A Future Not to Feel Sad About: Mental Health and Radical Inclusion
This is the text of the talk I gave at the 2017 Oxford Disability Lecture.
“I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.”
(Elon Musk)
(video below — my section from 18:00–32:00)
http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/humdiv/torch/2017_annual_disability_lecture.mp4
Imagine a world where it is always winter, though even in this putative permafrost two precious crops have flourished, pomegranates and cotton. And instead of weaving the cotton into coats and feasting on pomegranates the inhabitants of this world have decided to keep warm by burning all their pomegranate trees until one day the last flames flicker out and they wonder how they can feed themselves in a world where the only thing that grows is cotton.
In the coming century we will live through a winter of challenges that affect us on a global scale, from artificial intelligence to automation, climate change to food security.
But to see us through the cold we have the cotton of prosperity and the pomegranates of human potential. And yet we continue to burn our most brilliant minds as though they were nothing but a commodity to stoke growth, and those who will be left are fast approaching the day they look at their swollen bank accounts and wonder what nourishment they will bring.
We will only meet our challenges and take advantage of the wonderful opportunities they also represent if our full intellectual, creative and innovative potential as a species is unlocked. That will mean many structures we regard as essential and inevitable, and the many gateless walls that support them, must be torn down.
But there is only so much we can each do so I limit myself to the small portion of this larger picture where I can deploy what resources and experience I have — campaigning to widen the horizons of those disabled by mental ill health, and widening the pool of talent that becomes available in a world that does not disable us.
I must have been a perplexing child. The only thing I ever wanted to be was a public intellectual. I fell in love with words as I listened along to the melodies of Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman. I dreamed of my voice bringing a blend of hope and wonder over the receding image of a pale blue dot, entering the hearts and homes of a new generation maybe one of whom would one day remember and start down a road that would lead to a better future.
I never received practical advice on how I would do this. It was always just assumed that I would. If I was ever told anything by those guiding my future it was simply, “You’re clever. You’ll be fine. Just work hard.”
But I never understood *how* to “just work hard”. I could spent days at a time staring at a page or a ceiling or a mark on my desk for hours at a time as if it was the only thing in the world, aware of nothing but the thumping noise in my head and a cloak of fog cutting me off from a world where I knew time was passing without me, futures were being shaped in which I played no part, plans were being made that were slowly writing me out of my dreams. And I could do nothing.
And then there were the weeks at a time my brain was abuzz with a cocktail of energy and grandiosity that scattered itself gloriously like a glitterball parrying laser beams, filling my horizons with fabulous distractions.
And in the moments when I had the clarity to reflect the only names I had to give to these things were the ones that had been handed to me in primary school: laziness and naughtiness.
Yet still I seemed to be marshalling resources well, though I had no idea how quickly I was depleting them, and by 2000, I was well into my doctorate.
And then two things happened. After 6 months too terrified to open my post or leave my telephone switched on, one minute hiding rocking in the corner of a darkened room the next spending any penny I could find in a desperate attempt to rescue my academic life by simply buying more books and more books and more books still, I was, in every way, spent. My status as a student lapsed, the bank wanted back, at once, every penny it had ever loaned me.
Although I’d had bipolar disorder for over a decade, what I experienced was one summer in which the door closed on my future. It would remain closed for a decade and a half.
And yet just a month after I was at my lowest, still unable to open my mail or answer the telephone, I competed in, and won, the World Intelligence Championship. It was the first step in a very peculiar waltz between Oxford and a recalcitrant brain that would both soar in many and beautiful ways and at the same time close me out of the environment in which I could put it to use. Whatever I would achieve, I had become intellectually invisible.
12 years after I returned here to support those who do what I spent my life dreaming of doing, having started my journey back to work with 2 days a week at a warehouse, the only task I could persuade anyone I was capable of doing, Oxford and my mind remain locked in their danse macabre.
On the one hand, outside these walls, I have done more than I might have done had I entered academia. I have campaigned on debt and mental health for a decade, spoken in parliament, trained VPs of banks on how to handle customers experiencing mental ill health, helped draw up industry guidelines, given a talk at the global HQ of Barclays. I have performed poetry at the Royal Albert Hall, written a bestselling thriller set in Oxford, become the news editor for a global creative organization, and last summer became Creative Thinking World Champion. Yet inside these walls, I like so many remain resolutely defined by a contract that tells me my brain is invisible here.
And this is the strange double world that faces many of us disabled by mental ill health, locked out from making the contributions to our world’s intellectual landscape we are more than able to make. On paper the doors might appear open. We can study at night, we can retrain, we can access courses with reduced fees. But to reverse the pedant’s refrain, yes, of course we *may* but when debt has stripped us of the ability to reduce our hours and with levels of chronic exhaustion those who are not disabled as we are cannot begin to conceive, I seriously question whether we *can*.
For all that, my desire to be at the centre of the intellectual conversation about our world’s future has never wavered. There is a desperate need for us all to be involved in shaping our future. And there are simple things that can happen — on a large scale universal basic income, open access to the sum of human knowledge; on a smaller scale the empowerment of the disenfranchised through the gifts of time, money, and skills.
Now, after a decade and a half, for me the door has begun to show its cracks. Unexpected opportunities have come my way from The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, TORCH, our sponsors tonight. It seems that the bizarrely divergent clashing of ideas that wins you creative thinking championships and makes you want to become a public intellectual can be slipped under the wire of higher education’s current obsession with interdisciplinarity. And just last week winning the Humanities Innovation Challenge has given me the opportunity to develop and roll out a tool that could help everyone to be more creative.
I suspect I will always need to rely on cracks and backdoors, secret alleys and snickleways, but in many ways mine is a story of hope. And hope is the one thing we must never lose. But songs of hope should often be sung in notes of caution, and I would strike this note. When you hear stories are like mine, whatever we might achieve, do not parse our stories as survivor narratives. Every one of our stories is not only an inspiration but a rebuke. Every time someone overcomes the obstacles of a society that disables them and achieves great things, that does not only cast fuel on the fires of aspiration that burn in the hearts of those whose journey is just beginning, it casts the long shadow of shame on those who insist that such obstacles are inevitable. If I with all my privilege and good fortune manage finally to scrape my fingernails onto a ledge where I can finally use just a few of my skills then shame on those who waste the talents of every single soul in any way less privileged than me; shame on those who insist there is virtue in overcoming adversity but not in removing it.
If you want to fan the flames of hope in the hearts of those whose decisions will decide whether humanity makes it out of this century alive, do not show them the bloodied feet of those who walked over broken glass just to use what was left of themselves when the ordeal was done. Show them instead a road that you have carpeted with velvet.
To businesses, to academia, to policy makers and philanthropists and anyone in a position to make the smallest change, I would say this. Do not assume a person’s abilities mean they are “OK”, that for them life will run smoothly. Instead, ask yourself what they need you to do in order to use those talents. And then do it.
And whether it’s time out to train or to think, access to courses and resources, or money to provide replacement cover while you give your most junior office staff a sabbatical — what I like to call free to fail schemes could be rolled out with relative ease within many organizations, giving people whose dream has been taken from them once already by mental ill health the opportunity to explore where their talents could take them if they knew trying and failing would not bring their world crashing down around their ears.
We began with a dystopia. Let’s end by imagining another future.
The year is 2217.
It is one hundred years since humans came to Enceladus to build what has finally become the staging post to the stars. As the ship finds its final trajectory its captain stares out into the darkness hurtling towards her. Already growing inside her is the first human who will be born, live a full 200 year span, and die without ever setting foot on Earth.
Among the few remnants of her species’ past she carries with her is the book she reads again and again to her unborn child to pass their endless empty days. The book, simple elaborations of the enquiring minds and open hearts that have fuelled this journey from its first step, provides a single cord connecting her back in time past the first landing on Saturn’s moon, past the moment a human being set foot on Mars, all the way back past the moment the last border control on Earth came down, past the release of the last living creature born to be slaughtered, past the point of singularity when humanity enacted its decision that artificial intelligence would be used to hasten the freedom of the planet’s most vulnerable citizens…all the way to another single mother looking out on a cold Winter Tuesday night at the same stars, ones she has seen thousands of times, but this time seeing something she has never seen before. For the first time she simply stands at her window and looks, not dreading the decisions the cold has always brought in the past, knowing that there will be no more brown envelopes dropping through her door, her vision no longer blurred by tears from watching her child’s dreams disappearing day by day down the same track that has stolen her own. What she sees rushing towards her through the heavens is this: the future. Not her future. Not her child’s future, but the steps that will take us to the stars, a future seen through the eyes of another woman, a woman she knows she will never meet, who gazes out at those same stars. As her thoughts take their beautiful, daring shape she opens her computer and begins to type.
We talk a lot about inclusion, and there are so many simple and immediate steps we must take to adapt our world so that all can flourish within it. But in Oxford of all places our ambitions must not be constrained by such narrow horizons. Inclusion has to mean this as well — that we all, including those of us sidelined by mental ill health, play a part in asking the questions that will shape the challenges we meet in the decades to come, and that we are all given the opportunity to use the talents we have to contribute to finding and implementing the answers to those questions. Inclusion must mean precious portions of unfettered space to think, it must mean time to nurture our abilities and excel, and it must mean the financial security that provides the freedom to fail.
