ABSTRACT
The management of what some call ‘mental illness’, and others know – variously – as ‘madness’, diversity, or distress, has long been a contested space. In 2019, the hashtag #deargp began to bring together users of services who, bemused, aghast, or furious about the care they had received, turned the medical gaze outwards to post referral letters for their psychiatric specialists and mental health nurses. In tweet-length fragments and longer prose poems, these pieces depicted psychiatrists who were ‘moderately well-kempt’ but ‘somewhat preoccupied with insignificant details’ or mostly ‘oriented to time and place’ but ‘unresponsive to pain, dizziness, risk or emotional despair’. Ultimately this movement resulted in two published collections. This chapter situates the ‘Dear GP’ movement within the context of ‘Mad poetry’ from Margaret Cavendish to Pamela Spiro Wagner and beyond. It also explores some work by clinicians in mental health, such as Glenn Colquhoun’s Letters to Young People, and by poets who hold a clinical perspective alongside lived experience of madness, such as Miriam Barr’s Bullet Hole Riddle. Through these conversations, the chapter reflects on the place of poetry in questioning and reconstructing the relationships that shape clinical care and point to poetry as a means of resistance.
