How Therapy Helped - An article I wrote for TherapyToday.net - May 2014

Looking back, I’m astonished that it took me two major breakdowns, one in 1997 and the second in 2004, before I began having therapy. Even though, during the second episode, I was bed-ridden for nearly a year, I was prejudiced against seeing a therapist

• In the client's chair: The end of the rainbow

• by


• Rachel Kelly

• Looking back, I’m astonished that it took me two major breakdowns, one in 1997 and the second in 2004, before I began having therapy. Even though, during the second episode, I was bed-ridden for nearly a year, I was prejudiced against seeing a therapist. I thought therapy was for losers. My family motto was ‘Keep calm and carry on’; don’t make a fuss and don’t talk about your problems. Deep down, I was also frightened of what therapy might reveal. It was easier to trust my psychiatrist and his antidepressants and sleeping pills.
  
  But something changed after my second major depressive episode. I knew I needed to keep working at recovery. A history of depression makes you more likely to relapse. Subsequent episodes tend to be worse and more difficult to recover from. I needed to try to pre-empt depression and minimise the risk of its recurrence.
  
  In the end it was my psychiatrist who persuaded me. A person, unlike a pill, can listen to your story when you are well enough to tell it, and give you a fresh perspective, he said. There was a limit to what he and his prescriptions could do.
  
  But, even after accepting the need for therapy, I still thought I could bypass a therapeutic relationship. I first tried to teach myself cognitive behavioural therapy from a book. Though I made tentative steps in being able to rethink difficult situations, I remained highly anxious and dipped in and out of depression.
  
  I thought perhaps learning more about psychotherapy would help so I signed up to the Foundation Course at Regent’s College. Studying therapy was safer than having it myself. Then I realised that undergoing therapy was one of the requirements of the course. I had no choice.
  
  My tutors were persuasive about the importance of working with a therapist. We gain our sense of self from our interaction with others. Therapy is about a relationship between two people, in a room and, importantly for me, in the moment. This has become a key to my recovery: learning to stop regretting the past and worrying about the future; enjoy the present moment.
  
  It took me three tries to find the right therapist. My first therapist was sympathetic and helpful, but she lived more than an hour away and, with five small children, I couldn’t find the time to commit to seeing her. With my second, more local therapist, I was doing all the talking. This can be a good approach for some but I needed more interaction and for my therapist to actively try to help me with strategies and approaches to reverse my negative thinking.
  
  Therapist number three was recommended by a friend with similar symptoms and behaviour to mine. Sarah worked by helping me identify my feelings, root them out, classify them and investigate how they had solidified into beliefs. By acknowledging my feelings, especially those of anger, I came to accept them, and became less judgmental of myself and others in the process. Under Sarah’s supervision I would write letters to my different selves and plot maps of how I moved between them and the rules of behaviour I had created around them, many from long ago when I was an anxious child. I no longer needed to behave like that.
  
  Sarah worked with my own love of words. One of my chief consolations during my depressive episodes, along with the love of my family, was poetry. When I was well enough to concentrate, short, accessible poems pinned me in time. They also worked outside of time, connecting me to another person, sometimes centuries old, who felt the same as me. Sarah encouraged me to use poems, and added breathing as another way to stay in the moment and reduce my anxiety.
  
  She was both guide and instructor. Her aim was to encourage me to rely on myself, to trust my own feelings and ultimately become my own guide.
  
  Sarah and I ended our therapy last year, after two years. Since then, I feel I have my Black Dog on tight leash. Therapy taught me to be easier on myself, and to find a more compassionate voice. I only wish I hadn’t had to endure two breakdowns and too many wasted years before realising what an immensely powerful tool it can be in the battle against depression.

  ---

  Rachel Kelly’s memoir, Black Rainbow: how words healed me – my journey through depression, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. Its app, Black Rainbow, is available to download from the Apple app store. Visit www.black-rainbow.co.uk

How Poetry Helped - MAY 16, 2014 FROM THE COUCH BY RACHEL KELLY

Rachel Kelly draws inspiration from George Eliot this week in Kelly’s Keys to Calm.

We parted last week with reference to Rudyard Kipling’s line about meeting ‘Triumph and Disaster’ and treating those two impostors just the same: as we enter exam season, parents may find it helpful for their children who are now the most examined and tested in history. I find that talking to our five – three of them teenagers – about the stress to supposedly ‘succeed’ has helped my own sanity. When I say to them, ‘I love you for what you are, not what you can do’, the words are as relevant to me and my anxious striving friends as to them. We are not valued for the sum of our supposed achievements but for our importance as mothers, friends, wives, and daughters. When did you hear a funeral address about someone’s ascent of the greasy pole? Sorry to keep cheating by turning to those who write far better than me, but here’s George Eliot at the conclusion of Middlemarch. ‘For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’ 

Rachel Kelly is the author of ‘Black Rainbow’ her memoir of how poetry helped overcome depression, published by Hodder & Stoughton. Don’t forget she will be at the Idler Academy talking about her book on 5th June. Tickets are £20idler.co.uk and rachelkelly.co.uk

GUEST BLOG - 14th May 2014 - Changing Minds, Changing Lives

How poetry helped me recover from depression

Seventeen years ago, out of the blue, I suffered my first depressive episode: it was unlike anything I could have imagined. When I wasn’t heavily sedated I was in physical agony. I would howl like an animal, begging to be put out of my misery.

Mercifully, no-one listened. Slowly I recovered. I got back to work as a Times journalist and once again was able to look after our two small boys. I imagined I would never be ill again. But seven years later, I had a second breakdown, even worse than the first. This time, I was bed-ridden for a year.

For the last decade, I have been battling with the Black Dog. Thankfully now I seem to have the beast on a tight leash. Many different approaches have contributed to my recovery. I use antidepressants and therapy when needed, am careful what I eat, endeavor to exercise, and watch for the perfectionist tendencies that I now realise lay at the heart of both breakdowns. I wanted to be a good mother, wife, daughter and career girl. I’ve learnt to be more realistic about what I can manage.

In addition, one unusual approach has helped me enormously: the healing power of poetry. When I was first ill, it helped me articulate something of my despair. Then it provided solace and comfort and a sense that I wasn’t alone.

My mother or husband would read to me, the odd line at first, then as my concentration improved a verse. One of my favourite lines in the early days was this from Corinthians: ‘My grace is sufficient for thee; my strength is made perfect in weakness.’

When I felt at my most alone, when for whatever reason my husband or mother couldn’t be with me – either at work or in the middle of the night – I needed something to hold on to. Snatched lines from whatever I had heard, be that poetry or the bible, became mantras which I could repeat to myself in moments of fear and loneliness.

When the medication had started to take effect, and I could focus on short poems, my favorite became ‘Love’ by the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert. I found in his words the most perfect capturing of what it felt like to suffer depression.

The poem opens thus: ‘Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.’ It spoke of this inability to engage with positivity, to be in a way barred from love with which I identified. ‘Guilty of dust and sin’ accurately expressed my feeling of worthlessness, and also the sense of it being somehow my fault.

Herbert may well have been diagnosed with depression had he lived today, and his poems are only with us because he intended them for the emotional and spiritual wellbeing of others. Shortly before his death he sent them to a friend, requesting he publish them only if he believed they could ‘turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul.’ I would certainly count myself as among those dejected souls that his words have healed.

I later learnt more about the scientific evidence that poetry can help: Reading and comprehending poetry and its slight alteration of syntax has been proven to create new neural pathways. Personally, I have found that the concentration involved roots me in the moment, leaving less mental space for regrets about the past or worries about the future. This works in a similar way to certain mindfulness techniques, which require us to relax our judgmental nature while being fully alert in the present.

Consolatory poems put me in contact with a more compassionate voice, which counteracts the voice of judgment that may drown others out in moments of anxiety. For me, this is the effect of the later verses of Herbert’s poem, in which Love’s own voice accepts the speaker. This compassionate voice can often speak for you, too, when depression leaves you without your own words.

I hope my memoir Black Rainbow, as well as detailing my personal experience of the illness, gives people fresh hope about how to improve their mental health by including the 40 poems which were my friends as I recovered.

Rachel Kelly’s memoir Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me: My Journey Through Depression is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99. Its accompanying app is available for £1.49 on the Apple App Store. All author proceeds of the book and app are being given to the charities SANE and United Response.

Follow Rachel @rache_Kelly or go to www.black-rainbow.co.uk. Rachel will be speaking about the ‘Healing Power of Poetry’ at the Idler Academy on 5th June www.idler.co.uk

http://www.changingmindschanginglives.com/2014/05/how-poetry-helped-me-recover-from-depression/

How Poetry Helped - Blog in The Telegraph today - How poetry has helped me and could help you too

Rachel Kelly: How poetry helped me recover from depression

Author Rachel Kelly suffered such severe depression that she was bed-ridden for months. In Mental Health Awareness Week, she describes how poetry proved a lifeline

Rachel Kelly, author of Black Rainbows 

Tell people that you’ve written a memoir about how poetry helped you recover from depression and most look baffled. Poetry? Depression? How does that work?

But odd as it sounds, the healing power of consoling poems and prose was at the heart of my recovery from two breakdowns, or "depressive episodes" as psychiatrists prefer to call them.

The love of my family, drugs and therapy were hugely important in the battle to recover from an illness so severe that the first time I was bed-ridden for six months, the second for a year. But it’s no exaggeration to say that poetry proved a lifeline.

Though I couldn’t read during the acute stage of the illness I could listen. My mother would read to me from books of poetry or the Bible and I could manage to remember and repeat the odd line. My favourite when I was first ill was from Corinthians: "My grace is sufficient for thee; my strength is made perfect in weakness." It made sense of the suffering. I wouldn’t just recover: I’d be stronger too.

A second favourite was "But westward, look, the land is bright" from Say not the Struggle Naught Availeth by Arthur Hugh Clough, one of Churchill’s favourite poets, whom he was fond of quoting in the war. Again, I would get better. The land would once again be bright. Of course, as doctors know, believing in your own ability to recover in turn makes it more likely.

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When I was awake in the dark hours of the night, and suffering from that sense of complete isolation that is at the heart of feeling depressed, I would repeat these snatched lines to myself, prayer-like. I wasn’t alone after all.

REVIEW: Sane New World: Ruby Wax on beating depression 

It was only when the antidepressants began to work that I could concentrate on entire poems – and only short ones. I turned to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems which celebrate the healing power of nature, poems such as Pied Beauty. Nature was reaching out and grabbing me by the collar as I recovered, my mood perfectly summed up by Hopkins’s celebration of even the smallest miracles of creation. The language performed for me, rekindling my enthusiasm for words and refreshing my own stale vocabulary.

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

A poem can also provide a different narrative from the negative story in our heads. This was how I felt when I read George Herbert’s Love (III) during my first breakdown. During the first verse I felt a bolt of electricity pierce through me. All the hairs on my arm stood on end. It was the first time that had happened in a while.

Love bade me welcome,

But my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin,

But sweet-eyed love, observing me grow slack,

Did welcome me in.

Yes: my soul had been drawing back. Yes: I needed love to bid me welcome. The idea that my soul was "guilty of dust and sin" seemed the most perfect description of the depressive illness. The poem pinpointed a sense of guilt that I should be depressed while blessed with a loving home and husband, something I had not previously acknowledged. Herbert’s words were bursting through the clouds of my mind. It seemed we had been to the same place and spoke the same language, albeit that his visit was centuries ago. I had found a companion on my journey.

I’m not the first to derive comfort from poetry. Apollo was the god of poetry as well of medicine. In 1751 Benjamin Franklin founded the first American hospital, the Pennsylvania Hospital, where reading and creative writing were among the treatments prescribed for mental illness. Freud, Adler, Jung and others recognised the healing power of words, and this led to the 1969 founding of the Association of Poetry Therapy.

READ: GPs to prescribe library books to combat anxiety, depression and relationship problems

Nowadays, figures in the literary and philosophical worlds advocate their own brands of healing words. Alain de Botton's The School of Life has recently begun courses in mindfulness and poetry. William Sieghart, the founder of the Forward Poetry Prize, invites audience members at literary festivals to request "Poetry Prescriptions" to suit their specific emotional and psychological needs. As Boris the bard, endorsing the importance of poetry, humorously suggests, "There is no known disaster, That poetry can’t master."

There’s even some scientific evidence that poetry changes the way we think. The arrangement of poetry, even the clearest, has different conventions to continuous prose. This presents enough of a challenge to get our brains working differently. Research by Philip Davis and the neuroscience department of Liverpool University discovered that readers of Shakespeare, when they came across an unusual but totally comprehensible grammatical construction, would show a spike in neural activity. Even though the readers understood what was being said, their brains were shocked into activity. The requirement to concentrate in the moment helped me stop regretting the past and fearing the future in the negative mental spiral characteristic of depression.

In this way, poetry can work in a similar way to mindfulness, forcing us into the present. Robert Frost, demonstrating my point perfectly, put it far better when he said a poem can be a ‘momentary stay against confusion.

Black Rainbow, my memoir about how poetry helped me recover from depression, began life as a series of poetry recommendations to friends. They knew what I had been through and asked for poems I thought could help them in times of need. With the book’s publication, readers have been sending me the poems and prose that have helped them. Soon perhaps I won’t need to explain that poems can be as good as pills in helping you recover.

Rachel Kelly’s memoir about how poetry helped her recover from depression, Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me – my journey through depression’ is published by Yellow Kite Books, a subsidiary of Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99. All author proceeds are going to the charities SANE and United Response.

Rachel Kelly: How poetry helped me recover from depression Author Rachel Kelly suffered such severe depression that she was bed-ridden for months. In Mental Health Awareness Week, she describes how poetry proved a lifeline Rachel Kelly, author of Black Rainbows

How Words Helped - MAY 9, 2014 FROM THE COUCH BY RACHEL KELLY

Local author and journalist Rachel Kelly explains how words can help an anxious mind in Kelly’s keys to calm.

Time for a new device for your mental health toolkit after more general blogs about anger and acceptance. So … try learning two or three healing sayings which you can repeat like mantras. My favourites this week are: “This too will pass”, (from the Bible – Corinthians) “My strength is made perfect in weakness” (ditto) and “But westward, look, the land is bright” – Churchill’s favourite line in the war, by the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. Healing words can help your hurting mind – there’s proof from the neuroscientists, trust me (for another week). Apollo was the God of poetry as well as medicine. Keep reciting these phrases when you feel all hope is spent or that you will never recover. You will get better. One last favourite this week is particularly helping me: I’ve just launched my memoir about how poetry in particular helped me recover from depression and of course am anxious as to its fate. So thank goodness for Mr Kipling. ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same.’ Very good for a first-time author but I hope helpful for you too, whatever challenges you are facing this week.

Kelly is the author of ‘Black Rainbow’ her memoir of how poetry helped overcome depression, published by Hodder & Stoughton. She will be at the Idler Academy talking about her book on 5th June. Tickets are £20 idler.co.uk   rachelkelly.co.uk

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GUEST BLOG - 7th May 2014 - Juliet Barclay

I met Juliet at a #healingwords workshop in Maidenhead for Depression Alliance. Here are her thoughts on the benefit of poetry for those suffering and recovering from depression.

It can be hard to read when you’re depressed. In fact, it can be hard to do anything at all. The effects of the illness range from rank terror accompanied by strong physical symptoms, to a deadening misery that feels as though you’re wading through chilled molasses. When in extremis, all you can do is rest, but when the fog begins to lift a little it can be enormously healing to focus on words, and particularly on poetry.

Reading poems, or having them read aloud to you, can do much to arrest the pernicious spiral of negative thought that characterises depression. Both the pleasure of well-chosen words, and the images and messages they conjure up, have the power to derail depressing reflections.

Those of us who grapple with the tedium, frustration and despair of this horrible illness know how useful it can be to reconnect with the present moment and achieve some sort of perspective in the midst of the mental maelstrom. Powerfully descriptive poetry can sweep you out of reach of the Scylla and Charybdis of negativity and rumination. It can pilot you into the calm waters of delicious fantasy or heightened reality – or even amusement, for depressives usually manage to retain their senses of humour, even though their usual responsiveness may temporarily be dimmed by anxiety or unhappiness.

Poetry is a marvellous addition to one’s mental toolkit; it’s useful to learn verses that capture your imagination and give you pleasure, for there’s nothing quite like the way they bubble up at the right moments to provide solace, enjoyment or the intensification of feeling that comes when remembered words underline and heighten one’s present experience. In dark and difficult times you can travel numerous word-paths to relief and delight.

You can become lost in fantasy:

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.

She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone

On the fore-finger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep.

Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut

Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.

Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs,

The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,

The traces of the smallest spider’s web,

The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams…

You can be transported to distant climes:

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory,

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

You could be encouraged to continue to plough what can feel like a lonely furrow, until you are joined in it by the poet:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

You may be brought vividly into contact with the ecstasy of reality:

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes…

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting…

Sometimes you have an electrifying realisation of your self:

I celebrate myself and sing myself…

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems…

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either…

You might be amused and revolted by a rollicking historical rhyme:

Corinna wakes. A dreadful Sight!

Behold the Ruins of the Night!

The Crystal Eye, alas, was miss’t;

And Puss had on her Plumpers p---t.

Or gloriously challenged by the beauties of nature:

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day…

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Or be wryly amused:

You cannot hope

to bribe or twist,

thank God! the

British journalist.

But, seeing what

the man will do

unbribed, there’s

no occasion to.

And whether or not you have read, you can also write. There are few creative consolations so powerful as that of savouring your own well-chosen words assembled like a pleasing jigsaw on the page. If you can muster the energy, the very attempt connects you with a mindful concentration that dispels the darkness of depression and reminds you of your own intrinsic characteristics, and power, and identity:

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

Quotations from:

Romeo & Juliet, Act I Scene IV, by William Shakespeare

Cargoes by John Masefield

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Song of Myself by Walt Whitman

A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed by Jonathan Swift

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

The British Journalist by Humbert Wolfe

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

GUEST BLOG - 6th May 2014 - Culture Whisper Website

Whispers of the day

RACHEL KELLY'S CULTURAL DIARY

We’re constantly told to view art as therapy, but what does this actually mean?

The modish tenet is more than just media-speak or psychobabble, as journalist and mental health campaigner Rachel Kelly attests in her beautiful, devastating new memoir.

Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me  charts Kelly’s journey through cataclysmic depression and out again, whilst anthologising the poems that got her to the other side. It was poetry, she describes, that gave her shelter, comfort and that stopped the sky from falling in. 

With Black Rainbow hot off the press, (we urge you to read it; it’s exquisite) the writer and mother fills us in on her cultural highlights this summer.

Exhibition: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice: Veronese  National Gallery, until 15 June 14

It has to be the Veronese exhibition at the National. For the connoisseur and the casual enthusiast alike, this is an indulgent treat. The pieces have been flown in from galleries all over the world, and seeing them all together in this fashion is probably a once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity. 

Festival: The Anxiety Arts Festival London, June

This festival will be sponsoring a variety of events, taking place all over London for the duration of June. Their programme promises to be a fun, intelligent and accessible way of raising mental health awareness. 

Theatre: The Francis Bacon Opera  at the National Portrait Gallery Late Shift, 9 May 2014, 18:30. 

I first heard about this idiosyncratic short opera from friends who love the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s a transcript of Melvyn Bragg’s famous interview with the boozy artist set to music by Stephen Crowe. I’m excited to see it in a gallery environment! 

Gig: Kate Bush at the Hammersmith Apollo, 26 August – 1 October.

Need I say more? 

Literary Event: The Healing Power of Poetry with Rachel Kelly at the Idler Academy, June 5.

I know it’s rather cheeky to push one of my own events, but I really think this will be a winner! In discussion with Victoria Hull from the Idler, I will be giving tips on how you can use poetry to help you through everyday trials, as well as a salve for deeper troubles. I recommend this to anyone with a love of poetry or an interest in mental health issues.  

Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me was published by Hodder 24 April 2014

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