Urban Art Fair Website
Monday, 19 July 2010
Urban Art Fair 2010
On Saturday I helped out the Urban Art Fair in Brixton, South London, doing basic stewarding duties, looking after the artists, pointing people to the toilets, watching armed police chase a suspect, and listen to an eccentric man talking about pimps in his flowers.
But the best quote of the day goes to one of the artists, who said: 'I have to balance what people want to put up in their kitchen and nurturing the darkness of my soul.'
Urban Art Fair Website
Urban Art Fair Website
Saturday, 10 July 2010
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
my time on a psych ward 2005
.jpg)
found these old photos from my mobile phone, from when I was an a psych ward in 2005. Below describes my time on that ward.
He was wearing three pairs of trousers, and stank of urine. He would pee himself and instead of change out of his soiled trousers, he would put another pair on. He had the strange habit of pouring water over himself. His socks were usually half-way off his feet. The pyjama shirt he wore was always stained. Wherever he walked he left a snail trail of spilled liquid. I did wonder what his life was like leading up to this sad pitiful end to his life. Was he ever happy? I don’t know. And he doesn’t know either. That’s the tragedy of dementia. We were told to shut the door to our rooms so George couldn’t enter and take our belongings. But a closed door was no barrier to George; he came in anyway and took things like toothbrushes and flannels. Not to keep though; they usually ended up on someone else’s bed. I actually developed a soft spot for him, even when he blocked up the toilet with toilet rolls and his pants, or snatched people’s food from their plate.
A nurse came to do the admission paperwork. It was a mundane and bureaucratic exercise interviewing me about the state of my soul. The nurse then showed me around the ward. We started at the nurses’ station. She pointed one way, ‘That’s the smoking room’ and in the opposite direction ‘that’s the TV room.’ ‘There’s no TV in the TV room’ a passing patient informed. There were a few more communal areas and finally the dining area. People were having their dinner when I was shown the area. A stout Irish woman called Eleanor said to me, “Who are you visiting?”
“No, I am here to stay for a while.” She threw open her arms. I felt silly but went up to her to be hugged by her and pressed into her bosom. “It’s heaven here,’ she told me. You’re totally off your rocker, I thought to myself.
I stayed in the dining area as it was nearly time for supper. The next person I met was also called Eleanor. She had the demeanour of a nervy school teacher, pixy looking with mousey hair. She told me she was God. It was good to see a woman who thought she was God, that women were having a better class of delusion.
She was into channelling everyone and absorbing the guilt of the universe. She was as middle class as hell, making her stick out. She told me over my food that I was kidnapped by the king of Nepal. She was too jittery for my liking and I stayed out of her way. I did give her some of my washing liquid so she could wash her clothes. I was obviously the wrong thing to do because she then suddenly turned on me, saying I was in the centre point for all the contamination of evil in the universe. I felt like it so agreed with her.
We all had our own rooms, which I was thankful for. On the aquamarine door to my room was a name plate, with hundreds of rubbed out names of people who have moved on, and some of those people rubbed out permanently because the pain was too much. Behind my newly scrawled name were names that couldn’t be rubbed out, like: PROF, Frank, MIX92 FLY, LiLi, and Jesus…
The loudest person on the ward was a middle aged Greek woman. She was a figure of fun for the staff to tease, an annoyance to other patients, and a burden to her family. This is what madness has done to her, seemingly the thing that made her who she was had gone. That there was just no person behind that ravaged face was the accepted notion about her. But as I waited behind her as she clumsily made two cups of tea, her soul shone through her eyes just for a split second: she was still very much alive and still very much special. She handed the teas to the nurses who couldn’t go home because of the London bomb blasts.
The next day she was back to her tortured routine and she pulled the hair of one of the nurses, screaming, “You thieving bitch, give me back my trousers, you thieving bitch!” For all the time I was on the ward, she continued to protest about her stolen clothes. I never did get down to the bottom of the mystery of where her clothes went, whether the staff or patients did actually steal it, or whether she never had them at all.
The days went by, some days had less screams than others. The only unusual day on the ward during my stay was when there was the constant wail of sirens, more than usual. St Thomas is a general hospital too. Then I got a text from my mum, saying there had been bomb blasts in London, on the tube and on a bus. Later I found out suicide bombers had detonated devices. Shit. It made me aware how detached us guys were from the outside world. We didn’t seem so mad now. The detachment was ensured by the fact we had no TV in the TV room, and nurses who kept to the age old tradition alive of who could talk least to their patients.
TV ROOM WITHOUT THE TV
Do you know I’m here? Inside a saint.
stuck in a room on a psych ward that overlooks the Thames
jigsaw pieces of the Houses of Parliament show
in the missing pieces that are the old trees
swaying
The windows are open
only a few inches mind
so we can’t jump out of our pain
so we have to endure the TV room without the TV
so no-one hears our screams, our rants, tears,
our inappropriate laughter at a world terrorising itself
so no-one can see our journeys on a 1000 miles of corridors
or our skin being torn in protest of a life it has to
cage and enclose.
Do you hear us? Or don’t we exist?
We don’t exist, I think,
because those here before me have scrawled
on the sills: ‘SAVE US’ and nobody has
The trees outside have camouflaged us lost people well.
I have yet to be an inpatient on a psychiatric ward where the all the nurses did their jobs. This is what some MH nurses think their job is: Sitting slumped in a chair, looking at their nails; a patient tries to speak to them, they go deaf or release a bored sigh. Or if you are really super qualified, mimic someone’s distressed shouting or screaming back at them. An arsehole called Wilbert did this when the Greek woman in question shared a table with me for lunch. She was no longer shouting, but was in fact subdued and depressed. ‘Maw Wah Wha’ he threw at her. “Please don’t do that,” she murmured, her head bowed.
But there were amazing nurses too. One called Iman, who did the night shift, she would talk with me at night, assured me. Knowing she was on the night shift, I felt protected and cared for.
Time on a psych ward is either total tragedy or total comedy - there is no in-between. Except the soul-destroying boredom. There was some exercise on offer, nothing special. I don’t think our psychiatric patient exercise program will top the video charts. It was held in the dining room by Byron, a smiling Rastafarian. He brought Reggae to exercise to. I caught snatches of lyrics, such as: ‘Please let me go… How do I get out of here…’ The routine consisted of very basic steps, but could I get it right? Drowsy from medication and wearing my jeans without a belt because they confiscated it when I was admitted, I was all over the place. And my jeans kept falling down. One step forward, one step back was just too complicated for me, and I decided I would not come to the next session.
Friday, 9 July 2010
Thursday, 8 July 2010
the beginning of the career
I actually think the label 'mad' is misleading, I have appropriated the term in reaction to the stigma attached to it and the shame I am supposed to feel because I have been given the label. I have no shame. I think the shame belongs to people who cause others to become mentally distressed in the first place. If there was no stigma, I would not call myself 'mad', I would call myself a human being being human. And this human business is an absurd and ridiculous career. The career of being human didn't get off to a good start with me, the place I did my training for the human role - my family home - left me ill-equipped to deal with life, but trained me well to be hurt, confused, and lonely. To cope with the bad conditions, I recreated worlds in my mind, which helped my artistic creativity, but apparently I wasn't allowed to be creative with reality. I didn't know reality is a bureaucratic exercise.
Anyways, the following is taken from my first book 'The World is Full of Laughter' and details my experience being an extra in 'The Empire Strikes Back' and how it affected my later non-consensual thinking - or if you want to call it psychosis - in that I thought there was a battle between good and evil aliens and I was part of it, I can pinpoint the genesis of that in the following experience.
I had worked in films previously, but the first film I remember working on is one of the Star Wars movies ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ with my sister Sheila.
First we had to audition. We were told there and then we were hired and were measured up for our costumes. With our Dad as our chaperone, we worked on the film for about a week. Being an extra involves a lot of sitting around waiting to be called onto the set. Extras always look forward to meal times. Breakfast was always a tea and coffee urn, with sausage, bacon or egg in a roll. Although I’m vegetarian now, whenever I smell bacon or sausages being cooked, it always reminds me happily of those days.
There were 10 other kids with us, most from stage school. One of the production assistants realised it wasn’t fair for us children just to sit around, so he let us play on the part of the set not being used. The set was a labyrinth of white space age tunnels and futuristic cloisters. I always wanted a wendy house but this was much better. The 12 of us played chase, and had shoot-em-ups with prop guns. Our scene was going to be filmed after lunch, so after we ate, we were put into our costumes. Every single one of us had to wear a pair of green trousers and a green jumper that itched like hell. We were also given a circuit board each, which were to be our schoolbooks.
Finally called on to the set, we had to walk down a gangway with a teacher. A silver C3PO also shared our scene. Again we had to wait around between shooting. Sheila and I used this time to explore the set. We saw Chewie, which made Sheila cry. The guy inside had to take off the furry head to reassure her. All sorts of ghouls and monsters walked about. The longer I was there, the less I believed it was make-believe. I carried the feeling with me that it was a documentary. I liked this world, more interesting than ordinary life. Empire Strikes Back is basically about the battle between the forces of good and evil, and I felt part of it.
I saw our journey from our home to the studio as a space ship ride taking me to another world. “Where you going?” Fred the window cleaner asked us. “I’m going into outer space.” I told him proudly. Planet Earth was purely a stepping-stone.
I didn’t like planet Earth – it had my Dad and school on it.
Tuesday, 6 July 2010
Saturday, 3 July 2010
What is Mad Culture?
What is Mad Culture?
It is a celebration of the creativity of mad people, and pride in our unique way of looking at life, our internal world externalised and shared with others without shame, as a valid way of life. It is an acknowledgement that we are reacting to a society that is scared of us and will hijack our art and literature once our artists and writers are dead and therefore deemed safe and easy to control, corrupt and capitalise. Our culture is that we have control of our lives without being brutalised by a psychiatric system that wants us to conform to an ideal of normality that doesn’t exist anyway. It is challenging the idea that madness is something to be hidden; it realises that visibility counts in order to break the stigma that has a stranglehold over every single mad person alive today. Mad Culture is saying, ‘Yes, yes!” to life even if embarrasses the ‘normals’.
Mad Culture is saying: I won’t hold your sanity against you. My reality is good enough. Is yours?
Not all mad people are artistic, some are quite happy to be accountants, and I don’t think mad accountants should be discriminated against.
We are already an alienated sector of society, in fact the most alienated sector of society. We are not full members of this society or culture and that is not going to change without us changing it. Because why is it in their interest to change what makes them feel comfortable and superior. So in that sense we need to create our own culture in which we feel comfortable in. Some would argue that leads to separation, but we are separate. Where does madness fit in ‘normal culture’? We are the untouchables. Only fit enough to work in sheltered workshops, to be cleaners, media scapegoats and to paint multi-million pound masterpieces. Put simply, in this present culture we have victim status; in our culture, we are just ourselves. WE want a culture that doesn’t produce a suicide every 40 seconds.
Why have pride about suffering distress, some may say? It’s not about that. It is pride in our strength to survive that distress and what it teaches us, and not to feel like lesser beings because of it, and to question why we feel lesser beings because of it, to question that madness is an illness and not a human response to a sick society, a sick upbringing.
Can you imagine a world without music, art, dance and drama? It would be an empty, bland place. So why is the world without your music, art, dance and drama? If life is a stage, is yours worth watching? What would make the show better? Can we change the ending? Or make it a better story? Culture is letting us tell the story not them – it is as simple as that.
It is a celebration of the creativity of mad people, and pride in our unique way of looking at life, our internal world externalised and shared with others without shame, as a valid way of life. It is an acknowledgement that we are reacting to a society that is scared of us and will hijack our art and literature once our artists and writers are dead and therefore deemed safe and easy to control, corrupt and capitalise. Our culture is that we have control of our lives without being brutalised by a psychiatric system that wants us to conform to an ideal of normality that doesn’t exist anyway. It is challenging the idea that madness is something to be hidden; it realises that visibility counts in order to break the stigma that has a stranglehold over every single mad person alive today. Mad Culture is saying, ‘Yes, yes!” to life even if embarrasses the ‘normals’.
Mad Culture is saying: I won’t hold your sanity against you. My reality is good enough. Is yours?
Not all mad people are artistic, some are quite happy to be accountants, and I don’t think mad accountants should be discriminated against.
We are already an alienated sector of society, in fact the most alienated sector of society. We are not full members of this society or culture and that is not going to change without us changing it. Because why is it in their interest to change what makes them feel comfortable and superior. So in that sense we need to create our own culture in which we feel comfortable in. Some would argue that leads to separation, but we are separate. Where does madness fit in ‘normal culture’? We are the untouchables. Only fit enough to work in sheltered workshops, to be cleaners, media scapegoats and to paint multi-million pound masterpieces. Put simply, in this present culture we have victim status; in our culture, we are just ourselves. WE want a culture that doesn’t produce a suicide every 40 seconds.
Why have pride about suffering distress, some may say? It’s not about that. It is pride in our strength to survive that distress and what it teaches us, and not to feel like lesser beings because of it, and to question why we feel lesser beings because of it, to question that madness is an illness and not a human response to a sick society, a sick upbringing.
Can you imagine a world without music, art, dance and drama? It would be an empty, bland place. So why is the world without your music, art, dance and drama? If life is a stage, is yours worth watching? What would make the show better? Can we change the ending? Or make it a better story? Culture is letting us tell the story not them – it is as simple as that.
I started out first as a poet - here are some of my words
Pavement Poem
Do not step here
my dreams have fallen
out of my pocket, and
are hard to find again.
Don’t grind them into the ground
Otherwise I will have to wait
for the rain to run into the cracks
to the feed the daisies
to push them back up again
SPYCHOSIS
let’s go fly a kite &
see wombs reject clouds
I’ve got the hole word in my hand
crucified by candy floss
I throw out the rubbish
and find my dreams
which ones are recyclable, I don’t know.
Second-hand slumber is not so bad,
sleeping in your dreams is good enough
Something must be rested
Do you realise you never look in your diary in dreams
you always know what to do next.
Waking is putting on the body again
I never seem to find one that fits.
The smile is cut out to provide a spyhole
my paranoia gets stuck between my teeth
It’s a grind.
I am hungry now.
I have fallen down a hole
surviving on catatonic toothpaste
till my rescue.
My silent screams have fresh breath.
welcome to my dream
there is no admission fee
and you will leave something behind anyway
Do not step here
my dreams have fallen
out of my pocket, and
are hard to find again.
Don’t grind them into the ground
Otherwise I will have to wait
for the rain to run into the cracks
to the feed the daisies
to push them back up again
SPYCHOSIS
let’s go fly a kite &
see wombs reject clouds
I’ve got the hole word in my hand
crucified by candy floss
I throw out the rubbish
and find my dreams
which ones are recyclable, I don’t know.
Second-hand slumber is not so bad,
sleeping in your dreams is good enough
Something must be rested
Do you realise you never look in your diary in dreams
you always know what to do next.
Waking is putting on the body again
I never seem to find one that fits.
The smile is cut out to provide a spyhole
my paranoia gets stuck between my teeth
It’s a grind.
I am hungry now.
I have fallen down a hole
surviving on catatonic toothpaste
till my rescue.
My silent screams have fresh breath.
welcome to my dream
there is no admission fee
and you will leave something behind anyway
Friday, 2 July 2010
the Libel of Sanity
The libel of sanity. Can you prove reality exists in a court of law? Where are the witnesses? Where is the evidence? Except the invented evidence. You build the walls and say reality exists within these walls? Take the walls away and what have you got?
The jury is out. Their heads play games too. Spin doctors with their medication and their chemical concept of truth, their pills of soul kill. They say Heaven is a subsidiary
of a pharmaceutical company
And you ask why people choose to stay in their hell?
The jury is out. Their heads play games too. Spin doctors with their medication and their chemical concept of truth, their pills of soul kill. They say Heaven is a subsidiary
of a pharmaceutical company
And you ask why people choose to stay in their hell?
How I started my professional mad career
After years of sitting alone, suffering in silence, razor-whipped, razor-jarred by negativity and isolation, I decided to take small steps into improving the quality of my life. I started by doing voluntary work and visiting free galleries and museums.
As I gained more confidence I went out more. One Thursday morning, I would have rather have stayed in and watched TV, my energy levels were quite low and my attention span almost non-existent, but as per usual when I felt like this, I pushed myself off the sofa and out through the front door. Usually on a Thursday I went to LUV’s weekly Coffee Morning. LUV was Lambeth User Voice, a forum for mental health service users to support each other amongst other things. I enjoyed talking with the regulars there, Barry, Andrew and John. Carole Myers, the user development worker for LUV, used to laugh at my stories. This time she wasn’t there but there was a new face around the table. I took off my coat and this new face stuck out his hand for me to shake. “My name’s Jason.” “Dolly,” I smiled back. There was a book in front of him. I compared the guy on the cover with Jason and realised they were the same person. “You wrote a book?” “Yeah, I published it too.” “Really, wow, I’m a writer and publisher too.” “Really? Wow.” We talked shop and exchanged email addresses. I had no idea would be one of the defining turning points of my life.
We emailed each other for a while, talking about writing mostly before I got his book ‘A Can of Madness’ in the post. I read the book straight through, and then read it again. It blew me away. I had read books like ‘The Bell Jar’ with great curiosity because they talked about the ‘mad’ experience. Now I had met an author of a ‘mad memoir’ in the flesh, and he didn’t kill himself but was remarkably positive. He wanted to change the world and how it viewed mad people. I had been planning my own memoir in my head for years. I began to write seriously in 1992 when I was 21, and my memoir was in my plans then but I kept putting it off with other literary projects because I was basically too scared to do it. I thought it would be so painful, that it would turn into a suicide note. Jason really inspired me to finally sit down and write my story, so that’s what I did. Once I actually started it, the story couldn’t be stopped, it wanted to be told. I spent about 12 hours a day on the computer, with lots of necessary breaks to chill out. It was bittersweet liberation. I felt freed by the writing of my life but also I don’t think I had cried so much in my life. It was like watching a speed aging of a scared, scarred child into a scared, scarred adult. I wanted a happy ending for this person, and writing the book gave me an opportunity to script a better future for me.
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Welcome
Welcome to my first post, detailing my life as a professional mad person. I am not being factieous, I am actually mad and do get paid for it. An interview I did for the Open University tells you more about it. If you want to hear the audio version, go to: http://open2.net/mentalhealth/dolly_sen.html
My name is Dolly Sen, and I’m from London. I’m a professional mad person. And what is a professional mad person? Well, out of the experience of using the mental health system and having to deal with my mental health issues, I write and I paint and I make films. Luckily, people have paid me to write and paint and make films - not only that, to talk about my life and to teach others what has helped me.
So, basically, any income I have, it comes out of the fact that I talk about madness, I write about madness. I share my coping strategies, my creativity is fuelled by my mental health experiences, either by giving it content or, you know, if you’re manic, it gives you motivation and the belief you can do anything you want really.
I was born in London, and I’ve lived all my life here. I’m the eldest of five kids. My dad, basically, had a lot of alcohol problems. My mum was physically disabled, and she was also deaf, so I was her carer. So I didn’t really have an easy childhood. My dad was physically abusive and emotionally abusive. We were very poor. My brothers and I have had periods of neglect where we’ve been left for days alone. And because we were poor we were bullied at school.
So it seemed to be a kind of snowball effect that one area of, you know, pain and abuse kind of seemed to collect itself in other areas. For example, we were on the At Risk register at Social Services, but they didn’t help. I felt very alone as a child. I thought if everyone was not helping me, then it was me, that something was wrong with me. Which I think was the reason I had my first psychotic experience at age 14 and why I have the psychosis in the first place.
The first auditory hallucination I recall happened around at the age of 14. Every Sunday, the radio would play the top 40 UK hits. I listened to it and taped the songs I liked. All of a sudden, the music went quiet and a troll-like voice issued from the radio, “What do you want, Dolly? How much do you want?” My skin prickled. I shut off the radio in fear. Deep demonic laughter followed. “Can’t get rid of me, I’m yours for life now,” it said. “Who are you?” I said. “I am the universe. I choose whether you live and breathe.”
I got up and ran out of the room. I stopped listening to the radio from then on. And as the days passed I thought maybe I had just dreamed it all. The voices then chose the TV as their medium. I was drowning in a sea of bad ads that I had to read into for their cosmic significance. Soon, I stopped watching TV. I became obsessed with the battle between good and evil played out in the Empire Strikes Back. I was thinking, everyone thinks this is just a film - entertaining make-believe! But that’s what they wanted me to think, and that was the reality, and the audience watching and their little lives were the fantasy.
From that first experience of hearing voices, I began to see things. I saw shadows hovering over me. I thought the people in the TV were talking to me and when I walked down the street I had a sense that there were people on rooftops with guns that were going to kill me. You know, when you’re 14, and you have those experiences, if you think demons are chasing you, you want to escape, so therefore literally a week later after my first experience of psychosis, I attempted suicide.
Basically, the suicide attempt was an attempted overdose. I didn’t go into hospital or anything; I just felt very sick the next day. Both my mum and dad knew about it but that kind of thing made my dad angrier. And because my mum was in a kind of very vulnerable position in that she was scared of my father, and she was deaf, so therefore couldn’t pick up a phone to call the doctor or anything, Social Services referred me to a child psychiatrist.
I wanted, actually wanted to talk about my experiences but as soon as I went into the consulting room she was just very cold and was just literally reading off her questions off the page. No eye contact, no warmness about her, so I clammed up. I don’t know what the diagnosis was, but out of that session with a psychiatrist I didn’t need to go back to school. So I was supposed to have home schooling, but that didn’t work out.
The first few months after that, I mean I was still just struggling with the experience, I didn’t really do anything. It’s only when it started to lull down a little bit that I went to my local library and made the decision to read every book in the library. I think I did it over the course of a couple of years. So, basically, I just educated myself by reading, watching documentaries. So I did it myself really.
I didn’t want to use the Mental Services because I was just basically scared of them. It was only in my early 20s when my mum forced me to go. Although my first community psychiatric nurse was very nice, what I found frustrating was I knew where I needed the help in my life basically. I was, you know, still being physically abused by my father at that point, and I wanted them to help me either find my own place or to get some legal help.
I knew that the stress of the situation was why I was always suppressed and always reacting to situations with psychotic and paranoid thinking. What they thought they could offer me was a tablet. But like I say, you know, tablets don’t cure abuse, tablets don’t cure loneliness. I didn’t laugh or cry for many years whilst I was on medication. Periods in hospital, you know, some of the kind of worst periods in my life. You’re a vulnerable person and you’re put into the kind of space with other vulnerable people. Not really cared for, you’re just basically contained.
After like twenty years in the system and me telling them, you know, medication’s not the answer and I’d like to kind of talk through my problems, I was referred to a clinic at the Maudsley Hospital called a Pick-up Clinic, which is a clinic that offers CBT to people who suffer from psychosis. And CBT basically is just a new way of thinking about things. It’s a kind of questioning your thinking and how you respond to things. It was kind of a new thing because before then I used to say can I have CBT? They’d say you can’t have CBT because you can’t treat psychosis with CBT. But actually that was the thing that turned my life around.
It kind of made me see that my psychotic thinking wasn’t as illogical as I thought. There were certain triggers. For example, when I’m psychotic, because my behaviour changes slightly I start to become kind of withdrawn and a little bit kind of brittle. My family’s reaction changes accordingly because they don’t know what’s going on. And because I detect the change of behaviour in them, I think, when I’m out of it, I can see it’s because they’re just reacting to my change in behaviour, I get paranoid and I think, you know, they’re up to something because their behaviour has changed. That’s how my psychosis builds up really, and what it did was show me what happens when it does start to happen and, therefore, I can change my thinking. CBT has offered me another road to go down rather than the kind of psychotic road or the negative thinking road.
The other things that have helped is to kind of learn to think positively. Because of the abuse I had as a child and, you know, people’s kind of indifference to what was happening, I became very mistrustful of people. I became very angry. I was angry at the world really. I was angry at my dad. I just realised my father couldn’t behave in any other way really. He was stuck in that horrible mindset, and he couldn’t escape it. I had the realisation that I don’t have to take his mindset and that’s what, exactly I was becoming my father really, just hating the world.
I also kind of got into Buddhism at the time. One of the books I was reading was The Power of Forgiveness. And basically what the guy said in a nutshell was that if somebody has hurt you and you don’t forgive them, you’re handcuffing yourself to that hurt. So I kind of made the decision to forgive my father, and it was really hard at first but once I did, it felt like a kind of huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders because the anger had gone. I realised my dad needs compassion, really, and I need to be compassionate about myself.
Forgiveness is so powerful. I mean when you’re bitter about something, you are swallowing the poison and hoping the other person will get sick from it. And if you kind of think of it that way you realise how pointless it is. It’s quite a controversial thing because the hurt is so strong but, for me, that was a way to let go of that hurt, that the pain of my past didn’t own me. I had power over my life really.
After I went through the process of forgiving my father, it freed so much of myself and opened so much that my previously blocked-off mind and my blocked-off heart, it was just hungry to do things, and so my writing kind of flourished, I was starting to get published.
Because of my writing, I got involved with a few mental health arts charities, such as Sound Minds and Creative Roots, which are both based in London, and out of that I started to perform my poetry. I had written books before I wrote my memoir, but writing my memoir was the biggest challenge and the one that had the most effect on my life.
The most powerful impact the book has had when I wrote the book, and I read through the book, I could see myself for the person I was, really, that I was just an ordinary girl when I first heard voices, going through an extraordinary experience and for the very first time I had empathy for myself. I had empathy for the character in the book which was me, and I could kind of not hate her as much as I had hated myself because I could see why I became the person I became really.
It began the journey towards self-acceptance. I could actually connect to myself as a human being for the very first time. I just felt, you know, I’m just a human being doing the best I can. It was an extremely powerful experience. So glad I did it, yeah.
Something in your life will always tell your story, so you might as well have control over it. For me, creativity gave me control in the world where because of my diagnosis I had no control. A South American poet said, “Take away someone’s creativity and you take away their humanity. Give someone back their creativity and you give back their life.” I found this to be true while writing my story and every day after, too. Writing your life story does so much for you. It gives you an opportunity to reflect. It empowers you because you have nothing to hide anymore.
Everyone has their own story and the power to change that story as well. It also makes me look at the story of humanity and what my part in that story is. We live in brutal times, but I refuse to be part of that, that kind of darkness and negativity and I want to bring light. My creativity is my way of bringing light into the world.
My name is Dolly Sen, and I’m from London. I’m a professional mad person. And what is a professional mad person? Well, out of the experience of using the mental health system and having to deal with my mental health issues, I write and I paint and I make films. Luckily, people have paid me to write and paint and make films - not only that, to talk about my life and to teach others what has helped me.
So, basically, any income I have, it comes out of the fact that I talk about madness, I write about madness. I share my coping strategies, my creativity is fuelled by my mental health experiences, either by giving it content or, you know, if you’re manic, it gives you motivation and the belief you can do anything you want really.
I was born in London, and I’ve lived all my life here. I’m the eldest of five kids. My dad, basically, had a lot of alcohol problems. My mum was physically disabled, and she was also deaf, so I was her carer. So I didn’t really have an easy childhood. My dad was physically abusive and emotionally abusive. We were very poor. My brothers and I have had periods of neglect where we’ve been left for days alone. And because we were poor we were bullied at school.
So it seemed to be a kind of snowball effect that one area of, you know, pain and abuse kind of seemed to collect itself in other areas. For example, we were on the At Risk register at Social Services, but they didn’t help. I felt very alone as a child. I thought if everyone was not helping me, then it was me, that something was wrong with me. Which I think was the reason I had my first psychotic experience at age 14 and why I have the psychosis in the first place.
The first auditory hallucination I recall happened around at the age of 14. Every Sunday, the radio would play the top 40 UK hits. I listened to it and taped the songs I liked. All of a sudden, the music went quiet and a troll-like voice issued from the radio, “What do you want, Dolly? How much do you want?” My skin prickled. I shut off the radio in fear. Deep demonic laughter followed. “Can’t get rid of me, I’m yours for life now,” it said. “Who are you?” I said. “I am the universe. I choose whether you live and breathe.”
I got up and ran out of the room. I stopped listening to the radio from then on. And as the days passed I thought maybe I had just dreamed it all. The voices then chose the TV as their medium. I was drowning in a sea of bad ads that I had to read into for their cosmic significance. Soon, I stopped watching TV. I became obsessed with the battle between good and evil played out in the Empire Strikes Back. I was thinking, everyone thinks this is just a film - entertaining make-believe! But that’s what they wanted me to think, and that was the reality, and the audience watching and their little lives were the fantasy.
From that first experience of hearing voices, I began to see things. I saw shadows hovering over me. I thought the people in the TV were talking to me and when I walked down the street I had a sense that there were people on rooftops with guns that were going to kill me. You know, when you’re 14, and you have those experiences, if you think demons are chasing you, you want to escape, so therefore literally a week later after my first experience of psychosis, I attempted suicide.
Basically, the suicide attempt was an attempted overdose. I didn’t go into hospital or anything; I just felt very sick the next day. Both my mum and dad knew about it but that kind of thing made my dad angrier. And because my mum was in a kind of very vulnerable position in that she was scared of my father, and she was deaf, so therefore couldn’t pick up a phone to call the doctor or anything, Social Services referred me to a child psychiatrist.
I wanted, actually wanted to talk about my experiences but as soon as I went into the consulting room she was just very cold and was just literally reading off her questions off the page. No eye contact, no warmness about her, so I clammed up. I don’t know what the diagnosis was, but out of that session with a psychiatrist I didn’t need to go back to school. So I was supposed to have home schooling, but that didn’t work out.
The first few months after that, I mean I was still just struggling with the experience, I didn’t really do anything. It’s only when it started to lull down a little bit that I went to my local library and made the decision to read every book in the library. I think I did it over the course of a couple of years. So, basically, I just educated myself by reading, watching documentaries. So I did it myself really.
I didn’t want to use the Mental Services because I was just basically scared of them. It was only in my early 20s when my mum forced me to go. Although my first community psychiatric nurse was very nice, what I found frustrating was I knew where I needed the help in my life basically. I was, you know, still being physically abused by my father at that point, and I wanted them to help me either find my own place or to get some legal help.
I knew that the stress of the situation was why I was always suppressed and always reacting to situations with psychotic and paranoid thinking. What they thought they could offer me was a tablet. But like I say, you know, tablets don’t cure abuse, tablets don’t cure loneliness. I didn’t laugh or cry for many years whilst I was on medication. Periods in hospital, you know, some of the kind of worst periods in my life. You’re a vulnerable person and you’re put into the kind of space with other vulnerable people. Not really cared for, you’re just basically contained.
After like twenty years in the system and me telling them, you know, medication’s not the answer and I’d like to kind of talk through my problems, I was referred to a clinic at the Maudsley Hospital called a Pick-up Clinic, which is a clinic that offers CBT to people who suffer from psychosis. And CBT basically is just a new way of thinking about things. It’s a kind of questioning your thinking and how you respond to things. It was kind of a new thing because before then I used to say can I have CBT? They’d say you can’t have CBT because you can’t treat psychosis with CBT. But actually that was the thing that turned my life around.
It kind of made me see that my psychotic thinking wasn’t as illogical as I thought. There were certain triggers. For example, when I’m psychotic, because my behaviour changes slightly I start to become kind of withdrawn and a little bit kind of brittle. My family’s reaction changes accordingly because they don’t know what’s going on. And because I detect the change of behaviour in them, I think, when I’m out of it, I can see it’s because they’re just reacting to my change in behaviour, I get paranoid and I think, you know, they’re up to something because their behaviour has changed. That’s how my psychosis builds up really, and what it did was show me what happens when it does start to happen and, therefore, I can change my thinking. CBT has offered me another road to go down rather than the kind of psychotic road or the negative thinking road.
The other things that have helped is to kind of learn to think positively. Because of the abuse I had as a child and, you know, people’s kind of indifference to what was happening, I became very mistrustful of people. I became very angry. I was angry at the world really. I was angry at my dad. I just realised my father couldn’t behave in any other way really. He was stuck in that horrible mindset, and he couldn’t escape it. I had the realisation that I don’t have to take his mindset and that’s what, exactly I was becoming my father really, just hating the world.
I also kind of got into Buddhism at the time. One of the books I was reading was The Power of Forgiveness. And basically what the guy said in a nutshell was that if somebody has hurt you and you don’t forgive them, you’re handcuffing yourself to that hurt. So I kind of made the decision to forgive my father, and it was really hard at first but once I did, it felt like a kind of huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders because the anger had gone. I realised my dad needs compassion, really, and I need to be compassionate about myself.
Forgiveness is so powerful. I mean when you’re bitter about something, you are swallowing the poison and hoping the other person will get sick from it. And if you kind of think of it that way you realise how pointless it is. It’s quite a controversial thing because the hurt is so strong but, for me, that was a way to let go of that hurt, that the pain of my past didn’t own me. I had power over my life really.
After I went through the process of forgiving my father, it freed so much of myself and opened so much that my previously blocked-off mind and my blocked-off heart, it was just hungry to do things, and so my writing kind of flourished, I was starting to get published.
Because of my writing, I got involved with a few mental health arts charities, such as Sound Minds and Creative Roots, which are both based in London, and out of that I started to perform my poetry. I had written books before I wrote my memoir, but writing my memoir was the biggest challenge and the one that had the most effect on my life.
The most powerful impact the book has had when I wrote the book, and I read through the book, I could see myself for the person I was, really, that I was just an ordinary girl when I first heard voices, going through an extraordinary experience and for the very first time I had empathy for myself. I had empathy for the character in the book which was me, and I could kind of not hate her as much as I had hated myself because I could see why I became the person I became really.
It began the journey towards self-acceptance. I could actually connect to myself as a human being for the very first time. I just felt, you know, I’m just a human being doing the best I can. It was an extremely powerful experience. So glad I did it, yeah.
Something in your life will always tell your story, so you might as well have control over it. For me, creativity gave me control in the world where because of my diagnosis I had no control. A South American poet said, “Take away someone’s creativity and you take away their humanity. Give someone back their creativity and you give back their life.” I found this to be true while writing my story and every day after, too. Writing your life story does so much for you. It gives you an opportunity to reflect. It empowers you because you have nothing to hide anymore.
Everyone has their own story and the power to change that story as well. It also makes me look at the story of humanity and what my part in that story is. We live in brutal times, but I refuse to be part of that, that kind of darkness and negativity and I want to bring light. My creativity is my way of bringing light into the world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)