Where are the arts in mental health strategies?

Yesterday I attended Higher York's conference on young people's mental health, 'Everybody's Business', showing an extract of the performance 'Wormwood in the Garden' I developed with Imogen Godwin and other young people in a mental health setting).

There is clearly high awareness at every level of the need for really concerted action on mental health in children and young people.  Action that recognises that, for whatever reasons (we may suspect them but cannot prove them), we have a bit of an epidemic on our hands.  And for a different, more ecosystemic model of working in which young people don't need to jump over thresholds to 'qualify' for treatment, where all the adults working with them do feel qualified to engage with and support their wellbeing without fear.  The recent policy 'Future in Mind' is inspiring stuff in many ways.  And just seeing the full room of intensely engaged individuals coming together from such a variety of professions and institutions was equally heartening.

What still concerns me is that what is being called 'mental health' may be part of an agenda of shifting responsibility for concrete, economic, social societal issues onto individual young minds. However supportive we may learn to be of them, are we empowering (naff word but very apt here, no apologies) them to define these causes and help reshape the society we are growing up in?  If, for example, as one speaker said, the majority of Year 10 and sixth form girls are experiencing mental distress of some kind, can we not go further than lamenting the cuts to further education budgets and the increasingly competitive, individualistic employment market?  Not to mention the media-engendered body fascism, the constant requirement to perform an acceptable identity in the virtual sphere, the growing inequality gap, the precarious zero-hours contracts, the doom-laden inevitability of austerity and climate change? Don't young people need to rage, as well as conscientiously work to improve their mental wellbeing along with everything else we ask of them?

I will keep saying it til I am blue in the face, but young people need the arts.  They need them so as they have the widest possible spectrum of languages to find their own understandings of these things and decide just what needs to change.  Of course storytelling can provide this language for some.  So can theatre.  So can other artforms.  I could not find one single mention of the arts in 'Future in Mind'.  Yet eight different people, representing eight different organisations/teams, approached me after our session asking how they could get training in using storytelling and the arts in their work.  All seemed to be saying that talking 'about' young people's mental health problems with them was not enough.  Other languages are needed.  We need the big stories of our culture to help us understand where it's going and open up real dialogue.

Whose story is it?

For me as a storyteller, as for most drama practitioners I meet and read, stories are like oxygen - they are essential, help to make up the very fabric of the world, belong in some sense to everybody, can be used for all sorts of things and combined with all sorts of things.  We understand the respect we owe to their tellers, but feel entitled to be inspired by their stories and reshape them.  We inhabit their 'gaps' with our own perspectives.

But is this fluid relationship with stories actually something that most young people are ready to take on?  We might assume that everyone is postmodern these days, everyone understands that 'reality' is a complicated concept.  Yet, on several occasions recently I have worked with groups of young people whose anxiety about using the stories of others to make a piece of performance has surprised me.

In a reflective dialogue with one talented young storyteller I worked with, I asked her, 'What strikes you about storytelling, as an artform?  What potential do you see in it for yourself?'  Her reply made me realise that our methodology had been new to her: 'I like how you can take something you like and mix it up with other things that go to make the story change.  Before I thought that that was called plagiarism!'  She had been able to accept it easily because our 'source' story was an old folktale, everyone's and no-one's, and the experience she was mixing it with was largely her own.

In contrast, a youth theatre group tasked with devising a piece of theatre in response to the current refugee crisis was full of apprehension.  They felt that interviewing refugees, as well as people who had worked to support them, would give them a too-weighty responsibility for honouring painful and traumatic stories.  The lead practitioner and I explained that we would not be 'taking' those people's stories or 'twisting' them - rather we would learn from them with both our minds, hearts and bodies, use them to build an understanding of the refugee experience. We would use a myth (Dido and Aeneas, the refugee story par excellence, as in Nathaniel Dance-Holland's painting here) as our starting point, and infuse it with elements of our research into the modern-day refugee crisis.

It was not easy for the young people to understand what we meant by this, or who was giving us permission to play so fast and loose.  It turns out that other practitioners have had similar experiences. Helen Nicholson, in her excellent book 'Applied Drama - The gift of theatre', discusses an intergenerational oral history theatre project she led in which young people portrayed the experiences of elderly neighbours: 
'Because I had not introduced the students to the idea that memories are continually revised in the retelling, they were concerned to tell the stories as ‘authentically’ and ‘faithfully’ as they could.  However, I found this desire to reproduce events rather than represent them troubling…Their reluctance to experiment theatrically meant that their drama was limited by the confines of a form which, whilst it suited a rather simplistic retelling of events, did not really capture the ambiguity or emotions of memory.’ (2005, p.89)
In other words, as I often used to marvel in the first storytelling work I did with adolescents, the question 'is it a true story?' still often demands a literal answer.

Are there simple developmental factors at play here? Is it related to what David Elkind (1967) called adolescents' 'personal fable' - their belief in the uniqueness and incommunicability of their own strong emotions - and thus by extension, any one else' story or experience? Do you simply need to live for a certain length of time to develop an understanding that, while experience is not universal, all our stories draw on everyone else's stories?

Or is there also a generational factor at work?  I chatted this over with a friend who works and researches likewise with young people and in mental health. We suspected that the requirement to maintain a sophisticated performance of one's self on social media may make young people burningly aware of the value of retaining ownership of their own stories.  Danah Boyd (2014) charts the minefield this can pose and the considerable skills required to negotiate it.  For young carers I once worked with, their stories were a form of 'capital' they curated and built upon, both politically (to improve the lot of young carers) and personally (to obtain work experience, respect and contacts).  

One's story is one's life, perhaps, to a greater extent than in previous generations.  I am reminded of the Plains Indians' practice of burying their hair and nail clippings, so no-one could steal their soul.  It all presents an interesting challenge to a storytelling practice based on playing within storyworlds and celebrating the multiple possibilities they contain.  That is our understanding, from a position of relative comfort.  We certainly need to understand and respect young people's chariness of being too cavalier with The Truth.

REFERENCES

Boyd, Danah (2014) It’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Elkind, David (1967) ‘Egocentrism in Adolescence’. Child Development 38, pp.1025-34.

Nicholson, Helen (2005) Applied drama: the gift of theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Young people's mental health is 'Everybody's Business'

Last night I heard a radio programme, All in the Mind on Radio 4, which was asking: is there an 'epidemic' of mental ill health among young people?  And if so, why?  The general conclusion confirmed my impressions gathered from extensive work with young people, teachers and artsworkers: though nothing so subjective can be 'proven', the pressures on young people at present seem to be qualitatively different from those faced by previous generations.  And they need more support than is currently available.  The fact is that a third of young people seeking mental health treatment are turned away - and that some parents I have met 'pray' that their child will have a 'crisis' so that they can get access to treatment.  With the current cuts to all 'early intervention' services, and further rounds planned, it seems we can't expect any change to that situation. (A sort of slow-burning anger is becoming the undertone to most of what I speak and write these days, surely a corrosive state of mind for me too!)


So what's the answer?  There are increasing calls for schools and universities to start viewing students' mental health as part of their responsibility. These are resisted by many as 'not really their job'.  I think the interesting question here is, what can schools and colleges in fact do and what can they not?  How can they start to build a culture of communication and mutual support around mental health?  And - well I would say this wouldn't I - how can they provide opportunities for young people to explore alternative narratives, different versions of themselves and different ways of forming supportive, collaborative communities? A lot of what is being called 'mental ill health' may in fact be a chronic condition of our advanced capitalist society.  The stories of economic competition, commodification, academic pressure, social judgement, physical perfection are being heard clearly enough.  How can schools and colleges help young people to take the world with a pinch (or a barrel) of salt?


I have been asked to present a little bit of something at 'Everybody's Business', an upcoming conference about mental health services for young people in York on 25th November.  Unlike most conferences it has a specific outcome in mind - to inform the council's Health and Wellbeing Committee and how they shape their future strategy.  It will bring together people from all the city's higher education providers, with health professionals and local authority decision makers, to start to build a sense of common cause around some of the questions around young people's mental health.


I am delighted that I will be speaking/performing with Imogen Godwin, a young writer and storyteller who is very eloquent on the subject of the CAMHS system.  We will show a bit of our show, Wormwood in the Garden, and talk about the value of artistic collaboration in helping young people develop and articulate their own perspectives on their wellbeing. 


You can book for the conference here.

Epic distance and the rupture in experience: Bakhtin, Benjamin and me!

For over a year I have been setting up internal ‘discussions’ between two of my main influences: Walter Benjamin (particularly his essay ‘The Storyteller’) and Mikhail Bakhtin (particularly his thoughts on ‘epic’ versus ‘novel’).  This morning I feel I can intervene in their dialogue and help sort out their differences.  WARNING: this is a long and detailed post, I am deep in my theoretical woods here, so if you're feeling like a short walk by the river, check out some of my other posts instead...

If, as Bakhtin rejoices, the novel is about polyphony – multiple social languages in wondrous, open-ended, unresolved dialogue  (‘life’s fullness’, as Benjamin grants) – the flipside of this, mourned by Benjamin, is that it is about the irredeemably perplexing and ultimately lonely nature of life.  The novel is about the individual’s search for the meaning of life, ultimately a hopeless search in which no-one can guide him to the answer.  He is lacking ‘counsel’ (Benjamin) – why? Because of the ruptures brought about by rapid social change, the information age, the isolation of each individual’s experience.  Think of the working class father whose experience as a builder seems to have no bearing on his son’s endless string of casual call centre jobs, silencing his reminiscences.  Or think of the online ‘fangirl’ community where young women create disturbing and sexually explicit fantasy stories in an environment untrodden by any guiding adult, with its own social norms utterly different from those of the mainstream.  So the novel celebrates the individual’s endurance of perplexity in polyphonic chaos – their strivings to make it up as they go along, and call this meaning.

If on the other hand, the story is about continuity and communicability of experience (Benjamin), the common underlying structures of life (Milan Kundera called this the sense of ‘es muss sein’, ‘it has to be’), it travels along archetypal paths which bind the teller and the listeners.  The flipside of this is Bakhtin's view that the story’s epic nature denies either any agency: the epic story is finished and unchallengeable. (I realise I am conflating his views on epic with his contrasting views on folktale, but I think I wouldn't mind me doing so for the purposes of dialogue.) He forgets perhaps that the storyteller has already travelled these paths in her own particular way, as will the listeners in their own.

Then my burning desire to tell stories is an urge to declare underlying commonality of experience – to sew up tears in the rupture.  I feel this is the case: I want to show my counsel to be relevant, ‘useful’ as Benjamin says. 

Yet both I and my listeners were brought up primarily on the novel, not the story.  So it could not be otherwise than that I would ‘novelise’ (Bakhtin) the stories I tell, giving them psychological interiority and inconclusiveness.  As Benjamin decrees and I like most storytellers feel to be right, I will do this very little in my first telling – I will leave in that ‘chaste compactness’ that allows the listeners to bind the story into their own experience – but this is very much what I and the young people will be about in subsequent workshop activities.  We could hardly do otherwise.  Thus Bakhtin describes the way the novel pulls all other forms to itself. 

But things have moved on.  Bakhtin might have envisaged the novel endlessly tearing up ‘epic distance’, knocking down gods, parodying archetypes.  He might not have foreseen how, once all the gods had been destroyed, humanity would feel the need to rediscover the paths of counsel – that in storytelling workshops, a group of young people might sometimes take refuge in the ‘es muss sein’ of epic distance, telling them how they might live their lives and define themselves.  At other times, of course, they would restore the multiplicity and perplexity that they know must on some level exist within the most perfectly formed story.  They would play with these opposing pulls like a tug of war.

So when Tom Maguire talks about the ‘return of the storytellers’ to the stage, or when youth theatre practitioners tell me that stories are right back at the heart of practice with young people, they are evidencing what Kearney, Ricoeur and countless others call the ‘narrative turn’.  It’s a swing of the pendulum back towards counsel and archetype, but because of where it started we have assimilated many skills of navigating perplexity and writing our own identities.  This time, we listen to the stories and consciously choose to use their archetypal paths to guide us and dignify our experience.  This is the dialogic mode of storytelling.  It is a mode which restores the necessary role of the storyteller, but foregrounds the listeners' active re-making of the story as never before.

However, it gives the storyteller new responsibilities and insecurities.  No longer can she work in the innocent community Benjamin yearned back towards, assuming her listeners' life experience will turn out to be similar to her own, and thus relying on the self-evident usefulness of her counsel.  Her ‘usefulness’ (in fact her right to tell at all) must now be earned, by making it evident that she is ready to put her counsel at the listeners’ free disposal, as well as receive counsel from their knowledge, gained in their different world.  (I wonder: was Benjamin aware of this different, more knowing spirit of storylistening?  Did he foresee the narrative turn even as he was mourning the passing of story?  Is this why he emphasises the ‘chaste compactness’ and the vital role of the gaps in the story?  Because this is indeed where these dialogic processes occur.)  This is the 'moment' of the storytelling revival; this is why storytelling is in some ways a different artform than the archaic forms it claims descendance from, and I am experiencing this in my encounters with adolescents.  I need to justify my choice of story, contract delicately with them as to the right opportunity for telling it.  We take delicate steps together unto long-untrodden ground.

Then in what way is the counsel contained in this epic material ‘at their disposal’? What do they use it for?  Well, novelisation - understood as bringing the epic onto a level with interiority and everyday experience - can go two ways.  The adolescent young people I work with very rarely 'knock it down' to meet earthy everyday life in the way Bakhtin described.  Their engagement with it is playful but not always subversive. It frequently seems to be more about raising their personal experience up to meet the epic on its own archetypal plane.  Or something in between.  A young woman with whom I collaborated on a retelling of an Italian folktale drew on her own poetry written in moments of great emotion or insight.  She described this process of conscious novelisation afterwards: 'I was looking to myself and what I would do or feel.'

In fact, strikingly often, young people use epic to dignify their own experience – experience that sometimes seems uncelebrated, isolating and uncommunicable.  ‘Dignifying’ – what do I mean? Simply transcribing this experience onto the archetypal paths of counsel, simultaneously allowing it to reshape these.  In this way the rupture is healed and experience becomes communicable again.  At a sufficient epic distance, universality is re-established: say, between the teenage self-harmer and the young hero on an impossible quest up the glass mountain.  You see the same in novels and theatre: think of Jeanette Winterson’s parallels (in 'Sexing the Cherry') between her lesbian or transgender characters and the mermaids and dancing princesses of legend.  The apparently untraversable gap, between the young people's experience, mine and that of all the storytellers and storylisteners that went before, shrinks for a while.  There is no need to be contrived about this – it happens by itself.  I often don't see it til long after a workshop and I assume they do not either.  Story is a mutually comprehensible language which can re-frame adolescent experience, and be re-shaped in turn by it.  Thus lines of communication can be opened and I, at least, feel the better for it.  


REFERENCES

•         Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) 'Epic and Novel' in The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas.

•         Benjamin, Walter (1973(1955)) ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ in Hannah Arendt (ed). Illuminations. London: Fontana.

•         Kearney, Richard (2002) On Stories: thinking in action. London: Routledge.

'Storyknowing': A Symposium and Festival on Storytelling and Theatre with Young People

WHEN? Fri 22nd and Sat 23rd April 2016 

WHERE? York St John University and York Theatre Royal

WHO? Researchers, practitioners, teachers and young people (12-18)

Advance notice of ICAN's biggest practice research event yet: a two-day festival and symposium to explore the artform of storytelling for, with and by young people.  It will both disseminate our research, and contribute to it - threads from the workshops, talks, discussions and performances will be tied together into a short film, and perhaps ultimately into a book. 

Story is the way human beings make sense of the world they live in.  A story does not tell us what to think - it poses questions and leaves spaces for us to interpret them together.  It carries wisdom and experience, and asks us to add our own wisdom and experience before passing it on.  Therefore stories – whether modern, mythical, traditional or fantastical – are particularly important to help young people to position their own lives and difficulties in a wider context, and to become critical, responsible, problem-solving adults. 

The ‘narrative turn’ in literature and the social sciences (Kearney 2002, Meretoja 2014) has been mirrored in community arts practice.  Storytellers and theatre practitioners, ever more conscious of the impact on young people’s wellbeing of prevalent narratives of individualism, academic competition, physical perfection and social division, are increasingly seeking to provide alternative narratives for them to explore. Story is well and truly back at the centre of practice with young people.

And yet many young people may rarely hear or have the chance to work with stories.   The revival in performance storytelling has tended to favour adults and the very young, neglecting teenagers and older children.  ICAN’s research has found that secondary teachers, often constrained by tightly planned skills-focused curricula from reading a whole novel (OFSTED 2012), wish to ensure pupils’ access to stories; recent conferences on child and adolescent mental health have featured opportunities to build professionals’ confidence and capacity to use personal or fictional stories in their work. 

So what kinds of stories do young people need to hear?  What do they find in them, and how do they use them to put across their own perspectives?  How should we make the most of their power in our practice?  How should practitioners develop a participatory practice of storytelling? In what ways is this challenging to, or congruent with, current trends in education, mental health and youth work?

This festival and symposium will bring together practitioners, teachers, academics and young people to explore, through workshops, performances, discussions and outstanding practice, how we can use story to enrich drama and arts practice with young people.  It will also be about performance both by and for young people, showcasing both professional performances developed specifically for audiences aged 11-18, and performances by teenagers across various artforms.

BOOKING PAGE here 
There will be calls for papers (CfP) issued on research and practitioner networks, as well as on the ICAN website.

Enquiries: cath.heinemeyer@yorksj.ac.uk

Wormwood in the Garden

For the Love Arts Festival of Arts and Mental Health, some young people (from a mental health setting) and I devised a storytelling piece, based on Italo Calvino's folktale, Wormwood.  One young woman performed it with me and added her own poetry to amplify the emotions of these puzzling, cipher characters.  You can see a recording of it here and her blog post describing the process here . 

It was an inspiring and challenging process, provoking lots of questions for me about the nature of folktale and what it can do, which for now I simply present for your delectation / befuddlement.

The eloquence of non-engagement

My work in the adolescent mental health setting has been even more challenging than usual recently, with a difficult constellation of inpatients and a change of venue to a more distracting room.  Often only a handful of young people join me for the storytelling sessions, and only a couple are still there at the end. Meanwhile, these few have engaged intensely and enthusiastically, and produced some beautiful work in their own artforms based on story.

It was in this context that I had a 'research chat' (I would say 'trialogue' but it sounds too grandiose, or 'interview' but that would be pushing the point) with the two teachers in the setting, some of my firmest and most perceptive allies in all I am doing.  We looked into the reasons that many young people don't come, or leave part-way through.

The most challenging for me to consider is the fact that I often have an 'expectation' of 'something in return' for a story.  We recognised that almost all the young people love listening to a story - the rest and privacy it gives them, the absorption in a storyworld away from their difficulties.  But they know I will lead from that into a follow-up activity - a storytelling game, or creative writing exercise - which will demand an element of performance.   No matter how low-key this seems to me, for some young people it is too big a risk to turn up at all. Perhaps they will be judged or assessed or analysed. I have to remember the framing of their lives here - being permanently 'under the microscope' as some of them rage - and their lifetime of school experience in which almost every activity has a measurable learning outcome.  Such apparent open-endedness can only be suspect, or disorienting.

Then there is the power of symbolism.  These young people are strikingly intelligent and self-critical.  While the archetypes of myth and folktale might be an other-worldly common language, of great value in the right 'transitional space', they are just too obviously near to autobiography for some of these young people whose lives and emotions are in turmoil.  It is not possible to 'play' with things that are too hot to handle.  The 'storyworld' might be a place of danger rather than escape.  No matter how many times I assure them I am not a therapist and have no designs to analyse or heal them, the thickness of the atmosphere may contradict this for them.

There is, too, the 'discomfort' factor - the workshops involve sitting down quite a bit; the young people do not control the physical space as they would in other group activities designed to relax them away from their difficulties for a space and let their minds free-flow (like, say, cooking).  Thus unlike other groups, there is not the same element of escape from one's demons.  Although I often bring plasticine, yarn, beans to shell...it must be hard for them to overcome their desire to roam and escape the intensity of the moment, especially in the distracting space of the lounge.  There might be great value to their learning to weather the discomfort for sake of getting to a shared space of fun and creativity, but who am I to say that this is an achievable journey?

Then there is the adolescent suspicion of story and play - these are older teenagers for whom play has lost its charm and not yet regained it.  And finally, certainly not least, for some young people there is the sheer joyful empowerment of refusal.  We all felt there is considerable value to us turning up every day (in their case), every week (in mine), cheerful and consistent and pleased to see them, ready to be rejected or to fail another day, and then be back again the next morning.

All of these things call into profound question my belief in the 'other room' of the story, that a meeting of minds is possible in that room separate from the conditions and anxieties prevailing in the world next door.  That in that other room, people can take on different roles than they habitually do and meet as artists, be seen and appreciated for their strengths.  Yet this is a play space which can only exist under certain conditions, very difficult to achieve in this setting.

So one solution would be: I should just tell stories.  Clearly demarcated by music or simple handwork activities.  Many more young people would come along and would get something from it - the stories would stay with them to return to over the years.  This would be much more faithful to the core idea of the storytelling exchange: a story is told as a gift, the listener lends their ear as a gift, then the two go their separate ways, both enriched.  A more 'advanced' goal of getting to dialogue, genuine creative encounter between artists, is perhaps usually inappropriate to this setting.  Does an ill person want to be (benefit from being) in close dialogue with other ill people?  Am I treading on very dangerous territory here?

And yet I am not ready to give up on the power of play and retelling.  Because some individuals have stated in so many words their joy in playing together in the storyworld, knowingly perhaps but with great spark.  Because too, some groups in the ever-shifting parade of this community have seized certain stories and turned them into powerful satires, or used them to address the outside world. What right have I to claim all the storytelling role for myself, if there are such desires?  And related to this, because for a few young people story and related artforms are a way to start charting paths back out into life - to the theatre, to other identities they are experimenting with.

What this leads us to is an understanding that I need to do more to demarcate the storytelling space itself as a place where nothing will be demanded.  A gift only (and which can only be given if they choose).  I can use music, I can give undertakings and timings.  Thus the storyworld and its potential for free-floating will be available to everyone.  And (this is a bit Zen) by giving up any hope that we will get into the play space that lies beyond, I will therefore make it possible that just sometimes we will.  Some people will drift off and those few who have the will and ability to pass the many barricades will stay.  And we will fail and fail again, and see what happens!