Harvey Brough conducts Vox Holloway at the Premiere of Music on the Mind, 29 November 2015

It was the loss to suicide of four friends within two years that inspired Justin Butcher and Harvey Brough to create “Music on the Mind”. A new choral work, drawing on texts by “unquiet minds”, including those of Sylvia Plath and John Clare, it was performed for the first time at St Luke’s, Holloway, in November. I was in the pews and deeply moved.

I think it was the sight of members of the Maudsley Hospital’s Mind and Soul Choir shouting “KICK IT DOWN! KICK IT DOWN!” that thrilled me most. Comprised of staff and service users, their friends, family and carers, the choir was the beating heart of the performance. As they delivered with gusto this refrain (part of a choral adaptation of “An Unquiet Mind”, Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir of manic-depression) they were both deliberate – eyes firmly fixed on their conductor – and free, exhilarated.

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There is a famous passage in the Bible where Paul tells the early church to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ”. Deploying the language of war, he lays claim to a divine power that can be mobilised to destroy arguments and “every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God”. Just how difficult it can be to take control over thoughts is articulated by John Donne in the Holy Sonnet that begins “Batter my heart”, in which he urges God to take his heart by force. “Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, / But is captive, and proves weak or untrue.”

The idea of an internal war, of the fight to lay hold of our thoughts because of the sway they enjoy over our feelings, is central to the principle of cognitive therapy. In fact, Dr Pablo Martinez, a Spanish psychiatrist, believes that we can find in Paul’s instruction “the embryo of cognitive therapy”.  Read the rest of this entry »