I have been picking at a poem for a few weeks.

A poem is never really ‘finished’. The ones I post on this blog often evolve further. Having said that, the ones that I work on for longest are also often poems that I am less happy with so getting them to the point where I can park them on this blog is helpful.

This poem started with a few conversations about the other side of mental health problems.

I have to start this with a warning though. A good place to start is this article, describing just how debilitating mental illness can be, and the destruction it does to people’s long term wellbeing. Here is a quote which hits home;

In 2013 I was advised by psychiatrists to withhold my diagnosis from employers and be judicious with everyone else, as understanding of mental illness was limited in the public sphere and highly stigmatised.This was, at the time, absolutely the right advice.But in the last decade I have noticed a shift in how openly mental health is discussed; how many people are willing to claim psychiatric disorders as their own or armchair-diagnose those around them.But the sickest people I’ve ever known – myself included – have had almost no part in this opening up, as if we’re suffering from a different condition altogether.Nobody I’ve ever been locked up with in a psychiatric hospital felt accepting or “proud” of their illness.

As someone who has worked within mental health care for 30 years, this hits home harder as I am convinced that the medicalised powerlessness we enforce on people is a huge part of the problem here, and I have no desire to minimise or trivialise the pain that many people with long term mental illness experience.

And yet there is more to be said here, hence my attempt to describe this in a poem. Many of the best people I know have had devastating experiences of mental ill health.

Perhaps this should not be surprising- after all one in four of us will have these experiences, so they might be described as ‘normal’ or ‘commonplace’, but I would argue that there is something extraordinary happening here too.

Perhaps when we have experienced the depths of despair and somehow survive, our perspective shifts. We see the world in different ways. We see people in different ways. If we are not destroyed that is, if we can hold on and find our way forward, no matter how tentatively.

Perhaps too we are forced to make changes that previously we had avoided, suppressed and hidden under all sorts of coping strategies that had no longer worked.

Perhaps we finally recognise that success and failure are not opposites. Perhaps our experiences force us to get off whichever treadmill we are treading.

All I know is that wounds, even unhealed wounds, can become places of renewal. On a good day at least.

If this is you, I pray this enters your soul.

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When bad turns good

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You can’t always mend what’s broken

Some sickness cannot heal, but the

Wound which should diminish us

Can become a conduit for kindness

Right there in plain sight, goodness

Forms in knotted gristle, and love

Seeps like precious serum from even the

Ugliest of scars.

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It should be no surprise, for

A desperate mother will clutch a

Screaming child unable to take its pain away so

Instead, she takes pain deep into her own soul

Holding it level there like molten metal

In the knowledge that some must spill, and

All she can do is whisper ancient words

In hope of alchemy.