Albury schoolgirl Mary Baker's poetry included in Admissions, a new book of voices within mental health

"If they were all set to the same dial, there'd be no miscommunication and we'd all be as drab as the colour beige."

A new book of voices within mental health has been lauded as a "double rainbow" by the poet and novelist.

Admissions, an anthology of 105 poems, stories, essays and lyrics, "documents the state of mental health in Australia ... challenging the prescribed notions of illness, recovery, treatment and trauma while reclaiming language as an act of mad pride".

"Everything within these pages is someone's truth," write the editors in the book's introduction.

A poem by schoolgirl Mary Baker, from Albury on the NSW-Victorian border region, who took her life in 2011 at just 15 years of age, sits alongside the work of leading writers, comedians and public figures including Grace Tame, Felicity Ward and Christine Anu.

The release of the book comes as a time when mental health "has never enjoyed such prevalence in the national conversation nor such generosity of funding outbursts than in recent times...", begins the preamble.

"... fuelled in the main by the impact of a pandemic and the proliferation of public health platforms and initiatives encouraging us all to talk openly about whether we're okay or some shade of blue. Even urinals have posters at eye level to remind us that men feel things too."

From descriptions of dolphins and dogs to Dettol lakes, delusions, distress and disassociation, the collection is a "poetic take on mental health in all its forms".

There are no labels, no medicalised explanations of the writer's diagnosis and not a psychiatrist to be seen.

For "none of this needs to be dressed up in the language suit of clinicians".

Instead, the book brings together a resoundingly diverse range of voices with lived experience.

Within these pages, they whisper, weep, wail, shout, reflect, rail, languish, laugh and love.

These are the voices that need to be heard above all others in the mental health space, insists co-editor David Stavanger.

The project manager for Red Room Poetry (and contributor to this book) believes Admissions is a "must-read" for practitioners.

"We need to hear more and more from people in the system," Stavanger says.

"This is a long-haul collection that will resonate in many spaces for a long period of time."

As free as a bird in a cage,

You have trapped me.

And thrown away the key.

(From 'The Key' by Mary Baker)

It was through a collaboration between Red Room Poetry and Albury's Survivors of Suicide & Friends in 2021 that Stavanger was first introduced to the young Mary Baker's poetry.

Award-winning poet and Solstice guest Evelyn Araluen recited The Key in a powerful online video to mark World Mental Health Day.

"It's a very tender and delicate thing to read Mary's poetry," Araluen said at the time.

"Her work is a gorgeous testament to the power of poetry to articulate the deepest and darkest of feelings."

Stavanger says it was a "no brainer" to include Baker's poem in Admissions.

"We wanted to create a document of lived experience speakers and that includes writers who didn't make it through periods of great distress," he explains.

It was in Baker's writing that the loneliness and pain of her illness was revealed after she took her life.

Diagnosed with an eating disorder three years earlier, it had been a brutal, desperate scramble to find answers - and the help that might have saved her.

Baker wrote The Key as part of a compelling anthology (Out of the Shadows) for a Year 9 English assignment and her parents would later stumble across her school work.

The discovery was both illuminating and devastating.

In a candid reflection piece for the book, Annette and Stuart Baker discuss their reactions to their daughter's writing - the "gift" that has been the catalyst for their activism.

"I see myself in the poem as the primary holder of the key and for this, I carry an enduring sadness," Annette writes.

"That Mary was unable ever, even in the depths of her illness, to reveal her pain and suffering leaves me as her mother with deep regret and sorrow."

Stuart's overwhelming feels are of "sadness, understanding and gratitude".

"Mary has expressed the anguish and pain of her mental ill-health and the role she and we played in the three years of battling an eating disorder in our quest to return to normal," he writes.

They are, in many ways, proud their daughter's work sits among some "amazing voices" articulating their mental ill-health.

"Unspeakable things when unstrung, unsteady, unstable, unsound and unscrewed.

Unrestrained makes you unreasonable, unreal and unpredictable...

Unhinged and ungovernable when you've come undone."

(From 'The Z-A of Crazy' by Alise Blayney)

Albury-based author Jane Downing says Admissions is a "compelling" read.

"This book is not about misery or pitying people," she reflects.

"It's not a handbook for mental illness ... (and yet) as a reader you come away having learned something."

From the "brilliant" title to the clever sequencing by the editors (the works run in backwards alphabetical order, from Z to A, of author names), the book provides powerful insights from respected writers, prize-winning poets and even a few celebrities, according to Downing.

"It is not didactic .. at times it's surprisingly humorous, although that shouldn't be a surprise," she says.

"Hopefully you take away (the fact) that mental illness shouldn't define someone."

In Mary Baker's poetry, Downing (who has read and re-read The Key since Mary's death) looks towards the metaphors contained in the writing.

"It was very hard to read after her death," she reflects.

"Annette and Stuart feel they are the gatekeepers; a mother feels guilt ...

"But poetry is about metaphors; I see the gatekeeper was her mental illness - it's not a person.

"It doesn't mean you can't have two meanings - like the title and the cover of the book with its two faces."

"What I haven't accepted is that both parts of me are real. The brilliance and the numbness. The loudness and the deafening silence. And if they could hold hands long enough to understand each other, then maybe I wouldn't still be fighting this damp, suffocating disease. Maybe I wouldn't hold such contempt for it, and wouldn't shove it in my own face as a victimless badge of honour.

(From 'the absence of memory' by Felicity Ward)

Stavanger admits the title was the hardest part of the project.

IN OTHER NEWS:

"We brainstormed about 40 titles and some were just terrible," he laughs.

But in the aptly worded Admissions comes the heart of this collection, which seeks to represent as wide a range of mental health experiences and poetic forms as possible.

"It's about the number of people within the collection who've had admissions to the public health system," he says.

"It's also about truth telling - people reclaiming their story."

You start waking up in the night pulling teeth

out of your head from where your brain

chews on itself.

You start playing fetch with your demons

every solitary walk, hoping this time

they don't remember the way home,

but they do.

(From 'Bad Dog Moon Fever' by Samson JL Soulsby)

Admissions was officially launched on World Mental Health Day, October 10, 2022.

In her review of the book, Taylor Johnson, writes that the "solitary lived experience of each individual is urgent while the collective voice is nothing short of thrilling":

"This is being seen! they scream, sometimes in ALL CAPS; this is being heard!"