Hot Press Mental Health Special – Louize Carroll: "Early intervention is what it’s all about"

Louize Carroll
Musician/Chartered Occupational Psychologist

I think we’re more open now to having a conversation about what it is to feel certain things. But where it hits a glitch is when we start to pathologise everything that’s normal. Your mood being low is legitimate; you’ve hit a wall, you’ve hit burn-out. These things are a normal part of existence. Suffering is a normal part of being a human being, but we’ve pathologised it in such a way that we actually feel like the only way to be healthy is to avoid negative emotion. And by constantly trying to avoid negative emotion, we actually create disorders.

That’s what a disorder is: it’s the avoidance of discomfort. It’s okay to feel like shit, that’s actually alright. Use it to discover yourself, to learn about who you are: this is gold. You don’t learn anything about yourself when you fly through life successfully. You learn that you did something right once. But if you trip, if you fail, if you hurt yourself, you learn everything there is to know about who you are. And that’s what takes you through it.

If you have a shit day, talk about it now – don’t wait. Early intervention is what it’s all about. Talk about it when you first feel it, and then you can actually unravel it; don’t wait until it becomes a huge knot and you can’t remember where the beginning of the thread was.

If you’re trying to solve a problem that your mind creates, with your mind, you’re on a losing game. A lot of the work that I do with people is around getting back into your body, because when your nervous system is dysregulated – your heart’s beating fast and your temperature’s up – you’re in your emotion centre in your brain and if you’re there, you’re not here.

Here is where you think rationally. Here is where you problem-solve but you can’t reach this if you’re in your emotion centre. I remember when I went to therapy, she would go “Put your feet on the ground” and “What do you see in the room?” and I’d go “Jesus, would you just listen to my problem?!” But it actually works: get your feet on the ground, get into your body, breathe, regulate.

Make your exhale longer than your inhale because by doing that you’re telling your body that you’re safe, and if your body believes that it’s safe then you can move into this part of your brain and you can start thinking.

Music is not like a business or a company where you can go to HR if you have a problem or you can get sick leave if you have to take time out. That doesn’t happen in music: there’s no structure, there’s no one to report the bullying or whatever else might be happening to you, to.

So, it’s incredible to have a service like Minding Creative Minds now – a system and a structure that you can go to and not only receive support or counselling but also get mentoring or financial advice or legal assistance. That’s unbelievable.

Louize was speaking at the Hot Press/Minding Creative Minds session at Electric Picnic, “Does Being a Musician Drive You Mad?”

Read the full Hot Press Mental Health Special now in the current issue of Hot Press: