Review
Books
Comedy
Culture
Trauma
5 min read

Miranda Hart's diagnosis of the unseen

Beyond a medical illness she's on to something supernatural.

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

On a TV chat show, guests look to one of their own talking to the audience.
Mirnada regales a chat show.

There I was, standing in the book aisle with a choice before me. One that would dictate my mental state for the week ahead: I could pick up Boris Johnson’s hotly anticipated autobiography (although, at £30, it would mean putting the bottle of wine in my basket back on the shelf) or I could choose Miranda Hart’s latest literary offering.  

Externally, all seemed calm. Internally, an almighty battle of the books was raging within me. The price of Boris’ ruled out the option of buying both. So, which should I pick? Whose voice should I invite to live inside my brain for the next five days? Both books were offering me a cultural bandwagon to hop on, I just had to decide which wagon looked like the better option.  

Boris… Miranda… Boris… Miranda… Boris… Miranda…  

After some intense deliberation, I popped BoJo’s memoir back on the shelf and became the proud owner of Miranda Hart’s new book. And I must admit, after hearing from friends who chose Boris to be the victor of their own battle of the books, I am very happy with my decision.  

Miranda Hart, the deeply beloved comic actor, sit-com writer, and stand-up comedian, hasn’t been entirely honest with us. For decades, she has been suffering with what she now knows to be Lyme Disease. In her book, she draws back the curtain and reveals a lifetime worth of suffering with illness after illness – bronchitis, tonsillitis, pericarditis, gastroenteritis, labyrinthitis – as Miranda succinctly puts it, ‘too many itises’. Despite illness being her body’s default state, Miranda kept calm(ish) and kept on. That is, until around a decade ago when her symptoms became simply unbearable.  

She tells the story of collapsing onto her living room floor, extreme fatigue rendering her utterly unable to pick herself up. This was the beginning of months of being bedbound and years of having to press pause on her life. Miranda recalls how she wept with relief at being able to crawl to the bathroom, of how she had to watch the television with sunglasses on because of neurological symptoms, and how she would ‘look at a cup of tea on the table and wonder if I had the strength to take a sip’.  She also paints a terrifying picture of not being believed - of living with an illness that nobody can understand, of suffering with symptoms that have no explanation. Miranda contracted Lyme Disease when she was fourteen, and had it diagnosed when she was in her forties.  

It seems that Miranda Hart is trusting that all that she can see is not all that there is – that her suffering is not the truest thing about her and that she doesn’t need to be the source of all of her healing. 

For those with no experience of living with a chronic illness, Miranda’s honesty will open your eyes to the pain and frustration that comes with your body not allowing you to live the life you crave. If you do have experience of chronic illness, this book will make you feel seen. 

But, alas, this is Miranda Hart we’re talking about. If you’re looking for a woe-is-me book, this isn’t it (maybe you’d have more luck trying Boris?). This book is brimming with:  

A) End-of-chapter dance breaks 

B) Jokes about wind (obviously)  

C) Theology 

I kid you not.  

Each of her chapters outline a ‘treasure’ that she has found in the depth of her suffering, the ‘watchwords’ that she uses to encapsulate these treasures are: love, faithfulness, peace, self-control, kindness, goodness, joy, gentleness and patience.  

I got to chapter four of the book and had myself a real – ‘hang on a minute…’ - moment. As a Christian, I’ve grown up with another way of grouping those words together: I call them ‘the fruits of the Spirit’. 

By chapter five I was convinced: Miranda Hart has released a spiritual book.  

She has, quite excellently, trojan-horsed a bunch of Bible into the Sunday Times best-seller’s chart. And nobody seems to have noticed, I almost feel a little guilty for outing her. All the book reviews I’ve read note the hard-won warmth and wisdom included in this book (both of which are there, by the way) and conclude that it is a truly lovely self-help manual. And that’s where they’re wrong.  

This is precisely not self-help.  

In fact, I get the subtle sense that the self-help industry is one that irks Miranda a little bit, and understandably so – the idea that we can ice-bath ourselves into wellness must sound odd to someone who can’t pick themselves up off their living room floor. So, I’ll say it again: self-help is not what this book is.  

Instead, it seems that Miranda Hart is trusting that all that she can see is not all that there is – that her suffering is not the truest thing about her and that she doesn’t need to be the source of all of her healing. She mentions, again and again, that the truest thing about her (and us, her 'Dear Reader Chums') is that she, and we, are loved. Deeply, unconditionally, unshakably loved. We haven’t earnt it and therefore can’t lose it. In her darkest moments, she had lost everything – her career, her social life, her home, her hopes and dreams - but she never lost that love. Everything else she has to say in the book flows from that belief.  

I happen to think she’s dead right – but that is, undeniably, a faith statement. This book is built upon them.  

And listen, you could read this lovely book – giggle and weep your way through it – without ever sensing anything supernatural within it. But, make no mistake, there is the supernatural within it. 

What Miranda has affectionately called her ‘treasures’ and the Bible calls ‘the fruits of the Spirit’ are just that; they’re what grow when one lives a life informed by and infused with God’s spirit. They’re the tangible symptoms of putting yourself in God’s presence, of keeping company with him. They are him rubbing off on us.  

What I’m trying to get at is this: these ‘fruits’, they’re seen in us, but they’re all God. They’re not the fruits of the self and so the way to obtain them cannot be self-help.  

Miranda obviously appreciates that belief in any divine/supernatural/transcendent thing can be complex, that the notion of ‘god’ can come with baggage, and religion can be an all-out no-no. And so, she is incredibly subtle with what she has to say. This book is not self-help, but it’s not evangelism either. She uses her beloved ‘ists’ (phycologists, neurologists, sociologists etc.) to unpack the ‘treasures’/’fruits’, showing how recent research and ancient religion have many of the same things to say.  

And listen, you could read this lovely book – giggle and weep your way through it – without ever sensing anything supernatural within it. But, make no mistake, there is the supernatural within it. From the opening page to the closing one, God’s there, hidden in plain sight.  

I really am unspeakably glad I didn’t pick Boris.  

Review
Art
Care
Culture
Mental Health
5 min read

Mental health: the art that move us from ostracism to empathy

Four current London exhibitions show the move towards compassion.

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A painting of a haunted looking old man dressed in an imagined military uniform.
A Man Suffering from Delusion of Military Rank.
Théodore Géricault, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrayals of mental health were revolutionised from the nineteenth century onwards. While previous generations had focused on the ostracism of those suffering mental illness, and the fear their condition aroused in others, modern artists began to focus on the dignity and humanity of sufferers. Four current London exhibitions show this move towards compassion. 

On display at the Courtauld’s Goya to Impressionism, Theodore Gericault’s A Man Suffering from Delusion of Military Rank, c.1819 -22, shows the artist’s sensitive response to ‘monomania’, the term coined in the early 1800s for people living with a single delusional obsession. It is thought this painting is part of a series of portraits on fixations including A Child Snatcher, A Kleptomaniac, A Woman Addicted to Gambling and A Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy, the face of the last rendered in an unsettling green tinge. 

The circumstances surrounding the painting of the series remain mysterious. The timing coincides with Romantic painter Gericault completing his most famous work, the monumental The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19, depicting 15 survivors of a shipwreck, who had been adrift on a makeshift raft, originally containing 147 passengers, from the French frigate Meduse. Gericault’s preparation for the canvas included visiting morgues to check on the colour of decomposing flesh and building a model of the doomed raft. His difficulties in completing the huge work, over 23 feet long, and the possibility some of his close family may have suffered from mental illness, have supported the belief Gericault painted A Man Suffering from Delusion of Military Rank, and related portraits for personal reasons, possibly out of gratitude to the physician who cared for his family. But there is now doubt if Dr Etienne-Jean Georget commissioned the painting, and whether he was chief physician at Saltpetriere asylum in Paris. 

Even if a biographical motivation for the series falls down, and there is no way of knowing if the subjects of the portraits were individuals living with mental health conditions, these portraits remain unique in early nineteenth century painting. People deemed at the very margins of society are portrayed in the same manner as the most powerful, in half-length portraits emphasising their dignity and humanity, over their social estrangement and health challenges. 

The Raft of the Medusa, Louvre, Paris. 

A painting shows a wreck of a rafter holding survivors and corpses.

Van Gogh’s mutilation of his own ear is interwoven into his biography and his art. In The Ward in the Hospital at Arles and The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles, both 1889, the artist depicted the interior and exterior of the institution where nuns cared for him, during his mental health crisis. The paintings’ significance to his recovery is shown by Van Gogh taking them with him when he moved to another psychiatric facility 25 kilometres away at Saint-Remy-de-Provence. 

Blue is the dominant colour of The Ward, permeating the walls, the beamed ceiling, the crucifix and the door underneath it, and several patients. wear dark blue clothing, including the two nursing Sisters at the centre of the scene, whose Order of St Augustine black and white habits, have been realised in darkest blue. Van Gogh described the long ward as ‘the room of those suffering from fever’, most probably referring to patients with mental illness. The painting was reworked during the artist’s admittance at Saint-Remy-de-Provence, with the symbolic empty chair used in other works to represent him and his housemate Paul Gauguin added to the foreground, together figures gathered around a stove. The return to the painting was prompted by reading Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, a fictionalised account of the author’s spell in a Siberian prison, and the book’s characters may have provided the inspiration for the huddled men. 

The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles captures the grace of the hospital’s Renaissance building, by depicting the inner courtyard from the vantage point of the first-floor gallery. From this aerial angled viewpoint, the garden’s bright flora, radiating from a central pond, spreads out in all directions. Van Gogh’s description of the scene to his sister Willemien, hints at their Bible reading, clergy childhood: ‘It is therefore a painting full of flowers and springtime greenery. Three dark and sad tree trunks however run through it like snakes…’ 

Van Gogh’s images of healing were from memory rather than life, and document his own mental health recovery:  

‘I can assure you that a few days in hospital were very interesting and one perhaps learns how to live from the sick.’ 

The Ward, Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Van Gogh's painting of a mental ward in a hospital

Edvard Munch's Portraits, Evening 1888, shows the artist’s sister Laura, who had been hospitalised for mental illness, on and off, since adolescence. Although Laura is lost in her own world, staring fixedly ahead against a coastal landscape, the affection of the artist for the subject is palpable. Fashionably dressed in straw hat and summer dress, Laura’s dignity anchors the composition. Munch documented his own breakdown after alcohol poisoning in a portrait of Daniel Jacobson. His full-length portrayal of the doctor, arms akimbo, drew the reaction: ‘just look at the picture he has painted of me, it’s stark raving mad.’ Munch’s fascination with the doctor-patient relationship is evident in Lucien Dedichen and Jappe Nilssen, 1925-6, where Dedichen’s looming, purple presence, overshadows the diminutive, seated patient. 

Portrait, Evening. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

A painting of a  pensive young woman sitting and staring across a lawn.

Mental health and delusion form the wellspring of Grayson Perry’s Delusion’s of Grandeur. The artist responds to the Wallace’s flamboyant rococo collection in the persona of Shirley Smith, a character believing she is the rightful heir of the Wallace Collection. Eighteenth century style ceramics are decorated with outline figures resembling the Simpsons. Perry creates a family tree for Shirley from the Wallace’s miniatures, A Tree in the Landscape where every member has a condition from the American psychiatric guide Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 

Grayson Perry, Untitled Drawing, Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. 

A image of a woman against a detailed red background.

In Alison Watt: From Light at Pitzhanger Manor, the artist’s still lifes of roses, fabrics and death masks responds to the collection of Regency architect Sir John Soane, and the ever-present fragility and complexity of human life and psychological flourishing. “With a rose it is impossible not to be aware of human intervention. Roses are bred, altered outside of nature and given names. In the history of painting the rose can be read as a symbol of beauty, innocence and transience, but also of decline and decay, echoing Soane’s preoccupation with themes of death and memorialisaton.” 

With the scientific and medical advances of the nineteenth century, life in all its psychological complexity, could supplant death as artists’ inexhaustible fount of inspiration. 

Le Ciel, Alison Watt.

A diseased rose.

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