Up the Middle Road with the Crichton Trust.

You can find out more about the origin and development of this project on The Crichton Trust’s website!

Introduction video for Up the Middle Road 2022

A Crichton fairy story

When I first started reading the collected oral histories and researching historic treatments for mental health as I prepared for Up the Middle Road, one theme for me, started to emerge from the very start.

The number of personal recollections and narratives that shared common threads with fairy tales.

This may come as a surprise for many folk, but when you consider that stories have always provided a safe place to look at and reflect on difficult topics that we might find uncomfortable to consider, safe places to look at things we find hard to define or understand, a place to consider other people's struggles or transitions it may make more sense.

If you add to that the treatments, which often have herbal counterparts, the effects of which are often the symbolic trigger for a related but more dramatic response in fairy stories, you may be less surprised that the topics and stories shared by the staff and patients of The Crichton ( a former leading mental hospital in Dumfries) started to find immediate parallels with the stories I've looked at and collected over the course of my practice as a herbal storyteller.

The first revelation I had, as I read the stories, was from former nurse Betty Tindall's account of Dr Meyer Gross' use of pioneering insulin coma techniques to treat certain patients (predominantly elevated levels of mania and schizophrenia according to my wider research) in the late 1940's.

Meyer Gross himself was a German Jew who had left his homeland during the days leading up to Hitler's ascent to power. His pioneering techniques though dramatic and controversial by today's standards did seem to have some level of success and I decided to research further. Following the path of herbal parallels, as two plants connected to stories which are about people being in a deep sleep state and connecting to plants which have a balancing effect on blood sugar levels immediately sprang to mind.

One story has Hebrew origins, the tale of a young man whose family feared no good would come of him, as he was (in story terms) a simpleton. He falls asleep under a Fig tree and dreams that the gifts from the tree would help him cure someone. The next morning with a fig leaf accidentally stuck to his foot, he finds his intellectual and cognitive abilities are slowly improving, he gathers up fruit, resin and leaves from the tree and finds his way to a city where a princess is very ill and has lost her sight. He miraculously cures her with the gifts from the fig and of course the two fall in love.

I was intrigued by this story, as not only is loss of sight occasionally attributable to diabetes but extracts from Figs, long used by herbalists to balance blood sugar levels, are one of the plant-based treatments currently being researched as a treatment for diabetes (1).

Maybe a little connection to stories revealing science in a simple form?

The second plant story parallel that occurred to me was the apple that causes Snow White to fall asleep. Apples too are renowned for their ability to balance blood sugar levels, a little less close maybe, but bear with me as the story unfolds.

Snow White is a strong story archetype with similar stories around the world, the stepmother is often her biological mother, Snow White is not always the innocent victim but is on occasion a troubled young woman who grows afraid of her mother, why? We don't always know...

So, I started to think about some of the young women whose stories have been briefly mentioned in the Crichton's oral histories, one narrator describes daughters of the respected families who had found themselves unexpectedly pregnant.

We also know from a nurse's accounts that women suffering from severe post-natal depression and post-partum psychosis were treated at the Crichton.

Now although insulin coma therapy was not particularly used to treat post-partum psychosis, post-partum psychosis is much more prevalent amongst people already suffering from Schizophrenia and paranoid delusions are common amongst schizophrenics.

You can maybe start to see my processes?

I wanted the stories to acknowledge and respect the incredible recollections from staff and patients that we have been so generously allowed to read, but I am not a teller of the literal truth, the wonderful award winning tour guide: Kathleen Cronie of Mostly Ghostly was also working on this project and she and project director: Dr Valentina Bold, who had recorded memories for the oral history project, were in a far better place to share the true stories that inform and gave rise to this project.

My job is to be a storyteller to take those words and share a creative response, to weave them into new narratives that share the real, in new informed narratives that offers places to reflect, the classic 'safe space' offered by stories to look at difficult or emotionally charged topics. To take old stories and weave facts and histories into them to keep them alive, allow them to stay relevant for new listeners, to allow stories to grow, adapt and develop to meet their audience’s needs.

I wanted to take aspects of these incredible people’s voices and allow them to become stories of everyman, relatable characters that encouraged listeners to think about the way characters in ‘fairy stories’ behave, about the lives they lead and what the hidden stories might reveal: respectfully and considerately.

So I told my story from the viewpoint of a young nurse, who works with a female patient, not dissimilar in age, whose history of schizophrenia, leads her to develop post-partum psychosis, her paranoid delusions make her fear her mother is plotting against her, sharing commonalities with the stepmother in the best known variant of Snow White. The young mother has increasingly troubled schizophrenic episodes and as the tale continues is given an apple and falls asleep.

Meanwhile the young nurse meets and falls in love with a gardener, but this is the era of make do and mend, there is a war on and although they plan to be married at the Crichton church, they cannot afford a wedding dress, there is no fabric to be had.

The nurse is given a wartime silk parachute by one of the Crichton family members working in the laundry, I wanted to pick up on the self-sufficiency of the Crichton and loved the metaphor of the parachute as a 'safety net' gently assisting people's landing, allowing them to gently become 'grounded'.

The pattern is drawn onto the parachute, it is cut, pinned, sewn and becomes a wedding dress and the nurse marries her handsome young man at the Crichton church.

They think they have invited everyone to the wedding, but there at the back is an unrecognised figure, a glamorous lone woman, the uninvited guest.

(I was thinking of the wonderful 13th fairy at Sleeping Beauty's christening!)

As the wedding party leave the church, the nurse thinks of her patient and wonders if she has yet awoken...then as they walk down towards the pavilion for their wedding tea, they see the young mother smiling and pushing a pram, along the avenue of Linden trees, trees renowned for the calming qualities of an infusion made of the blossom.

The uninvited guest, melts away from the crowd and holding a silver coin out, places it on the baby’s blanket, a hansel, a lucky silver coin...

You can hear the story for yourself in the film, filmed live at the event in 2022

(1) – Atkinson FS et al.: Nutrients. Abscisic Acid Standardized Fig (Ficus carica) Extracts Ameliorate Postprandial Glycemic and Insulinemic Responses in Healthy Adults. 2019 Jul 31;11(8). pii: E1757.