It always amuses me when the media informs me that "many people have mental health". For some reason, despite making efforts to dispel the stigma attached to it, they are still reluctant to use the term "mental illness". This is presumably because, for many decades, "mental illness" has been synonymous with "madness" and has been viewed as meaning that the person concerned has something wrong with them. That "something" is still not generally regarded as the equivalent of a broken leg or a bout of flu, and the victim is often thought of as dangerous and incurable.
It's true that some mentally-ill people are dangerous, though usually the danger is more to themselves than to others. It certainly isn't true that they are incurable, though, as with cancer, we have not discovered all the cures yet. Mental illness is also not contagious, and there is normally no need to avoid seeing or speaking to such people. Attitudes have certainly changed, but not always for the better. Even Siegfried Sassoon, a man of great compassion, referred to his fellow-patients at Craiglockhart Military Hospital as "dotty", and found it hard to relate to them.
Sassoon naturally did not like to think of himself as "ill" when he was admitted to the hospital through that slightly forbidding main entrance (which some of us will see when we attend the ALS conference in Edinburgh in just a few weeks' time). Many doctors thought likewise, even when they were treating soldiers who were suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. They called those men cowards, shirkers, fakers, and many other things - as if they were not already feeling worthless enough.
Not only did many doctors not believe in or see any distinction between "shell-shock" and "madness", but even those who did, the sympathetic pioneer psychiatrists like William Rivers and Arthur Brock, were unsure how to treat such patients. Brock particularly favoured physical activity, which in some cases produced good results, and Sassoon certainly believed that his long conversations with Rivers were helping him recover.
A charity called Glenart uses music, art, and other activities to help rehabilitate injured military personnel and those who, for whatever reason, need assistance in returning to civilian life. Appropriately, one of Glenart's sponsors is Napier University, the establishment which now occupies the buildings at Craiglockhart and acts as custodian of the War Poets Collection, which is mainly housed in the former entrance hall of the military hospital. Performers from Glenart will also be providing some entertainment at the ALS conference. The charity takes its name from HMHS Glenart Castle, a hospital ship of the First World War that was torpedoed and sunk in the Bristol Channel during 1918, killing 162 people, mainly patients and medical staff.
If you have watched television or listened to the radio recently, you cannot have helped hearing that Mental Health Awareness Week is just drawing to an end. The experiences of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq have done a great deal in recent years to foster understanding of PTSD and other mental problems resulting from involvement in warfare. These are hardly any different from the experiences of soldiers a century ago, but we have a greater awareness of it now, and thank goodness for that. Even in the "normal" adult population, though, statistics suggest that only 13% of people have "high levels of good mental health", whatever that may mean.
Sassoon was one of the lucky ones, though he did not always feel that way himself. He survived the war, both physically and mentally, and went on to make a great contribution to English literature. Compare him with Ivor Gurney, a talented poet and musician, who wasted away in a mental institution for nearly twenty years before his premature death, or even with David Jones, a poet and artist who had two severe breakdowns, one brought on by the very process of reliving his memories for the purpose of writing his unique prose/poem "In Parenthesis". We should remember them all when we enter Craiglockhart and meet representatives of Glenart.
