I must be Mad to do this: writing, living, and mental health

I’ve been planning this post for months, and to be honest I’ve been dragging my heals. There’s an apposite reason – I’m bipolar my own mental health hasn’t been tip top the past few weeks. There are good reasons, as in yippee good – I’ve just finished touring a fabulous words and music show with a host of other great writers that’s played to a set of sell-out crowds.

And there’s the real reason – I don’t really know what to say. Well, that’s not true. I would like to go off on a rant about the ridiculous perception that having mental health issues is glamorous. Or that bipolar people are predisposed to be creative. But I’d just get too angry, and I’ve done it before. Many times.

So I’m not going to hobbyhorse you. Well, I am but not in a down your throat and make you gag kind of way. Hardest and most counterintuitive, I’m not going to talk about me, me, ME. I’m going to talk briefly about three remarkable artists and how mental health relates to their art. Then when I’ve got that out of the way I’ll talk about me! No, really, I won’t.

Cody James, author of The Dead Beat and Babylon, is the best novelist of her generation. She also has schizophrenia. She is also and has been also many many things – meth addict, Satanist, punk, opening act for Marilyn Manson, consumer of ludicrous quantities of noodles, zinester, photographer, my best friend. And just about the funniest person I’ve ever met. She’s taught me two things about mental health and writing. Well, the first is more about writing in general. Back at the start of last year, she made a brilliant video advertising our first big live show, at Rough Trade Records. In it, she read a passage from Babylon in which the central character, Daniel, tries to kill himself, something Cody has done 4 times. The video was deleted from Facebook after being reported and a massive debate followed. Cody’s contribution crystallised everything I feel about writing. She explained how an English teacher told her once she should try and make the world a better place. Her take – “maybe there is no way to leave the world a better place, and all we can do is tell the truth.” Simple, and all-encompassing. The truth doesn’t mean facts or autobiography. Telling the truth in your writing means peeling your skin off and poking down through the layers to reach the innermost part of yourself, then smearing it all over the page.



Which leads to the second thing – life, the truth, everything to do with this glorious and messed-up world, is complex (and mental health is only one very small part of it). It has more than one side. There is always hope in despair and despair in hope, humour in depravity and depravity in humour.

In a wonderful interview she did for me Cody said:
“What upsets me more than anything in novels and movies in this genre (Selby Jr. I’m looking at you) is that they seem hell bent on portraying only the moments of shock and depravity – they rob the reader and the viewer of the full experience. Yes, we were really fucked up and yes, we did bad things, but we were still trying. I still spent some Sunday mornings eating cereal and watching cartoons with a 7ft tranny. And, even though you’re all jacked up and your apartment has no furniture, you still try. Even though the person cooking the turkey has been up for three days and can’t remember how to work a stove, and your guests keep going to the bathroom to shoot up and then keep falling asleep in the mashed potatoes, you’re still there celebrating Thanksgiving. There are still moments of utter joy and there is still so much laughter. If, as an artist, you don’t portray that, you’re nothing but a cheap hack.”
I can’t really add to that.



Katelan Foisy is the author of Blood and Pudding. It’s the book that has influenced my writing and performing more than any other. It tells the story of her bipolar, heroin-addicted best friend Holly. Specifically it is a transcript of tapes Katelan made when one Xanax-fuelled teenage day the pair of them decided to get in a car and see where they ended up (another lesson from Katelan – record everything. You never know when you’ll want it). The transcriptions, full of idealism and energy, form the book’s bones, which Katelan has fleshed out with stories from the years between that trip and Holly’s death from an overdose just a few years later. I have never read such an uplifting celebration of a life. Or of Life. Holly’s was a life cut short, a life shadowed and tarred and tarnished, but it was a Life. Damn, it was a life. Blood and Pudding opens with the wonderful words “Wherever we end up, we end up,” and urges the reader to “go out and live. And live. And go on living, because you never know when it’ll stop.” There are two things to say about that. Mental illness is not a death sentence. Don’t treat it as such. In yourself, or in others. And make sure your writing contributes to Living. Because anything else is as good as being dead.



Dave Griffiths is the former frontman of the band Witches. He’s the writer and musician behind the fabulous Grey Children project. He’s using the project, which combines his considerable musical talents with his equally considerable literary ones, to raise awareness for Pure-O, the form of OCD he has. In a recent interview I did with him one of the things we discussed most was the role music plays in managing his symptoms. Music provides a total immersion that draws his mind away from everything else. I realised how similar what he was saying was to the role writing plays in my life (and listening to music), to the experience of so many people I know with various mental health problems. Sadly, sometimes the things we use to engulf our minds, to drown out the noises in our heads, are things that do us as much harm as the illness itself, if not more – drink, self-harm, drugs. But art is something that can improve both our mental health and our wider lives. Maybe even the lives of others.

There we have it. Three amazing writers. Three amazing people. Three ways mental health and writing intersect. And a single strand running through the whole thing. Life. And the importance of living it. Without apology and without restriction.

Head Health and Hard Choices

By now most of you will be aware I'm bipolar. If not, I clearly haven't been banging the campaign drum hard enough for a while. Something I'll try to rectify this summer. I had a minor but rather debilitating low episode this March, and have begun to recognise some of the oncoming symptoms in recent weeks: the disjunction between headspace and reality, that rushing feeling that the world is moving too slowly, an increasing inward-looking slience as intrusive negative thoughts start to gnaw away and need time to be dealt with one by one, the slow tunneling of one's vision on the one hand and tuning up of other senses on the other.

So, at a ridiculously busy time, the only thing to do is pare back. But what do you cut? Work is always the last thing to go, because it's what pays the bills.

Following Amazon's so-called Sunshine Deal whatever (see this post on the effect), sales of my books have absolutely tanked. So, at a time when money is desperate, the last thing to go should be something that gives me the chance to perk up sales, right? OK, before I talk about my decision, I'll do the beggy buy my booky thing:

The Company of Fellows is still just 70p for Kindle here, and has spent over 3 months in the top 100 thrillers on Amazon, as well as being voted "favourite Oxford novel" in a Blackwell's poll. You can get the paperback at Blackwell's, or here. And remember, to read Kindle books you don't need a Kindle - just download the free app for your phone, Mac or PC.


Black Heart High is just 69p to download. It's the first in a 7-part series designed to be the literary equivalent of a classy HBO series. It's genre fiction (dark paranormal romance) but I think it's the best thing I've ever written.

So, what to cut back? The obvious choice would be for the one thing that could make me serious money to be the one thing that stays. I was recently asked to take part in the Kindle Summer Book Club. It's a super collaboration between some of the bestselling independent authors out there - the likes of HP Mallory, J Carson Black, Victorine Lieske, Saffina Desforges and the Mark Williams/Louise Voss combo behind not one but two books in the current top 5 on UK Kindle. It's an extraordinary honour, and an extraordinary opportunity.

And it's the thing I've cut. The main reason is simple. It's a venture in which 10 other people would be relying on me, and pulling out half way through if my health deteriorated would cause all kinds of chaos and be really unfair on everyone. Also, those things in which other people are relying on you are always the ones most likely to cause dangerous amounts of anxiety - most people I know care more about not letting other people down than they do about letting themselves down. It's one reason I get so stressed about my work at eight cuts gallery. Especially the publishing - there are people relying on me to come through for them. Not just people but dear friends whose work I consider the best to have graced the 21st Century. And sometimes I don't have the mental resources to do what I'd like for them. And that hurts me deeply.

But there's something else I've learned from years of experience, and from many many hours of advice from GPs and shrinks - mine, my wife's, and friends'. Sometimes for the sake of your long-term mental health you have to say no things that would be financially beneficial in favour of those that, for the want of a non-naff phrase I can't quite find, make your heart sing. And anyone who knows me at all knows that selling books doesn't make my heart sing. If it happens as an accidental by-product it's a godsend in keeping a roof over ur heads. But I went indie so I didn't have to think about selling books. I did it so I could write what I want to write and put it out there how and where and when was best, and sod whether anyone would pay.



It might feel some times as though the agonies of organisation are driving me nuts, but The New Libertines tour is a large part (not as large as an understanding and equally fruitcakish wife, of course) of how I've stayed sane these past few months. Creatively, I live to perform. If I quit a summer and Autumn that promises gigs in Covent Garden, Blackwell's, Birmingham and the Albion Beatnik as well as preparation for a now-definite run on Edinburgh next summer, then something would die. And to write whatever needs to be scraped from my head, be it sentimental or plain sick. At the moment that's a 7-part series of books about a teenage ghost who lives to take revenge on the people who took the love of her life away.

One of the particular aspects of my own bespoke customisation of bipolar is an extremely strong (we're talking scotch bonnet) side order of anxiety, which means letting people down in any way seems a way worse sin than protecting your own mental health (OK, there's a cayenne dish of self-loathing there to boot). But sometimes it's not possible to avoid letting people down. You can't please everyone all the time. And when you're in that position and every sound in your head is screaming to a crescendo telling you just to ignore the situation and hope it'll go away, actually the only thing that will make it go away is taking the hard decision knowing it'll leave people mad at you.

Which (and this is the banging the campaign drum bit) leads to the very reasonable question (which, thankfully, because they're great people as well as great writers - go on, go and support them - I don't think any of the Summer Book Club authors will put) - knowing I'm bipolar and susceptible to the vicissitudes of an unstable mind, shouldn't I just have declined when I was first invited? And by transference, shouldn't I avoid things I may need to pull out of later? I want to present a rational answer to that question based on taking equality seriously, based on valuing people, based on seeing what someone can do and not what they can't, based on the kind of society we want to claim to be part of. But that's not really how I feel about it. If people really think that, then my honest response is a request to please leave before I give them an even more honest response.

Who Killed (Archie) Progress?

A short, and not particularly sweet, post.

Just over a fortnight ago, on February 1st, I had the pleasure of speaking at a conference on the media portrayal of mental health,thanks to the conference organisers, Social Spider and One in Four magazine, the super aspirational lifestyle mag for those of us with mental health difficulties who don't define ourselves that way (OK, they let me write an article for them so I'm biased in thinking their content's fab). I was speaking as a writer and blogger who's bipolar and has written about mental health issues fairly uncompromisingly as well as using it as the painful heart for some of my creative work (see the previous entry).

Also speaking was the BBC's head of diversity, who spent much of her time being roundly praised (and rightly so) for the BBC's handling of the Stacey Slater bipolar storyline, a superb, amazingly acted portrayal of the horror and unglamorousness of living with this crippling illness.

Two weeks late I feel kicked in the teeth.

Who killed Archie? The bipolar nutjob. Of course. And if you really think people are too nuanced to see it like that, try searching twitter for "bipolar".

I have personal experience of the ridiculous myth that associates bipolar with axe(or bust)-wielding violence (in the form of a particularly hurtful jibe from a work colleague who should have known better). This ludicrous association keeps many out of jobs in the first place, sees us muttered and giggled about, accused, victimised, bullied, without considering the damage it does to our already vulnerable health - or to society as a whole.

Then along comes Eastenders and does a great job of breaking some of that down. Which is why it feels like so much of a betrayal to have this done to us. Better to have done nothing at all! Sure, maybe they're going to use it as a kicking-off point for a HUGE debate that breaks the bipolar/violence connection once and for all. Maybe not :p Maybe it's too late anyway.

Just consider this. In the 70s and 80s black actors were cast as baddies in the media at a time when much opinion on race relations was disgustingly backward. Sure there was no direct statement of causality, just as the BBC didn't say Stacey's illness made her kill Archie. But such casting is easy for us to see as reprehensible, revolting, and doing nothing but contribute to preposterous racial stereotyping. I'm not saying things have got better or worse as far as the way we handle race is concerned, but here's the thing - people will say "but it's obvious those casting decisions were wrong, what are you talking about with mental health, no one's implying a connection" and they genuinely won't see their illogic. And in a way the BBC's unawareness that they've done anything wrong is more worrying than malice - it shows just how ignorant we still are - and will remain as long as such stereotyping persists.

Shame on the BBC; shame on the head of diversity who smiled and talked and took our praise. I am ashamed and embarrassed to have shared a platform with you.