Crazy

One woman's search for sanity'

C

razy: One Woman’s Search for Sanity performance project engages communities in creative healing and paradigm-shifting dialogue about anxiety and depression.

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Spring, 2002. I am working on my MFA in multimedia performance. At the moment, I am doing an encore performance of breaking up with my partner-the fourth of such performances over a period of a year. Behind on schoolwork, piles of dirty laundry and dishes covering my apartment, I spend most mornings in bed, alternating between crying, concocting a method of suicide both tidy AND painless, and rolling over to lose myself back in sleep. I spend nights in the same bed, laptop and books strewn about on the comforter, my work continually interrupted by noises that, to me, indicate somebody is trying to break in. Several times I am so convinced that I hide-under the bed, inside my closet, behind a door, heart pumping, senses magnified, cortisol raging.

I was a mess.

Had it not been for a graduate school advisor’s suggestion that I start creating using my dark emotional state as material, it’s likely I would have dropped out of school. Activist art, for me, was making work about 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, not about my embarrassing mental weaknesses. I only felt open to Keith’s idea because he himself was a well-respected and strongly engaged political artist. So, instead of checking into the psychiatric ward, I started videotaping myself. I started scribbling words about my internal state. I started drawing the pain as it lived in my body. I also began reading about anxiety and depression from different perspectives. I read feminist theory, explanations and interpretations from various schools of psychology, neuroscience, Eastern and Western religion and quantum physics. I read socio-economic analyses and books by innovative psychiatric researchers. My own understanding of the nature of anxiety and depression began to shift from a very individualized model to a broader, more systemic paradigm. I began understanding myself in context.

This shift led me to wonder about the value of sharing my story-in essence, of bringing that shift into my art practice. As a relatively privileged person (white, upper-middle class, uninstitutionalized American with access to decent health care) and as an activist, I wondered if creating and sharing a performance could challenge stigma, reduce isolation and help shift the paradigm of mental health towards a more systemic and community-based model.

Now, six years later, the project has evolved into a play, a community dialogue, an arts workshop, a blog and an evolving “creativity and wellness” curriculum. The piece was a selection of the juried New York International Fringe Festival and was awarded funding for a stigma-busting tour to universities in partnership with VSA Arts of Vermont; I’ve presented in collaboration with community partners in Canada including the Canadian Mental Health Association, the College Committee on Disability Issues, the Anxiety Disorders Association of Canada, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Beers Foundation as well as numerous community groups serving youth in Montreal. Crazy was also featured in the Philadelphia GLBT Arts Festival last spring. I have developed the project in tandem with conversations had throughout the process, making the work a living and growing entity.

As an artist, I have experienced firsthand what a creative process can do for somebody coping with anxiety and depression. But even more exciting was the discovery of the paradigm shifts that can happen as part of a creative inquiry. I now strongly believe that the arts can not only play a key role in expanding the types of services offered to mental health clients and prevention program participants, but also in shifting the paradigms shaping how we think about mental health and, therefore, selecting more effective and appropriate mental health care policies.

In this presentation, I’ll talk about Crazy from the perspective of an artist whose practice, along with her concepts of mental health, blossomed into a paradigm of interconnectedness. I’ll begin by articulating goals and describing the project’s structure. Then, I’ll discuss the changes I experienced as an artist within a framework of theoretical questions with a particular focus on stories about my interactions with audiences throughout the process and the opportunities I was able to offer them to rethink their own concepts related to mental health.

Project outline

When I began work on Crazy, I developed a set of goals that continue to morph with audience feedback and dialogue. My current goals are:

1. to expose my own darker side in the interest of destigmatizing the experiences of anxiety and depression, known in mainstream North American culture as “mental illness;”
2. to create openings for deeper relating and connection, beginning with the invitation of my story;
3. to shift paradigms about mental health, exploring different definitions of and paths to wellness;
4. to promote positive mental health through creative expression
5. to nurture each relationship associated with the project (following the theory that balanced, respectful relationships are an integral part of positive mental health);
6. to host public conversations (as opposed to the private ones occurring in doctors’ and therapists’ offices) about an issue that I strongly believe has social roots (and therefore social remedies), such as isolation, economic injustice, environmental toxicity, nutritional issues, and violence.

The structure of the project changes somewhat each time I work with a different group, depending on the context and the needs or interests of the particular audience involved. However, at present, there are four main components to the project: the play, the community dialogue, the workshop, and the online blog and resource list.

The play

Crazy the play integrates monologues, character portraits, storytelling, movement, video and audience interaction. The stories are drawn from my remembered history and center around my experience as somebody diagnosed very early with anxiety and depression; most tales are framed by interactions with the 18 counselors I’ve seen in my 42 years, beginning at age 5. The stories included have been, in part, chosen in response to audience discussions and tales told to me, in an effort to reflect a broader social reality. For example, during the anti-stigma tour to colleges and universities in Vermont, our workshops consistently revealed that a majority of audience members knew somebody who had attempted or completed suicide. These conversations led me back to my own experiences with attempted suicide and the realization that including those stories could significantly deepen the connection between the audience and my material.

The community dialogue

The dialogue that follows the performance has taken many forms. In the early stages of development, my goal for the conversation was to talk about the issues raised by the play rather than about the play itself. I tried many formats: leading an informal conversation myself, leading a conversation using choreographer Liz Lerman’s “Critical Response Process,” collaborating with a facilitator who led the discussion, structuring the dialogue with exercises and pointed questions, and, finally, engaging several community members to form a panel.

The panel structure proved to be most effective in focusing the audience on the various issues raised by the play. Panelists included other “consumers,” psychotherapists, psychiatrists and a medical student, the executive director of an advocacy group, a youth social worker, and the director of a safe house for women experiencing domestic violence.

In spite of the panels yielding a broader more issue-based type of conversation, audiences continued to express a strong desire to respond to what they had seen as a work of art, separate from the social issues the play brought out. Initially, I saw this as a modernist impulse irrelevant to the intentions of the piece (reducing stigma, shifting paradigms and opening conversation about mental health). But in returning to the goal of facilitating deeper relating, I began to understand that this desire was something I had to attend to as an important element in the connection process. In fall of 2008, I collaborated with the Executive Director of a mental health services organization in Montreal called AMI-Quebec; she and I sat together onstage for the discussion, fielding questions both about the play and about the issues; that format yielded a fluidity in conversation in which people were able to talk about both, moving back and forth without compromising either.

The workshop

After many shows, I have offered a creative workshop component of the project that enables audience members to reflect on the subject kinesthetically and imaginatively as well as interactively. I co-developed the workshop with social worker Amy Stuart, who works as an academic advisor at the Community College of Vermont and has had ample experience leading groups.

The first exercise we presented was the “spectrogram,” where statements are read relating to the topic at hand and participants can situate themselves between two extremes of the room, “Strongly Agree” and “Strongly Disagree.” Examples of statements we used were:

1. I know somebody who has attempted or completed suicide
2. An individual suffering from depression/anxiety is mentally ill.
3. I would feel comfortable “coming out” about my own mental health struggles at work or at school.

After people had positioned themselves, we would pause and ask for comments, offering the chance for people to speak about why they were standing where they were standing. Oftentimes people would share stories from their lives during this portion of the workshop; at one gig a particularly poignant moment happened when several students shared about suicides in their immediate circles. During another, a group of Masters in Community Mental Health students noticed their collective lack of comfort revealing personal struggles with mental health in their jobs, leaving them wondering about the ironically high levels of stigma in their chosen field. At a third, a heated conversation ensued about the function of labeling in an individual’s healing process and the paradigm of diagnosis as objective and knowable truth.

The second exercise involved writing. We formulated a “fill-in-the-blank” type of structure to create poems with the title, “Crazy is…” We asked participants to write down lists of three answers including the following sample questions (which have evolved over the course of the project):

1. List 3 words that come to mind when you hear the word “crazy.”
2. How would your grandmother or somebody in her generation describe someone who is depressed or anxious?
3. List three inventions that were, during the time they were invented, highly unusual
4. List three of the most moving events in your life

Then we asked them to put the words “Crazy is” in front of each line and read their poems to themselves or, if they wanted to, out loud. The process was designed to explore, personalize, deconstruct and destigmatize the ideas of “depressed,” “anxious” and “crazy” in creative and lighthearted ways. This was one structure that consistently yielded discoveries and paradigm shifts around mental health since it forced writers to look at and reflect on they myriad things that “crazy” is and can be. We purposely began the structure with the negative and moved into the positive in an effort to introduce new possibilities last.

Here are two samples from the annual meeting of the Canadian Mental Health Association of Saskatchewan:

We also asked participants to memorize one line of their poems to be used in conjunction with the third exercise. For this, we invited them to come up with a simple gesture to express a response they had to “crazy.” Then we divided them into groups of between 6 and 12 and asked them to put their gestures together into some kind of group performance. Finally, we invited them to integrate the one line they had memorized into the performances and then share with one another. This proved to be the most challenging exercise for many people because of stage fright, although we also heard in feedback forms that this was powerful for many to witness.

The online blog and resource list

The final component of the project is a blog I set up to converse with people after they have had some time to digest the information in the show. I post before and after each show as well as when I come across interesting information or others doing related work. On the blog I have a growing resource list; at some shows, I’ve passed out hard copies.

Theoretical questions

Crazy changed me. The project was born out of a very isolated individual experience and has blossomed into a platform for alternative social discourse about a topic that is still often taboo and around which much shame and extreme thinking still revolve. It is this dialogic nature which makes Crazy a community arts project. Collaborators and audience members who have come in contact with the project have also repeatedly reported being impacted by it. I think those changes are complicated, interesting and worth sharing.

As the project grew and developed, it became clear that it was about something much broader than my personal healing-it was about the place of my story in the context of a larger social conversation. I developed some core questions that have guided me in the work and that I will use in framing this section:

1. How can engaged / activist performance about mental health be structured to optimize opportunities for connection and transformation for both artist and audience, without becoming “therapy?”
2. How does autobiographical work create openings, offerings, and genuine opportunities for change, avoiding the frequently levied criticism of self-indulgence?
3. What role do boundaries play in forging nourishing connections between performer and witnesses?
4. What is the artist’s responsibility for her audience’s sense of safety?

Performance that transforms: artist and audience

When I first began generating material, my intention was not to create a performance to share with an audience-my intention was to save my own life. The raw material took many forms, including drawing, vocalizing, creation of mask characters and videotaping myself during my worst moments. I never had any intention of sharing this material with anybody. Once I had moved into a different energetic space and was able to look objectively at my artistic goals, I realized that utilizing some of this material, edited, refined, and placed into a structured performance, could help me make a stronger connection to the audience and help them make a stronger connection to the material.

Many people who encounter Crazy equate it with Drama Therapy, which is not the frame in which it was created. The raw material was certainly part of a theraputic phase of development. But my intention and goals in creating the show, which happened later, have to do with something much larger than my own individual healing-a social change model of activist art, falling into the reconstructive post-modernist camp. Through researching and developing the show, and through the ongoing process of revising, I gained a sense of power and collusion with my dark times and no longer view them as a problem I need to “conquer” or get rid of. To me, this is enormous progress and represents a new period of self-acceptance. That does not translate, to me, into therapy but rather a politicization of my experience, broadening my understanding of it to include the larger context, gaining confidence in my own radical understanding of myself and finding the courage to take my own path which is inherently intertwined with the paths of others around me.

Also, perhaps most importantly, through providing a community forum for conversation and visibility of these experiences, my vulnerability has become connective tissue and vital for understanding the deep pain of others going through similar experiences. By crafting a project that is dialogic in nature, I have produced something antithetical to the mainstream North American “solution” to psychic suffering- medication or therapy, both primarily individualistic responses. Facilitating a community art project that is living and breathing is a sign of my own transformation and integration of the more systems-based analyses I discovered through my own development and learning. I frame this through the lens of activist art.

Audience feedback from different stages of the project reflected transformation for participants as well. Written evaluations yielded many, many variations on comments including:

The one performance in which feedback did not reflect such strong engagement was at a medical school where many students reported a lack of understanding about what the material had to do with their future work as doctors. In processing this with my co-producer, Judith Chalmer from VSA Arts of Vermont, we realized that the medical school culture was such that additional advance preparation could have made the experience feel more relevant to the students. In general, though, the layered approach (performance then panel then workshop) gave audience members a rich experience, building upon established safety and moving toward personal engagement, and seemed to be an important aspect of the success of this project.

Autobiographical performance: self-indulgent or generous?

In an earlier post-show discussion, one gentleman asked, “How does a performer doing autobiographical work, especially about a painful topic like this one, know if the work is generous sharing or if it is merely ‘pooping’ on the audience?” Because serving and connecting are main project goals, the question caught my attention.

Originally, my focus was on communicating the truth of my experience. I spent hours, days and weeks in my studio, trying to find some theatrical representation of my experience of anxiety and depression. I would share this material with workshop audiences and get that it wasn’t working but not know why, except that people were profoundly uncomfortable. I knew that this in and of itself was not indicative of an artistic problem, but somehow I also knew that my choices were not resulting in connection and opening, in spite of my intentions.

It was at this point that I actually went back and looked at the video footage I had taken of myself during the deep depression that had preceded my work on the piece. I wondered what would happen if I took stills and interspersed them into footage of the conductor (footage of me dressed in formal garb and conducting an imaginary orchestra) and the little bike-riding girl (video footage my father had taken of me at age 4 learning to ride my first two-wheeler) to show the integration of all the selves, as well as to share the extreme vulnerability and direct expression of the dark times. I knew at this point that there was nothing I could do onstage live to “act” anxiety and depression; I also knew that even trying to do this was a choice that distanced audiences. Including fragile and despondent still images seemed like it could accomplish a few goals. First, it would boldly challenge the notion that grief, fear and vulnerability are shameful states of being (or illness, for that matter) that need to be hidden. It could also, in the context of the montage, normalize these images to some degree, communicating that this is something people can go through and that it does not have to define them.

During the next few performances, there was much discussion about “the crying footage.” It appeared just once, at the final video montage after I rode away on my bike, and people talked about feeling shocked and disturbed by it. Essentially, because the crying footage came at the end, after hearing stories and viewing images that were much more “low impact,” it seemed out of place, as if it were from a different play entirely.

A Middlebury College student made a suggestion-to pair the crying images with an on-stage action sequence that expressed something very different-what somebody might show the world while they were suffering deeply inside. I decided to sing bits of a show tune, since I was already playing with my obsession with Broadway as a theme, while the stills flashed in the background- I received very strong positive feedback from audience members about this new scene.

Staying open and, indeed, encouraging dialogue with people who came into contact with the work remains key for me to staying on the “generous” track. This did not always prove to be easy. After one of the early versions of the piece, a woman I had considered a friend took me out to lunch to tell me that she thought it was “a bunch of middle class whining.” Another woman, who herself dealt with mental health issues, told me she thought I should not be doing the play but that I should be seeing another therapist instead, possibly within the confines of an institution. I wish I could report having had a thicker skin but, in fact, these conversations were quite devastating. I debated putting the work to bed, hanging up my creative goals and going back to where I clearly belonged-the nuthouse.

But with every comment like the ones above, there would be numerous others that indicated profound engagement and identification with the themes brought out in play, as well as excitement about the work artistically. At one discussion following a performance for a national mental health agency, a long-time director “came out” to her colleagues about a serious depression she experienced years ago but never told anybody about. This led to an important conversation within that group about stigma within the mental health field. Another woman revealed to the audience during the post-show conversation that she had stayed at a psychiatric hospital years ago; this was the first time she had disclosed that information to her community, and she also realized as she spoke that she needed to do some rethinking about the type of treatment she received there. People frequently pull me aside after the formal group conversation to tell me about their sons, daughters, brothers, spouses, nieces or coworkers who are struggling, or even to share about their own difficulties. I include my email address in the program and have received numerous emails from people who were affected by the piece, including several people dealing with depression themselves. This feedback is testimony to the openings created by the piece as an invitation to connection.

The choices about how to present stories about medication is another example of my journey toward making Crazy a generous offering. While working on earlier versions of the play, I had discovered a bulk of information about psychiatric drugs and felt that I needed to share these urgent political views with the audience. One way I chose was to project the text on the screen with statistics about numbers of children being prescribed Prozac, or the percentage of people reporting feeling better on a placebo versus the medication being researched. It became clear early on that these choices were distancing, especially to audience members who had found relief from taking medication. I saw that oversimplified, one-sided or didactic expressions or even caustic humor about a particular issue resulted in people disengaging from the conversation (people in evaluations talked about my views being anti-medication; some even argued about how medication helped them and people they knew). I also realized later that my own views on medication were not so cut and dried, and that sharing this ambivalence was not only more truthful but also created more space for questioning and discussion.

Simply listening to and respecting people’s reactions and partnering with them as I continue crafting the work, especially the more emotional or potent material, is for me a huge aspect of the process becoming more and more generous or community-centered and less and less about the “truth” of my experience.

Good fences make good neighbors: the importance of boundaries

Boundaries also proved to be an immensely important element of the piece’s success in creating connections. In earlier versions, I broke the fourth wall repeatedly, moving in and out of traditional theater boundaries-asking people direct questions in the middle of the play, teaching a breathing exercise, and at one point, inviting audience members onstage to participate in a game show. I thought that this type of “play” would raise the issue of boundaries, something of huge importance in the world of psychotherapy, with the audience. Instead, audiences consistently seemed uncomfortable and many appeared to have trouble focusing on what was happening because they were too taken aback. Having the safety of being observers, audience members could sit back, allow the stories to flow into their awareness and mingle with their own and then, later, process out loud during the post-show discussion (or on their own as they wished). Also, because mental health is still taboo, having me talk about it first, without them needing to get involved immediately, seemed to open the door at a slower pace and create the safety necessary for more open sharing later. Forcing interaction earlier did not yield the same depth of sharing that I believe is a connecting experience.

Artists as citizens: what is our responsibility for audience safety?

There have been several times throughout this process when issues of safety came up for audience members. On numerous occasions, audience members cried during post-show discussions and once two women got into a heated argument because both were triggered by material in the show. Thus, the question of ethics has been an ongoing inquiry.

My vision as a theater artist is akin to that of hosting a dinner party. I have invited audience members to be guests in my artistic home and, as such, I feel I do have a responsibility to do my best to create a safe space. I have also had enough experience in groups and in life to know that guaranteeing safety is not something anybody can do. Because art is designed to probe the human experience deeply, it’s bound to stir up strong emotions in people, especially when the topic is something as potent as mental health. When thinking about my ethical responsibility, therefore, I began thinking in terms of creating a container with soft yet durable sides to hold and support whatever reactions audience members had. This continues to evolve.

After the first few shows, I heard from audience members that the material was upsetting and that they hadn’t had enough information to decide whether or not they wanted to “go there” via seeing the performance. I experimented with a warning sign posted at the box office: “Warning: this performance contains sensitive material about mental illness.” I ended up deciding not to use the sign after a few performances and people reporting feeling confused about the sign and afterwards, telling me they did not feel it was necessary.

As another way to help create a container, I decided to utilize the convention of the program to communicate to each audience directly. Instead of the traditional booklet format, I used a letter format instead, complete with greeting (“Dear UVM Medical School students” or “Dear Coaching Center members.”) I made sure that the program notes were tailored specifically to each audience so that it was more likely they would sense my desire to connect with who and where they were rather than simply a generic audience-something that is important in creating healthy relationships. I also included my email address as a way of inviting further conversation or processing.

Conclusion

Crazy: One Woman’s Search for Sanity has been a catalyst for community connection around anxiety and depression as social issues. As the artist, I attribute the piece’s success to approaching it as a conversation. The project continues to unfold; two new branches of the project are creative workshops for junior high and high school students and a “creativity and wellness” curriculum that can be used for prevention or recovery groups. These projects came directly out of comments and questions posed by audience members. I hope to encourage others to support their personal challenges by engaging their strengths to make changes in their communities.

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How have you discovered the potential for creativity to shape health care services and policy? If you have not had this experience, how might you imagine a project that could complement the work you are doing professionally?