Putting 'the stories that aren't told, that aren't heard' on to the stage led performer and writer Little John Nee to question attitudes to mental health, he tells Sara Keating
Sanity is a privilege and a lot of hard work. It's not that madness is indolence, but that good mental health is a constant battle for balance against the chaos of life. It requires the management of time, stress levels and the variety of physical factors that contribute to emotional well-being. It also requires vigilance against a cultural and chemical disposition in Ireland which has diagnosed depression, alcohol and drug addiction - often both the symptom and the cause of mental health problems - as difficulties that affect a staggering proportion of the population.
Writer/performer Little John Nee, whose play The Mental opens at Axis Ballymun tomorrow, has a heightened sensitivity to these issues. Having spent the last year researching a commissioned performance piece for the inaugural event of an arts and mental health festival being held this month in Ballymun and Letterkenny, Little John is aware of the fragility of emotional wellbeing. Often, he says, it is the most basic, simple aspects of mental health, "like the importance of getting lots of sleep and eating well", that are the defining factors in guarding us from the darker parts of ourselves.
"People just assume the extremes when they think about mental illness, but [something like that] could have happened to me at different stages in my life if the circumstances were different. It could still happen. In fact, it could happen to any of us," he says.
The fieldwork that Little John undertook at St Conal's Hospital, Letterkenny, was instrumental in shaping the form that The Mental would take, though in a different way from what he might have expected. Originally, he was commissioned to develop a performance piece based on the stories of Fergus Cleary, a former staff member who had worked at St Conal's for many years. However, as Little John immersed himself in research, he was drawn to a different history, that of the people who had spent their lives in the institution.
"I found out as much as I could about the history of St Conal's and the history of mental health care in Ireland," he says. "I talked to people about their notions about St Conal's, because it was an employer in the area, and at one time it was an important influence in the economy of the town, as in most towns that had an asylum.
"I met people who'd worked in St Conal's and talked to people who'd been resident in institutions in lots of different places. I researched as much as I could, but it was just endless and I knew I had to be very careful because I'm an actor and a performer and a writer, and if you do so much research you're considered an expert on the subject, when in actual fact you can only skim the surface.
"It became more important for me then to write from the point of view of a resident, because these are the stories that aren't told, that aren't heard. When someone is deemed insane, everything they say is treated with suspicion or is invalid and their opinions aren't regarded as worth much, so I decided to take it from that angle."
The Mental itself is a fictional story "about a character called Joe Boyle from Donegal, a punk who has spent a long time in America. It's about his breakdown and his time in St Conal's. It's a lovely character piece to be doing, because it's about someone who's very sensitive, at times hyper-sensitive, someone who's got a lot of time on his hands, time to think and to philosophise and to notice things, like the light changing".
"One of Joe's things is that he's very sensitive to sound, and music would be his main connection with the world.Where some people would have religion, Joe's spirituality would exist through music. The other side of it is that he's also sensitive to all the other sounds around him, all forms of noise pollution, which can upset him."
The music that defines Joe's personality plays an important part in the staging of The Mental, which has an original score performed by Laura Sheeran and Nuala Ní Chanainn, that reflects, and sometimes influences, Joe's emotional journey throughout the play.
Little John plots Joe's journey as a personal history, allowing a rich and complex portrait of his character to come through. This aspect was particularly important for Little John, whose research brought him to the conclusion that one of the main problems in the mental health care system today "is that the symptoms are treated and the people aren't seen at all". In The Mental, he wanted to give a fully rounded history to his character's mental health problems.
"There are aspects of his childhood that would have affected him, and aspects of being different," he says. "Joe just wanted to be himself, and then he rebelled in his teenage years by being a punk and took refuge in New York in the rock'n'roll scene, where there was a crazy culture of substance abuse and lifestyle issues.
"Joe is someone who ends up living on the fringes and he falls through the net. He has no support group, he's on his own, and The Mental is about how things can escalate this way. If there had been someone to see him and be there for him, it mightn't have gone the way it did."
Little John can recognise the good fortune of his own mental health, particularly in the circumstances of the writing of the play.
"The Mental is about isolation, withdrawal from the world and the inability to be in the world," he says. "But to create the piece I had to withdraw and get into a creative process. Then, throughout the rehearsal process, I had to face profound fears that I had, and develop a sensitivity to my own mental health. Like, the distance between being concerned over what people might think about the show or my own working process . . . well, you don't have to go too far down that road to be dealing with paranoia. It's been difficult mentally and emotionally, but it's been healing for me as well."
Little John believes that it is issues like these that need to be brought into wider public discourse.
"I'm not challenging the mental health system . . . I think it's ourselves that need to be challenged, our ignorance, our prejudices," he says. "People with mental health problems are excluded from our society in a blanket way . . . People are uncomfortable with it because it's a question that we have to ask ourselves all the time: am I sane? And it's a scary place to go, because mentally we are fragile.
"There's a part in the show about that, where Joe is observing people on the outside and how much insanity exists out on the street anyway that is not being diagnosed. And there's so much more stress and anxiety now. It's nearly fashionable to be stressed out about your work, and things like advertising deny any flaws or anything that might be regarded as imperfection or difference. In this consumer lifestyle, we are told how to do everything. We've all become institutionalised to this way of life and that's insane as well."
• The Mental runs from tomorrow until Sat at Axis Ballymun, Dublin (post-show discussion on Fri) and then at An Grianán, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, from Wed, May 24 to Sun, May 28 (pre-show discussion, May 27)
Out of the Silence: festival events
Art exhibition: Artworks from mental health service users. Axis Ballymun and An Grianán, Letterkenny.
Snoezelen: Based on Calypso Theatre Company's work in the Snoezelen Room at St Brendan's Hospital and the Central Mental Hospital, both in Dublin, Calypso actors will facilitate an hour-long reading of poetry, prose and drama on the theme of mental health. Axis Ballymun, May 18, 7pm; St Conal's, Letterkenny, May 28, 2.30pm.
Create a Smile: Street performances to promote mental health awareness. Main Street, Letterkenny, May 27, 2.30pm.
An Audience with Fergus Cleary: Fergus Cleary, a former staff member at St Conal's Hospital, Letterkenny, shares stories and recollections of his time spent working with mental health service users. Axis Ballymun, May 19, 9.40pm; St. Conal's, Letterkenny, May 27, 2pm.
