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Lockdown literature: humour and mental ill-health
My 99-word story for the recent flash fiction collection, a new way to office, is about as social worker’s unease about office humour. Was it derogatory? Disrespectful of the clients? Or was it an essential part of the professionals’ toolkit, a barricade against burnout for those dealing daily with distress?
I cheated when I turned in my story. I used a character and situation from my new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home. The topic drew me because, like my character, I’m currently preoccupied with the role of humour in the book itself.
Humour and delusion
Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home is about a brother and sister, separated for fifty years, and the ardent young social worker who seeks to reunite them. What has kept them apart for decades? Will they reconnect?
My novel is set in a long-stay psychiatric hospital and a seventy-year-old patient is the star. Matty perceives the world differently to those around her: Ghyllside is a country estate, the nurses are servants, her fellow patients are houseguests and the psychiatrists are journalists researching stories about a society heiress.
I didn’t intend to write a comical novel. In fact, I cringed when Matty turned out to be funny. Mental disturbance is no laughing matter. People given a psychiatric diagnosis are too often the butt of jokes. Yet I couldn’t find any other way around it if Iwanted Matty to be both good company and authentically mentally ill.
Humour and dementia
Until reminded in a recent interview (see above), I’d forgotten I had a model for Matty in Emma Healey’s beautiful debut, Elizabeth Is Missing. Eighty-one-year-old Maud is a decade older than Matty, and is diagnosed with dementia rather than schizophrenia, but both characters contain a similar blend of poignancy, humour and tragedy.
Dementia renders the ordinary unfamiliar. Names of people and everyday objects are forgotten; life becomes a mystery to be solved. This aspect of the condition is beautifully played out in the novel as Maud attempts to resolve the dual mysteries of the sudden absence of her good friend, Elizabeth, as well as the disappearance of her elder sister in her 1940s childhood. If you haven’t read Elizabeth Is Missing, I urge you to give it a try.
I’m reassured to imagine the ghost of Maud lodged within my laptop in the years I toiled on Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home. Of course, there were other influences, but none with the same kind of humour. But I’ve read a couple in the space between turning in my manuscript and publication. If you didn’t think mental ill-health could be both funny and serious, get hold of these and think again.
Humour and depression
As the world prepares to see out 2008 with a party, forty-year-old New York writer, Bunny, is clinically depressed. If she wasn’t, it would be a fine excuse to opt out of dinner with her husband and two other couples at a pretentious restaurant, followed by a party hosted by people she hates. But one of the paradoxes of depression is that those who are prone to it often aren’t very good at taking care of themselves, and they’re especially bad at taking care of themselves when they need it most. So despite her husband’s best efforts to dissuade her, despite not having had the energy to wash for a week, Bunny is determined to go. And where does that determination take her? Seeing in the New Year on a psychiatric ward.
It’s hard to write honestly about depression without sucking the reader into the mire; Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum must be the best fictional representation I’ve read.
Humour and hearing voices
Tom doesn’t expect life to be easy; it’s more important to follow true path. Single, jobless and reliant on benefits, he prioritises abstinence, spreading kindness, and devotion to his god. For twenty years he’s trod the tightrope between sanity and madness, with those who police the boundary as much a hindrance as a help. When the novel opens, Tom is under pressure from both his sister and his care coordinator to participate in a drug trial, for a substance initially developed to treat athlete’s foot. His psychiatrist refuses to prescribe the only medication Tom deems effective but, in the British mental health system, the patient’s assessment of his own well-being is often overruled.
Jasper Gibson was inspired to research and write The Octopus Man after the death of a family member who had a schizophrenia diagnosis. In my work as a clinical psychologist, I met many people like Tom. They also had a love-hate relationship with voices that would both protect and persecute. They felt a similar ambivalence about their dependence on a service system that defined their cherished beliefs as insane. They experienced the daily humiliation of underperforming, and being patronised by care staff who were younger, and/or less intelligent, than them.
But this is a novel, not a case study. It’s a beautifully written and absorbing story, narrated by an unusual character who is as lyrical communing with nature as he is conversing with his personal god. I strongly recommend it for its compassion and humour, and, most of all, and in every sense, for the voice.
Which – if any – of these novels takes your fancy? Can you recommend any that portray mental ill-health authentically and with humour?
Anne Goodwin is a clinical psychologist turned author who writes entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice. She is the author of three novels and a short story collection with small independent press Inspired Quill. Anne posts about reading and writing on her blog Annecdotal.
Welcome To My World
‘Welcome to my World’, so said my youngest, V, when lockdown struck.
Almost six months on, I have a deeper glimpse into V’s world. But this is not a temporary world as for most of us.
For V this shall not pass. Not so much.
V was diagnosed ten years ago at eighteen with Asperger’s Syndrome (a high functioning autistic spectrum disorder – ASD). V struggles with aspects of social communication, such as reading certain social cues. Chronic anxiety, depression and the need to retreat means V is socially avoidant outside the home. Online is where V’s world exists, with friends of many years.
How can you have real friends you’ve never actually met? Such was my worry, before I started blogging. Now I know…we can and we do. Heck, I met my husband online…but that’s another story.
Lockdown world over means confinement to our home and garden (if fortunate enough to have one), leaving the house only for essentials and no socialising with anyone outside our household. Now we are keen to relay our lockdown tales of where we walked, how we ate, what we did or didn’t, how we coped, what we binge-watched (Ozark, anyone?).
Safe to say, a good few said sod the toilet roll, so long as there’s gin…
But lockdown brought a dark side. A shocking rise in domestic violence. A seeping loneliness for those isolated from their loved ones. And a hard toll on mental health for many.
The internet became our refuge, our place to keep in touch and communicate. But imagine if your social life is always online and not just for lockdown? Watching the world before you achieving, doing, laughing, playing. As some say, living your best and so-called perfect life.
And V cannot do any of it. This does not mean V is a social misfit, whatever that actually means. If it means not being the same as everyone else, then I know which I’d rather be. I wonder how much lockdown has changed us all in a world those like V know too well.
A doctor once told V they were “special” with a “gift.” I wish I could have brought that doctor home with us so she could have heard V’s enraged and wounded response.
If feeling like I’m drowning means I’m special, then I guess I must be.
V wants a life, of course. And I think about my life now, too. The longer I stay home, the longer I don’t want to go back out there. I don’t like the world out there. Our beaches are overrun. Our roads are chock full of traffic, walkways too narrow and difficult to socially distance.
As for pubs, no chance.
Finding myself housebound (broken ankle) on the heels of lockdown easing, threw me for a loop. Only now, nine weeks later, I am starting short walks outside, unaided. Very soon, I hope to drive again.
But I’ll let you into a little secret: a part of me can’t wait, but the other? I’ve lost confidence, I’ll admit. I don’t want to go back to navigating busy supermarkets with a facemask steaming my glasses, getting covid rage all over again when someone invades my space. I don’t want to people-dodge all over again.
‘Now you know how I feel, every day,’ said V.
V is right. Now I do, but only a little.
And there is light. Always light. V’s world never fails to surprise in different ways.
For example, masks are now compulsory in the UK in shops and of course anywhere medical. But V wore masks long before Covid-19. Having read a couple of years ago about a high risk of a SARS-like virus soon to invade the west, V purchased a large pack of masks from Japan and wore one to a hospital appointment last year.
You bet it raised some eyebrows and quizzical stares.
This might sound odd to some, but it made perfect sense to V, who not that long before had been struck down and admitted to hospital with an unknown virus. Why risk a repeat?
Thanks to V, we already had our masks at the ready when Covid struck.
Who knew? V did.
And something else: a mask serves dual purpose for V.
‘I feel safer with a mask, more secure’, V recently told me. ‘It makes eye contact easier, I don’t have to worry what the other person thinks…I’m not so anxious about them or myself…’
This reminded me of part of V’s diagnostic testing for Asperger. Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, developed by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, which “…assesses the extent to which people are able to attribute thoughts and feelings to people based upon the expression in their eyes.”
The mask hides our facial expressions, so we “neurotypicals” are at more of a disadvantage reading subtle changes of emotion in others. For V who for instance, can’t tell the different between worry and anger, this is perfect. V has discovered help with social anxiety. This warrants further exploration, I think.
Ten years after diagnosis and our current crisis aside, V seeks to find a way out of permanent lockdown to pursue a love of travel, learning languages, of Japanese and Nordic culture, and of their art.
Pretty heroic, I would say, at the best of times.
While bringing her memoir, ‘Stranger in a White Dress: A True Story of Broken Dreams, Being Brave and Beginning Again’ to publication, Sherri’s articles, short memoir, personal essays, poetry and flash fiction are published in national magazines, anthologies and online. She invites her readers to share the view at her Summerhouse blog and is a regular contributer and columnist at ‘Carrot Ranch’, an online literary community. In another life, Sherri lived in California for twenty years, but today, she lives in England writing stories from the past, making sense of today and giving hope for tomorrow.
