Over the past few weeks my mood has been very erratic, and several times I have been overheard describing myself as ‘dysfunctional’ to sundry friends and acquaintances.

Not only that, I have been like a magnet – drawing all my other ‘dysfunctional’ friends to me. In fact, I have had conversations with several friends along the following lines:

Me: I’m in a very weird place at the moment – I’m not functioning at all well.
Friend: Join the club – there seems to be something in the air at the moment.
Me: At least we understand each other.
Friend (or me): Yes, you’re the only one who doesn’t put the phone down/freak out/
run down the road laughing when I scream/cry hysterically/
spout strange gibberish.
Us: We must stick together and be there for each other.

So here we have it – I appear to be part of a community of dysfunctional people who are very good at supporting each other. This has been one of the blessings of my mental health problems over the years – all those wonderful and interesting people I meet along the way. And what people they are! People with amazing intelligence and quirky, questioning minds. People who are funny, who you can hold a proper conversation with. People who are there for you even when their own world is caving in.

I was talking to another friend about this recently and I began to question my language and the use of the word ‘dysfunctional’. I started adding qualifiers – that I only meant dysfunctional in relation to how this rather narrow-minded world sees normality and ‘normal’ ways of being in the first place. What is ‘normal’ anyway, and who’s to say that this is a healthy place to be? My friend immediately responded: ‘You are the New Functional.’

Brilliant! I love it. I had to reach for a pen and paper to write it down because my memory is as dysfunctional as my mental health. This was no easy thing, given that I was driving at the time. ‘Remember that phrase,’ I told my friend as I sent telepathic thoughts to the next set of traffic lights willing them to turn red so that I could safely record this moment of wisdom and insight. I have it beside me now – a scruffy piece of paper with my shopping list on it, and at the bottom the words: ‘The New Functional – communities of dysfunctional people supporting each other’.

The more I think about this the more I like it. It seems to me that it’s not about whether I, personally, am a ‘functional’ person or not. It’s more about how we deal with what we are given. The way my lovely friends have supported and helped me has been far more effective and fruitful (in terms of me feeling a bit better) than anything the mental health services have been able to offer me. The mental health services are overstretched and underfunded, and my hope that they may be able to give me someone to talk to regularly about how I handle things is probably misplaced. However an expectation that my friends will be there for me has always proved to be built on solid foundations.

Beyond this is the massive well of kindness and support available from complete strangers – something that has been facilitated by social media and people’s willingness to share their innermost feelings via blogs. The community of people who share experiences around their mental health is very varied – both in personality types and the kinds of problems we encounter – but when it comes to supporting each other we always come up trumps.

So I’m sending a toast to ‘The New Functional’ community. We’re doing good – and a big ‘thank you’ to you all.

MAD MOMENT…

Trying to be ‘crew’ on my Quaker friend’s narrowboat. The River Trent and Erewash Canal had never seen anything like it! If you want to talk dysfunctional, think me, rope throwing (in the water), lock keys (how do they work?), crossing narrow lock gates (balance? what’s that?), etc.

MARVEL MOMENT…

FREE intellectual stimulation! The excellent Firth Lectures at the University of Nottingham’s Theology Department on the topic of ‘Imagining Faith: perceptions of religious belief in modern writing’ – delivered by the ever erudite and wonderfully nuanced Rowan Williams.

© Anne de Gruchy