In 2012 I took up the cause of mental health research and activism. However, the extraordinarily negative impact of Covid-19 on ethnoracially minoritised communities drew me to the conviction that if b/Black people are experiencing both health and healthcare in much more negative ways right across the life-course than all other demographic identities, then there is a much bigger set of challenges to think about. This is of course the case, and so my portofolio of health research interests has expanded. Health and mental health are a huge part of my identity as a humanities researcher (more on the ‘Humanities’ page).
My interest in mental health pre-dates the recent-and-ever-increasing proliferation of disquisitions from clinical/academic enterprises that have hit the media, all of which are doing their best to raise awareness of the ever-increasing global mental health crisis (e.g. the World Health Organisation has been talking about upcoming crises re: clinical depression (‘psych’) and dementia (which is not a single diagnosis, but an unbrella term for nearly 100 recognised diagnoses and several which are not specifically ‘taxonomised’). Unfortunately, the national and international health and mental health crises now serve as tickets for potential work opportunities which all sorts of professionals in all sorts of sectors are desperate to get their hands on – for all sorts of reasons. There is spectacular and profound inequity in the health and mental health research guilds; despite the clarion call from disability activists ‘not about us without us’, this is exactly what continues to be perpetrated.
In my case it is entirely personal. Mental health challenges have touched my family on both my father’s and mother’s side, and at more than one generational level. I myself have suffered badly but in understanding the monumental ethical and pastoral failures of statutory mental health services, I cannot ever become a service user – the ‘help’ that is needed cannot really ever come from a clinical care guild with the current ideological and metaphysical presuppositions that obtain. And in my other ‘familial’ relationships I have witnessed some huge struggles at very close quarters – and not all got the help they needed. Some did! But others were (and are) victims of a system that needs ‘critical friends’ as opposed to angry, impotent, inchoate and conceptually-and-clinically-limited opponents. I owe my positive state of mental health to music – if it had not been for some of those edgy and transformative gigs I played as a young tyro of jazz piano back in my twenties, I do not know where I would be.
The bigoted racial ideologies that inhere within the historical genesis of modern experimental psychology and the limited anthropological conceptions inherent within psychiatry have become a growing concern for more and more thinkers (inside and outside the professional world of ‘psych practice’). This does not mean that they have nothing to offer – but it does mean that they should be interrogated more rigorously by more constituencies than is currently the case. In certain ways it appears as if postmodernity has come and gone and the NHS never really noticed – but at the same time, the increasing awareness of the importance of ‘patient knowledge’ is beginning to have an impact.
The Church has not been very good at dealing with people suffering in this way, and the conspicuous denial on the part of many Christians of mental illness as an ontologically-extant reality bears no resemblance to (for example) the one enumerated by Tomas Szasz’s famous 1960 essay. But if you are – as I am – an African-born Caribbean male living in the UK, you are now in the demographic of those most likely to be in a jail cell or a mental health institution. I can no longer stand idly by – people are suffering – not just black men – and I am determined to do what I can to help and to support those who help them.
I am particularly interested in diagnostic practices and the conceptions of language which go into the necessary judgement for diagnosis. I am especially interested in how the psych disciplines (conceptually and clinically) handle service users who have a religious affiliation – because in some cases that will aid their recovery. In others, it will be the reason for their breakdown. This is why I myself need music as a necessary counterpoint to words and ideas – because as some intellectual historians have noted, philosophers can be a little on the unstable side even as they pull things apart which others might not have considered to shed light on thought itself. And bad theology and toxic religion have more capacity than many other things to send good people into psychiatric meltdown. I have seen it at first hand.
All of the foregoing constituted reasons for deciding to prioritise mental health. But when poor young Richard Okorogheye went to his death back in 2021, I watched in horror as several b/Black people simply assumed – along with white and others – that he was just another mentally unstable b/Black person who had taken his own life – despite the fact that the press had released the details of his condition as a sickle cell disease sufferer. And then I realised something. I only know about just how debilitating the pain of SCD can be because my mother was a haemoglobinopathy specialist nurse and counsellor for many years and spent much time fighting for her patients in A&E and hospital wards due to inadequate and inhumane approaches to pain management. After that tragedy, it became clear that the police had failed to do their best by this poor young man, and I then discovered that there are a few formal research papers looking at mental distress that occurs as a direct result of sickle cell disease. One significant outcome has been a Wellcome Trust grant to fund a new research network that will look very specifically at the experiences of b/Black people regarding pain in medical healthcare.
I am thrilled to be a part of the inaugural cohort of Artists Represent Recovery Network (2023) and now even more aware that there is not a lot of clinical apropos in arts and health interventions; as such, I am looking very seriously at how these kinds of interventions are conceived and realised as I develop my own practice in this area. I am also delighted to have been given an opportunity to work at an interection of both arts and health and health/medical humanities with Ty Pawb in Wrexham and look forward to seeing how conditions can be laid to support better lived experiences of health and wellbeing for ethnoracially minoritised communities in North Wales.
In summary: I am doing all in my power to use the gifts of language and music as part of both advocacy and non-clinical intervention activity to support health and mental health sufferers and contribute to the mediation work going on between the NHS and other care-giving organisations to help make a substantive difference to the world that I am still alive and privileged to inhabit. It is time to start writing again on my Rethinking Mental Health blog…
Alexander Douglas - a writer of words and music 