The message that comes from the heart of this double bill sounds simple:
if you have mental health problems - speak out. Easy to say, but both pieces - part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival - reveal how different, and difficult, the "outside" world looks to some-one in the grip of an altered perspective.
In Mirror Mirror, performers Joshua Payne and Vanessa Coffey channel material volunteered by women who have experienced eating disorders.
Text, movement and visual imagery - especially the distorting mirrors that enclose the space, and the huge balloon that symbolically weighs, Atlas-like, on Coffey's shoulders - create a sense of how fragile,and easily-skewed, self-image can become in a society that apparently judges everyone and everything by appearance. And if you're convinced you don't look right? For some, the shock of discovering they were slowly committing suicide helped shatter this illusion. Who knows how many stay fatally silent …
The Vacuum Cleaner, as the solo artist in Mental is called, emerges from under his duvet - along with the medical records, police files and other information that define him in the eyes of the system. Panic attacks, self-harming, suicide attempts. Spells in hospital, interwoven with political activism, mark him out as disruptively anti-social - on paper, anyhow.
The man disclosing this to us is quietly spoken, frank and humorous as he details the treatment that never helped him cope, but has stigmatised him. His last episode, this spring, broke the pattern with friends supporting him in a self-imposed "house arrest". If his speaking out harrows and saddens, his dignity and resolve leave you lost for words.
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