Mad and Saintly: Mental Health and Destitution

I have volunteered in a Night Shelter for destitute asylum seekers and refugees for five years now. Asylum seekers and refugees often come from countries and situations where their experiences include intense violence, torture, dispossession and, at the least, extremes of fear, where they are escaping from levels of intimidation and lack of personal freedom which are cause enough for their flight.

 

A, a man from Zimbabwe in his thirties, arrived at the shelter, recommended by the help desk. He was withdrawn, kept himself to himself, avoided conversation and was clearly disturbed and anxious showing all the signs of a severe mental health condition. Over the coming year he returned irregularly to the shelter and often carried the signs of living rough. Other men at the shelter who were sharing the room with him found it increasingly hard to have him there. His hygiene was so profoundly compromised by his state of anxiety and depression that he smelled increasingly strongly. At first he was asked to keep his shoes and socks outside the door but eventually in order to maintain a sense of calm at the shelter he was asked not to come.

 

Those who have been subject to or witnessed extremes of violence will bring with them often debilitating mental health conditions. Once destitute, often they can not cope with the demands of etiquette that are implicit in taking assistance from either friends or volunteers. These people, who are in a sense the most vulnerable, become those most difficult to help. They are those most damaged by a system that gives a legality to total destitution. Voluntary organisations can not usually cope with mental health problems and are obliged to try and refer such cases to other bodies. Destitution leaves vulnerable people completely isolated. Voluntary groups and peers/friends alike are often unable to cope well with mental health issues and thus the only recourse of the destitute can be removed.

 

B, a man from Iran, is destitute. He has left Iran because he had the sense to escape before he was tortured and abused. He isn’t a heroic figure who resisted to the point of carrying the scars or his family asking for the death certificate. He ran away, quite justifiably, in great fear from a political/religious situation where he was obliged to lie constantly about himself in order to survive.

 

Those who are not scarred by their experiences to the point of having severe mental health problems face another set of issues. Their destitution, lasting years perhaps, insists that they remain ‘good’, cheerful, willing to engage with the voluntary groups who offer help, able to manage the human relations that allow them to profit from offers of assistance from their peers, visits to solicitors, regular signings at the Border Agency, occasional detention. And always these people are required to show good will, good nature, not to be aggressive, not to show passion. Such a need to be constantly on best behaviour when such an approach has no legal benefit to the destitute individual, can lead to a sense of confusion, of lack of self which can result in the onset of mental health problems.

 

C walks around the city always with a dark cloud over him. Working out our own mental health issues is hard enough but when you might have to mix understanding how to regulate your moods with just surviving is unbelievably hard. D is always ready to help, to assist, he is a good man ready to offer his time to others. His situation requires that he remains sane, doesn’t lose his temper, stays stable when he is alone and frightened in a foreign country that forces him to be destitute.

 

The destitution of asylum seekers and refugees turns some, the most vulnerable, into suffering figures unable to manage their situation. Another element, in order to maintain their sanity, are trapped in a cycle of being gooder than good, when of course, they are asylum seekers and refugees, not saints. Being a refugee or asylum seeker does not make you good, it makes you vulnerable and arises from vulnerability. Destitution alienates further those in most need and puts impossible demands on those more able to cope.

 

 

skyfall and ideological form

Starting from the premise that the film makers are aware of what they are doing but that still they are tracing a shape whose contours are formed by the ideological sub-strata of our society.  This is the ‘big other’ of Zizek and via his work Lacan, something to which reference is made implicitly in all works, the form of which is accessible not by looking directly at representations but by looking at what those varied forms do, how they relate to the material world in which they have existence.

What is the ideological form of which Skyfall is the clothing or as my sister called it the lichen, morphing lichen?  So if I look at material conditions of the film, those events outside it that allow it to be, give it shape, what are they?  To take one; it is referring to Julian Assange as the baddy saying firstly that the world of real politics and death is the proper subject of a film.  It might be seen as saying that in the end death, war and destruction, torture are possibly also just elements of entertainment.  The work with Assange doesn’t fall into real politics and get dirty.  The baddy is like Assange, sexually ambivalent and potentially dangerous.  He has unresolved issues with mother and is a laugh at therapeutic roles and practice.  His downfall is that set of issues and not the meat of his crimes in themselves for which he is un-attackable,  he only loses through his personal weakness. His crimes stay free of any comment, only existing as the perfect geek’s unaccountable, impersonal actions.  His normal yet extreme complexes are his downfall and the final crime is his resolution of that complex of emotions.  These are the boring old ones of rejection, lack of love and punishment and betrayal.  This followed by torture which leads to bitterness.  So Assange is subsumed into entertainment, a sort of mainstream Woody Allen film where we laugh with the therapist.  So that’s one condition of the film: it takes the real events of war and our proximity to its truth through wikileaks and makes it pure entertainment based around the audience’s awareness of psychological categories.  The ideological shape is that this is what matters perhaps?  The ability to laugh at oneself, to allow the sacred (real death and war) to be turned to the service of an evening out.  This is the form we believe in.

public art

Pubs are closing everywhere and at an astonishing rate.  Their signs are going down and for sale signs going up all over the place.  I was passing this pub near Mosborough and took a photo of the sign.  I wonder where they all go?  There is I assume a collector somewhere with a warehouse full of defunct pub signs.  Anyway – what a collection of paintings that would make wouldn’t it?

Joseph Glover Pub Sign

compassion?

I have a friend who told me about her long term interest in violence, something stoked by a young man who brought those ideas more than somewhat to life.  She proclaims an understanding of the violent, the obscene, the killer, the paedophile and wonders if that makes her bad? Is she in need of help?  I found her intensely compassionate in her telling of her tale and told her so.

Is that true compassion then?  To understand the other to point of being able to experience a lack of evil in even the most extreme behaviours?

amazing cave

This shop has opened up in an old building which backs onto the Don.  The owners are living above the shop with two balconies facing out over the river.  I’ve been driving past often and never had the opportunity to stop and look inside, the spot is well of the beaten track tucked in a corner of an old industrial area which has gentrified in spots but is still both small scale industrial and hosts a fair amount of sex workers.

The owner was sitting inside, his name is Aaron.  He was tired as he’d been down at a market inside the M25 and not slept.  He intends to sell classic guitars and amps as the speciality.  My reason to stop besides pure interest was that S had said ‘Give them that old radio’.  So I carried an old valve radio in and said ‘this is for you’.  ‘I don’t have that taste’ he said, so I explained I didn’t want to sell it but give it to him.  He accepted and we talked a while.

My daughter E wouldn’t come in because she was scared by the stuffed birds in the room, the taxidermy.  The shop has been building up (‘organic’ he called it fairly) for some two months or so.  I drove past early on with an artist friend who said ‘For an amazing cave its not very amazing’.  I thought that mean and born of jealousy.  The place thrilled me partly as its colours and taste took me back to so many places from the past.  Rather like a café in Attercliffe it recalled a site in Venice from the early 80s, by a canal, a dream of a sort, sleeping on a table after the bar closed.  Then maybe an Islington I never knew but Leytonstone High Road in the 60s and an unimagined taste born of class unconsciousness.  You were there M!  Stuffing falling out of the upholstery…

 

I also told Aaron about the design/production fashion company who were to occupy the old factory across the river; that I’d thought he may have taken the shop knowing that this was to come?  But he didn’t know although he was interested in the conversations of the old works locally.  He said many customers or passers by were prostitutes and that he hoped to be able sell guitars to the boys down at the skate park.

 

Good luck to Aaron.  To the Amazing Cave.

practising structure

My daughter E is doing something for the first time and showing me.  She explains that this is the way she usually does it.  She has no way of doing it though, she is just doing it.  I ask her if that is the case, does she have a way to do it or is she inventing one straight away.  Yes she is making it up.  Why?  She doesn’t know.

Structure, my child and others too seek to order the world immediately, to have objective standpoints with which to look at the world, a desire for representation.   What she has learned to do and what she is practising is structuring, that is what she is explaining to me.