Clarissa

Clarissa is a new collection of poems, together with a prose account. The publisher, chipmunkapublishing is unique because it aims to give people with mental ill health - and their carers - a voice. Mental illness affects one in four, or even one in three of the population of the UK at some time or other in their lives. Severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, blights the lives of young people and devastates their families. One estimate says it has killed the potential of more young people than the two world wars put together.

It could be you. It could be a son or daughter - please God, no! But suppose it is? Who cares? Who will help?

These poems highlight some of the loneliness and loss, the confusion and the groping for solutions which everyone going through major trauma experiences. Clarissa offers a unique insight into a troubled mind. Best selling writer Terry Pratchett, diagnosed with Altzheimer's, contrasted the positive approach we take towards cancer "fighting with cancer" with the negative attitudes we show towards mental ill health. It was exactly that difference that made me write these poems. Here is one on that theme:

                    This mystery which kills not life but function

                    I could refuse recovery, the scar
                    instead of breast, the mutilating knife
                    and let this cancer eat away my life
                    and break no law. They would persuade – no more.

                    From her we force consent. Officialdom
                    invades her home – may even axe her door
                    and drag her down the windswept corridor,
                    detain, confine. I may choose radium,

                    the hope of healing. We force her to agree
                    to jags in flesh and muscle which dispel
                    delusion, incapacitate and dull
                    as much as the disease – this mystery

                    which kills not life but function. The core
                    defies discovery – as does the cure.