Edward Elgar and His Dances for Lunatics
There is a tradition of naming hospital wards after famous people associated with the local area. For example, Shelton Hospital in Shrewsbury, where I trained as a mental health nurse, had a Housman ward. Although the poet A E Housman was from Worcestershire, his best-known work is his collection of poems A Shropshire Lad so it was fitting that the former Shropshire and Montgomery County Asylum should commemorate the poet. Likewise, when the city of Worcester opened an impressive new psychiatric inpatient unit to replace its Victorian mental hospital, it named part of the building The Elgar Unit, after the celebrated composer.
The use of Elgarâs name is more than simply decorative, however. Not only was Edward Elgar born in Worcestershire but he had a deep connection with the history of mental health care in the area (de Young, 2015). As a young violinist, the man who would later compose the Enigma Variations and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches played in concerts at Powick Hospital (or, as it was known then, the Worcester County and City Lunatic Asylum.)
The County Asylum Act of 1845 had required local authorities to construct and manage their own accommodation for âpauper lunaticsâ. By the late 19th century, towns and cities throughout England and Wales had, on their outskirts, asylums staffed not by nurses but by attendants. Hospitals like Powick and Shelton were self-contained institutions, almost self-sufficient communities, producing their own food, having kitchens, laundries, chapels, dance halls and cricket pavilions on site. They often boasted their own orchestral bands and sports teams made up of patients and attendants and it was seen as an advantage, when recruiting staff, that they should be able to play a musical instrument or be good at sports.
Worcesterâs asylum was particularly fortunate to have young Mr Elgar as a neighbour. Lacking the funds to travel abroad to study music at a conservatoire he, instead, chose to serve his musical apprenticeship in the asylum band. By the age of 22 he had taken up the post of bandmaster and was composing polkas and minuets to be performed every Friday evening at dances organised for the entertainment of the patients. This, of course, was not music therapy , in the modern meaning of the term, nor was it dance therapy , but Elgarâs specially-composed Dances for Worcester City and County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, performed by patients and attendants, show a connection which is central to this book. Music and dance in a mental hospital â a connection between creativity, wellbeing and mental health.
About This Book
This book is all about connections. As the title makes obvious, it is about the connections between creativity, wellbeing and mental health practice, but it is also about the connections between mental health and the creative arts, between patients and poets, between asylum attendants and mental health nurses. It is about the connections between the wellbeing of service users and the wellbeing of service providers, between artistic temperament and madness, between me the writer and you the reader.
In Creativity, wellbeing and mental health practice, creativity and mental health are examined from several perspectives, considering the notion of creativity and its interaction with the creative arts and caring interventions. In this book I invite mental health nurses and other practitioners to reflect on how creativity can be applied in practice and how mental health care might be considered a creative activity in itself.
Along with providing a new model for creative mental health care this book also clarifies what is understood by the term wellbeing. It provides a framework for readers to make sense of this concept and makes recommendations about how it can influence practice. It argues that a clearer understanding of both creativity and wellbeing can help transform mental health services â for service users, for carers and for the providers of care themselves.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nurse
I mentioned earlier that, as a mental health nursing student, I worked on Housman ward at Shelton Hospital. I was born and brought up in Shrewsbury and so, unlike Housman, I really was a Shropshire lad. While I enjoyed my time on the inpatient wards, and learnt a great deal, I felt more at home in the day hospital where I discovered there were art therapists and occupational therapists (OTs). There, I was encouraged to share my interest in music with service users and was allowed to experiment with running improvisational music-making sessions in the art therapy room. These provided a prototype for the Music Workshop Project that I developed later, (and which is discussed in detail in Chap. 6).
Alongside my longstanding interest in music â playing guitar, songwriting, improvising â my other passion was for writing and literature. I found an outlet for this by helping to facilitate therapeutic creative writing groups (see Chap. 7) and by writing about mental health. In some ways, I have led a kind of double-life as, throughout three decades of working as a nurse, I was also a writer, contributing to nursing journals and other publications. This parallel career began when my wife and I lived in a house in the grounds of Powick Hospital, just a few years before it closed ⊠and a hundred years after Elgar had conducted its asylum orchestra.
Why This Book and Why Now?
Not far from the site of Powick Hospital (now a housing estate) is a large field that is frequently used for car boot sales. My mother-in-law is a car boot sale addict and so, one Sunday, I found myself browsing through the bric-a-brac and old books haphazardly covering the trestle tables. Here I came across a book called Reflections on Community Psychiatric Nursing which I had written several years ago (Gillam, 2002). For any author, finding oneâs own book in a charity shop or at a car boot sale provokes a mixture of feelings. First, the shock of recognition, then a sadness that it has come to this, and a forlorn resignation that the book is no longer considered useful, relevant or valuable to the original owner.
I picked up the well-worn paperback. âAny good?â I asked the woman behind the table, who looked hopeful of a sale.
âOh, that? Well, I found it really useful when I was doing my nurse training,â she said.
Well, that was some consolation. What I realised, though, was that this was natureâs way of telling me it was about time I wrote a new book.
For years, I had been having conversations, writing articles, running conference workshops promoting the benefits of using creative approaches in mental health, facili...