Some more things that may have contributed to the making of 'The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland'

Watching the 1967 Frederick Wiseman documentary ‘Titicut Follies’ in 2003 and again in 2013

Reading hundreds of books on the subject, amongst them ‘What is Madness?’ by Darian Leader and ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ by Thomas Szasz

Rereading ‘Awakenings’ by Oliver Sacks and trying very hard to watch the sentimental film again

Being mesmerized by the Roy Anderson films ‘You the Living’ and ‘Songs from the Second Floor’

Watching 'The Bothersome Man' for the third time, saying it’s for research purposes, although it wasn’t really

Reading Auden’s Christmas Oratorio while trying to write a Chorus for ‘The Eradication’

Watching a documentary about Brian Blackwell, who had narcissistic personality disorder, killed his parents and then took his girlfriend on an expensive holiday to the States, fantasizing that he was a professional tennis player  

Downloading the Finnish saga ‘The Story of Burnt Njal’ with a view to plagiarizing it for our Chorus

Revisiting Anouilh’s ‘Antigone,’ in which I played the messenger at university. ‘The queen! The queen! Where is the queen?’

Seeing Alan Ayckbourn's ‘The Norman Conquests’ in Liverpool because a character's exit from one play corresponds with an entrance in another and this is something we would like to try

Meeting Ben Sessa, psychiatrist and author of The Psychedelic Renaissance, and hearing him talk passionately about the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs

Visiting systemic family therapists in the Tavistock Centre who tell us about a man called Jaakko Seikkula who’s developed a dialogic approach to treating psychosis - Open Dialogue – that’s practically eradicated schizophrenia from Western Lapland

Driving to Western Lapland with David Woods 

Stopping on the motorway to take some photos, marveling at the special quality of the light and getting covered in mosquitoes

Searching for Keropoudas Hospital, where Open Dialogue began

Meeting a drunk man in a Tornio pub and finding out he’d been in Keropoudas Hospital

  

Wondering if an apparently deranged man in the street in Tornio is pissing or masturbating or both

Being welcomed by Timo Haaraniemi at Keropoudas Hospital and taking part in an impromptu simulated Open Dialogue session

Attending a Dialogic Practices conference in Hameenlinna and being over-awed by Jaakko Seikkula, Peter Rober, Professor John Shotter, Markku Sutela and just about everyone there

Tolerating uncertainty

Witnessing Jaakko Seikkula and colleagues disco dancing on the last night of the conference in Hameenlinna

Some things that may have contributed to the making of 'The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland'

Reading R. D. Laing as an ontologically insecure undergraduate and finding the idea of madness quite attractive

Flicking through The DSM IV and noticing I've got most of the disorders

A psychiatrist asking me if I agree that I'm a danger to myself and others and when I say ‘No’ telling me ‘In that case I’ve no option but to detain you under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act’

Spending 6 months in the Maudsley Hospital and finding madness wasn’t so attractive after all

Having my clothes taken away from me and being accompanied to the toilet every time I wanted to go

Being told that I wanted to get out but I didn’t want to get better

Agreeing, for a fee of ten pounds, to be the subject of a psychiatric presentation

Imagining it would be a bit like appearing on the Parkinson show

Discovering it entailed sitting on stage, answering questions from an audience of psychiatrists and breaking down in tears

Listening every morning to someone chanting from the ward below ‘Help me someone I’m dying’

Being ashamed to have a mental illness and not wanting anyone to know

My family trying to understand

Seeing a Pelican book on my condition on the bookshelves at home

Being told that I sometimes seemed quite normal

The book stating ‘It’s all about a desire for control.’ This wasn’t my experience. I felt out of control, actually possessed

Living near a mental hospital in Shrewsbury when I was a boy and ending up in it in my twenties

A nurse in hospital taking my temperature every 30 minutes and saying to me ‘I don’t know if this is what you want but if you carry on like this you’ll very soon be dead’ and my thinking ‘Good’

A patient called Roy Christy telling me how John Fowles the novelist stole his first wife from him on a Greek island. I was never sure if this was true, but years later I picked up a copy of Fowles’s Journals and discovered that it was

A man in the Maudsley sitting next to me and telling me he was Jesus and I was John the Baptist

A bearded lady in the Maudsley asking me if I thought she should kill herself or just put up with it

Seeing a night nurse throw a patient against a wall, reporting it to the hospital board, nothing being done and wondering if I’d imagined it

A nurse supervising the eating disorder patients’ mealtimes while slowly consuming a pot of very low fat cottage cheese

A manic patient called Liz who I found attractive and who told me I was an angel

As I got better beginning to fancy some of the patients, particularly a thickset suicidal boy called Darren

My psychologist telling me that she’d seen me looking longingly at a patient called Douglas who’d been experiencing hallucinations. It wasn’t true. Was she projecting onto me?

Going to the ward round. The eminent consultant (Professor Gerald Russell, whose hobbies include art galleries, photography and music) asking me how I felt and my saying ‘I am terrified about my imminent confrontation with the outside world’ and him saying ‘That’s a very philosophical statement. What exactly do you mean by it?’

After the ward round the nurse who had escorted me there saying to me ‘You did very well. What a wonderful opportunity for an actor’

Being allowed home for a weekend, scoring some dope at the Prince John in Peckham and walking out straight into the arms of the Metropolitan Police

Being taken to the police station and locked in a detention room. Explaining I was a mental patient and being let off

Making friends with a schizophrenic who told me he taught the Foreign Secretary’s children to play the cello.

Coming out of hospital and a relative saying to me on the phone ‘What are you going to do? You have to do something, you know’