Marian ‘Billy’ Lindkvist obituary

Marian “Billy” Lindkvist, who has died aged 97, was a pioneer in the use of drama and movement in therapy. The method she created, known as the Sesame approach, involves the use of touch, story enactment, improvisation and non-verbal communication to help people with various cognitive and mental health conditions.

Developed by Billy in the 1960s in conjunction with sympathetic actors and health professionals, Sesame acquired its own institute in 1971, responsible over the years for training hundreds of people in its disciplines, which have been successfully taken into hospitals, day centres and community settings. Billy was for many years director of the Sesame Institute in London, as well as a teacher on its course, which evolved into the MA in drama and movement therapy currently taught at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

Billy was born in Cardiff to John Gaskell, a solicitor, and his wife Rita (nee Gaskell – she was his cousin), both of whom were directors of the Red Cross in Glamorgan. After a Catholic boarding school in Newport, she spent a year in France teaching English.

She had two children from a brief early marriage, and the story of Sesame began when Billy was looking for ways to help her older daughter, Helen, who was diagnosed in the 1960s with autism. Little was known about the condition at the time, and Billy was convinced that her child needed something different from the treatment she was getting.

While working in advertising in London and struggling to help Helen, Billy found solace and inspiration in a drama group based at City Lit, an adult education college in Covent Garden. She played Tituba in The Crucible and Polly Garter in Under Milk Wood, and found that being involved in the stories and characters not only occupied her mind, but helped her to keep going. Then one night in 1964 she had a dream about some actors coming into a hospital and interacting with the patients. In contrast to the dreary wards where she had spent a lot of time with her daughter, the place came alive. When she awoke she decided to make the dream a reality.

Billy’s singlemindedness inspired fellow actors and directors to get involved. With Ursula Nichol, her director at the City Lit, she formed a mime and movement troupe called the Kats, which toured hospitals and day centres and drew members of the audience into its performances. Another small team of actors, directed by Graham Suter, ran workshops for occupational therapists in hospitals, encouraging them to bring drama into their work.

Doctors and psychiatrists were impressed with their patients’ responses and invited Billy to carry out further work in their hospitals. She also began to visit the US and South Africa. At a psychiatric hospital in Cape Town, where she became a regular visitor, some patients taught her a stamping ritual that she brought into her teaching, a strong movement to a drum beat with a feelgood effect that is still enjoyed by therapists and their clients.

In 1971 a galaxy of theatre people launched the Sesame Institute as a charity to support and raise funds for Billy’s work, taking the name from the magic phrase that opens the robbers’ cave in the Ali Baba story, revealing treasure within.

In 1975 the institute began a one-year Sesame course, teaching the use of drama and movement in therapy at Kingsway Princeton college in north London (now Westminster Kingsway college). Billy drew in tutors from three separate disciplines: Peter Slade on child drama, Audrey Wethered on Laban movement analysis (a method of interpreting and documenting human movement) and Molly Tuby, who brought in the psychology of Jung. By the time the course transferred to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 1986, drama and movement therapists were working all over Britain in a wide range of settings, including hospitals, day centres, schools, prisons and homes for elderly people.

Billy taught on the Sesame course for many years, in both studio and clinical settings. I met her when I studied on the course in 1989. In a session for adults with autism I was paired with a man who was prone to fits when he became over-excited, which he did. Calmly directed by Billy, I found myself seated on the ground, rocking the man in my arms while the group sang. Later I reflected that this was unusual behaviour with someone unknown to me an hour before, but it felt fine and the session ended well.

Billy retired in 1994 when she handed over directorship of the Sesame Institute. After that we worked together on a book, Discovering the Self Through Drama and Movement (1996). Billy then brought out her own publication, Bring White Beads When You Call on the Healer (1998).

In the mid 1950s she married Torbjörn Lindkvist, a BBC journalist. He died in 1998. She is survived by her two daughters, Helen and Christine.

• Marian Lindkvist, drama and movement therapist, born 2 June 1919; died 2 February 2017

Marian ‘Billy’ Lindkvist obituary

Novelist Marian Keyes reveals fight against constant "suicidal impulses"

The novelist Marian Keyes has revealed how she battled constant suicidal urges at the height of her mental illness.

The Irish writer opened up to Kirsty Young about her struggle with alcoholism and depression on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday.

At her worst – an 18-month period beginning in 2009 – Keyes said she struggled not to harm herself.

She had stopped being able to eat, sleep and interact with others, and was eventually hospitalised.

“Then the suicidal impulses started and it was very hard to physically to stop myself from going through with it,” she said. “For months and months, every day was an enormous effort not to do the acts of wounding myself.”

Her recovery was “really speedy”, but the experience altered her perception of what it meant to be depressed.

“Nothing worked but the passage of time … It’s an illness and it ran its course.

“I had always described myself as melancholy or depressive but I hadn’t a clue. Anything I had before was a blue day by comparison. This was altered perceptions, a mental illness.”

She wrote her novel The Mercy of Mystery Close in that period. She told the Guardian in 2013 that a scene in which the heroine planned to kill herself in a hotel room was inspired by her own experience.

“I had two goes going out assembling the whole kit and buying paper and Sellotape to write the note,” she said. “The conversation Helen has with the man in the shop, I actually had that, with him asking: ‘What is it you’re proposing to cut?’

“It was so bizarre to be standing in a DIY shop, buying a knife to open my veins with. I was absolutely going through who would find me, leaving money for her to apologise … I wasn’t in my right mind.”

Keyes, 53, also told Young about her experience of alcoholism while living in London in her 20s.

“Alcohol was the love of my life. It was my best friend and, in the end, my only friend … I had stopped eating, stopped hoping, I was constantly suicidal. There was only one way it would go. I couldn’t stop drinking and was preparing to go under.”

Writing was her “rope across the abyss”: she wrote her first short story, then a few months later began a rehabilitation program for alcoholism. She has now been sober for more than 20 years.

“It was that primal urge in all of us to stay alive, saying ‘I can give you this, will you live for this?’ It didn’t get me sober but gave me something to hope for.”

Keyes’ debut novel, Watermelon, was published in 1995.

Her 12 novels to date have sold 35m copies worldwide and been published in 33 languages.

Her 13th book, The Break, will be released in the UK and Ireland on 7 September.

• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. Hotlines in other countries can be found here

Novelist Marian Keyes reveals fight against constant "suicidal impulses"

Bitter irony: I wanted to speak out about mental health but my anxiety stopped me | Marian Faa

I think and write a lot about mental health. Since being diagnosed with anxiety and clinical perfectionism, writing has become an important way of coming to terms with my own psychiatric ailments, while trying also to raise public awareness. It’s not an easy task. Despite my eagerness and many importunate attempts to give a voice to mental illness, I am often left feeling like the world isn’t ready to listen.

But when mental health week ticked around this year, ears pricked up. My news feed was awash with articles about mental health, friends brandishing popular hashtags and events popping up all around my city.

Finally, a week where mental health was a hot topic, where my issues were on the frontline. If ever there was a time when my humble opinions on the human brain might count for something, this was sure to be it. I panicked.

Determined to seize the opportunity, I started bashing out stories and pitches with intensity, like I was trying to give my computer’s motherboard some kind of frantic deep tissue massage. My mind turned cartwheels. Within 20 minutes I had chewed all my fingernails back to the quick and yanked out a few generous handfuls of hair – telltale symptoms of my escalating anxiety.

I forgot to have lunch. I forgot to pick my little sister up from school. I missed two calls from my partner. But somehow I still managed to singlehandedly pluck all the tiny hairs on my leg, another delightful habit I tend to deploy with fervour whenever I need to curb my anxiety.

As time ticked by and the pressure mounted, I realised I was heading for a nervous breakdown. Maybe I was making too big a deal of mental health week, but that is the very nature of my mental illness – the tendency to inflate and catastrophise. It was a bitter irony: my anxiety was the very thing that stopped me from writing about it.

So I closed my laptop and resolved to stay silent for mental health week. I decided that protecting my own mental state was more important than writing about it. And I reassured myself there would be other opportunities.

See, that’s just it with mental illness. Often we cannot talk about it when the world wants us to – whether that be our families, therapists or the media. And when we are ready to speak up, we can’t find the ears.

Even with efforts to reduce stigma, mental health is an extremely sensitive topic. It takes a long time to develop the personal insight and vocabulary to be able to communicate about our mental states. In my experience, you can only really talk (or write) about it on your own terms and in your own time. This means we need a culture that is receptive to discussions the year round, not just at designated calendar points.

While initiatives like mental health week are exceedingly important, they are not always as beneficial to sufferers in the ways they intend to be. The sudden spike in publicity may feel like a fleeting injection of sympathy that leaves us even more isolated once the week is over and our issues fall into the background once again.

The ephemeral support for mental illness shines with a suspicious veneer, tarnished by the knowledge that talking about mental illness might earn you a hundred likes on Facebook on one day but compromise your job application the next.

On the other hand, the sudden spotlight on mental health can also cause people with mental illness to cringe and withdraw, unnerved (so to speak) by the unfamiliar pressure of public exposure. And then there is the risk of triggers that comes with a disordered flurry of news articles and tweets about mental health.

I am not disputing the merits of mental health week and the media’s reporting of it. I think these initiatives are noble and necessary. I think they are crucial to creating a society that makes it easier to live with a mental illness. But if listening to people with mental illness and understanding their experiences is the most important step in dissolving the silence and stigma, we need to be open on a more general, everyday basis.

We need a culture that is attuned to the nuances of mental illness and accepting of the silences as well as the disclosures. We need a world where mental health is an acceptable topic regardless of time and place, beyond the field days and short-lived social media campaigns.

Bitter irony: I wanted to speak out about mental health but my anxiety stopped me | Marian Faa