MENTAL

Mental is a short play of about 45 minutes in length set in a mental health day centre. It is a farce that looks at the failures of psychiatry and the oddities of mental distress. The play has three characters that are users of the day centre. It questions many of the assumptions of mental health and whether it should be considered a health problem at all, as opposed to a problem of living caused by individual responses to societal pressures. The characters also take on other roles such as bored/naughty school children and a harassed teacher, a GP, the Prime Ministers psychiatrist. The play includes rants, comedy, slapstick humour, a banner, an activist talking to the audience directly and occasional audience interaction. Near the end of the play the users of the day centre offer psychiatric drugs and ECT to the audience as if they were ecstasy or some other party drugs. Humorous and iconoclastic the play provokes questions on many aspects of the mental health system in early 21st Century Britain.