Arbours Crisis Centre

Mary Barnes

Two Accounts of

a journey through

madness

Mary Barnes

and

Joseph Berke

MacGibbon and Kee London

This book is the account of how a woman experienced the absolute depths of madness, found doctors who helped her through it by new and unconventional means, and discovered her own talent as a painter. Mary Barnes 'went down' at Kingsley Hall, the community founded by R. D. Laing and his colleagues in the East End of London. She was helped constantly by Dr Joseph Berke, and their recollection of the events at Kingsley Hall is as much a critique of conventional approaches to mental therapy as the story of a most remarkable relationship.

Mary writes:

I am forty-eight years old. The five years at Kingsley Hall were all my years, for therein was held my past, my present and my future. The nurse, the teacher, fled; the child returned, crept back into the womb, emerged, grew as never before, in body and soul.

Painting came with dancing and singing, and outing and trying. The writing of stories. The bashing of Joe. "Squeeze out your badness into me," would say. I did, again and again, and I came to feel "good", warm, like the sun, and I plunged the depth of the sea of my soul and there I met God. My faith, known from without, was confirmed I verified from within. The world sang and I was in love with all creation.

This book is my baby, born from my family, through darkness into light. It's like a bird In flight, my soul, flying out on the wind. It's all the colours you could ever know, because I'm packed with colour. It's piercing, like the nails of the cross, as that's how I feel...

To touch the feet of Christ, that's the "Mary" in me. To see Our Father in Heaven, that's St Joseph through Joe. Meeting yourself through the eyes of a child, that's what having a baby means.

The field must lie fallow, the shoot rise from the bulb the leaf fall from the tree, As the seasons merge and life falls back into the earth, so do we he the rhythm of God.'

Mary Barnes 1971

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