Showing @ The Arches, Glasgow, until Wed 15 Oct @19:00
2014 sees the eighth year of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival. One of its key aims is to challenge preconceptions relating to mental health and wellbeing and the systems that promote and diagnose it. James Leadbitter (aka the vacuum cleaner)’s piece meets this aim with a participatory experience that questions the labels we put on individuals, and why.
Our host and artist begins by explaining: this is not a performance so much as a social experiment. Each member of the audience is invited to fill out a mental health assessment; over 200 questions that examine depression, anxiety, mood and personality disorder. Upon completion, you are given your ‘diagnosis’.
Set up like a school examination – with invigilator’s desk at the front – the room is intentionally intimidating: there is no safety of a fourth wall. By asking us to assess our assessment, questions that have been collated throughout Leadbitter’s own experiences, the objective is clear. The frustration with the yes/no questions, the internal arguments over semantics is to be embraced and understood as a criticism of the system.
The concept is interesting and the message is important – but it needs to be developed. We, as an audience, could be challenged further. It only scratches the surface of the complexities of mental health assessment, and diagnosis. Though, in its simplicity, there is an appeal and perhaps a comfort to the younger audience members who take part. It is a brave piece: the artist makes himself vulnerable, and it is by all accounts heartfelt. The Assessment criticises the questions, tick boxes and numbers that suggest mental health is something we can quantify with maths: it produces an absolute. It leaves no room for the nuances of individual experience and discourages the notion that we are anything beyond the answers we give.