It took me a couple of weeks of coming to Sheffield Flourish before I began to feel comfortable here. As part of my Master’s degree in English Literature, I have been given the opportunity to spend a couple of months here on placement, taking part in some of Flourish’s groups and producing content for their website. I have worked in schools and retail jobs before now, but this is my first time working in an office, and changes to my routine such as this are the kind of thing that make me nervous: my life-long experience with various forms of anxiety is one of the reasons I felt drawn to a place that supports people with their mental health, but it also makes this kind of work feel harder. After a few weeks here, I feel that my mind is beginning to settle, and I think this is mainly down to the people I have been playing and discussing music with.
So far, I have been coming to Flourish on Fridays and taking part in two of the music groups
the charity runs. The second of these is an ensemble of guitarists, drummers, pianists, bassists, and vocalists with a cathartic repertoire of rock and pop covers that they know inside out. I have played Blur’s ‘Parklife’ with these guys most weeks since I started my placement, but the performance that stands out in my memory is the first one, when I did the backing vocals in the verses. For anyone who doesn’t know the song, the verses consist of actor Phil Daniels offering spoken word slices of London life in the ‘90s, and front-man Damon Albarn singing “Parklife!” every two bars. Tunelessly shouting this into a mic with a whole band behind you is really fun. Everyone plays well on this song, but the person who stands out to me is the other vocalist, a man named John Paul who does an excellent Phil Daniels impression, bringing to the part the Cockney confidence it calls for and ably taking on the choruses that I struggle to sing while playing Graham Coxon’s fiddly guitar lines. John Paul is a regular attendee at these jam sessions, and is usually on the bass, though he also does a great job of belting out ‘Zombie’ by The Cranberries. I think he has the kind of chilled-out aura that I have come to associate with bassists over the years, and am grateful to him for offering to tell me about his experience of music, mental health and the connections between the two.
John Paul is a life-long music lover who has been coming to Sheffield Flourish for a couple of
years, since his wife came across it while googling music-based support for mental health. He
has been prescribed anti-depressants for ten years and has during this time had a course of
CBT, but felt his mental health deteriorate significantly over lockdown and knew he needed
new forms of support. Though he has always felt anxiety about his daily life, over lockdown
these feelings became so strong that it was a struggle for him to go outside, and he began to
experience suicidal thoughts. All of this has been compounded by working from home, then
being made redundant. In retrospect, John Paul thinks that he has probably always felt a lot
of anxiety, but has been repressing these feelings for a very long time. In addition to his own
struggles during and after lock-down, he has also watched his two children, both of whom
have autism diagnoses, struggle to get through school. After seeing the support his children
have needed at secondary school, John Paul has begun to come to terms with the fact that
he himself needed more help than he got as a child, which has led him to consider the
possibility that he might also be autistic.
There were parts of John Paul’s story I found hard to hear: I am an ADHDer myself who has
worked as an SEN Teaching Assistant since I finished my undergraduate degree, and being
reminded of the many ways our society lets neurodivergent people down never fails to make
me feel powerless. I am still struck by his description of how he felt after years of pushing
down his anxiety: he told me that when he thought about his future, for a long-time it felt
impossible to make any kind of decisions, because he had become so used to repressing his
feelings. If there is sadness and anger in seeing someone who has been unable to be
themselves for a very long time, I also felt plenty of hope when John Paul talked about his
experience of recovery. Though he still struggles with irritability when he is at home, he is no
longer having suicidal thoughts, has connected with a therapist who helps him get to the root
of his struggles, and has found joy in coming here to play music. Sheffield Flourish has
helped him re-discover his love for singing, which has been instrumental (pun intended) in
growing his confidence. John Paul made the observation that self-belief is essential to singing well: if you can’t believe in what you’re singing, the words won’t come out right. The literature student in me wants to see John Paul’s experience of finding his singing voice as a neat metaphor for re-connecting with your neurodivergent self in a world that is not set up for you; the ADHDer wants to go and have another go at shouting “PARKLIFE!”
