alisonhankinson

Voices of Whittingham….Past lives in an Asylum.

This is again for mental health awareness week. I spent some time today at the archives in Preston. I am currently participating in a local history/arts/creative writing/mental health project. It is based around the Whittingham Asylum at Preston and it aims to give a voice to the lives and stories that played out there. It was a very large Asylum and Preston was very proud of it, there were about 500 staff and often as many as 3000 inpatients.

Whittingham Lives Project.

I have learned a lot in such a few sessions and certainly had some of my own assumptions challenged. The Asylum opened in 1873 and had patients sent there from all over the north-west of England, many of the other Asylums, workhouses, almshouses were already bursting at the seams. It was regarded as a model Asylum and postcards of its external facade were sold as memorabilia. There were extensive gardens where fruit and vegetables were grown and it even had its own orchestra. Underneath this facade still lurked the very real horrors of Victorian poverty and the mental health of a scarred nation. End-stage syphilis was one of the significant causes of the mental and psychotic decline that resulted in many people spending their end of days in the Asylum and in the period of World War 1, both shell-shock and a form of hydrocephalus resulting from the Spanish flu were responsible for increased demand for spaces and places within the Asylum. The superintendent’s journal from 1873-95 was stark to begin with detailing the very worst events including the frequent dismissals of staff for what can only be described as physical abuse of the inpatients and the frequent outbreaks of scarlatina, diarrhoea and typhoid, whilst rules and regulations resulted in greater detail in later entries, including the deaths from misadventure, poor health and at their own hand.

The Asylum had its own cemetery. People came and went though, it wasn’t always the end of the road and when the photographer that came to capture the newly admitted, those well enough would ask to have images taken to show they were well and recovered to send to their loved ones with the plea to come and take them away.

Today we were considering restraint, emotional, physical and chemical.

I wrote this for Charlotte.

In Chains

Into the light, beyond the bands that bind me tight,

Into the dawn, beneath the hands that hold me down,

Into the sunlight, the stench of starch and sulphur stings my eyes

Into the madness, my muddled mind festers in fetid fettered manacles.

Deliver me.

Mental health Awareness Week 2018- Procrastination

Thirty-three things to do

Each one causing stress

If only I could get off my butt

Step up and procrastinate less.

Procrastination- the action of delaying or postponing something usually related to depression, anxiety or psychological distress.

Just a moment…

Each moment is distinct

it may or may not relate to the preceding moment

it may or may not be followed by a moment of equal or even greater magnitude

it is what it is- a moment.

It will pass

It will be superseded

It will be vanquished, resurrected, redefined, it will shine redolent as the star in its own story

And then be gone….to make way for the next moment.

Always remember this.

It is but a moment.

unremarkable yet remarkable

It will pass.

I first published this in 2018 for Mental health Awareness week, but have made some small edits. It was World Suicide Prevention Day on Sunday 10th September. Suicide has a profound impact on all whom are touched by it, and I certainly don’t have any answers, but I know in my heart of hearts that what looks just so in one moment, can look entirely different in the next moment.

I think this is what I was trying to capture.

This is for Open Link Night at d’Verse.

The day we fell….

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,

We remember them each and everyone, every year, it is our duty

We solemnly speak their names, we treasure their memories in our hallowed halls

We honour their fate on memorials and museum walls.

Kick back, flashlight, night flare

We are back there

I do solemnly swear to bring honour and bear witness

To my country but he is missing in action.

tap tap….clack clack…. frack frack

I scour the wall of missing people.

©Alison Jean Hankinson

First line taken from For the Fallen- by Laurence Binyon. Last line taken from “Leaving time” Jodi Picoult. For Bridging the Gap at d’Verse.

Identifying stressors in our lives.

In the US mental health awareness month has been celebrated in May since 1949, and here in the UK we have our Mental Health Awareness week this next week May 14th-20th. The theme this year is stress.

For most of us stress is a part of our everyday lives, and there are stressors that are positive and stressors that are negative. Whilst stress can contribute and exacerbate many physical and mental health problems it is not the only feature or factor.

Mental Health Org UK

I think we can all define stress in different ways, and whilst it clearly exists as some form of human alarm system it does have a necessary function and purpose. In NZ during my time as a High School Teacher I ensured that mental health, resilience and stress were all covered within the mainstream curriculum to ensure that students had the opportunity to explore key themes and concepts and to identify strategies to help them recognise stressors and deal with them appropriately.

I look at our students today and think that stress is indeed a pervasive feature of their lives and I worry for them as a generation.

Anything can act as a stressor, it can be an event, something environmental, something physical, even a thought, so, for example, someone who sweats (physical) excessively might find being in a warm room stressful. (Physical and environmental). A lot of the information out there seems to focus on the impact that stress can have on a person’s well-being and I wanted to focus more about how we can learn to identify our own stressors and manage them.

Ironically I would initially encourage students to use a really simple technique that I use in the classroom daily when encouraging students to be independent learners, a simple Questioning approach that can help us identify what a problem is, and in a sense begin to search for a helpful solution. It is the 3W’s and an H. What, When, Why?

What? : What is the source of the stress? What is the stressor? What is it that is causing the “unease”?
When? When does this make me feel stressed? Is it all the time, or just now?
Why? Why is this making me feel stressed/uneasy?
How? How can I deal with this stressor and minimise any unease in the most practical positive and useful way? Try to think of at least 3 things here….Magic 3.

So what does that actually look like-

Student A-

1. What– the stressor is an assignment deadline.

2. When-I generally feel stressed by deadlines especially when there are many of them close together.

3. Why– I feel stressed because I don’t feel that I have the time or organisational skills to manage the deadlines well and get things completed and this the makes me feel inadequate.

4. How– a) I could create a work plan to manage my assignment workload.

b) I could talk to someone relevant about the deadlines, workload, and stressors.

c) I could eat biscuits and worry and procrastinate and do nothing.

I feel that this is just a starting point and I have been student A many times in my life and probably done all three possible solutions.

The solutions themselves might bring additional stressors- I don’t know how to create a work plan…. I don’t know who to talk too….but at least we have a starting point.

So next time I will move on to how to approach a stressor in a pragmatic manner. (unfortunately, this isn’t eating all the biscuits….)

©Alison Jean Hankinson

I don’t belong to you…the voice of a lover crossed.

I don’t belong to you

I never did

I was just a borrowed shirt

An accessory of sorts

To compliment your crass existence

I wasn’t yours to own.

We danced all night, our bodies entwined

It was love at first sight,

We belonged together forever.

But at the end of the night

You were gone.

I was alone.

Do you want jam with your toast?

I prefer eggs she thought.

Is this my life I see before me?

Always him before me, and he can’t even see

Always sugar in tea, no chance to be free

No room for me.

I had his head on a platter

Silver ornate, shiny no blood spatter

It was the only way to win you see

I got to be loved and adored

Play the field, chair the board

And still be me.

©Alison Jean Hankinson

Learning still…

To know the sound of a robin or a pukeko call

To see a sycamore whizzer and collect conkers at fall

And to know that inspite of it all

I know nothing.

I was given eyes to enjoy the sunset at eve

Ears to hear the geese call as they leave

And I know I can smell a storm on the breeze

and yet I know nothing.

I know for sure the road is long and winding still

And that whatever the weather we must do what we will

To better the lives of others with our goodwill

And still I know nothing.

As each day passes by of this I am sure

There are interesting things and I need to learn more

There will always be a wonderful allure

To learning still.

This is for d”verse poetics.

Puddled

Some days I have brain fog, it is part of my illness or disease-puddled,

it is like swimming in porridge and I can see things clear as mud.

In the muddle

my life is befuddled

As I try to unriddle

my addled mind.

For d”verse quadrille on “Muddled”

A little bit of light-heartedness. I suspect the answer is a relaxing cream tea somewhere…..

A moment of clarity.

I can’t do everything

Sometimes to fight battles on all fronts is a futile endeavour

I need to cut loose.

Fifteen years on…

Fifteen years ago we were at a child’s birthday party in the Church hall at Bride with our girls, when Dave revealed that he had received in the post that morning compulsory call- out papers to serve in Iraq. It was completely unexpected, he was a serving member of the Territorial Army but we had always been assured that they would never serve in an active Theatre of War, and yet here we were and my then 41-year-old husband was given less than a month to sort his affairs out before being whisked away at the end of May to Basra Palace.

We had only just moved to the Isle of Man with our girls and the whole situation was like some complete nightmare and it was a day full of sadness and grief, and as the children played party games I spent most of my time crying quietly in the corner. In so many ways that moment, that letter, that situation changed our lives forever, and in a sense, I think even at that moment we knew that things would never really be the same.

In fact it almost feels like fifteen years on, we are only just beginning to put it all behind us, the path it sent us down was not an unhappy path but it was a path that was less travelled and it is only now that we find ourselves walking back to the crossroads in an attempt to rediscover some of the life and lives we left behind.

This weekend the sun shines. We have taken a road trip to Harrogate to spend a night at the Old Swan Hotel. A beautiful place that used to be called the Harrogate Hydropathic and is infamous for providing Agatha Christie with a safe haven during a troubled part of her life in 1926. Unbelievably we have been given the room she stayed in as our room for the evening and I feel very privileged.

We stopped off in Skipton on the way through and enjoyed watching the Tour De Yorkshire. They were also celebrating down on the canal and the Accrington pipe band put on a splendid performance and they must have been sweltering in their uniforms. The canal barges looked inviting and the post-industrial landscape told a story of reinvention and rejuvenation.

We came to Skipton quite a few times before the girls were born, we even used it as a stepping stone and caught the train to Leeds a few times when I was having my IVF treatment there in 1998. So it is a place of memories, the last visit the girls were about 2 and in the double buggy, we stopped at what was Woolworths and bought Ellen a toy Jake from the Tweenies and Emily a Mopatop. I think she still has Mopatop, but Jake got lost in the Mcdonalds at Llandudno junction in about 2001.

After Skipton, we drove on to Harrogate where we are staying at The Old Swan Hotel. What a joy, it has its own character and sense of self and here we find ourselves in room 253 which was the room that Agatha Christie stayed in for 11 days in December 1926 when she went missing. It feels a little like serendipity, it has been a dark and deep week and the cracks have been showing and I could happily have disappeared myself on Wednesday and if I had found myself here I am sure it would have been a positive and healing thing to have done. I would like to think that she may have found this too. She divorced the following year and rumours about her mental state at the time of the missing 11 days vary from the concept that she was suicidal, or in a fugue state, to the fact that she was making it difficult for her husband to continue with his affair and he claimed she had amnesia following a car accident. I guess no one really knows. I hope she found peace here. The room doesn’t feel tormented so perhaps she did.