interviews

dolly sen

WORDS

Interviews

My interview with the Open University about creativity and mental health

ROBERT TEED'S ARTICLE ABOUT ME

We hear a lot these days about the power of creativity. When even a multinational electronics company uses the exhortation ‘Go Create’, it’s not surprising that the currency of creativity starts to feel somehow devalued. But we should remember that the act of creating something is a powerful, almost magical, thing.
Dolly Sen is a woman who has used the power of creativity to transform her life. Now 36, Sen is - amongst many other things - a writer, performer, poet and film-maker, and has just published her second book of memoirs, Am I Still Laughing? (Chipmunka Press). This rich creative life, however, is only a recent transformation; and it has been achieved against the odds, for Sen continues to share her mental stage with the severe mental health problems that have accompanied her since her first psychotic experience aged 14.
Following on from The World is Full of Laughter, Sen’s first book of memoirs that ‘started out as a possible suicide note and ended up as a celebration of life’, Am I Still Laughing? is a heartfelt cry for the better understanding of ‘the mad’. It is also in turn funny, moving, wonderfully poetic, savage and satirical.
Sen meets me to talk about life, art and madness in a Camberwell café close to where she works voluntarily as a key member of Creative Routes, a mental health charity run by, and for, the survivors of the mental health system. In the words of their publicity, Creative Routes ‘aims to dissolve the stigma of mental illness by encouraging the unique creativity of mad people’.
So is it good to get back that word ‘mad’? ‘We realised that taking back language has empowered the gay and black movements’, Sen notes. ‘We wanted to do the same, to reappropriate the experience of being mad. Madness is not just a biochemical thing’. This philosophy has not been without problems. Creative Routes has had complaints from those who don’t want to be labelled ‘mad’ – ‘those complaints are usually from people early on in their psychiatric career’, Sen adds wryly.
It seems right that Sen has found a haven in Creative Routes, given that creativity has in a way been her salvation. As she writes in Am I Still Laughing? ‘During my worst depressions, writing gave me a reason to wake up in the morning… Creativity for me was not only a personal expression but a way to connect with the universe and to light its dark corners’.
Sen is adamant that her creativity and her madness ‘really are intermingled’: ‘When I’m writing poetry I have a voice that dictates the poem. I’m just a typist, really’. She gives me a look, and smiles: ‘I do edit it, though’. Sen’s poems (a recent collection, Eccentric Fish, is also published by Chipmunka) are dazzlingly direct, evoking experiences of psychosis that are both chillingly immediate and intensely lyrical. ‘I only write poems about love and madness’, Sen jokes self-deprecatingly.
Talking to Sen one gains the impression of a woman totally in control of her life, dynamically driving it forward with creative project after creative project (poetry, documentary making, performance, playwrighting, filmmaking, publishing, appearing on Radio 4’s ‘Between Ourselves’ – the list really does seem to go on and on). So it is a shock to be reminded that Sen’s madness holds her constantly in thrall, that ‘the beautiful flower that is psychosis’ might bloom at any moment.
Sen’s ‘wobbles’, as she calls them, might manifest themselves in early morning wakings to find herself ‘in a schizophrenic experience.’ In the past such wakings would have left Sen stuck helpless in her flat for days, but years of practising Buddhism and skills more recently acquired through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy mean that Sen is increasingly able to combat these experiences – ‘I’m able to flip it,’ she says. ‘For example, if I’m too paranoid to leave the house I can say, “It’s better to go out than stay in here like this”.’ She makes it sound easy, but it has taken her ten years to learn this strength of will.
Sen’s early years were dominated by abuse and mental distress, and she had her first psychotic experience aged 14. For the next 7 years her life was ‘awful’, dominated by madness (psychosis, paranoia, not speaking, self harm, suicidal urges). Then came a sort of deliverance through poetry – ‘I started reading the Beat poets – they were so different from the white middle class English writers I knew – they really inspired me, and things started to change.’
Even so it was a long, slow haul. And it took Sen to the brink of murdering her alcoholic, abusive father before she discovered that there was another path that she could choose to her life ‘now that suicide or homicide was no longer a lifestyle choice’, as she disarmingly puts it in The World is Full of Laughter. And so, taking encouragement from the Beats (‘Charles Bukowski, Henry Rollins and Jack Kerouac taught me that I can write my life any way I like’), Sen set about creating art from her life.
‘I think that because I don’t put my energies into hallucinations and delusions’, Sen reflects, ‘that that energy needs to go somewhere – into creativity, into comedy, into poetry, somewhere. I’ve turned from being a negative person to being a more positive person and my anger’s not there any more – the madness is still there, but not the anger.’
It has become a cliché to talk of people with ‘vision’, but for Sen that word is actually appropriate. ‘I feel like there’s two realities’, she admits. ‘I’m a bi-realitist – it’s my reality, not other people’s. I realise most people don’t think the way I do’. And like her fellow South London visionary William Blake, who saw an angel in a tree on Peckham Rye, she does see things. ‘I might be walking down the street and see the lollipop lady has angel wings’.
There is much for others to learn from Dolly Sen’s journey through life – how creativity really can rescue you, how positive self-belief can sustain you through even your darkest hours. As she writes in Am I Still Laughing: ‘Whatever you do, it feeds the next moment. Negativity breeds more negativity; positivity fuels more positivity… But there are always chances, apertures of light and guidance, if you keep your eyes open’.

Interview with Sunday Times