Deirdre Kashdan led a conventional life.
In the first half, at least. She became a teacher, then a school head. She got married, had a child.
But eventually the paperwork, and the way education stifled children’s creativity got to her. She quit in her forties and went to study art in what is now University of the Creative Arts in Canterbury.
She did a foundation year, got hooked, and ended up spending four more happy years there, quietly becoming an artist.
Meanwhile, the rest of her life fell apart.
“My son had just started university, and my training – and this new life – coincided with his first breakdown. That was when my work became personal. I started to explore and express my own, very private feelings.
“All the time that I’ve worked as an artist, I’ve been expressing the impact of my son’s mental illness upon myself.”
She smiles when recalling her son’s childhood. “He was always very quirky and creative. Lots of fun. Always pushed the boundaries. He worked very hard at school. It didn’t come easy, but he got his A-levels. And he went off to university in Hull.”
Even before he left, she was worried.
He seemed depressed, but their doctor still encouraged him to go to uni, saying it would be good for him.
“And it might have been,” she says. “But while he was coping very well with the academic side of things, he was not coping socially. And when he arrived home after that first term, he was clearly unwell.
“He literally started to unravel over the Christmas holiday, in a very frightening way. I was sleeping with furniture against my bedroom door, because I was scared. Something had changed in him.”
It spiralled downwards quickly.
He walked into a pond, and when she couldn’t get him out, she called out the emergency services. This was the first time she heard anyone use the word schizophrenia when talking about her son.
“He ended up being admitted to a private hospital. Because even then, all those years ago, there were no beds available in the NHS. They injected him with something, sedated him. And then he was out of it for a long time – for four months, in fact.”
Very little was ever explained to her.
“His consultant was actually very good and very kind. But not all staff were. I remember being told very early on, by one of the nurses, ‘You should know that it’s very likely your son will commit suicide.”
It was a two-hour drive to the hospital. But she did the journey every day, to visit him. That day, she couldn’t drive for crying. “I just thought, ‘What on earth are you telling me? What is going on?’
Her son was 19 then. He’s now 47.
“It’s been a roller-coaster,” she says calmly. “This has been going on for many years. And I am fuelled not just by sorrow and trauma, but anger – anger that services are even worse than they were in the beginning.”
He worked for some years, in jobs such as office cleaning where he didn’t have to interact with other people. Over the last decade, despite many attempts, he hasn’t been able to undertake paid work, but creativity has been his own salvation.
Even during long periods of homelessness, living in a tent, he has always made sure he had paper and paints.
After years of fighting, he was given a council flat.
But he wasn’t safe there. “Vulnerable people soon become very apparent to others – people who are equally desperate, probably – who prey upon them.”
With no support from the community mental health team to help him live independently, he was robbed, beaten up, even had people climb in through the window and refuse to leave.
He barricaded the windows and doors. The walls slowly became black with mould, the kitchen infested with mice.
A serious breakdown followed.
But another long period in hospital meant he was at least safe. After discharge, with a written care plan that nobody seemed to look at, Deirdre was left to pick up the pieces yet again. He had lost his flat, and with nowhere else to go, he moved in with her.
It wasn’t until he was finally given supported accommodation that she was able to refocus on her creative practise. And the focus was clear.
Then she discovered Victorian hidden mother photographs.
“The child is photographed in the foreground, but when you look closely behind the child there is somebody hidden. They’d be disguised, draped or maybe just scribbled out and erased from the image. You wouldn’t know that person was there. But they were holding the child whilst the photograph was being taken.”
It seemed to her to be a perfect metaphor for her own role in supporting her son, writing letters, making complaints, asking for meetings – but rarely being consulted or acknowledged.
She too has been erased from the picture.
“What’s really made me angry is that I’ve often been dismissed as irrelevant by hospital staff. Why don’t they talk to me? Why don’t they ask for my input?
“They don’t have to share confidential information regarding my son, but just listen, please. And add my views into the mix, because I’m going to be the one that looks after him when he is well enough to be discharged. We should be working together to keep him well.”
She knows her son best.
“I know from the expression in his eyes how he is. I can see when he’s not well. But I can also see when he’s becoming dangerously unwell. And one would expect the mental health crisis team to listen. But they don’t always.
“That can leave people in a very frightening and vulnerable position. I don’t feel it right now because my son is more stable and is being supported. But there have been times when I have imagined something terrible might happen.“
She began to explore this in her art.
She asked a friend to take a photograph of her in the guise of a hidden mother, draped in a full-length cloth. And she put out a call on social media formatted as a missing poster, asking for women in a similar position to get in touch.
At first, she thought her project would be about mothers. But other women contacted her, too: daughters, sisters, partners, all invisibly holding up a loved one.
She calls it The Missing Project.
“Not only was I missing and were they missing, but our loved ones are missing too. Because where is their role?
“One of the saddest things I ever heard my son say was, ‘There’s no place for me in this world.’ Isn’t that a terrible thing to hear? Because there should be a place for everybody. We all have a contribution to make.”
So far, 250 women have participated in the project.
Some have contributed words. Many have also taken their own hidden mother photographs.
“Women have sent me the most amazing portraits, choosing a drape and setting that’s significant to them. Sometimes they hold a prop. So, there’s a whole range of quite poignant imagery.
“They’re disguised, but every one of those 250 women relate to each other’s story. It’s helped to reduce that sense of isolation, offering an opportunity for people to speak to others with similar experiences.
“We trust each other, we listen to each other. Because we all know exactly how it feels, what it’s like. And we can reassure each other, too.”
It is giving these women a voice, some visibility at last.
A few days after this interview, a 27-year-old participant in the project took her own life. It is believed the pressure of caring for her mentally ill father had contributed to her own depression. This tragedy highlights the importance of this work.
It has already been shown in libraries and on train platforms in Kent, and on the exterior of City Lit College in London, where Deirdre studied for a year at the start of this project. It has won two awards for its contribution to improving Mental Health.
Now there’s a more extensive exhibition at The Beaney Museum in Canterbury, until September 7.
It’s an intense, moving show.
The photographs are shown life-size, and a slideshow shares some of the messages between project participants. Deirdre is working on an artist book, and she is continuing her live performance piece, They Don’t Care, which started last year.
“I got 27 reams of paper to represent the 27 years of my son’s illness, and I sat for 27 hours repeatedly writing the words ‘To whom it may concern’. It was agonising, because it reminded me how traumatic it is writing those letters, particularly when nobody responds to them.
“While I sit there, visitors to the exhibition can come and engage with me. I completed five reams of paper last time for the first performance, so
I’ve got lots more paper to be filled!”
Deirdre is 73 years old.
Her age is the least interesting thing about her, but she says it does give the work an urgency. “I have to do something about this while I still can, using this experience and using my creative practice to tell not just my story, but other people’s stories too.”
I wonder if she has any advice for creatives who think they’ve left it too late. “The only time it’s too late is when it is literally too late,” she says. “You keep going to the end!
“We have a lifetime full of experience. Use it, keep using it, keep adding to it. And use all those very transferable skills that you don’t even know you have!
“I’m not one ever to give up. Don’t let anything stop your dreams or prevent you doing something you really want to do. If it’s important to you, it’s important to all of us!”
Portrait of Deirde Kashan (top) by Iwa Lougher. Work from The Missing Project, above and below. So far, public shows of the work have been crowd-funded. If you wish to donate, you can do that here. If any journalists reading this want to write about her, please get in touch.
What do you think?