pen as safety valve, The

Mental Health Nursing,  May 2003  by Wells, Amanda

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Since being granted a Real Lives Reaf People Mind Millennium Award last year, Amanda Wells's thoughts have turned to the role that creative writing has played in her survival of and recovery from the mental distress which she has suffered for much of her life

The purpose of the Award enabled me to attend two writing courses at Ty Newydd, North Wales so that I can further my writing skills, and also to share those skills with the community by tutoring creative writing sessions at the mental health drop-ins in North Powys. I attended the first course in August, and returned so inspired and enthused that I was able to finish the short novel on mental distress and the mental health system which I had been writing for many years. That novel is currently with a publisher for consideration.

I had begun writing the novel to try and understand my own experiences of mental distress and of being a user of the mental health system. Throughout my life, I have communicated my deepest feelings on paper, as a child leaving notes around the house for my family to find whenever I wanted to communicate to them something painful, angry or otherwise difficult. I never felt able to handle face-to-face confrontation, so as soon as I could write I began leaving a trail of 'I hate you' and similar notes about the house. My mother used to particularly look forward to cleaning my bedroom, as she found these notes highly amusing.

I progressed from writing my feelings down in this way to writing more creatively. I used to write bedtime stories for myself and my sister, and would look forward to reading them even though, as the author, I already knew what happened.

My favourite classes at school were creative English classes. I thoroughly enjoyed being asked to write a story or a poem. And it was always my story or poem which the teacher read out to the whole class - this used to embarrass me a little. Perhaps that is why I now use a pseudonym for my creative efforts.

Then, when I was 16, I began to write serious poems, for my own consumption only, about my feelings of despair and mental anguish. By that time I had been suffering for some years, but it had never, previously, occurred to me that it was a fit subject for writing. I needed an outlet and fast, however, or I feared I would go insane. As I felt unable to talk to anyone about my increasingly intense distress, I began to write poetry about my feelings. Over the years this has built up into several booksworth of poems, most of which have never seen the light of day. A fair proportion are awfully sentimental and more than a little self-indulgent, but there are some nuggets in there which I would be happy for other people to see. Over the years I have selectively shared my work with my closest friends, who have always proved to be an appreciative audience.

Not that all my work is doom and gloom. I have also written about the joys of nature, about politics, about love, about pretty much anything that I felt inspired to write about. At the age of 18 I branched out into prose, and there are a number of short stories as well and also a few half-written plays that I would like to take up again at some future date. That word, 'future', is what writing is all about for me. It gives me a future, a sense of hope when all else seems bleak. Perhaps it is not accidental that so much work has been started and not finished, Maybe it is a subconscious ploy to keep me going as I look at the part-works and think 'I must pick that up again one day'.

There is also the hope of maybe one day being published. Writing does not exist in a vacuum, and though I write mainly for my own benefit, writing is just what I do, as natural as breathing. I am also aware that writing needs an audience if it is to get its message across. I feel very passionately about the recently completed novel on mental health, that it deserves to be published and has a role to play in educating the public at large about the feared, shunned and secret world of mental health. If the first publisher rejects it I will keep hawking it round until someone eventually gives in and accepts it.

Writing has quite literally saved my life on more than one occasion. In the depths of despair, when I have been actively suicidal, I have found that writing about suicide has released the pressure and I have been able to avoid taking action. Not always, but often. Without that vent, that release valve of pen on paper, I am sure I could have died or cracked up beyond any hope of recovery by now. Writing has got me through the dark days and dark years, given me a way of tolerating what would otherwise have been intolerable.

And now writing is providing my way back into the world. Over the years I have thought more and more that my work deserves a wider audience and could help other people going through the same kinds of experiences that I have been through.

The only way to achieve this is to be published. This has turned my thoughts from an inward direction, forever contemplating the horror inside, to an outward direction, feeling that it might be possible to be an active participant in the world, not only active but also fulfilled. The possibilities which writing present make me feel that there is a point to life, that my life could find its meaning after all these years in the wilderness. I need to drag some meaning out of the long, hard suffering, and writing is what has given me the courage to make a start, to at least try. A pipe dream it may be, but at least I am daring to dream again. MHN

Copyright Community Psychiatric Nurses Association May 2003
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