Mad about writing

The benefits of being both an author and a book festival organiser

Having expressed interest in organising an event with Sir Norman Lamb, his publisher kindly sent me a proof copy of his book Be More Human. Coincidentally its arrival coincided with one of my weeks of depression, and so I read it with even more interest than I would usually. The book comes out in September.

I’d met Sir Norman a few times when he was an MP and I was involved with projects in his constituency, so knowing him to be forthright and straight talking, suspected that an event with him on stage, about a topic as thorny as mental health, would attract a good crowd. That event, here in Leiston, where the construction of a nuclear power station is causing local people some stress, will take place this autumn.

The book won’t be featured at the Leiston Book Festival, because there we’re quite strict about sticking to books that explore our relationship with the natural world. That policy is paying off, and we have already sold 70 tickets, before our marketing campaign kicks off in June.

Even if you’ve not met Sir Norman, you will feel that you know him after reading the book. I was fascinated to read that like me, he had failed his 11+, and like me, grown up feeling that he was somehow inferior. Of course his record as an MP and later, Chair of a mental health trust suggests otherwise. Too many of us were written off at a young age by that divisive school exam.

The book contains a good number of case studies, some uplifting and others more sobering. One featured the horrific experience a journalist I know had endured as an in-patient, shipped hundreds of miles to an austere and seemingly uncaring mental health facility.

Like the prison system, mental health institutions can become too focused on containment and find it hard to make time to help people recover. One of the things that keeps me relatively sane, is the fear of incarceration should I have a major wobble and be sectioned. Perhaps that’s the reason why some of these places are so grim.

But perhaps the best reason for reading this book, is because Sir Norman makes the point that we have become disconnected from each other and from the natural world. He goes on to explain why medication is not always the answer, and that rebuilding our links with nature is far more wholesome cure. And that of course is also one pf the messages in my own forthcoming book Down to Earth which will be published in July.