28 • happiful.com • August 2019
As Kimberley Wilson says: “I think
it’s always helpful for patients to
have some agency over how they
and their condition are described.
Receiving any health diagnosis can
be a dehumanising experience;
your personality and personhood
can disappear under the weight
of the label, and this can be felt
even more acutely when your
personality is diagnosed as ‘the
problem’.”
Poetry provided a channel for
Rosie to write about the things that
hurt the most, and turn them into
an ‘object’.
“It’s hard to convey the intensity
of the highs and lows I feel,” she
says. “But poetry gives me a way of
communicating these extremes.
“Describing myself as an electric
eel, and accelerating the rhythms
and frequency of the rhymes, can
portray a rush of hypomania. I can
capture my loneliness by likening
myself to a prawn crawling around
on the seabed, or convey the terror
of an episode by repeating ‘help
me’ seven or eight times.”
Rosie’s voice became one of
representation and solidarity,
letting others know that even in
their most difficult moments, they
aren’t alone.
“The first time I read my poem
‘Bear’, which is about an eating
disorder, a woman said to me that
my poem had said the things she
wanted to say but didn’t know how,”
says Rosie.
Though a powerful tool to help
translate the reality of living with
a BPD diagnosis, self-exploration
isn’t all that the spoken word canachieve. Poetry can function as
a platform for promoting social
justice, an opportunity to act
against the unfair treatment that
emerges from misunderstandings
and misrepresentations of mental
illness.
It enables people to leave behind
the spectator role that separates
us from the perspective of others,
and gain insight into mental health
as a personal experience, felt by
someone with a past and a future
worth caring about.
Rosie says: “Self-expression can
be a form of activism. After all,
the personal experiences we have
are shaped by the world we live
in. Mental health doesn’t exist in
a vacuum. There is a clear link
between social exclusion and
marginalisation, and mental health
problems.
“More than anything, I want
people going through emotional
distress to be seen, heard, and
cared for, with respect and
compassion,” Rosie says. “Lots
of people experience BPD as a
diagnosis of exclusion from mental
health services, and it’s never OK
for someone to be left without
access to support.”
Rosie’s words aren’t a call to action
to talk, as she acknowledges that
not everyone wants to, or feels safe
doing so. It is an effort to mitigate
the guilt and shame so often
enveloped in a diagnosis of BPD.
Rosie says: “When reading my
writing, I feel compassion towards
myself. My writing bears witness
to moments of pain, and as a result
becomes proof of my survival too.”