Stephen Fry forgot the first rule of Cyclothymia Club. If he keeps this up people might start to understand that life is temporary, jaffa cakes are forever.  

As a society we’ve failed to educate ourselves about what mental health actually involves. Why start to drag our collective selves into the present now? Can’t we just be happy that equal marriage in 2013 is becoming a possibility? Sheesh. There’s no pleasing some people.

Before I return later to pick up this intro thread, I’ll explore a tangent and share with you one of my all-time favourite lyrics which happens to be from one of the world’s most famous bands from their poppiest album. Can’t get much more anti-hipster than that.

“I skipped the part about love, it seemed so shallow, and low.” – R.E.M. lyric from the song Low.

Love. Creative minds obsess over things such as life, love, death and jaffa cakes.

REFLECTIONS AND MIRROR IMAGES

Recently I watched the movie Silver Linings Playbook which explores the concept of love between manic personalities with disorders. It’s an enjoyable movie but hard to take the story seriously when the leads aren’t exactly ugly. I’m guessing they couldn’t make the same movie with Ron Pearlman and Tilda Swinton as dysfunctional would-be lovers. Romantic comedies tend to do better at the box office when you have generic pretty face #1 and generic pretty face #2 to sell the thing.

Since sex and violence sells, we’re still waiting for a movie where normal characters are revealed to be every bit as dysfunctional, yet conform to what society expects and cover up their issues with mundane, socially acceptable daily grind numbing drugs such as alcohol, tobacco, sugar, and anything else that can create an addiction. For now it’s all serial killers, serial killers, serial killers, and serial killers. As long as it’s as far removed as possible from reality so that we can’t recognise any shred of ourselves in it, that’s OK.

In saying that, sex addiction is expertly tackled in Michael Fassbender’s film Shame. A grim and gut-wrenching depiction of the lengths the mind will go to to cope with our deepest fears and anxieties – and all with a smile painted on.

I WANNA KNOW WHAT LOVE IS

Long before we ever get to experience the types of films I’ve just mentioned, Disney animations and Hollywood movies hard sell us the fairytale of true love and happy endings.

Ah, the fairytale of true love. That bolt from the blue that is going to suddenly appear out of nowhere and sweep us off our Netflix watching bottoms. Yet the reality is just a little different. Sure, it doesn’t apply to everyone. I know people that I would say are definitely a match for life. However, the number of marriages ending in divorce (42% in England and Wales) would lend weight to the idea that – how we define what love is – may be a little flawed.

There I go again with the hard data. Sorry about that. Anyways…

Disney needs to make a new film where instead of talking about True Love, they replace it with the more accurate concept of Proximity Love.

What’s Proximity Love you may ask?

It’s where you’re more likely to fall in love with the person you’re often in proximity to, with whom you share the same core values.

Oh, so you bumped into your true love at work, or at a place that starts within the first half of your local post code. I mean wow, what are the odds?

Or worse. There’s the Proximity Love Timer.

This is even more likely to happen if you’re a female in your mid-to-late thirties whose baby-making biological clock is ticking down and at least one parental figure regularly reminds you of this fact.

Thanks parents. You spent all that time telling us not to get pregnant or to not get anyone else pregnant, and before you know it they’re dropping fairly unsubtle hints about grandkids. Personally I’d expect them to observe the meaning of the word boundaries before denting your dream trip round the world budget on mini-me’s. It’s the least they can do.

So despite the fact that generally speaking, in your twenties you wouldn’t dream of getting engaged in less than 18-24 months of knowing someone, in your thirties the implied expectations from family are enough to accelerate the process of true love. How wonderful.

I’ve attended a wedding where the bride and groom met online while playing World of Warcraft. To me that’s far more romantic than that time you drank too much in a club, flirted too much, and woke up beside your new true love the next day. And it doesn’t take long for (pollyanna reference coming up) craving the comfort that person gives to take hold.

One of the most common fears we all share is that of being left unloved and alone. That combined with the proximity love timer can generate a wedding plan quicker than you can say, ‘stay together for the kids’.

A MODERN WAY OF LETTING GO

Returning to Stephen Fry’s blog post, reading it reveals familiar patterns.

Creative minds with cyclothymia could easily ponder daily over love or death in the same way you might check your Facebook for status updates every day/hour/select addiction level as appropriate. You know you don’t need or have to check Facebook again but you do it anyway out of sheer habit. Think for a moment about how powerful that voluntary habit is. Then imagine what it would be like if your mind was wired to involuntarily behave in that way about any other aspect it thinks about.

It puts me in mind of Cyclops the x-men character. Until you learn to control that level of laser focused mental creativity, you’re going to potentially burnout from everything you look at and think about. Potentially hurting the people and things you come into contact with in the meantime. Or at very least misrepresenting your true self and intentions.

In his post Stephen Fry explains that,

“I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from “suicidal ideation” on an almost daily basis. In other words, for as long as I can remember, the thought of ending my life came to me frequently and obsessively.”

It may sound strange to most people but that ideation would have likely fitted into daily thought patterns filled with very ordinary activities. I’d give you examples but we’re in black comedy territory here.

He expertly makes a point of tackling the issue of people’s perceptions and total lack of understanding with the line, “Feelings are not something to which one does or does not have rights.” It’s not a question of having the right to feel a particular way. You just feel.

Mastery of that creative and thought-driven surge is a lifelong  journey. Over the course of a year I can use it to make companies millions in revenue, promote obscure underground music, and take emotional muscle building to Olympian levels.  It doesn’t automatically make me happy or sad. It doesn’t automatically stop me having thoughts like what’s the funniest epitaph I could write for my tombstone. You spend a lifetime hiding something until one day you realise you’ve got more in common with Spike Milligan than you do with your self-created, self-imposed, self-image.

Letting go of who you think you’re supposed to be? Sheesh. There’s no pleasing some people.

Creative Minds: Life, Love, Death and Jaffa Cakes

HOW we perceive people who build physical and emotional muscle says a lot about us as a society. Mainstream media has failed to adequately explain the difference so I’m going to do it for them without using the S word. Buckle up. 

From our parents, our peers, to the media – our views and opinions are shaped by what we’re told and what we see and experience. Taking the time to educate ourselves and establish our own informed view requires effort, so many people don’t bother. The blinkers stay on and are passed on.

Every article you’ll read will probably discuss what the Government is doing about it. Why is that? Why do we immediately look elsewhere? The answer lies with each of us. We must take responsibility for our own outdated belief systems and for the love of kryptonite, improve it. You can’t run off Windows software forever just because you got it from a parent or friend for free. It was a dodgy copy to start with.

If we wait for a government to fix the problems of society we’ll have a long wait. It starts by challenging conventional wisdom and bad science. And if you hear bullshit, speak up and call it out. How else are we going to evolve ideas? All great characters have periods where they go through the wringer. That’s how you build character. It’s also how you build muscle.

BUILDING TWO KINDS OF MUSCLE 

Building physical and emotional muscle really isn’t that different. How we perceive those engaged in personal improvement differs radically, however.

Take a man or woman who decides to increase their physical muscle. If he or she said they go to the gym, society generally thinks of them as strong – or at least getting stronger.

Now take a man or woman who decides to increase their emotional muscle. If he or she said they go to therapy, society generally thinks of them as weak – or at very least flawed and needing fixed in some way.

You can argue against those viewpoints all you like but it’s easy to take the correct standpoint when you have no relationship with the person in question.

What if you were a prospective employer? It’s easy to take a liberal standpoint when there’s no company revenue or careers on the line. What if you’re a friend? Can you stop yourself from being judgemental and place yourself in someone else’s shoes? Or is your own viewpoint too important to you to put it to one side. Unless there has been or there is the possibility of investment, you’re not engaged in the outcome.

That’s why the attitudes of employers can be held up as representative of wider society. They’re the ones who have hard choices to make. Ironically, as we transition to a more problem-solving knowledge economy, creative minds are even more valuable. For example, there’s an entire social media industry now that didn’t exist ten years ago. Content makers of all types and writers are in demand.

The Channel 4 reality tv programme of 2012 around employers’ attitudes to prospective employees with a history of mental health issues – which for some people is simply an emotional muscle issue – revealed the archaic attitudes and general ignorance around this topic.

Running a business is all about minimising costs and risk. No employer wants to take a risk where it can be easily avoided. That old chestnut of ‘perception is reality’ comes into play because ignorance and fear can easily create perceived potential risk where none exists. Let’s face it, hiring anyone is a risk. Hiring a creative mind with a point to prove is never a risk, yet that’s rarely how people who have come through emotional muscle challenges are treated. If we constantly referred to footballers as having “physical health issues”, we’d start thinking there was something wrong with them too.

THE CHARACTER EXAMPLE OF DON DRAPER 

Fans of the TV Show ‘Mad Men’ will be familiar with the tv character that is Don Draper. On the outside he’s handsome, strong and powerful. He looks exactly like the kind of man Microsoft or any global corporation would hire to run their business in a territory.

Yet in terms of emotional muscle he must be one of the weakest men ever to star in a tv series. He loathes himself so much that he even hires prostitutes to punch him in the face during sex. He self-destructs regularly only to be saved by those around him who, with the exception of Joan, choose to ignore his obvious failings. The man is a walking disaster.

Which brings us back to the idea that we too readily attribute positive connotations to surface image (physical muscles) and negative ones to the mind (emotional muscles).

So what’s so kudos-worthy about the physical work?

Going to the gym to build physical muscle does requires determination. Even with a fitness program tailored to your goals, it’s going to hurt a bit. Waking up the next day and getting out of bed only to feel your arms and chest muscles burn and ache is not pleasant. The sensation doesn’t last long thankfully and the more the body moves about, the more the soreness decreases. You get used to it. If people see you a few months later and notice that you look physically stronger, it’s because it’s easy to understand something when you can see it.

At some level there’s a degree of ego involved. You want to feel better about your own physical appearance and health. The entire multi-billion cosmetics industry worldwide will attest to that. Although the word ego has negative connotations it is very much part of all of us and how we form our identity. Whenever we tell ourselves who we think we are, or whenever we judge something, that’s our ego talking. Try going for 60 mins without judging anything and you’ll find it’s impossible. In the Western world it’s how we’ve been brought up, with reality tv exacerbating this to new depths.

Thing is, building physical muscle is very easy compared to building emotional muscle.

“CAN IT WAIT FOR A BIT? I’M IN THE MIDDLE OF SOME CALIBRATIONS” 

For example, you could go to the gym for two years and have amazing results to show for it. But as any mental health professional will tell you, you could have a patient in therapy for two years who still doesn’t acknowledge emotional dependencies. That kind of breakthrough takes seriously heavy lifting, the type of which you cannot imagine unless you’ve done it.

Instead of needing a day or two to recover from sore arms and legs, maybe a person would need to take a few months off from work to allow the mind enough space to perform its own recovery. The mind is no more broken than the arms and legs that are painfully sore. Muscles take time to heal and the mind takes longer.

It takes longer because it is the single most powerful “muscle”, tool and gift that we have at our disposal.

With it, we can have ideas that can change the world. Every remarkable journey by a remarkable person began with a simple idea. The mind is a muscle that creates ideas that can ease suffering (Mother Teresa), heal communities (Nelson Mandela) or even put a man on the moon (everyone at NASA). It is something we need to continue to educate ourselves about so that we can evolve beyond our prehistoric learned behaviour.

Anything as powerful as the mind needs to be calibrated and that takes time. Then awesomeness ensues. Any Mass Effect fan knows that.

Creative Minds: Perception of Physical & Emotional Muscle Builders

{This topic may become a series…we’ll see how it goes.}

MUSIC can mean different things to different people. For some it’s the soundtrack to a night out getting pissed. For others it’s weaved into the fabric of their identity. You may be aware of the famous quote, “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.” It’s not unusual for some people to feel this way about being creative.

That’s not to say that if you are creative then you have a mental health condition. It’s just that the two are no strangers to each other.

I’ve often pondered over the idea that ‘comfort does not breed creativity’. Does it partly explain why musicians with everything still to prove often make better music?

Overly simplistic perhaps but if we accept the principle to be true in many cases then I’m going to assert the notion that, discomfort can provoke creativity.

What interests me about this is that if you had a broken leg, you wouldn’t feel the urge to start training for a marathon. Similarly, if you had a broken leg you wouldn’t walk around feeling that you had to pretend that everything is fine. When others can see a problem, they have the opportunity to reach an understanding of what that means quickly.

If they can’t see the problem then they have to draw upon their own limited knowledge of what that means.

People who have little to no knowledge of a particular subject will obviously be uninformed on that subject. They’re not going to go on Mastermind and try to bluff their way through it. Yet those same people who have never experienced mental health issues will likely have a strong opinion on the subject, despite having little to no real knowledge of what they’re talking about. Suddenly, everyone is a fucking expert.

When seasoned experts struggle to agree on things like, “what is consciousness?”, it’s safe to say the average person is plain ignorant on mental health issues.

Relationship between mental health and creativity

Famous examples of creative minds with mental health conditions, such as Stephen Fry and Spike Milligan, figured out new ways to express themselves.

If you love writing music or discovering new music then it’s a hobby that you can draw a lot of comfort from. Creative minds create. They do so in ways that don’t necessarily follow a straight line. For some people with mental health conditions, there is often an overwhelming need to engage in these types of activities.

At times it may feel that there isn’t enough headspace to think straight, let alone be creative. Organisation websites such as Breathing Space and the Scottish Association for Mental Health are useful starting points.

If it sounds like a cliche it’s probably because it’s true. Knowing that there are other people who have experienced similar problems, or catalogues of different problems, can help.

Those people who are uninformed are unlikely to replace opinion with facts but you can. And things are always bigger in your head.

Managing your mental health, the same as our physical health, is a one-day-at-a-time habit which starts whenever we get out of bed. A digital alarm clock that can play 6Music doesn’t do any harm either.

Creative Minds: Managing Your Mental Health #001