Felicity Ward on Bags, Bowels and Mental Health

Comedian Felicity Ward powers into the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival with her superb Fringe show 50% More Likely to Die

Feature by Ben Venables | 04 Oct 2016

“I can't believe you've got a mental health festival,” says Felicity Ward, “it's the coolest thing in the world.”

The 'coolest thing in the world' Ward speaks of is the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival. Now in its 10th year of celebrating the artistic accomplishments of those with mental health issues, and also challenging the surrounding preconceptions and stigma, the festival programme has grown to over 300 events. As a representative of comedy at the festival, Ward is something of a perfect ambassador. Since exploring anxiety and depression in an Australian documentary Felicity's Mental Mission in her home country – and especially in her last two live shows – Ward seems to have really discovered her comedic voice while articulating and sharing her own experience of mental health challenges.

Although Ward has had a string of successes since she first began stand-up in 2008, it was a deeply personal crisis which anticipated her current direction. “At the end of 2011 I stopped drinking, I had to move back in with my mother and I left my fiancé, who I'd been with for eight years. It was a life-changing experience.” When delving into these experiences onstage, Ward became determined not to diminish the reality of that time. As she puts it, “I didn't want to sell it short.”

It isn't that comedy hasn't been addressing mental health, but it does seem to be an area currently cultivating an ever richer variety of shows. At the 2016 Fringe, Susan Calman, Chris Gethard and Taylor Glenn are just three of the comedians who explored very different sides of depression in their respective hours. Also, on screen, Netflix's BoJack Horseman is arguably a meditation on depression as much as an animated sitcom about a has-been actor, and Lady Dynamite is a creatively sublime series on bipolar disorder.

“A lot of people have been writing about mental illness,” says Ward, “and it seems audiences are ready to hear it at the same time a bunch of performers are ready to talk about.” She feels she's been fortunate in this timing with her own shows, “There was just a little bit of luck on top of the hard work if that makes sense.”

For her own show, Ward was inspired by mortality statistics of those with mental health conditions, especially the phrase she read '50% more likely to die'. “As soon as I read that sentence I thought, ‘that's the show title’ and I could picture it with a photo of me looking really happy.” 

However, rather than going too deep into those statistics, it became framed more through the probability and coincidences of the day Ward left her bag on a bus on Merseyside: “This year's show happened in 24 hours. I was taking a bus in Liverpool and I left my bag, my keys – everything – on the bus. Over the next 12 hours I could not have written the coincidences that happened that led to the rest of the story.”

Stand-up comedy especially can open up issues people have traditionally found difficult to discuss. As an art form it tends to be confessional, happens in the here and now, and an audience often want to view the comedian as authentic – rather than buying into a more fantastical story as we might enjoy in film or theatre. While it may not always feel this way when we're sat on the front row, it is the comedian on the stage who is taking all the risks, the one lowering their status via self-deprecation and casting light on problems we'd perhaps rather avoid.

Deliberately lowering everyone's guard as a way into comedy and communication might be familiar in stand-up, but it is something Ward excels at. Her commitment to this is demonstrated in her 2015 show What If There Is No Toilet? when she took to making irritiable bowel syndrome funny. 

"Obviously there is something universal about going to the toilet. Heaps of people have irritable bowel syndrome but it's almost more taboo to talk about IBS than mental illness. I don't wish to deride people with IBS because in many cases it can be debilitating, but in the show talking about the toilet gave the material a ‘low status,’ or a point where people could get on the lift to start thinking more about mental illness.”

The connection between IBS and anxiety was a comedically fertile one. The two conditions are not necessarily related, but when acting together – as they often do for Ward – it can create a perfect storm of unpleasant symptoms. As she points out, the neurons in the gut are as numerous as in a cat's brain. (There is a reason one of the best phrases and metaphors to describe feeling fear is 'shitting yourself'). What If There Is No Toilet? certainly seems to have made a difference in the lives of many who saw it, especially for those suffering from untreated anxiety for years: “The connection the show created was incredible. I got a message from someone who saw it back in May and had since been to the doctor about their anxiety. The doctor understood how hard it was for them to make that appointment and was glad that they were now talking.”

As Ward says, it isn't just the discomfort of talking about mental health that's the problem, it's the questioning of our own experiences:  “You're not sure if it really is as awful as it feels, or if you're making it worse than it actually is – you just don't know. Unfortunately, you can't measure your happiness in the way you can measure your weight and your height, you can't say, ‘last November I was 3 kg happier.’ This makes it very easy to descend into an unhappy lifestyle and low-level misery, because you don't have anything to emotionally compare it to in quite the same way.”

And, it's often the way that when people do open up, even well-intended responses from friends are not always helpful: “The bad advice on anxiety is always the kind of shit you've heard 100 times. Like, ‘Have you tried camomile tea?’ or ‘Have you tried reading before bed?’ as if you don't know or haven't tried this stuff.”

Although, conversely, sometimes the obvious advice is worth listening to. Ward has become a keen advocate of exercise, especially swimming: “If I want to operate on a semi-normal level I have to swim three times a week. It's really changed my life; with swimming it is physical and mental, it can be meditative and cardiovascular. There is something immersive about swimming where you can't hurt yourself... Well, you can drown – but there's usually a lifeguard there.”

There's no lifeguard when she's on stage though, so has discussing anxiety to an audience helped with her own show nerves? “When I've felt a panic attack coming on, or just nervous and fragile, I've thought, ‘No this is what the show is about, I'm talking about it onstage'. This took so much of the shame away, and it's fine to be anxious and just letting it in. It's like the paparazzi, if you try to run away from it, it will chase you. It doesn't always work, but it's a different way to approach it that I have found helpful.”

Felicity Ward: 50% More Likely to Die, CCA Glasgow, 10 Oct, 8pm, £10/£12. https://www.mhfestival.com