Richard Morrison
When musicians grapple with their mental health, they need our support
Why musicians’ mental health is a major concern
Recently I had a disturbing conversation with Alexis Ffrench. Not, I hasten to add, because the ‘grandmaster of piano chill’ is a disturbing character. Quite the reverse. Laidback, humorous, properly proud of his origins and achievements without being pompous, he struck me as a fine role-model for young minorityethnic musicians trying to make their way in the classical world.
But the incident he related was deeply disturbing. ★is best friend at specialist music school had been a brilliant youngster called Chris. They got up to all kinds of pranks together. Then Chris became ill. Mentally ill. ★e spent long periods in the Maudsley psychiatric hospital. At 21 he took his own life.
As Ffrench told me this I felt a deep chord, more like a shudder, resonate in my own memory. As a young journalist in the late 1970s I covered the death of another dazzling young British musician. Terence Judd was a phenomenal pianist, already a prizewinner at the Tchaikovsky Competition, but prone to severe depression. As a teenager he had been through a nervous breakdown and been treated with electroconvulsive therapy. One Sunday just before Christmas 1979 he had lunch with his parents, then said he was going out for a walk. They never saw him alive again. A week later his body was found below Beachy ★ead.
At the time I couldn’t understand why someone with such talent, opportunities and support from loving parents and dedicated teachers would end up in such evident despair. But within the next decade I interviewed a string of great instrumentalists – Vladimir ★orowitz, Claudio Arrau and John Ogdon among
them – who had suffered bouts of mental illness. I came to realise that the qualities which elevate a musician into the highest realms of virtuosity can occasionally be accompanied by mental instability. In particular, bipolar disorder (such as we now believe Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Elgar and Rachmaninov to have suffered from) can produce dazzling bursts of creativity interspersed by troughs of despair.
I also learnt – because many top musicians told me of their own childhood experiences – that specialist
People in the arts are four times more likely to commit suicide than the general population
music schools and conservatories were, in the past, often scandalously and in some cases tragically unsupportive of the fragile prodigies entrusted to their care. Too much emphasis had been placed on technique. By contrast, far too little thought and time had been given to nurturing the students’ development as balanced human beings at a time in their lives – adolescence and early adulthood – when even the most grounded kids can feel confused, angry and alone. On top of that was the relentless pressure to ‘win’ – a ‘kill or be killed’ mentality built into every level of classical music, from junior competitions to professional auditions.
Whether the pastoral care offered today by those specialist schools and conservatories is a vast improvement on how it was 20 years ago, when Ffrench’s friend died, is a debatable issue. ★owever, other help is at hand. Last month the Maytree Respite
Centre (maytree.org.uk), a national suicide prevention charity, launched a programme of suicide awareness and prevention training designed for people in the music business. Called ‘Space Between the Notes’, it’s a response to some shocking statistics – for example, that people working in the arts are four times more likely to commit suicide than the general population, and that around 70 per cent of musicians say they are struggling with depression.
Maytree’s programme is targeted at managers, agents, publishers, promoters and others who deal with professional musicians. And that’s vital. I know of too many cases where musicians have become burnt-out shells of their former selves without their employees or colleagues appearing to notice or care.
But the necessary training to spot the signs that someone is spiralling into depression and/or suicidal thoughts is something that all those nurturing young musicians in educational institutions also have to acquire. In my column last month I wrote about the need for students to be taught ‘how to deal with jealousy, criticism and the ruthless competition built into the music business at all levels, while retaining an essential grace, civility and decency’. I realise now that the word ‘sanity’ should have been at the top of that list. It’s not good enough to shrug and point out that history is littered with ‘highly-strung’ musicians going off the rails. That it still happens in our supposedly enlightened age should be a stain on all our consciences.