‘What does love require of us? Perhaps when it comes to mental health, it is less than we fear.’ Photo: Nikko Macaspac / Unsplash.
‘We learned the role of humour as a weapon of the Spirit in achieving mental health.’
One in four of us will experience a mental health problem in any year. Antonia Swinson went to Quaker Life council to consider the subject
Of the ninety Quakers who converged on Woodbrooke last month for the second 2019 Quaker Life Representative Council, I doubt I was alone in thinking that my Area Meeting should have found someone – anyone – better suited to the subject matter. The very title, ‘Building Inclusive Quaker Communities – Mental Health’, seemed such a huge challenge to live adventurously.
Enormous thanks and praise must go to the Quaker Life staff team and the Quaker Life Central Committee. Crafting a conference on such a tricky topic is not easy with an audience who, in most cases, had no training in the subject matter. But thanks to the health warnings, careful timetabling – and clear permission to take time out if it all became too much – most of us negotiated the weekend successfully, and grew in faith. It was made clear that the weekend was about building inclusive Meetings, not one concerned primarily with personal growth. This discipline was crucial, especially when unguarded hurts from past and present could suddenly begin a chorus-line tap dance along the raw nerves of the psyche. There were times when we couldn’t help feeling each other’s pain as well as our own.
The real strength we found, of course, was in each other. What an extraordinary group of interesting, life-enhancing people, drawn from all over the UK. How inspiring to share the high and lows of everyone else’s Meetings, from Islay to Exeter.
I recommend that every Meeting should play the Quaker Life ‘Snakes and Ladders’ game. This involves writing on both snakes and ladders what makes us sad at our Meetings and what builds us up. We all pitched in and shared stories of pain and success and I discovered how lucky I am to attend such a grown-up happy Meeting.
There were three ‘Aha!’ moments.
Firstly, helping each other up with a tender hand at Meeting does not mean turning into Sunday morning social workers. Being Quakerly means actively listening and taking time to be interested in others’ lives and experience.
‘How are you?’ ‘How are you doing today?’ ‘Are you OK?’ Practice these sentences in a low voice in the mirror. Make eye contact and see how hard these questions are, even to ask oneself! How often do we ask these questions after Meeting and take the trouble to listen to the answers? Are we too often tempted to fix things instead? Of course, proper listening takes time and effort. Too easily we settle for the comfort of surface small talk, which comforts no one.
Secondly, it can be difficult to empathise with other people’s experience of mental illness or distress.
How can we imagine others’ pain if we have never had a nervous breakdown, or suffered from coercive emotional abuse or bereavement, or come out as a lesbian and find the right words? Even if we have, how tempted are we to superimpose our own experience on the other person instead of listening to their truth?
We heard a remarkable ministry from a Quaker in her early sixties. Her bipolar, narcissistic ninety-something mother has dementia and is making her life a living hell. I found myself in the grip of an empathy breakdown. How could she and her long-suffering husband possibly tolerate that level of pain and aggravation? Surely no amount of daughterly love, or childhood memory, or inherited wealth is worth it? I felt the urge to yell ‘Run!’ Was I missing something? How effectively could I really bear her up with a tender hand if she attended my Meeting? And given today’s demographics, how many millions of people are suffering like her?
Thirdly, we learned the role of humour as a weapon of the Spirit in achieving mental health. I hugely enjoyed the roleplay performed by a speaker with schizophrenia. She ruthlessly mimicked an insensitive consultant who looked for an easy label and a prescription to shut her up. We were also treated to stand-up comedy on Saturday evening, and a showing of Inside Out – the 2015 Oscar-winning animation where the characters of Joy, Fear, Disgust, Anger and Sadness vie for control in an eleven-year-old’s head.
What does love require of us? Perhaps when it comes to mental health, it is less than we fear. In Meeting we ask in the silence for support to find our voice, and for the right words to clothe our thoughts. Mental distress is not mental illness and any of us can suffer at any time. We just need to feel safe at Meeting, and to ensure others feel safe too. It is as simple – and challenging – as that.
I want to give the last word to a wonderful speaker, who was written off as a child because of autism.
‘The light is there even if you cannot see it.
‘The light is there even if you cannot feel it.
‘The light is there and loves you very deeply.
‘No matter what.’
Selected resources:
- ‘Mental Health in our Meetings’, a two-day course, Woodbrooke, 29 November–1 December (contact enquiries@woodbrooke.org.uk)
- A day retreat for Quakers who work in mental health, Edgbaston Meeting house, 29 February 2020 (contact Alison Mitchell: mhdo@retreatyorkbfund.com)
- Mental health in our Meetings, a Quaker Life pamphlet available from Friends House
- Encounters with mental distress: Quaker stories, a booklet developed by the Quaker Life Network Mental Health cluster, available from Friends House
- The Retreat York Benevolent Fund gives grants to Quaker-led mental health projects (see http://retreatyorkbfund.com/Projects)
