Applied Drama/Theatre and Madness: Can psychiatry inform dramatic work towards social awareness on mental health? (original) (raw)
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Theatre in the late twentieth century and into the twenty first inhabits a rapidly changing world in terms of science, technologies and medicine in which long-standing diagnoses and therapies having given way to the systemization of diagnoses and to a rapidly evolving and changing range of drug therapies. In its invocation of madness, contemporary British theatre has borrowed from the discourses of modern-day medical disciplines including psychiatry, neurology and psychotherapy to depicts characters who are positioned as the 'others' of society – the abject of the rational. This article explores plays that set out to take sides in the debates concerning madness by attempting to tell the stories of the patients rather than their doctors. The plays selected for analysis here announce this through their titular focus: Augustine: Big Hysteria by Anna Furse and Mary Barnes by David Edgar because each is named after a real life psychiatric patient and not the doctors by whom they were treated. Although more obliquely titled, 4: 48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane refers to the experience of more fictional psychiatric patients and offers an explanation of its title that is centred on this consciousness of the patients and has meaning to them as the point in the early morning in which clarity is reached.
The paper describes an approach to theatre as an educational intervention in society linking the artist, the psychiatrist, and social groups with an interest in mental illness. An exploration of narratives and diagnostic criteria from psychiatric case studies led to the creation of two dramatic monologues focusing on awareness and impact of bipolar disorder on intimate personal relationships, particularly on the evolving transactional roles between the partner/caregiver and partner/patient. The paper argues that devised performance based on themes and characters that emerge from within the field of psychiatry may be used to address perceptions of mental illness and stigma for general community audiences. It concludes that psychiatrically informed material can be successfully translated into original dramatic performances to address current educational and social issues and raise social awareness in thought-provoking and stimulating ways to members of the public.
The paper describes an approach to theatre as an educational intervention in society linking the artist, the psychiatrist, and social groups with an interest in mental illness. An exploration of narratives and diagnostic criteria from psychiatric case studies led to the creation of two dramatic monologues focusing on awareness and impact of bipolar disorder on intimate personal relationships, particularly on the evolving transactional roles between the partner/caregiver and partner/patient. The paper argues that devised performance based on themes and characters that emerge from within the field of psychiatry may be used to address perceptions of mental illness and stigma for general community audiences. It concludes that psychiatrically informed material can be successfully translated into original dramatic performances to address current educational and social issues and raise social awareness in thought-provoking and stimulating ways to members of the public. Keywords: Devised Theatre, Mental Illness, Stigma
Mental Illness Through Popular Theatre: Performing (In)Sanely
This chapter explores the transgressive and liberatory learning and creativity of popular theatre when the freedom and power to imagine and raise awareness is placed in the interacting bodymind relationships of a group living with multiple psychiatric diagnoses.
"Antic Dispositions?": The Representation of Madness in Modern British Theatre
This thesis examines how mental illness has been represented in British theatre from c. 1960 to the present day. It is particularly concerned with the roles played by space and embodiment in these representations, and what emerges as bodies interact in space. It adopts a mixed methodology, drawing on theoretical models from both continental philosophy and contemporary cognitive and neuroscientific research, in order to address these questions from the broadest possible range of perspectives. The first part of the thesis draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre to explore the role of institutional space, and in particular its gendered implications, in staging madness. The second part introduces approaches to the body drawn from the cognitive turn in theatre and performance studies. These are connected to the approaches of the first section through phenomenology’s concern with lived experience. Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher’s work on ‘the phenomenological mind’ provides important context here. In addition, Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of ontology offers a solid basis from which to think about how to act ethically as both a producer of, and an audience member for, representations of mental illness. Through these explorations, this thesis suggests a model of madness, not as something to be bracketed as ‘other’ and belonging to a deviant individual, but as emerging between bodies in space – there is no madness outside of social, spatial and embodied contexts. This in turn suggests a new approach to understanding the role theatre can play in addressing the lived experience of mental illness. While many productions currently attempt, unilaterally, to reduce the ‘stigma’ of mental illness, this thesis suggests that, in fact, discrimination against people experiencing mental illness is more likely to be reduced through the interaction between an ethically minded production and an ethical spectator. Such a model does not claim to be able to reduce the experience of madness to a totalising concept which can be communicated through theatre, but rather insists that it is only through an embodied, empathic interaction that a true concern for the (‘mad’ or ‘sane’) Other can emerge.
ACTING CRAZY: PSYCHOTHERAPY, DRAMATHERAPY, AND DRAMA? AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC PLAY
2012
Psychotherapy, acting, and drama therapy have traditionally existed as separate knowledge silos in the research cannon, although many interrelations exist between them. This research examines those interrelations through the researcher’s perspectives of being involved in all three as an actor/director, acting teacher/coach/facilitator, and an aspiring psychotherapist, using an autoethnographic stage play to tease out the general themes. The general themes that surfaced centered on the importance of desire, and its relationship to the will and self; how desire constructs meaning through language; psychology’s ambivalence with sexuality; the relevance of communitas and environment to learning; the pitfalls of therapy and drama; awareness; the self as an ultimate defence and survival mechanism; veneers and actualization as power grabs by the self; real caring versus professional caring; reality versus fantasy; rationality versus emotionalism; science/knowledge/mind versus art/faith/body; drama as therapy, and therapy as drama.The conclusion of this research examines a host of topics too: how these domains’ nomenclature is problematic; how the researcher’s self interacts in these three embedded environments; the potential interpersonal, social, and cultural impacts on participating in these programmes; the significance, strengths, and limitations of this research; the potential applications of its findings; and,future directions that are possible for further research.