In this episode:

love lay down before me and we wept sprang from an essay that was published a couple of years ago in Boundless magazine about Helen Taylor’s experience of being admitted to a psychiatric ward and sectioned under the Mental Health Act. An experience which, as you might imagine, was pretty grim. 

Amid the horror though, there were moments of pure comedy and unexpected comradeship. 

And of course, plenty of material for writing.

When Helen first wrote the essay (Inside Ferguson House), her Open University tutor encouraged her to share it. But she couldn’t. Not back then. She was too vulnerable. Still too unwell, even if she didn’t entirely realise it. 

Years later, she saw a Channel 4 News feature about proposed changes to the Mental Health Act in England. As she listened to the people who were interviewed, to their accounts of frustration and anger at their loss of agency and their sense of being treated as less than human, and even though all their circumstances varied widely, their experiences resonated so clearly with hers that Helen knew it was the time to send her essay out into the world. 

Now, for the first time, she tells the entire story of why she was there, what happened, and the love she discovered during those dark days. This really is a story of love in the dark.

Helen Taylor is appearing at the WayWORD Festival in Aberdeen 23-24 September 2022. Tickets are free.

Links:

• Support Helen’s book on Unbound - https://unbound.com/books/love-lay-down-beside-me-and-we-wept/
• Open University - https://www.open.ac.uk/
• Inside Ferguson House - Helen Taylor’s personal essay
• Nick Cave - Red Hand Files
• Wayward Festival, Aberdeen, Scotland - https://www.waywordfestival.com/

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