The humour in madness

As users of mental health services we end up ‘performing’ to a kind of script. Such is the way services are organised, we find ourselves telling our story over and over again to a variety of workers as part of our treatment. A small minority of us have also told aspects of our ‘personal journey’ during training sessions for workers. But including the humour of your situation, doesn’t often go down well. Or maybe it’s just me and the way I tell it, since it does tend to be quite black!

So whilst there is often humour in mental distress, you don’t often get the chance to share it. Take for example suicide, finding others who are happy to discuss such thoughts and actions is rare, having the opportunity to add the humour too, is rarer still. Occasionally wonderful things will happen, like the time I was in a café with a small group of fellow clients, plus a couple of workers, and the guy next to me started to peel of his shirt to show me the consequences of failing to hang himself. We laughed together for a moment whilst the others sat in stony silence. But what we were laughing about was not so much the absurdity of an incident that had happen six months before, but that he had found himself laughing about it within half an hour of it happening.

When suicide is the subject there seem to be two sources of potential amusement; the absurdities and contradictions of the situation itself, and the ideas and language that mental health professionals bring to it. And the two may seem to bare very little relation to each other - providing an ironic twist.

Like the identification of suicide ‘hot spots’ which are then fenced-off with the occasional telephone provided, leading to the action simply moving elsewhere. How studies of ‘suicide by train’ highlight platform behaviour whereupon the potential suicide just moves further on down the line. The very rigidity of the professional’s model of ‘suicide prevention’ (while we have a ‘duty of care’ we never leave the client alone), which leads us to lie about getting better. And how for the last fifty years they have rolled-out prevention training (to which the experienced client is almost never invited), which often includes how to spot the deceiving client! But such ‘arms races’ arise out of the contradictions of the situation.

The simple fact is that the clients intend to kill themselves, but fail due to incompetence. They then learn from experience, as do those who seek to prevent them. And that game (for it does appear to have rules) can go on for decades, leading to bizarre and absurd behaviour by clients, carers and workers - played out in domestic and clinical settings. Ridiculous because eventually everyone has to be left alone, and even the most confined and watched person can still exert choice. Thankfully when peer supports peer, there is the opportunity to create a space to talk about the real issue - is life worth living? The chance to create distance from the pressures of daily life, time to create more choice, more freedom to act, be in a new situation in which the world looks different (you do an activity with your peer today, which shows the world to be a less fearful place) - where the supporter takes the responsibility and where only very occasionally will their role be to clean up afterwards.

Humour can be an acceptable way of educating and getting information into the public arena - if you’re a ‘jumper’, height is important. Choosing a multi-story car park may well mean ‘a one-way ticket to Stoke Mandeville!’ If it’s to be a hanging, then consider the ‘drop’. No drop and it’s up to half an hour of slow strangulation; with a drop, the length required varies with build and body weight - and will what you’ve attached the rope to, take the strain?

A year or so ago the stand-up comedian Mackenzie Taylor (http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/berkshire/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_8701000/8701610.stm) developed a routine, based around his history of mental distress, and one particular suicide attempt, entitled No Straightjacket Required which he performed at the Edinburgh Fringe. I was lucky enough to see a preview in which he made some telling observations on; the therapist who never laughs, the distressed mind being like Jazz with eight things happening at once, how political correctness led the BBC to deem ‘brainstorming’ offensive, how the NHS made him a ‘client’ but never ‘wined and dined’ him, how you may have to wait for the second train since the first may be coming to a halt, on why he seemed so happy beforehand (because he had a plan which would bring all his troubles to an end), why the right combination of pills and booze might be thwarted by what you’d eaten before…

‘What's funny about a man who tried to kill himself because his unstable mental condition had pushed him to indescribable lows? Well, the answer is a surprising amount. Mackenzie Taylor tells the audience all about his attempted suicide at the end of last year's Brighton Festival, never shying away from the often incredibly harrowing details of what brought him to try and end it all. It is this completely honest, open discussion of mental health which really makes this an interesting show, not straight forward stand-up, yet not quite help-group. A show that challenges our approach to laughing at mental health, and the darkness that lurks within all of us. Go see it, or he might try it again!’ - Three Weeks