Comedy legend Spike Milligan famously had the last laugh with the epitaph on his gravestone reading, ‘I told you I was ill’. Yet there is more to that tale. His epitaph proved controversial enough that to be approved by Chichester Diocese it had to written in Gaelic and it therefore appears as, ‘Duirt me leat go raibh me breoite’.
Mental illness is no respecter of delicate sensibilities, it is a remorseless presence, one which I have described in my own life as living with the enemy within. It is a life threatening presence and learning to deal with it comes down to, at times, a matter of survival, of looking at both life and death and desperately trying to decide which is going to win. The extremes of the battle have, for me, led me to realise that I have no fear of hell because I have already been there and come out the other side – many times.
There are many levels of terror involved in surviving mental illness, not least in losing the ability to function where everyday tasks slip away beyond reach, shopping, satisfying the bodies relentless demands for food, having enough money to survive when work becomes impossible, wondering if my final fate will not be under a bush somewhere, homeless, starving, alone and ultimately dying. Everyday tasks can be so terrifying they pass beyond the ability to achieve them and well meant advice can settle like stones in the bottom of a pond and become a threat that may cause the lake to rise, overflow it banks, and end the life that surrounds it.
Living in a world that celebrates normality the ultimate loneliness is the silence with which life with mental illness is surrounded. Mental illness is not a dialogue with the world and nor is that in any way expedient, conversations about the living presence of this internal war cannot be conducted down the local pub over a pint and a game of darts, it just does not and cannot work that way. It would be like trying to conduct a conversation with aliens with no common ground, no language with which to communicate the knowledge or pass the lived experience on and without living it words remain a mere description which may elicit sympathy but no understanding.
The best counsellors do not proffer advice, understanding that advice is high risk and can prove life threatening. Telling someone with depression that the best thing they can do is exercise when for that individual attempting to exercise is like reaching for the moon is often an exercise in futility succeeding only in increased distress and internal pain and suffering. In the same way, the expectations of others can frequently stretch the person to breaking point. Yet talk therapy remains astonishingly effective in the survival of some mental illnesses and in my own life has enabled my continuing survival with love and gratitude for the kindness of the space to find expression and the sharing of my own inner world. My experience of high quality therapy has enabled me to develop an extensive internal tool box for survival, enabling me to explore survival options, learning to make choices where previously there have been none. The best therapy is that which eventually makes the therapist redundant, where I have been enabled to discover the tools to become my own expert in my own survival.
There are many forms of mental illness, some can be helped by medication, but not all, over a lifetime my own has proved to be incredibly resistant to medication such that I no longer accept that route for myself. It is part of learning about and becoming expert in ones own experience of mental illness that medication can be tried and the experience added to what becomes the toolbox of personal survival. I have also had to learn to become assertive in my survival and not visiting doctors or ‘experts’ as a supplicant but as an expert myself. I have certainly sat beggarly in surgeries and in mental hospital waiting to learn my fate at the hands of others. Learning that I was in line for electric shock therapy (ECT) and that had I not responded in hospital in ways that satisfied doctors unknown agendas was a whole level of terror that was indescribable – my life in their hands regardless of whatever my own wishes might have been. That was one of those life experiences which I can safely say was an interesting one. Many mental health patients have to learn how to escape the system and certainly I and others in the psychiatric hospital had to learn how to play the experts at their own game in order to escape and if that sounds manipulative, learning to play the system for ones own ends, it certainly was. I witnessed a human being daily reduced to a dribbling wreck through ECT and only learnt after my escape that he eventually died.
Mental illness is a brutal master and a lousy slave. I have had to learn to live with it as a partner I am married to for life in which I made no vows of fidelity but learnt to accept over many long years of hoping that maybe one day I might get a divorce. It is not pessimism to accept ones limitations and it is not optimism to hope for what one cannot achieve. Learning to live with mental illness is a journey of a lifetime, a voyage of intimate discovery. The poignancy of Spike Milligan’s epitaph is that it is like sticking a finger up and saying, ‘I told you I was right’, in the end what mattered was that he believed in himself and was one of the funniest men who has ever lived, wacky, subversive, with a talent that could only have come from embracing his own simple but complex truth of a life spent with mental illness. ‘Duirt me leat go raibh me breoite’, farewell Spike and thank you. I don’t know whether he learnt to love his enemy, but I suspect he did.
Keith Lindsay-Cameron
