LORNA Collins has a remarkable story to tell even if she cannot remember it all.
She remembers nothing, for example, of her childhood or her passion for horses; or of the accident that left her unresponsive and in a coma when she fell from her mount; or the helicopter airlift to an intensive care unit where she was to spend several days on a ventilator.
In fact, the first thing she remembers clearly is not being able to remember. Her memories of the subsequent 20-year period in hospitals across England and France are sketchy at times but they are characterised by one disconcerting thing.
“During the depths of my illness, I found no one was listening to me. They were medicating me, so I was sedated six or seven times a day but I had nothing; they took everything away from me,” she said.
In truth, not quite everything was taken away because what she still had access to were paints and pencils; she would lie on the floor of her room “scribbling and painting” to pass the long hours. That was what helped her stay alive, she explains, with no trace of exaggeration.
“Having the capacity to express myself using words and colours, it was as though the words and colours were holding my darkness and misery, so I could then somehow feel relieved and continue. It’s hard to express that now in words even though that’s what, at the time, it was doing.
“I found I could load the art materials with the hard things about myself and the torment I was experiencing. They could express what I couldn’t do in real life because no one was listening to me, and I didn’t know how to verbalise it anyway. Over the years, I just couldn’t stop making stuff,” she said.
Dr Collins – today she has a PhD from Cambridge and works with the NHS and the Royal College of Psychiatrists to help those with eating disorders from which she also suffered – was in Jersey last month to speak at the Harbour Gallery to pass on some of her experiences to enrich the gallery’s own community support sessions in the arts.
She says it is a huge honour to come to the Island to talk not just of her academic achievements but about the impact of creativity which has been truly transformational in her life.
“It’s as if that experience is empowering, as opposed to making me vulnerable. That’s a huge shift because all my life it’s been the opposite of that – my mental illness and physical difficulties with the brain injuries have been limiting me and making me unable to do things.
“I remember a doctor saying to me: ‘you are disabled by your conditions’. Now it’s the opposite: I am enabled and I’m doing things I never dreamed of doing,” she said.
Dr Collins’ upbeat enthusiasm for life is reinforced by the bold design of her T-shirt. Bearing the legend “a creative transformation”, you might perhaps think it showed a clown’s face, though it could equally be an abstract design intended to raise the spirits in much the same way. It is neither: it is a scan of her damaged brain, emphasising as clearly as you could wish the fascinating relationship between the creative and mental faculties.
The day on which that relationship became clear to her is one thing she can remember clearly. A doctor was passing her room in hospital and looked at one of the pictures she had created of the hallucinations she was experiencing at the time.
“He said: ‘I can see your experience in this picture’. It was the first time someone had connected with me through my artworks. He had actually diagnosed me, then medicated me and treated me by looking at that picture.
“He gave me a diagnosis of schizo-affective disorder which at the time was correct – it was basically a combination of schizophrenia and depression because I had psychosis, hallucinations and I was also very depressed. He read my diagnosis through looking at the picture, and then he gave me a new medication which was helpful. At the time it was essential,” she recalled.
Later, she was given a recovery programme which incorporated art into her treatment. Painting and writing became a means to channel negative responses to her symptoms, and she found that she was at her best when allowed to express herself through art. Remarkably, painting was actually added to the list of her regular medication.
Today the notion of social prescribing – introducing people to activities, groups, and services in their community that might positively affect their health and wellbeing – is becoming an increasingly recognised feature of health care, with pilot schemes run here in Jersey. But, at that time, the link between health and creativity was a personal discovery for Dr Collins.
“It was a fundamental moment for me because I realised my painting could help me get well. It took many more years before I did get well, and now I have made a full recovery from some of my conditions. I had a very severe eating disorder and I don’t have that any more, and I had depression and I don’t have that either.
“I’m left with some remaining issues because I have a brain which has been damaged and will always be damaged but I still live well. For me, recovery is not an absence of symptoms, it is learning to live well with symptoms, which is something I advocate in my work.
“I still have hallucinations and I still have experiences no one else has but I personally think that’s the most interesting thing about me. Who wants to be normal?,” she asked.
Years after making the discovery of the link between wellbeing and creativity, Dr Collins says she is doing everything she wants to do in her life, even if she recognises that, like everyone else, she still has to deal with her mental health.
She treats her hallucinations quite differently for they are “like beacons that illuminate parts of my life that I still need to attend to”.
“I can always respond to them creatively, as opposed to disruptively. My artworks enable me to deal with my experiences in a positive, life-affirming way which I can build my life on,” she said.
But what is it about those works that makes them so potent a tool when it comes to living with the challenges that have characterised Dr Collins’ adult life?
“When I felt that no one was listening to me or believing me, I felt that if I pictured it physically on paper then people might take me more seriously. Now, in my practice as an artist, one reason why I write so much and paint my hallucinations is that it turns a subjective experience which is unavailable to anyone else into a physical thing that I can share with other people; and that helps me understand, process and move on.
“It changes things from one level of reality to another. I’m now working with patients with psychosis and brain damage, and researchers and clinicians in a research project. It’s nice having insights which really helped me,” she explained.
Those insights are to be the subject of a documentary which is currently being made by Lasse Johansson, a Swedish film maker who has a particular interest in the stories of those whose voices might remain unheard. While Dr Collins was at the Harbour Gallery, a film crew visited the Island to capture some of her work with groups in Jersey.
She can barely conceal her excitement about the project, which chronicles not only the extraordinary part that the arts have played in her recovery but also the internal processes involved in trying to reconstruct those early experiences so mysteriously lost in the accident, the parts of her life that– as she puts it – “all fell to bits”.
“The film is about me trying to piece together the life I lost before the head injury, and it’s also about who I have become now and what I have made of my life. Although I lost everything, I have become metaphorically bigger than I was before.
“I am so glad – I no longer want to be that person I don’t remember being.”
