Putting experiences in writing can be a powerful therapeutic tool, no matter how horrific or mundane they are.
“An amazing thing happens when somebody who’s mentally ill gets a chance to express her emotions, to slow down, to organize what’s happening,” says Sheila Dowd, a licensed clinical psychologist at Rush University Medical Center.
Writing can provide “an incredible sense of accomplishment” and tangible help when a mood is changing or stress is building, she says.
Travis Oliver, a case manager at Community Counseling Centers of Chicago (C4) who runs a writing group as part of patient therapy, sees putting pen to paper as a door that a mentally ill person might have kept slammed shut.
“It gives them an opportunity to let it out,” Oliver says of hurts or trauma. “It might have happened a long time ago, but they now can process as an adult and think about how they’re dealing with certain situations.”
He tells clients there’s no pressure, no one to judge what’s written.
“It helps give them a voice. We all have stories, and they can say, ‘Wow, I’m not the only one that experienced that.’ They could touch someone,” Oliver says.
Trying to move out from the shadows of mental illness led visitors to a C4 drop-in center on North Broadway in Chicago to start their own writing group. They call it Silent Voices.
In just a few months, the attendees, who vary in number from week to week and have no clinical leadership, have started a blog and organized a fundraiser in pursuit of a very specific goal: to publish an anthology.
Their essays, poems and narratives are achingly personal and fiercely important to them. Here are the stories of three authors and some excerpts of their work:
Kelly Greenwood, 31
A silenced voice is as useful
As a lead balloon
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Heavy on the heart
Like heaven it weighs a ton …
A year ago, Greenwood was homeless, careening from couch to couch, sleeping in her car for six months. She was hospitalized after a suicide attempt and then began outpatient treatment.
“There was a lot of craziness in the wilderness,” she says.
Often times, it feels like I’m wasting time.
Trying to condense all the finest points
gun violence gone domestic,
watching as crack, heroin, poverty
continue to decimate the South and West sides.
It’s like a modern day Holocaust
people are feeding off each other
just to stay alive,
the kids on the streets at night
thinking the poison they sell will save their lives.
In the Silent Voices group, she says, “Everyone has something important to say, and their voices deserve to be heard.
“As soon as I joined, the whole world opened up to me. I’m riding a creative wave of energy,” Greenwood says.
She’s written since she was 12, filling 42 journals with thoughts and poems, many reflecting the depression she says she always suffered. “Writing was an alternative to suicide. I could take it out on paper.”
But moving around — 25 times by her count — made the journals a physical burden, and their subject matter made them an emotional burden. “When I moved, the pain, the hurt … I didn’t want to keep reliving it.”
So, after yanking out the poems, she set all 42 journals ablaze at Montrose Beach. “It was beautiful … cathartic for me,” Greenwood says. “Almost 20 years of my life — that’s what went up in flames.”
She was starting to unravel mentally, she says, and sought help. Now she’d like to turn what she’s seen and experienced into a memoir. She still roams the city, exploring alleys, abandoned buildings and appreciating the grittiness of it all.
“My father is from Guatemala and my mother is German. The minority in me is always fighting the European in me. I relate to ruins, that’s my heart,” Greenwood says.
A line from her favorite book, “White Oleander,” by Janet Fitch, inspires her: “The phoenix must burn to emerge.”
Greenwood said, “Writing is like breathing. Once I start, things just pour out of me.”
Elizabeth Hipwell, 48
The theater was where Hipwell thought she’d be expressing herself. She earned a master of fine arts degree from DePaul University in Chicago but then lost both of her parents in six months. “That was the catalyst for a breakdown,” she says.
After several hospitalizations and a suicide attempt, a friend suggested she try art. While foreign to her, it appealed because she could make things alone, something not possible with acting, Hipwell says.
“I used to be a cutter, so I needed to occupy my hands. I look at life differently now. My life is occupied so I don’t have time to dwell on the misery,” she says.
Art led to writing, and both have yielded an important realization.
“Unlike things that happen in life, you can rework and try again. I can be open, take risks, destroy it and remold it,” she says. “I want to use writing to advocate, to say the truth. I talk about hard stuff, and it helps me process things and gives me power over them.”
Nothing was harder than a trauma she suffered at 28. She’d been unable to talk about it, but she described in a work titled “The Girl in the Purple Dress.”
This determined man asks her to dinner.
She thinks, “Finally a real date.”
This young woman goes to her favorite
Vintage shop
Buys a purple sundress …
Full of anticipation
Hope
Feeling good about herself …
I’m nervous.
“Are we going out soon?“
He takes my glass away.
Swoops in.
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Attacks with tongue and hands …
If this was sex for sport,
I don’t want to play.
Writing “was a tool so it would not continue to burden me,” Hipwell says.
Now, she’d like to expand Silent Voices into a nonprofit with a space of its own, especially for evenings and weekends when the drop-in center is not open.
Sheri Hillson, 42
Home sick one day in kindergarten, Hillson wrote a story, complete with dialogue in bubbles that her mother helped draw. She thought her path was set.
“I like the physical act of putting pen to paper,” Hillson says. She spent countless hours copying books she checked out of the library. And she wrote poetry in high school, something she now realizes was a cry for somebody, anybody, to notice her depression.
“I was not diagnosed until I was 25,” she says, when she was working at a bakery in Chicago and had a meltdown. “I started cutting (myself) and I ended up in the hospital every month or so.”
She’s quick to note the date of Jan. 3, 2001 — her last electroshock therapy. While the sessions every three weeks helped keep her out of the hospital, she says, the final one left her with three ruptured discs in her back from insufficient muscle relaxant.
As she was finding her way to a psychiatrist and other treatment, she also persisted at something else: a degree from Columbia College. It took her about 20 years.
“I took a lot of writing courses and clung to the dream of being published by the time I turned 40,” Hillson says. She was published shortly after her 40th birthday, with poems and a short story appearing online.
“It was just to make a mark, to let people know I’m there,” she says. “With my mental illness, I want to be noticed for the struggle and for how far I’ve come.”
She suggested a writing group to organizers of the drop-in center when it opened last spring. She facilitates each Wednesday’s meeting.
She particularly likes free writing, which, technically, she says, is putting your pen down and not picking it up for 15 minutes. “We have to have a place to do that because if not, that’s when bad stuff happens.”
Her “When are we writers”:
Do we call ourselves writers
When our best friends are notebook and pen?
No matter what,
Even when we couldn’t afford bus fare
Or a cup of coffee,
We had writing.
It could not be taken from us …
It’s a skill many of us have
But many of us haven’t discovered.
This jewel in ourselves;
To be writers,
To shape society,
To voice our passions.
When are we writers?
When it is the most important part of our day.
The Silent Voices blog can be found at silentvoices4u.blogspot.com.