Words by Leah Shelton // photograph by Joel Devereux
I’m back in the rehearsal room for BATSHIT and so often when I come back to this work I’m filled with sadness. Sadness for my grandmother Gwen and what she went through. Sadness for the many women – cis, trans and beyond – who have been pathologised, disbelieved, sectioned, medicated, misdiagnosed. Sadness for people still trying to survive in a system that pathologises them for what is often a sane response to a fucked situation.
When I started making BATSHIT, it was based on a gut feeling about how calling someone crazy is used as a tool for social control. It was based on my own experiences of being called hormonal, of being told to calm down, of seeing female politicians belittled and called hysterical, seeing celebrities like Britney Spears becoming the butt of jokes, hearing friends stories of having their pain dismissed in the doctor’s surgery, seeing women’s testimonies in the law courts being framed as unreliable, irrational, too emotional.
All of these personal experiences sat alongside the partial knowledge of the story of my grandmother Gwen, who was incarcerated in a medical institution in the 1960s and given a cocktail of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy without her consent – all for wanting to leave her husband. But much of Gwen’s story was unspoken as I was growing up. And so, working alongside my Director, UK performance art luminary Ursula Martinez, we decided to dig deeper.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when I started to research and dig deeper, it seemed that things for Gwen were actually worse than I could have imagined. Through the research process for this work, we uncovered the medical case files from her incarceration at Heathcote Hospital, Perth, WA. The reports were full of judgemental, condescending, and gendered language from doctors and nurses, consistently implying that she was detained because she wanted to leave her husband – and then deemed “cured” when she returned compliantly back to her husband after treatment.
The more I learned, the more my sadness morphed into rage. And as I researched more about where we are today, I discovered there is still so much medical misogyny and discrimination in our health and mental health systems. In Australia, women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression, anxiety, panic disorder, phobias, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, eating disorders and PTSD; and seven times more likely to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Women, trans and gender diverse people are more likely to have their experiences of pain dismissed; the systems for supporting birth trauma and sexual health are often loaded with discrimination – and now I’m hitting perimenopause there’s a whole other array of assumptions and issues I’m becoming aware of!
So, I guess it’s no surprise that, throughout the process of making BATSHIT, the urgency has grown – and the show has become a scream of defiance, an explosion of anger and a call for change.
As an artist, I believe it’s my duty to ask questions, to challenge the times, and to ask how we can do things better. So, alongside the feelings of sadness and rage, I also feel hope. So many people are working to bring these issues to light, and to discuss how we can do things better. And this work is my offering – that we can channel the sadness and rage towards hope and change.
BATSHIT will be at Brisbane Powerhouse 10-13 September as part of Brisbane Festival. Tickets available here.
