In 2005 as I sat on a train on my way to Leeds to see a friend, I began to feel very strange. By the time the train arrived at it's destination, I have somewhat broken memories of myself staggering along the platform towards the steps. I managed, somehow, to ascend the steps, cross the tracks below me, and descend at the other side, but by the time I arrived at the main concourse, well, I didn't get a taxi, put it that way. I do have vague but definite recollections of other commuters backing off as I lurched and staggered about. On the train, I'd tried to call my friend to tell him I was feeling ill, and could he pick me up from the station, but there was no answer from his phones. I did not have the capacity to dial any number by the time I eventually reached the concourse at Leeds railway station.
I don't remember anything at all from those final fuzzy memories of the frightening mêlée of Leeds railway station until regaining consciousness in the evening, in a wonderfully quiet room at the Leeds General Infirmary. It took them some time to definitively diagnose a stroke, because I had a further “thunder clap” headache whilst on the Neurology Wing. I lost complete movement in my right arm, partial paralysis in my right trunk, leg and foot. Thankfully, my speech was not affected, apart from drooling, which was the deficit to rectify itself. I spent three weeks at the LGI, and it took a further six months before my right side more-or-less caught up with the left.
However, I've got a permanent weakness in my right hand, so playing any fast Chopin Nocturnes or Bach Preludes at their preset speed has gone out of the window. I play slower stuff now, like some of the Schubert Impromptus instead! But I realise how lucky I was, even though they discovered the cause of the stroke was due to an Atrial Septal Defect (a usually asymptomatic hole in the heart, and a blood clotting disorder, Factor V Leiden, which in layman's parlance, is rather like the opposite of Haemophilia. They think that a clot traveled through the hole in my heart and thence through the arteries upwards into my brain. I see myself as very lucky, but I'm usually someone who puts themselves down, but I think part of the reason I got better as successfully as I did was because I absolutely did not want to lose the one the gift I'd been given – that of being a musician, and a kind of stubborn determined will set in.
The reason I talk about those events of eight years ago is because they are hardly ever talked about. Like mental illness can, it came on suddenly, it was serious, it took months to get over it. But the difference is is that if you have a stroke, you're not “marked out” as “that person who had a stroke”, in the same way a person who might have had a mental breakdown – something I've succumbed to on several occasions – as that “person with mental health problems”. Of course, because I've had a stroke, I take ACE inhibitors, and other blood pressure medication. A couple of times a year, my doctor checks it, and it's always fine, but that's as far as it goes.
Yesterday I realised, that after my breakdown in November 2011, I was finally over the worst of it. In other words, the “acute” part of my illness was over. This isn't to say that I don't have mental health disorders, but my mental health is no longer the axis around which my life turns. And even for very stable individuals with mental illness, their mental issues are that axis, and to my mind, I can see that isn't living, it's allowing yourself to be a slave to a set of pathologies. A set of pathologies that should be recognised and understood, but must never be in control. This isn't the same as when a person with a mental illness is in the active stage of their illness – depression for example. It would be like asking them to “cheer up”. Not only deeply insulting, but showing a disconnect between their suffering and your understanding of it.
Put in it's simplest terms, many people with mental health issues are not “actively ill” 24/7. But much of the language and the tropes used by mental health professionals can feed into this myth, which can then be believed by the individual with the mental health issue. Sometimes, like any chronic illness, symptoms recede, almost to the point of invisibility, and it's at those times that people with mental health illness need help in learning the Art of Living, which can be forgotten completely if you have been shoved in a box called “sick” for years. This applies from everyone to those with anxiety disorders to people with Paranoid Schizophrenia.
But, unlike my stroke, where people give me clear indicators that things are “getting better”, this is often completely absent in mental health. Once you are labelled, there is a real and frightening risk that the most important thing in life – living it to the full, could be lost amongst a sea of changing diagnoses, outpatient's visits, therapies; swimming in an ocean of mental health modalities.
I've been told that my mental illness is with me for life, so rather than have it lead me by the hand, I'd rather put it into my back pocket. I can accept what they say, for now. But I also accept that too many people with mental illness become defined by their illness, and I'm not going to be one of them, because the illness becomes the master, and you become the slave. And whilst ever you are enslaved, there can be no hope of understanding or enjoying the art of living.
