“The headless man with no body” by Sara Stanton

A friend of mine recently reminded me of how when you play some records backwards you hear hidden messages. Having spent more years now being preoccupied about why I hear voices rather than being preoccupied with trying to stop them, I’m going to attempt to write this whole article without using the word schizophrenia or mental illness. Although I identify as disabled, this is not because I have been diagnosed as having Schizophrenia; (opps.) rather my life chances have become disabled because of my diagnosis. I have become less of a ‘patient’, but my agenda, is about more than just challenging and deconstructing ideas of illness and the institution(s), which surround it. Oppression is all around us and I see from my own experience of mental distress that it is about more than the here and now, even more that just historical and culturally specific context. The impact of institution (al) ‘care’ and the way western society is structured so that people will always be positioned as different, ‘the other’ through a dialectic of “mad” / “bad” stems right back to the enlightenment rather than just what is happening now in community care/mental health legislation. Ideas and thoughts are more about an experience of existence and less about any political, economic, military or social system.

As the Chair of Listen To The Voices (LTTV), we have been very busy. Trying to create opportunity out of ideas, we have always had them, just never channelled them or had the mechanisms of resources available to channel them. Digital media is both the channel and the exploration. My own motivations, although not necessarily therapeutic are about, enabling better understandings of what it is like to ‘hear voices’ and to produce valid representations as a creative rather than ‘recovery’/therapeutic based process. I fundamentally believe that digital media; particularly computers and software programmes can be used to externalise what it means to ‘hear voices’ and the mechanics of this is just as important as the outcome.

The Media plays a fundamental role in representing images of madness and there is much talk that discrimination would be combated if the media would portray more positive and representative images. But all this has to be taken further. I agree with this but the problem is bigger in terms of what the media is actually about. It is about reporting events - a lot of them pretty badly, but events say nothing about the way people live. When you buy into these events it all becomes snowballed and the media can carry you along without considering the context in which the event took place. So, no matter how well meaning a newspaper article is, the article is printed within what is ‘newsworthy’ and that’s a different context to the lived experience of the person/event being reported. LTTV is about Survivors and service users creating our own media rather than waiting for the media to change its ideas and work practices.

A love of film and an understanding of the power of this medium have led to a desire to try and do some innovative work in mental health. I strongly believe in the agenda of ‘expert by experience’ and that then means giving editorial control back to users of services, rather than, as is the case, mental health service users waiting for Researchers and Producers to approach us. My own belief in the electromagnetic spectrum, there is something very personal about my relationship with technology. I think that’s the context. Editing film also enables me to channel ideas; it’s a coping strategy in itself, pure escapism. Technology is progressive, mental health service provision is stale, and it generally doesn’t work because old ideas are constantly being reformulated rather than fresh ideas injected. Bill Gates would never say, scrap the lot; lets get rid of Win XP and return to Win 3.1. Mental health services are doing that all the time; the government’s new Draft Mental Health Bill is a fine example to old asylums reformulated for this century.
I am fascinated by ideas of time and space and see that by looking at the laws of the universe, the logic of science, that of physics applications, particularly quantum mechanism theory is applicable to recontexualising, the experience of ‘hearing voices’. Psychiatry is an art, not a science, and so excluded from this analysis.

An awareness of the relationship between language and thought and action is crucial and how we all act this out in ways, which we are comfortable with through written and verbal creations. But what does all this mean? The meaning behind the experience of hearing voices, not just the words used to create and represent it. Language itself represses ideas because words are understood within a societal context. My own experience of ‘hearing voices’ is not about the word ‘Schizophrenia’ rather about my place within the universe. I’ve come to see that the world of the digital universe, that which happens within the computer is a parallel to the biological universe, which in itself is full of universes. All universes are dependent on laws; creating film on a computer is about following the laws laid down within the programme. And in contrast, the concept of the ‘Null Universe’ is where you have to begin when recontextualising what ‘hearing voices’ is about. A Null Universe is the only universe within the biological universe, which is completely independent of the laws of any other universe, and so its existence is proven by its non-existence. This is part of the reason why I work in digital media, because it is not real, only what is captured on the camera / into the computer / transferred onto the tape. Still not real, just an image of a ‘reality’ based on what we think is there. The irony is that it is there for as long as the product exists that it was transferred on to, i.e. tape, CD Rom, yet may as well not be there if you do not have a VHS/DVD/CD/VCD player because you don’t have access to the image.

Computers and software have given me the opportunity to manipulate what people see, I can distort reality in the same way that it becomes distorted when someone ‘hears voices’. But my argument is that the ‘reality’ itself, that which is taken for granted, as ‘fact’ is indeed a manipulation of different laws of the universe. So to hear voices is not a distortion of - or losing touch with - reality.

My film making Survivor colleagues have reinforced to me the idea that what I ‘hear’ may not necessarily be a sign of something wrong within me, i.e. a chemical imbalance. Having considered this, of course it is not, that is the construction that society has placed on my experience. My experience is of something ‘external’. Now I may not actually have certain people talking to me, or they may just as easily be, but I do have these experiences within a universe that has certain laws attached to it. This idea means rejecting any idea that there is such a thing as ‘mental illness’ and this has helped me come to terms with being diagnosed as having Schizophrenia, but it can also be turned into an opportunity to explore concepts by playing with different ideas. For example the idea of ‘Schizophrenia’ as art form in itself rather than illness. I am not talking here about schizophrenic people being creative people or creativity as a route to recovery from the ‘illness’ through art. For me, video production is not artistic, film making is not glamorous, its hard work and expensive and I would forsake it all my ideas to maybe not have some of the experiences I have had. But being ‘Schizophrenic’ is a hard one so you have to find some other way of reconciling experience with psychiatry and fact with truth. The word itself is generally used as a noun and an adjective. Compare with people who have Cancer, they do not become it, they suffer from it). But ‘Schizophrenic’ could be used as a noun in relation to art form, like singing, dancing, and painting rather than as an illness. So it is also a verb (doing word). It exists external to the individual much like the work produced by other artists.
When society takes hold of this art form it turns it into quite something different - deviance seen through the eyes of the medical model, i.e. illness. You can become seen as deviant as a singer, i.e. Michael Hutchence but that is because of what the singer does which creates an image, aside from singing. The singing itself is not an illness or deviant because it exists separate to him regardless of what he does. There is no such thing as an illness called singing. To contrast, what Cliff Richard sings will never be considered as deviant - or part of an illness - because his image is clean cut. If Cliff Richard started singing Michael Hutchence songs he would still be seen as ‘wholesome’. Or if Cliff Richard started to get up to some of the things we are told Michael Hutchence did ‘Summer Holiday’ would still be a ‘great family number’.

Is there no difference then, between schizophrenia, as a concept and singing? Its something that people do, it’s not what they are. And they are certainly not ill, but because of the way what they do (i.e. hear voices) becomes referenced in society (an hallucination) they have to deal with the negative impact of being diagnosed as mentally ill which creates an image around who they are. Schizophrenia as an illness does not exist because it is a form of art. Feedback please?

LTTV is going to be doing some work in 2003 around digitalisation of voice hearing through time-based cinematography. Yes, it is about, challenging beliefs about the nature of mental illness by demystifying some of the stereotypes and powerful myths about Schizophrenia and what ‘Schizophrenic’ people are meant to ‘do’, but at the same time it is about exploring the significant and powerful experience of ‘hearing voices’ and the meaning attached to it, through digital technology. Using this medium to externalise the experience but also to explore how this medium works and can be used to parallel the experience of what existence is meant to be - for non-voice hearers as well.

Computers impact on our lives and they can and are used to alter our perceptions of what our lives are about. Not necessarily conspiratorially. This in itself is a developmental process because it is about learning more about the laws of a digital universe and how these laws are merely a replication of the laws of the biological universe and each universe within that. None of it can be proven; because none of it is real. My psychiatrist and I will always fundamentally disagree on the origins of my voices but I believe it has been concluded that neither of us can ‘prove’ the other to hold the truth through proof alone.
There are areas that define in people’s minds what ‘mental illness’ is about so it makes sense it terms of artistic practice to use these as a context. But rather than work with this in a clinical or academic setting LTTV’s works with them digitally to remove the restrictions that such contexts place on them.

One aspect of the biological universe is time. Time is open to manipulation and distortion, much the same as hearing voices can be digitised and put ‘out there’, externalised from the hearer of the voices. This is a creative experience that will enhance the knowledge and skills that LTTV members already have and to develop these through practice. For example, Mechanical time can be digitised so that it can be manipulated. To play with an idea that mechanical time regulates all experiences of existence. Or does it? What is mechanical time? Because there are people/agencies who are experimenting with the idea of creating time through other means, i.e. energies, forces. I mean here, there is allegedly 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. But people do not question, how long a second is. I think that it structures rather than creates existence but people do not see this as they are to busy being dictated to by it. If mechanical time was removed from experiences of existence, can another source of time be implemented? To explore just how difficult it is to completely remove mechanical time from all of our experiences of existence. To look at rebuilding time through using software programmes and editing to externalise what ‘hearing voices’ is like when it happens, as such experiences continue to exist, for me, outside the laws of the universe and so do not depend on mechanical time. And to explore this through digital devices and the exploration of what a digital universe could be as compared to the biological one that is understood as ‘reality’.

My recovery has been more fundamental in harnessing creative thinking than my journey into ‘psychosis’. It is what I discovered about the nature of existence on my return to ‘reality’ which fascinates me more than what I learnt about myself while I was operating exclusive of ‘reality’. In itself this term, ‘reality’ is a fascination. Digital based work is a way of addressing this.

Sara Stanton
admin@listentothevoices.org

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