Feng Shui for the brain

Author: John Sawkins

Published: 13 January 2010

John’s period of crisis marked the beginning of a transition to a more creative and fulfilling life. Here he describes the therapeutic effect of helping others, his decision to stop taking medication, and how he has embraced interdependence in his relationships with others.

Recovery tends to imply some notion of going back to your old self. After all, that is what your friends and relations would most like – perhaps clinicians, too. For me, however, this was not to be an option. I decided to dump the garbage and start afresh with a new persona, after experiencing some kind of hypo-manic episode just at the turn of the millennium.

Like many who experience the life-changing effects of having a nervous break-down, I found myself impelled to cultivate a totally different existence to that of the person I used to be. Fortunately for me, my employers were sufficiently sympathetic to allow me to indulge my more creative side and I effectively abandoned the subjects I had taught for thirty years, taking up instead more creative pursuits such as music and photography.

That is not to say that I had never had such interests, however. It was just that I never found the time to indulge them. After the break-down (which, incidentally, I regard as being the start of a therapeutic healing process), I could sense the need to adopt more right-brain oriented thinking, and a number of long-cherished aspirations came to fruition. I felt the need to remove the clutter from my thinking, jettison the unwanted baggage and embrace a fascinating - if somewhat more challenging - future.

I first recorded a CD of songs I had written back in 1968. Then I joined the Caithness Big Band and tried to teach myself bass guitar – in that order! I subsequently joined the North Coast Jazz Band and have been with them for around eight years now. More recently, I have succeeded in getting my poems Rare Frequencies published through Chipmunka, the mental health publisher based in London.

Recovery (for me) has been achieved by following my own best instincts and reading widely about mental illness, the history of its treatment and opinions of a wide variety of professionals who have challenged the received wisdom of their colleagues particularly concerning the long-term use of medication to modify behaviour patterns.

Taking up advocacy work through Advocacy Highland has proved to be a kind of therapy for me. I needed to get out of the self-pitying self obsession that isolation can bring. It is important, I feel, to avoid scenarios where negative thoughts and downward syndromes are reinforced.

So what was it, you may rightly ask, that I recovered from? To be honest, I’m not exactly sure, but since I exhibited some cyclothymic behaviour, that might have suggested bipolar as the psychiatrist initially thought, but there were also other aspects of my behaviour patterns that did not quite fit the bill.

During the four weeks I spent in a psychiatric hospital, I had no choice but to take the medication: haloperidol, procycladine and zopiclone; but once I was out of there, I decided – and I’m not necessarily implying that this was the most advisable course of action, though, at the time, it seemed quite reasonable – I decided to go cold turkey. Most folk who try this end up regretting it, for various reasons: some realise that they cannot function without their medication, and, however reluctantly, are forced to acknowledge the error of their ways. Others find the detoxification process altogether too horrendous. Still, I decided to ride out the storm, and this took about four weeks. I have not taken any form of medication now for ten years since that date.

My employer did not wish me to return to work as quickly as I had hoped, so, in the interim, I needed to find something useful to do. I discovered The Stepping Stones, a local drop-in facility, and soon found out that my therapy was to be found in acting as a volunteer. The advantage for the centre was that, having experienced a similar state of mind to the users of the centre (schizophrenia, bipolar, borderline personality disorder, etc), I was better able to converse with them. Self-disclosure can do wonders when trying to open up people to discussion. I did poetry, art and music with the members and it was during such activities that spontaneous discussion arose. In helping others, I discovered an ability to help myself: my preoccupation with my condition and that destructive form of self-obsession that seems to accompany mental illness started to ebb away, as I found myself increasingly interested in and concerned about the issues preoccupying the members.

Six months after my “episode”, I was pronounced sufficiently recovered to return to my former job as section leader for communications in a college of further education. It was to be a further four years before I took on additional work as a volunteer with Advocacy Highland. I would like to think that my contribution to tribunals, meetings, and care review plans has made a significant difference, in a positive way.

There appeared to be three choices facing me as the would-be recoverer: independence, dependency or interdependence. I preferred the latter, though I could see the attractions of the other two, as well. In some ways, I learned most from fellow-sufferers, and this is where my concept of interdependence started, but I instinctively knew that I would eventually have to learn to be interdependent in a world that did not solely comprise fellow-sufferers. Medication and the various professional services, on the other hand, can inadvertently lead you down the road to dependency. This can include co-dependency issues, where both supporter and sufferer have difficulties weaning themselves off the relationship. Independence was another alternative, but, as I was soon to discover, no man is an island, and we need our friends and partners in order to lead a half-way normal life. I put my road to recovery down in no small measure to finding my wife, Aileen, whom I married in 2006. Whether I have totally “recovered” is for others to judge, but at sixty-one I can say with some degree of certainty that I now very much enjoy life with all its little ups and downs.

John’s first novel ‘Defragmenting the Soul’ will be published shortly by Chipmunkapublishing.

If you’d like to share your thoughts or experiences of recovery then contact us on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 0141 240 7790 to discuss.

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