A Poem for World Mental Health Day 2022

For World Mental Health Day 2022, a poem called 'There's a kind of sadness', published in Maitri Poetry's anthology, 'Night Sweats of the Spirit' and recorded for its launch.   

A Poem for World Mental Health Day 2019

This poem is from my 2016 collection, Breadcrumbs, published by Indigo Dreams. I'm posting it for World Mental Health Day, with the reminder that when you've lived in a familiar situation for a long time, it can be very hard to see just how damaging it is. Also, that writing - or otherwise exploring your creativity - helps (if you're able to do that).

Headland

  

This was no rupture. No sudden loss

that left you stranded from yourself

All the same, the land is gone

He must have filched it with a spoon

so surreptitiously sometimes even now

you don’t perceive its absence as anything

more than a tendency to dream

don’t hear the breach filled with echoing dark,

don’t notice you’ve stopped building boats and bridges

out of stories

©Deborah Harvey 2016

Stepping Out Theatre: The Rise and Fall of Ronald J Dump

The village of Hallen doesn't get much of a look in when it comes to histories of Bristol, or even coverage of contemporary concerns, such as pollution, nearby industrialisation, and the plight of its residents. 

I suspect the fact that it was sliced in two by the building of the M5 did a lot to render it invisible. In any event, I've lived no more four miles distant for much of my life but have only been there twice. And one of those visits was by mistake. 

So it's high time Awareness Was Raised, and this is what Stepping Out, our outstanding mental health theatre company, is doing with its latest political satire, The Rise and Fall of Ronald J Dump, currently running at Kings Weston House. 

If you care about our city and its environment, please go and see it. And in the meantime, here are some highlights of last night's show. 

A Poem for World Mental Health Day 2017

William Cowper was an 18th century poet and hymn writer, born a generation or two before Blake, Coleridge, Clare and Keats, and like them, posthumously diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Of course, we can never really know what caused their mental illness and it seems rather prurient to conjecture about this aspect of their lives. In any event, what's more interesting about Cowper is the fact he kept three orphaned hares as pets and found some comfort in caring for them. 

Mr Cowper’s Hares

And so he sits without moving

holds them in his lap

not so tightly they’ll take fright

leap through the window

scream up the lane

outstripping every attempt to catch them

hurling themselves

from rock to moss to wild supposition

till they’ve gone beyond all returning

no longer know they have a home

and not so softly they’ll take fright

bolt down the passage

out through the door

dodging the grasp of passers-by

plunging

almost suicidal into tan pits

brought back half-drowned in a sack

caked with lime

and so he holds them without moving

pent between his hands

sees his reflection

in their mad amber eyes

©Deborah Harvey 2016

This poem won the Hilly Cansdale Prize for Local Poets at Wells Literature Festival last year, and I'll be reading it at the prize-giving ceremony for this year's shortlisted poets, this Sunday at 3.30pm in the Bishop's Palace. 

Landscapes for Life with Samuel T Coleridge and Ted the Border Collie

The defining feature of my life for the last 30 years has been the amount of caring involved: for disabled children who, although now adults, still need daily input, a daughter and ex-husband with Type I diabetes, and these days for very elderly parents too. 

Going on forays into the country for a few hours lifts me above the frustrations involved in having to set aside my own interests, and replenishes my not-always-very-deep reserves of patience.

When I go out on a jaunt, more often than not I find myself in either an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty or a National Park. We are spoilt for them here in the south-west. 

Which is as well, because as far as my mental health is concerned, these places are life-savers. 

So I am always thrilled and delighted when one of my poems pops up in connection with the bodies overseeing these special places on our behalf. 

My poem Coleridge Changes his Library Books, which is from my first collection, Communion, is currently gracing the AONB's Landscapes for Life blog. This is particularly apt as many of the places it mentions are under their guardianship. It can be read it here. 

Meanwhile, today's caring duties will take me to one such area, the Mendip Hills. I think I'll take the dog along and make an afternoon of it. 

Wallace Real’s Ministry of Madness, Stepping Out, the Brewery Theatre, Bristol

I've just written a review for bishopstonvoice and filtonvoice of the most recent production from Bristol's Stepping Out Theatre Company. Here it is. 

Wallace Real’s Ministry of Madness, Stepping Out, the Brewery Theatre, Bristol

When you’ve been afflicted by a strange new disorder that makes you believe you’re a character in a play about your own life, the last thing you need is help from a polar bear who claims he’s a psychiatric nurse and a self-declared ‘swashbuckling pirate of psychiatry’. Or is it?  Because whom do you trust when anxiety and self-doubt blur the boundaries of reality and you’re in danger of losing the plot?

Stepping Out is a charitable organisation which has been working with users of the mental health services and their allies since its foundation in 1997.  During this time it has put on 47 shows, the most recent of which, ‘Wallace Real’s Ministry of Madness’, has just ended its runs at the Rondo Theatre, Bath and in Bedminster’s Brewery Theatre. 

Far from being doomy-gloomy, this is a playful, thought-provoking and above all, honest look at the perception and treatment of health service users.  A stroke of genius was having the main character, Lucy, played by five actors, representing different facets of her personality at varying times in her life, as she struggles to find herself amid the insanity of a Mental Analysis Diagnostics supervisor who colour-codes emotions, duplicitous psychiatrists and vicious Mental Elfs, Chemical Cara the crazed drug-designer who represents Big Pharma, and the callous, under-age Coalition Twins. 

Add to this the fabulous Ladyboys of Bedlam, a gloriously colourful troupe of belly-dancers (along with Paul the Polar Bear, something of a Stepping Out tradition, I understand), and a nod in the direction of the Rude Mechanicals from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and you’re left with a production that is not only achingly funny but also challenges head-on all those destructive notions about mental illness and its treatment.  This, truly, is Theatre with a purpose.  

All photos © Stepping Out 2014