I can suffer from anxiety. Sometimes I don't feel like getting out of bed (though this morning I sprang out of bed at 4.30am - there's two sides to me), afraid to face the day, and, often, I try to avoid my neighbours in case they indulge me in small talk or, worse, ask me something practical about our small residential area and general flat maintenance.
But I've never been scared to leave the house because I thought everybody outside was spying on me. I've never feared that there was a global plot against me and I've never thought that trees and clouds were fake, and real houses were actually Lego houses, all as a part of a worldwide conspiracy that the voices in my head keep telling me I'm the only to know about and that if I tell anyone I will be in very serious trouble.
That's because I'm not, at least not yet, suffering from psychosis. It sounds an absolutely crippling condition and I have complete sympathy for anyone who suffers from it. If you're gonna try and make art about psychosis you need to tread carefully, you need to not just be sympathetic. You need to be empathetic too otherwise it could easily end up becoming indulgent at best and exploitative at worst.
But, under the auspices of Artangel, Marcus Coates - with his new work The Directors, has done just that. It's a site specific art installation, I suppose you might call it an immersive experience, in which you wander the streets of the Churchill Gardens Estate in Pimlico and visit an array of quite surprising venues. Each of which, there's five of them, is showing a film in which Coates himself stars. He's directed by various sufferers of psychosis who try to explain to him, often very successfully - though admirably he's open when he can't quite get it, how the condition affects them.
For it to work we need Coates to be both sensitive to and curious about the lives of his 'directors':- Anthony, Lucy, Marcus, Mark, and John. Which he is. The shortest film is sixteen minutes long and the longest is twenty-seven minutes so you have to invest at least two hours plus all the walking between venues.
Because of that The Directors works far better than it might if it had been on at a more typical gallery. I started my tour, as requested - because that's where you pick up the map and guide, at the Churchill Gardens Residents Association building on Glasgow Terrace. A fairly nondescript concrete building into which we see Coates imaging sitting on a bus, like Marcus, as the world closes in on him.
The voices in his head tell him everyone's looking at him, everyone thinks he's a freak, everyone thinks he stinks, even that he's pissed himself. He's not sure if he has or not. The voices in his head get louder and louder, faces appear to his side. Soon he's sat on a chair with large red curtain drapes either side of him and he's feeling smaller and smaller. On its own this film was sympathetic enough but it was only when mixed in with the four other films that the wider picture appeared.
I walked down to Pimlico Spice, a former Indian restaurant, to hear the story of Stephen who was not only scared to leave his house but scared, sometimes, to move out of his chair. The crippling nature of his psychosis, when he finally summoned up the courage to leave his flat, was so overwhelming that he walked in a bizarre hunched fashion, repeated in the film by Coates.
The strange gait caused curious onlookers to stare which, of course, only increased the sense of paranoia. Eventually the voices in his head told him he simply had to go home. It was too dangerous to stay out. Later in the series of videos, we hear a similar tale of someone laid so low by it all that they would simply get in their bed and lie in it.
"We've all done that" you may think - and, indeed, many of us have. I've done it for hours. This poor man would lie in his bed for days on end. It's unclear if he ate or got up to use the loo but I've certainly heard of instances where people don't eat and simply piss the bed because they're so consumed by the illness.
The next, third, stop was perhaps the most bizarre of all. I had to go up to the the fifth floor of a tower block, Chaucer House, and wait outside. A member of Artangel's staff informed us we'd need to either wear bags over our shoes or take them off as the flat was actually somebody's home.
The owners weren't in but, after a short wait, a group of about six of us (the maximum number permitted) were lead to a small bedroom where we sat on a group of chairs, and some on the single bed itself, to watch a film that, rather creepily, appeared to have been filmed in exactly the same room.
Of course, with these walking art tours you keep seeing the same people and, indeed, I did when I arrived at the next port of call. A health centre located on the, all things considered, unfortunately named Lupus Street.
I presumed it was a former health centre but on entering there were people sat waiting for appointments and rooms for ultrasound scans etc; I felt a bit uncomfortable about this. People's health can be quite private and very personal to them. Sharing with healthcare professionals can be difficult enough but having a load of art enthusiasts wandering around seemed a bit much.
Another part of me, however, felt that this is, possibly, something the world of mental health welcomes and therefore it seems quite apt to hold it in a healthcare centre. As long as nobody gets in the way of more important stuff that goes on there, it seems important that people are educated further about mental health issues, be that via art or whatever.
The stigma relating to mental health is slowly being eroded but there's still a long way to go. People feel more able to talk about their feelings now but there are still plenty out there who think men with issues should just "man up" and the like. That's not worked in the past. It won't work in the future.
I've not written, specifically, about most films and about most cases because as the experience went on I started to see parallels and similarities. These people stopped being outliers and became something of a group. The psychotic experience was unique to each individual but did have many similarities. Feelings of elation and unbridled joy at times followed by crushing lows and suicidal ideation. Voices in the head, sweats, hallucinations. Believing oneself to be both the best person that ever lived and the worst - sometimes simultaneously.
The last film, directed by Mark, was in a back room of the Cave bar on Tachbrook Street. It was late Friday afternoon, early Friday evening and people were having birthday drinks on the terrace outside. I went in and watched a film in which a man walked around Greenwich Park feeling completely invincible before getting swallowed up by his own securities to such a degree it felt like people were punching him as he walked past. Earlier other sufferers had spoken of feeling as if people were pouring water over them.
As I came out of that final film, the birthday drinks were in full swing. I thought that somewhere, not that far away, somebody was probably lying in their bed, sheets pulled over their head, scared to even go outside. It occurred to me that, quite easily, any of these happy celebrants could, like me, find themselves like that one day. Maybe they'd already been there. If Marcus Coates and The Directors made me realise one thing it's that people with mental health issues aren't "just like us". They are us.
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