Celebrities back 'black dog' campaign to defeat depression

Well-known impressionist Rory Bremner suffers from depression Photograph: Andy Hall

First coined by the Roman poet Horace and later adopted by Winston Churchill to describe his own depression, the metaphor of the "black dog" has been used for centuries. Now a mental health charity has reclaimed the expression and wants to bring it to a plinth near you.

Sane is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month and, to mark the occasion, it will be continuing the fight to beat the taboos surrounding mental illness by producing larger-than-lifesize sculptures of dogs that its founder and chief executive, Marjorie Wallace, hopes will be sponsored by companies, schools and individuals and put in prominent positions up and down the country.

The campaign has attracted the support of celebrities who have suffered from depression, including Rory Bremner, Stephen Fry and Ray Davies, and each dog will have a specially designed coat.

"The black dog has been used as a metaphor for depression from classical mythology through medieval folklore to Churchill. It acts as a symbol to externalise moods and thoughts that are difficult to communicate," said Wallace.

"We have artists, celebrities and people with mental illness designing coats to brighten the dogs, ready for auction in 2012. We hope the dogs will stimulate new awareness and give people a language to express their inner feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness. It is easier to say you are having 'a black dog day' or 'the black dog on my shoulder' than it is to say you are depressed."

"The shadow of the black dog touches us all, but it is possible to master mental illness so that it no longer dominates your life. This campaign is to encourage people to learn to live alongside their 'black dog', [and] seek help."

One of the first to design a coat for one of the sculptures is 52-year-old British artist Anthony Cleyndert. "It is actually a large piece of stained glass and I designed it to represent hope," he said. Cleyndert has suffered with recurring mental illness for 30 years.

"Well, it's absolutely essential for someone suffering from mental illness to have an optimism of attitude towards their illness. I have been hugely helped by the work of Sane and I was thrilled to be asked to help them raise awareness. It's not just the mentally ill who get the black dog, everybody can, which is why this campaign is so important."

Sane began as a result of the outpouring of public support that Wallace had received after she wrote a series of newspaper articles in the mid-1980s about what she called the "forgotten illness".

"It was much against the zeitgeist of the times. It was breaking taboos then to talk openly about mental illness; people were often isolated and kept their sufferings secret.

"In those days I went to many funerals where I knew that had the person been given understanding and help, they might not have felt driven to take their own lives.

"Now depression is more widely recognised as a condition often underscoring many others which can be treated. We and others have campaigned to erase the stigma which has hindered acceptance and knowledge of why some of us are so much more vulnerable than others. There has been a sea change in awareness and that has to continue," she said.

But Wallace still sees a long fight ahead: "Paradoxically, I think now we are seeing a loss of soul in the psychiatric services. With all the cuts, closures and mergers, it is increasingly hard to provide compassionate care the one-on-one relationship of trust on which recovery so often depends.Nor do we provide places of sanctuary for people in crisis: it is a struggle to find a hospital bed or see the same psychiatrist more than once. We also need more support for families, who can find themselves neglected and engulfed by having someone they love face mental illness, with few ways of finding them the help they need. It takes courage and persistence for everyone involved."

It is a theme that is very much welcomed by professionals working in the field of mental illness, said Professor Guy Goodwin, the head of the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University. "The work of organisations such as Sane and others to make mental health less of a taboo is absolutely a key part of tackling mental illness.

"It's very important for us because ultimately we need to be treating mental health the way we are treating coronary care: preventively and proactively."

He said that significant steps forward had been made in the past 25 years, especially in the identification of risk factors for those likely to be affected, "but not enough to get complacent".

"I think that the work of the next 25 years in the mental health field will be focused on how we intervene earlier. One hates to be the nanny in this, but we have to be getting clear messages out, just as we do to prevent heart attacks.

"If we [were to offer] advice and psychological behavioural interventions in advance to the 5% or 10% of the population whom studies suggest are at risk of mental illness, we would really see big changes."

http://www.sane.org.uk/what_we_do/black_dog/