Papageno and the poetry of disquiet

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Can disquieting poetry damage the vulnerable and suicidal, or can it be a source of help?

Writer Joanna Cannon draws on her experience as a psychiatrist to ask if poems about death or despair can damage the vulnerable and suicidal or can be a source of help and solace.

Some of the finest poems in the English language flirt with death, but does that make them dangerous reading for those struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts?    

Suicide prevention websites today routinely warn that young people drawn to suicidal impulses listen to music about suicide or seek out literary texts about suicide.  But from John Clare to Sylvia Plath, some of our most celebrated poets have written about the impulse to die by suicide. 

Author Joanna Cannon is well known for her bestselling novels, but her work as a psychiatric doctor, often working with suicidal patients, has led her to a greater understanding of the power of poetry, not least in her own life, and how it can help to alleviate the darkest moments of despair.

Joanna seeks to make sense of the conflicting attitudes towards this “poetry of disquiet”.  How should we read Sylvia Plath’s powerful depiction of her suicide attempt in The Bell Jar, or Anne Sexton’s “Wanting to Die” in an era when we are more sensitive about idealising self-harm and suicidal ideation than ever before? How much is the creative impulse intertwined with depression and mental health? Can a poet’s distillation of despair be a destructive influence on vulnerable readers? Or rather could those struggling with life - and death - instead draw something positive from those who have written about suicide? Just like the character of Papageno in Mozart’s opera the Magic Flute, who is dissuaded from taking his own life, can what is known in suicide prevention circles as the Papageno Effect be achieved by finding hope and solace through a poet’s words?

Drawing on her own experience, Joanna also questions writers, poets, those who have struggled with depression and suicide and those who work to prevent it, and finds a fount of solace and understanding in words which with exquisite clarity can strike a chord deep within the troubled mind.

Joanna is the author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep and Three Things about Elsie.
Contributors include Femi Oyebode, professor of psychiatry and poet; Heather Clark, professor of contemporary poetry; Ella Risbridger, writer; Thomas Niederkrotenthaler, deputy head of the International Suicide Prevention Association, and those with lived experience of depression and mental illness.

Produced by Amanda Hargreaves
Readings by Susie Maguire and David Jackson Young

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