Healing intergenerational trauma of musicians with mental illness
Hattie Butterworth
It all started because I felt a deep connection to my paternal grandmother, Kathleen. In the first years of my mental illness at music college, her name would come up a lot when on the phone to my parents. I always felt comforted to hear that she too had suffered with debilitating anxiety. I never met her, but I seemed to know her and still think about her so much. I knew her pain and I have heard my dad speak of the helplessness he felt from the silence she held around her trauma, anxiety and grief.
History is often viewed through a romantic lens and I think it is this same viewpoint from which we see past composers with mental illness. Perhaps we see it in this way because it is so far removed from our own understandings of creative life, as well as the pressures we face in our current world. But for me, understanding what it is to suffer mental illness and knowing the beauty of recovery is a privilege allowed me by the miracles of science and reduction in stigma. This is a reality that composers and performers didn’t experience until very recently.
A darkness of mental illness has often been confined to people’s closest family and friends. Moving through generations of musicians and it’s difficult to think of more than a handful of examples of those who have suffered, except on an anecdotal basis. Additionally, many people who experience mental illness are so-called ‘high-functioning’; their illness invisible to everyone as they continue with great productivity.
I frequently feel I want to apologise to the generations of musicians, artists and humans who have suffered the darkness of mental illness without connection, support and treatment. I feel a deep understanding for their hopelessness and confused that people explain composers’ creativity as ‘what got them through’. We don’t know that for sure. Even if it’s true, is it a good thing? Art is not a substitute for the adequate treatment of mental illness.
I have started a new series on TMDTA’s Instagram and TikTok called Depressed Composer of the Week in which I discover and focus on (and paint) a different composer with mental illness, telling their story and researching their illness, its impact and treatment. It feels important to make this series because many composers are presented to us with this toxic positivity- the sentimental depiction of a fierce brain, angry and possessed by music.
I see the series as an apology and a new connection with musicians of the past who suffered just the same as we suffer today. The composer biography needs a context of what it meant to suffer, removing musings of valiant adherence to the pains of music. Let’s consider their suffering in a new, personal and realistic way.