GLASGOW’S CCA today plays host to The Dust Of Everyday Life, billed as a one-day “annual symposium on the arts, mental health, stigma and social justice”.
Presented by the Mental Health Foundation and See Me, the Scottish Government-funded national programme to tackle mental health stigma and discrimination, the event takes its name from a quote variously attributed to 19th century author Berthold Auerbach and Picasso.
The former held that: “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life” while Picasso said it was art which did so. The event is driven by the belief that creativity is a key part of well-being, whether it’s through direct practice, participation, appreciation or discussion.
IT’S ALL A DREAM
DUST is a sister event to the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival (SMHAFF), which will celebrate its first decade later this year. Andrew Eaton-Lewis, SMHAFF arts lead explains that Dust, now in its second year, functions as a think tank for the much longer festival in October.
With the help of Creative Scotland’s open funding, SMHAFF is helping to develop three major projects with big name Scottish theatre-makers; one about suicide, another about loneliness and another about Syd Barrett, founder member of Pink Floyd. Dust will feature an excerpt, played by three actors.
Eaton-Lewis says he commissioned the play, titled One Thinks Of It All As A Dream after realising that SMHAFF’s tenth year coincided with the tenth anniversary of the musician’s death. He also was aware that playwright and author Alan Bissett was a fan.
“We were thrilled when he [Bissett] said yes,” says Eaton-Lewis. “One of the great clichés of art is the ‘troubled genius’ – the brilliant, pioneering artist destroyed by mental health problems. It’s a very reductive way to describe people, and also a reductive way to describe mental illness. And Syd’s story defies that cliché.”
The original frontman of Pink Floyd, Barrett was mostly responsible for writing psychedelic rock touchstone The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and one of the greatest pop song ever 1967’s See Emily Play. Performing – or at least miming to – the song on Top of the Pops, Barrett sat on a cushion on the floor, so fragile was his health. A few months later, David Gilmour became the band’s lead guitarist and it announced that Barrett was no longer in Pink Floyd.
“He withdrew from the music industry and public life completely,” says Eaton-Lewis. “He continued to live and be creative, painting for years and years. One of the questions Alan’s play poses is – what is so healthy about being a rock star anyway? Perhaps Syd’s decision to withdraw from all that and live a more private, ordinary life is the sanest thing anyone could do.”
TRANSGENDER LIVES
ALSO at Dust will be a discussion of the impact of stigma and prejudice on the mental health of transgender people with Vic Valentine of the Scottish Transgender Alliance and Alison Wren from LGBT Health and Wellbeing joining playwrights Jo Clifford and Cora Bissett, who are working on Eve/Adam, a double bill of shows exploring transgender lives.
In recent years celebrities such as Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner have helped shift attention on to trans issues in general, such as the experience of higher rates of mental ill health. In 2014, a survey conducted by LGBT mental health charity Pace found a staggering 48 per cent of trans people under 26 had attempted suicide. The figure for under-26s as a whole was six per cent.
“How much this trickles down into a change in public attitudes towards transgender people generally, I don’t know, says Eaton-Lewis of the increased media attention given to (at least famous) trans people. “There’s still an awful lot of prejudice and ignorance, and the mental health issues a lot of transgender people struggle with are a direct result of that.”
THE DUST OF EARLY LIFE
JUST as trans mental health is becoming more of a concern, that of children and young people has featured more prominently in recent years. In March the WHO published a study which found that teenage girls in Scotland suffer some of the worst mental health in Europe and that there had been a 54 per cent rise in the number of young people prescribed anti-depressants in the UK between 2005 and 2012.
Chaired by Fiona Ferguson, development director for children’s festival Imaginate, Dust’s opening session will explore how to talk with children about mental health issues with contributors including Deborah Malcolm, author of Meh, a children’s book about depression and Alice McGrath, producer of the acclaimed children’s show Titus.
“The hope is that the session at Dust will be the start of a much bigger conversation,” says Eaton-Lewis, noting that SMHAFF plan to do more work on children’s arts and mental health in October.
“There’s a lot of very good children’s theatre in Scotland that explores issues relating to mental health – loneliness, isolation, grief, even suicide in the case of Titus — and there are several new shows in development at the moment, by Tortoise in a Nutshell and Amy Conway, among others, that are doing similar things, all of which we’re keen to support if we can.”
ARTS AND MENTAL HEALTH
DURING these long years of imposed austerity, arts and culture have often been seen as luxuries, added extras that can be plucked out to little harmful effect. But there’s long been a consensus among front-line health practitioners and neurologists, many artists and counsellors that creativity is essential to human well-being.
There are many reasons for this, whether it’s through meeting the basic human need for connection, building empathy and understanding through discussion and exploration, and the healing power of catharsis, entertainment and the transcendence of everyday life. In terms of storytelling and fiction in particular, it’s thought that the act of following a story lays down new neurological connections, helping to expand an individual’s range of experience and sense of empowerment.
Eaton-Lewis says: “For me it’s about empathy and imagination. If you read a story, or listen to a piece of music, or watch a film or a theatre show, you are – I would hope – empathising with other lives and imagining other possible worlds.
“There are obvious practical things it can’t fix – poverty, most obviously – but it can, in theory, help you see that life doesn’t have to be the way that it is.”
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