believe I could win, only to be knocked down again.

In most respects being under the negative, deterministic and dehumanising spectre of `mental illness’ was a monumental barrier to my recovery. To break through this barrier I needed to find a place for my madness, instead of allowing psychiatrists their futile attempts to get rid of it. I needed to know that I could have a good life whether I continued to go mad or not. But there was a cruel, unrelenting determinism about mental illness as it was portrayed to me by psychiatrists.

My madness was like a boarder coming to live in my house, who turned out to be a citizen from an enemy country. Knowing I might not get rid of him meant I had to make peace with him and learn to understand his language. Once I got to know the boarder, he was no longer the stereotypical enemy, but a complex character that deserved some respect.

Finding Club Mad

My madness was one of the most profound experiences I’d had. It was as intense as falling in love, a religious revelation or overwhelming grief. I didn’t want to romanticise madness but I knew it deserved the same status and respect as any other powerful human experience.

What did it mean when the world was too beautiful for me to look at? What did it mean to be inside the black box? What did it mean that I lived in such extreme zones of existence? Nobody really knew or cared. Except me. Mostly, it meant terrible suffering and my desperate struggle to find a place in the world.

At first it meant wandering around the crumbling edges of human experience like a lost explorer. But over the years I met many fine people who were mad like me. I learnt that our madness had taken us to a foreign land where only mad people could go to. Some of us stayed in this mad land for a long time while others of us got out and kept returning to it. Mental health professionals stood at the border trying to pull people out of the mad land, even the ones that wanted to stay. They knew the mad land as a bad place where people got lost, sometimes forever. But most of them had never been there.

My peers helped to show me that I was not the lone lost explorer I thought I was. The mad land, for all its perils, had some of the most enchanting scenery in the world. Like a land that has mountains and ravines, rivers and caves, blinding sun and swirling storms, the mad land could be a place of beauty as well as danger. My peers helped me to understand that there was a whole tribe of us who had been there and seen many of the same things. Things other people did not understand.

Many people reach the border of the mad land at some time in their lives. Most manage to skirt their way around the edge of it and look on with dread at a distance. But those who go right into its belly come out with richer pictures of a being that has been lost and found again. The tragedy is that no-one wants these pictures. Like the paintings of some abstract artists, people look at these pictures and think they could have been done by a child of three.

My own pictures of madness came in the form of words and metaphors. At their most powerful, my words floated in from the blackness and passed through me onto paper. I made meaning, not in spite of my madness, but because of it. It was not the kind of meaning that answered ambitious intellectual questions such as ‘why?’ Like haunting music or poetry, it was a meaning saturated with soul, an intuitive expression of being without the labour of logic.

The Wisdom

One of the last times I went mad I lay on my hospital bed with my eyes shut and my thoughts started sliding off into nonsense. This terrified me so I tried to make some sense of things by taking bits out of nonsense and putting them into a sequence:

An old woman and her grand-daughter lived by a great ocean. Every day the old woman went fishing. She yelled in awe to the ocean, ‘Let me take the life out of you with my net.’ She always returned with fish and cooked them for herself and her grand-daughter. One day she gave some of the fish to her grand-daughter and said, ‘Cook these for yourself’. The girl wailed, ‘I can’t’. The old woman replied, ‘You must find your own power’. But the girl didn’t understand and went to bed hungry.

*

That night the girl woke from her dreams to a booming voice from the sky: ‘You have the power of the old woman and the great ocean flowing into the core of you. Now, take meaning from the rawness of life and cook it for yourself without fear’.

At first I just repeated the words over and over to myself to ward off the chaos. Later I realised the words had arranged themselves into a story, a story that was telling me I didn’t have to go mad any more.

Another Dimension

The conventional wisdom says madness and sanity can never meet over the great wall that separates them. But I have experienced both and they bleed into each other like water into wine. My madness and my sanity are not two parallel stories; they are one story in two dimensions. Madness and sanity are not two different garments; they are the warp and weft of the same fabric.

Sanity is the container madness sits in; they are made for each other like a cup is made to hold drink. Sanity stops madness from spilling everywhere. Madness stops sanity from confining us to the tyranny of the ordinary.

Who Knows?

Madness and sanity hide away in the great blackness beyond the horizon of certain knowledge. People seek to understand them with the puny power of their minds, like tiny searchlights slashing the night sky.

For a second they see a narrow strip of the origins or nature of madness and sanity. Then they fall to the temptation of believing their strips of understanding are very big truths.

I have waved my own searchlight in the great blackness seeking some clues to my madness. I have tacked my strips of understanding into the montage of stories I have just told. It is a work in progress, with many black spaces left to fill.

http://www.maryohagan.com/

Their popularity has continued to grow with the recent release of their critically acclaimed, Danse Macabre. Its single, The Dance of Death spent four weeks on the Kiwi FM Top Ten, and its video lingered for 6 months on the Amplifier Top Ten. Music Review

Having just finished performing in AK09, including a show in The Famous Spiegeltent, the band are now preparing to unleash their debut album, Polkapocalyptic, and getting ready to embark on a 6 month European tour.

Benka is just one of Ben’s many onstage personas (though perhaps the most outspoken, and certainly the most heavily accented.) Ben is also an actor, writer, and producer, with recent work including MC-ing two shows in the AK09 Fringe Festival. It’s no wonder he needs extra versions of himself to keep track of his creative work.
Rather than be interviewed alone, Ben has chosen to include them all here, a sort of panel discussion in his own head if you will…

Cast of Characters

BEN: Performer-composer-maker, or deformed-decomposing-faker? Likes to think of himself as a master of all trades, jack of none; but he’s probably wrong. Will try anything twice.

BENJAMIN: Teller of Stories and Master of Ceremonies, Benjamin Wolff is always on cue with a steady hand, a quick wit and a sonorous voice.

THE G-MAN: He was trouble from the beginning. The G-Man, while rarely heard to speak, tells volumes when the agony and ecstasy pours forth from the music.

Benny: The gently spoken, extravagantly dressed Benny Profane sings songs of the pain of love and the love of pain, while playing melodies that cascade off the piano and guitar, and weave around him.

Benka: When the enigmatic Benka Boradovsky ascends the stage, the room is swept into a frenzy behind songs of war, drink, dance, love, loss, pain and freedom. His clarinet and accordion dance in a mad fury while his voice soars across octaves of debauchery and passion.

The Interview

BEN (in monologue): The bee works busily at the flower, skillfully gathering its nectar in a dexterous flurry. Standing close by is the bee-watcher, analyzing the bee’s work and sometime getting lost in the beauty of its movement. A little way off stands the bee-watcher-watcher, marvelling at the attentiveness of the bee-watcher, but also questioning his motivation, and wondering about its other lives. He in turn is gazed upon by the bee-watcher-watcher-watcher. And so on… But at times these watchers become so embroiled in their thoughts that they become bees themselves, and bzzz off to work upon a flower of their own. Sometimes many flowers are being harvested at the same time. But an unwatched bee can be an unpredictable thing…

BENKA: What is all this jabber-jibber, hmmm?

BEN: Sorry… I get a little carried away at times.

BENKA: No, is very nice story, but what the hell is it about?

BEN: Ah. Well, you see, I was trying to explain the idea of multiple consciousnesses all working at once… Like, you can be doing one thing, and have other thought processes analysing that thing, and in turn, each other, but you can also be thinking about multiple things at the same time – like listening to multiple different conversations at the same time and understanding all of them.

BENJAMIN: And this is how your mind works?

BEN: Well, it’s the best explanation I’ve come up with so far…I don’t really like all the pigeon-holing that goes on these days. A lot of labels get bandied around: depression, anxiety, obsession… But those aren’t really the right fit, and the aspects that do fit are more symptoms of the way my mind works than the causes.

BENJAMIN: But the way you describe it, the manner in which your mind works seems to be a very useful thing!

BEN: Well, it definitely is, in ways… It means I can think about topics from a wide range of angles, which is handy for a natural skeptic. I like to play the devil’s advocate against myself. It’s also handy for getting into the head of characters with different perspectives from mine, both in acting and in writing… But it also has some strange, and even negative effects.

BENNY: I’m always into kinda weird things…

BEN: Well, one example is that I like to play chess against myself … I can kinda distance the two sides, in a way … I also like to be stimulated by multiple media at the same time – like reading a book while listening to a lecture.

BENNY: That still sounds pretty fun!

BEN: True. Okay, one strange thing is the way I view public personas. Not being anyone else, I’m not sure how other people experience this, but I feel that we all change our behaviour a lot in different situations. But in these situations, I am simultaneously aware of and analysing my own behavioural changes, and, sometimes, trying to control them… This makes me feel awkward when ‘trying to be myself’… I’m much more comfortable in public if I take on a ‘character’. Whenever I perform on stage, I take on some sort of guise. This way, I can freely relax into this and not have to worry about it.

BENKA: What, so you’re saying I’m some kind of puppet? Hmmm?

BEN: In a way, yes. It’s helpful because, in Benka’s case, I’m also fronting a band, so there’s lots of other things to think about, such as what song’s next, when I have to conduct the band, the audience, the lighting, etc. Benka can just be Benka, and not worry, but I can still think about all the important things somewhere else in there.

This is also why I love acting so much – I love creating a character around myself, sort of like building a shell, but a creative interesting one (not necessarily a pretty one, of course – a lot of characters aren’t pretty!)

BENJAMIN: Yes, we are all just shells really, aren’t we..

BEN: Not quite… Other characters are temporary shells, to be shed and discarded, but you three and the G-man, you’re built of sturdier, and more personal stuff. There’s a little more of me in all of you than the others, in a way…

BENKA: Ha! I knew we were special!

BEN: Yes indeed. You, Benka, take out and accentuate my wild side – the want to dance and get everyone else dancing too! Benjamin takes out my desire to be flamboyant and a little ostentatious, high-brow.

Benny’s different again though. He’s more transparent than the other puppets. I like to try to let him speak some of the other thoughts that are running in the background of my consciousness, at times.

BENNY: That’s nice to know. But none of this seems that negative yet!

BEN: Well, on the most side it isn’t. But there are negatives. Over-thinking so much leads me to get easily obsessed about things – and obsession is a dangerous beast. When multiple consciousnesses are all repeating the same thoughts over and over, it can get kinda painful.
Also obsession can be rather unhelpful in relationships – and I have to constantly monitor that! (Although I think all people suffer obsession in this way – just like all people suffer grief when losing a loved one – but for those of us who tend to obsess naturally, it becomes more intense).

BENJAMIN: Are there any particular experiences you’d like to share with the group?

BEN: Well, the earliest I can think of is when I was a child. I’m not sure how old – about 5 or 6 perhaps. Around this age, for a period (I can’t remember how long – it could have been a month, it could have been a year) whenever I closed my eyes, I’d hear voices. Never words though. At first it would only be a couple, but whispering in such quiet susurration that I couldn’t make them out. As they’d get louder more would arrive, so they’d be so garbled that I still couldn’t understand them. Eventually there’d be hundreds, thousands of voices shouting, screaming at me. Then I’d HAVE to open my eyes.

BENNY: That doesn’t sound fun!

BEN: No, it sure wasn’t. But it wasn’t all bad things at that age either. One of my folks told me that when I was young, I asked, ‘What do people mean when they say they’re bored?’ to which they replied, ‘Well, it means they’ve got nothing to do’. I responded, ‘But why don’t they just think about stuff?’
Also from a young age, I’ve been interested in the differentiation between dreams and reality. I think the way my brain works helps me to achieve lucid dreaming, which is a grand pleasure. Of course, it is also part of the cause of my insomnia as well … so there’s a balance.

BENJAMIN: Well, you’ve talked a lot about how it helps you with performing, but how about in the creation process?

BEN: As I mentioned before, it means I can look at things from multiple perspectives at the same time – be my own devil’s advocate, if you will. This is helpful in songwriting, because I feel I can create a more complete image that way, by thinking about how the individual parts (harmonies, melodies, lyrics) of the song I’m writing all stand by themselves, while thinking about how they work together to form a whole. Also, I use my experiences a lot as inspiration. It was thinking about the nature of obsession, and the danger of it, that led me to write The Building, which is my favourite story thus far!

BENJAMIN: Well, as MC here, I guess it’s up to me to wrap things up, and that seems a fine place to end. Thank you for coming along, Benka and Benny. Very nice to meet you both. I hope we do it again soon.

BEN: We could play some chess…

BENKA: Next time, maybe The G-Man will show up? I’d like to meet with that guy!

BEN: He’s been here the whole time… Hey, G-Man!

G-MAN: Uh… hi…

BENJAMIN: He doesn’t say much does he?

BEN: Well, no one does, compared to you guys. But give him a guitar, he talks even more than Benka!

**********

The Benka Boradovsky Bordello Band – www.myspace.com/bbbordello

Album “Polkapocalypse” available now from record stores and www.monkeyrecords.com

Benny Profane – www.myspace.com/bennyprofane

Writing – http://volponeprofane.livejournal.com/

I’m Shona, I’m 27, and one of those people born, bred and still living in Auckland.  Where am I now? I’m currently sitting in front of my laptop and flicking between writing this, and a really geeky computer game that allows me to have a ginger pet cat as my sidekick.

What do I do?

I’m a youth advisor who was ‘Out of My Mind’.  My job is essentially about encouraging youth mental health services to listen and act on what young consumers are saying about the services they receive.

While my job provides ‘a perspective from a young person who has used a youth mental health service’, I feel that it’s really about helping to change negative attitudes and unhelpful practices of people in general, though more importantly, people working in the mental health sector. There is some literature suggesting that mental health services that discriminate against people with mental health issues have one of the largest influences on someone’s recovery. A number of people report stigma and discrimination from the mental health services they’ve received, and for some, the consequences are devastating (Peterson, Pere, Sheehan & Surgenor, 2004).

I also have a slightly different perspective as Psychology was my major in my undergraduate university degree, and I’m currently doing some postgraduate study as well.  So, while I’m not a clinician, and don’t plan to be, I have been in the position of straddling both sides of the fence (which, I might add, can be uncomfortable!). When I began doing youth consumer work at 18, I felt I had to prove myself – that I was capable and my role was worthwhile. Learning about mental health/illness at university broadened my perspective and gave me knowledge that I could use, and still use, to inform my job.

Some of the stuff I’ve learnt at university is very much aligned with the traditional deficit-based medical model of care.  This means that a professional with power will ascertain what your problems are and categorise and treat you according to these problems. This process sometimes fails to see the whole person, and consider all the other things going on in their life that might impact the situation.

We don’t all necessarily want to be ‘fixed up’ as that implies that there is something wrong with us. This approach is consistent with the dominant Western paradigm of a professional fixing, curing and helping the vulnerable disempowered “patient”.

On the other hand, some psychology aims to focus on people’s strengths and inherent abilities to promote change and create meaningful lives.  This is the stuff I like to focus on and what drives me in my job and, I guess, my future career.

What drives my involvement in mental health work?

My own experience of ‘mental ill health’ and the services I used drives me, or more specifically now , the people within them that I meet, both professionals and young people.

One night ten years ago, I was sitting on my bed in my hospital room. My nurse came in and told me to get under the covers.  I refused – why should I get under the covers? – I wasn’t going to be able to sleep for a number of hours anyway.  I guess I was also being a rebellious teenager.  The nurse grabbed my legs and arms and physically forced me under.  It was relatively easy for her to do I guess, though of course I struggled.  I remember flailing around thinking how ridiculous this was, being physically forced under the bed covers.  She eventually got me under the sheets and left me – perhaps she realised she couldn’t sit on me all night until I fell asleep.  I immediately got out of them and later fell asleep on top of the bed covers.

This was just one of many incidents that motivated me, even as a 17 year old, to want to make a positive difference in the lives of people accessing mental health services.  The idea that professionals had so much power over me as a vulnerable young person and had the ability to cause fear and distress when I needed care and love, wasn’t ok. At the time I felt like I couldn’t say anything.  Now I can. I want to encourage other young people to speak out when their services aren’t good enough, as well as when they’re fab.

Despite the changes in the mental health sector over the last decade or two, there is still a way to go to ensure services and the wider sector address some of the big issues. I’d like to see changes in the mental health sector that would shift away from paternalistic services towards ones where we will have much more autonomy. This means closing hospitals, bearing in mind that there are also a large number of mini-institutions and a cessation of compulsion, which includes seclusion, restraint (chemical or physical), coercion with threats of hospitalisation and particular treatments.

An increase in autonomy would occur not just within individual treatments but also with service development and delivery, and policy development. I hope that new policy documents, reports or articles, will provide the impetus for social inclusion to be practised more, and the freedom to live life as you choose, in the community. The contribution to society of people with mental health issues is potentially greater than most anticipate. It isn’t necessary for people to be isolated because of society’s fear of mental ill health.

I include young people in all of the above – they’re often missed out of new initiatives or projects unless they are youth specific ones. It’s much more difficult to involve young people and they’re less likely to be vocal about a service issue.  However, it’s also incredibly important to make sure that young people as service users have the opportunity to participate in service development initiatives. Young people bring fresh ideas and can be less limited in their thinking.

How do I describe the distressing or mad experiences I’ve had?

As much as most people around me use the word, I never say I am, or have been ‘unwell’.  ‘Unwell’ implies a physical problem which therefore means there should be a physical ‘cure’ such as medication or surgery.  I don’t think my experience has a purely biological cause. While my serotonin levels or neurotransmitters may be doing some fruity or annoying things, neither I, nor any doctors, will ever know whether those neurotransmitters are acting up or whether it’s how I feel that impacts on the neurotransmitters.  I tend to think it’s more about the experiences I had, and just the fact that I’m more sensitive and emotional than others. This can be challenging, but also a personal strength.

What language do I use?

I refer to myself as crazy or mad sometimes – though only in jest. I don’t personally identify as a ‘mad’ person, though I do like others reclaiming a previously derogatory word such as ‘mad’. Instead I tend to talk about the things that I feel or experience, such as feeling really sad or anxious. I don’t talk in diagnoses. I don’t particularly believe in them though I acknowledge the initial relief some people have in being able to put a name to their distressing experiences.

Whatever language is used, it’s somewhat inevitable that people will select a word to suit their own purpose.  The word ‘lunatic’ originally comes from the idea that people acted more bizarrely at night (luna meaning moon).  This word wasn’t meant to be derogatory, though because of the fear of people who appeared to be different, it gradually became a way to socially exclude those who society deemed abnormal.

What do I think about societal perspectives on madness and distress?

I think there are misunderstandings and misconceptions about mental health/illness etc, which leads to fear.  Because I’ve personally experienced and been around plenty of people who have experienced ‘madness’, I don’t have that same fear. Instead, I understand it to be a fully human experience.  Everyone can feel sad, angry, extremely happy, anxious, fearful etc, and for many this can be about reacting to the people and situations in their life.  For me – I experience some of those things (and more) to a different degree than most people, and more often, which impacts on aspects of my life.  I can imagine the general public could understand and empathise with someone they know with depression, more than they could with the homeless guy on the street who’s talking to someone only he can see.  However both people may have had similar significant experiences in their lives.

Young people also get a bad rap in society. Young people with mental health issues can be seen as bad, and are punished for their behaviour rather than their behaviour seen as a reaction to the things occurring in their life and the social inequities that exist. In my work in youth mental health, I like to think of young people as having problems or some things that aren’t working that well in their life.  Whatever they are experiencing, be it mood, thought or behaviour related, it’s a glitch. Being a resilient young person, this ‘glitch’ won’t be a life-long debilitating issue as it may have been up until ten or so years ago. Community based care and early intervention also encourage a more hopeful outcome for young people and their families than did the historical hospital-based approach.

Not only does society tend to have a warped understanding of mental illness, so too do people who have the power to make policy changes. Plenty of people (including those in government who should be relying on research rather than media sensationalism) believe that people with mental illness are dangerous and violent.  However, when you look at the stats, these ‘mad’ people are more likely to be victims rather than the perpetrators of violence.

It’s not all bad though. Various mental health promotion activities and campaigns serve to facilitate more positive portrayal of ‘mad’ people, and there are many initiatives occurring both within the mental health sector and other sectors that do valuable things with, for and by people with mental health issues.

What do I see as the value of my experiences?

I tried to include the value of distressing experiences in a workshop about mental health with some young people who had only recently been diagnosed and were transitioning back to school, a course or job.  They really struggled. They didn’t see themselves as having a mental illness, at least not yet, not until they’d been repeatedly told by people that they were unwell.  They also had difficulty getting their head around it because they didn’t see anything good had come from their experience at that point. They weren’t at school hanging out with friends, they may have been in hospital, and were pretty likely to be distressed.  I’d experienced those things too, but they were a couple of years behind me. Now I was facilitating this workshop that I not only enjoyed, but was also a good confidence boost. Of course there was heaps of value in my experience – I had an exciting job because of it, and this has since led to a number of opportunities I wouldn’t otherwise have had.  While my experience was distressing at the time, in hindsight I see that it has given me a unique and worthwhile perspective to whatever I’m doing.

In school, I was never a leader.  I was quiet, and not one of the popular kids.  Public speaking in my job was revolutionary for me, for while it provoked anxiety, it gave me the opportunity to talk and express my opinion. Everyone had to listen and it was nice knowing people thought I had something worthwhile to share!  These public speaking opportunities initially came about because I’d utilised a youth mental health service and these opportunities made me think critically about my experience. I found it meaningful to educate people from my perspective as it felt like I had gone through what I went through to make a difference in the lives of others, particularly those that use mental health services.

I believe my experiences make me more empathetic, more compassionate and more able to help others going through difficult times.  I’d like to think my skills lie in places other than therapy and at the moment I enjoy doing project-based work that will hopefully benefit others.

How have my experiences impacted on my work?

My experiences have made me passionate about the mental health services that people (especially young people) receive. It’s this that motivates me in my job, and hopefully my passion helps me work better.  Perhaps I put too many of my eggs in one basket, and it can be frustrating and disillusioning when the mental health (and other related) sectors take so long to change. However, I enjoy the focus on hope and strength that young people bring. I like that young people don’t think in terms of ‘mental illness’ or state that they are unwell or crazy, but refer to their problems – things to be solved.

How have my experiences changed me?

Because I experienced my mental health issue through much of high school (and my undergraduate degree at university), it’s kind of hard to separate my experience of mental distress from who I am and my perception of the identity I was in the process of forming during this time.  I think rather than changing me, it hugely contributed to the formation of the person I am now.  I’d probably be doing a very different job and have different passions if I hadn’t experienced my mental health issues, though I really can’t imagine it. In some ways I don’t want to – working in mental health makes me feel worthwhile because I’m aiming to make a positive difference in people’s lives.  I’m still working out what life is about, so when I have an existentialist crisis, it’s reassuring to believe that my aim is to positively impact others.   Whatever I end up doing career wise, I think I’ll always be passionate about people’s mental health and hope that I continue to have opportunities to influence mental health services in New Zealand.

Reference

Peterson, D., Pere, L., Sheehan, N. & Surgenor, G. (2004). Respect Costs Nothing: A survey of discrimination faced by people with experience of mental illness in Aotearoa New Zealand. Auckland: Mental Health Foundation.