Counter Culture

Poppy Radcliffe in conversation with Pat Harrington

How do you hold a system to account while it’s holding you? That’s the question pulsing beneath SECTIONED – Schrödinger’s Mental Health, the raw, poetic, and politically charged solo show from neurodiverse performer Poppy Radcliffe. In it, Radcliffe takes the audience on an unflinching journey through nine years of coercive psychiatric intervention—including eight sectionings, the most recent of which occurred just weeks before this year’s Fringe.

Blending slam poetry with sharp commentary, she takes a scalpel to a system that asks patients to be simultaneously unwell enough to detain yet well enough to self-manage. The “Schrödinger” metaphor, far from a gimmick, becomes a lived paradox—a way to interrogate the cruel logic of mental health bureaucracy where diagnosis justifies surveillance and vulnerability is met with suspicion.

Here, Poppy speaks candidly about the trauma of being detained, the institutional failures she’s endured, and her hopes for poetic protest as a catalyst for reform. In this moving and urgent interview, she lays bare the contradictions of a system that claims to care, but too often punishes, isolates, and invalidates. What follows is both testimony and artistic mission statement—one that may well leave you changed.

About the Show and Creative Approach

1. What inspired the title SECTIONED – Schrödinger’s Mental Health, and how does the quantum metaphor shape both the narrative arc and audience experience?

The title Schrödinger’s Mental Health is a reference to two things being true at the same time.  When dealing with the mental health services, it often feels like you are expected to be both well and ill simultaneously.  You are expected to accept life long ill health and medication but act calmer and more together than people without diagnosis. If one is well why can’t there even be consideration to reduce medication? If one is ill, why do you get no practical support? 

The show asks the question: am I ill or am I well, because I surely can’t be both? 

2. You describe the piece as part crushing poetry and part TED talk. How do you balance raw, confessional verse with the more structured, informational elements?

This is one of my favourite aspects of the show.  The show transitions smoothly from the prose parts to the poetry, with the poems chosen to highlight the emotional impact of the policies on the patient, there is no stop and start between them.  

3. Your debut show was shortlisted as “best emerging artist” at Brighton and won Best Neurodiverse Performance. How has that early recognition influenced your creative process this year?

It has certainly given me confidence that the show will be well received.  Writing this show has been incredibly difficult, it is a scary thing to stand up and say that a system that is universally loved and believed to be doing the best they can is in fact failing as many people as it helps.  Winning the outstanding neurodiverse performance award at Brighton was an honor and a shock, until I received the nomination, I wasn’t even aware that any awards people had seen the show.  It made me feel that there really was a chance that the show and story could get noticed at Edinburgh this year, which is both everything I want and also terrifying as the thought of being the face of mental ill health in the UK brings its own level of anxiety.  

Anxiety that got so high that my most recent sectioning was between Brighton and Edinburgh 2025.   I had to take the mental health services to a tribunal (independent legal process to determine whether I should be released from section) in order to get released in time to perform at the fringe this year.  A tribunal I won and I am very proud of that as apparently that is rare.  In a weird way I am grateful that I had recent experience of a ward, it had been 2.5 years since I was last in and it is easy to forget the horror, but if anything they are worse than they ever were.  

It has thrown into contrast the general public perception of myself and the perception of the services, the former seeming to have faith and the latter, that I am only trying to help, still doubting my sanity.

Talking Sectioning and Inpatient Care

4. You’ve been sectioned eight times in nine years. Can you walk us through the most jarring moments during the AMHP and medical assessments—what questions or procedures stay with you?

My first sectioning and last sectionings were the most jarring. The first happened three months after the separation from my husband at a time when I felt as mentally well as I have ever done.  I slipped up, over did things and got arrested for drunk and disorderly, not my finest moment but in my view understandable given the circumstances and it was the first time ever in my life.  When I left the cell the next morning, the second lieutenant said to me “Don’t worry, a lot of people who go on to do amazing things have records for drunk and disorderly”.  I felt seen, supported and ready to repay their faith in me by buckling down and working.

I got sectioned two days later after nothing more than a row with my parents who didn’t know how to handle the arrest.  In that meeting, and it was until recently the only one that I had seen the section notes of, I was called delusional for believing I could build a database (my area of expertise), they commented that my speak was laboured when talking about my parents, people who had broken a promise and with whom I had always had a difficult relationship.  At the time I was a satellite engineer, I may have used the term “rocket scientist” a slight exaggeration.  The section notes wrote there were “elements of truth”.  I felt that they saw a distressed woman and formed their own conclusions when there was nothing at that point to be worried about.  That decision was the start of my mental distress, not the culmination of it.

In general, I could not tell you what parts hurt the most because I have not been given access to what they have written about me, you are almost periphery to the decision process about your own future.

The most recent sectioning hurt because prior to it, I had spent a week trying to get myself voluntarily committed.  I called an ambulance on myself 8 times, because I was so mentally unwell that it was also physically ill, an interconnect between my mental and physical health now being something I deal with on a daily basis.  The ambulance came 5 times and each time wrote me a note, saying “Talk to your sister” or on one “If you experience unconsciousness, dial 999” which is impossible advice and then left without me.  I honestly thought I was going to die and they left me and only sectioned me after I had recovered my strength.  Yes I damaged church property, but if I committed a crime whilst psychotic then charge me with a crime and allow me to tell my side of the story.  It is not right to lock people up with no ability to advocate for themselves.

5. Mind’s guide to sectioning stresses the right to an interpreter, a friend present, and full explanations of each stage. Which of these rights did you find most critical in preserving your dignity, and where did the system fall short?

None of these were offered for any of my admissions, I was not even aware until this interview that I had a right to have a friend with me at the assessment phase and have never done so.  The explanations for the treatment tend to amount to “We believe you need medication” but no explanation given to what exactly they believe they are treating.  

I can not think of any way that the system has not failed, nearly all actions in my life that sound shameful were during the sectioning process at first admission to a ward.

6. Looking back at your ward admissions, which practical changes—big or small—would have transformed a punitive experience into a genuinely therapeutic one?

The key thing I would change would be the welcome.  Arriving at a ward is scary, no one greats you.  You are just dumped and left to wait.  It’s a minor change but if you were met by a nurse and given a cup of tea and taken to a quiet place to talk and have the rules of the ward explained to you, I think this could do wonders to transform the experience.  The first time I was in a ward, I had my phone confiscated after putting a post on Facebook trying to track down a woman’s partner.  She had been picked up and taken with no notice and no ability to get a message, believing he may have thought she just left, she was desperate to reach him.  I thought I was doing a good thing, no one had explained to me that you weren’t allowed to post publicly about patients and for doing so they confiscated my phone, my only link to normality.  It was just hours after this that the first signs of psychosis occurred in my mind.  Something I had never experienced before I was sectioned that first time.

So give a proper explanation and tour.

Also the way they deal with medication is atrocious.  You go into a ward and are handed small pots of pills to take throughout the day, you are often not even told what they are or what they are supposed to be treating.  Medication can be transformative is done right, my sister is the poster child for the positive effects of the right medication, but in wards they do not listen to you when you say that the pills they are giving you are not right.  People in mental wards are not stupid, they are the ones with lived experience of the medication, believe them and listen to them about what they are struggling with and try different meds with their agreement until you find something that actually works.  Nobody wants to be chaotic, no one wants to be in distress.  The arrival of the mental health services should feel like the cavalry has arrived, in reality it often feels like shelling from the enemy.

Systemic Reflections and Remedies

7. You argue that a successful service is one that makes itself redundant. From your research and lived experience, what three concrete tweaks to acute inpatient wards would most accelerate that goal?

1: Believe what the patients are telling you.  You do not end up in a mental ward because you have a supportive family and good people around you.  In my most recent admission I was called delusional for believing in the threat to my wellbeing from my neighbours, a very real threat.  Even if they seem far fetched, start from a place of trust.

2.  Make the services point of contact, make it easy for someone to self refer, have a more GP like system for appointment, mental health does not occur on a regular monthly basis, if a crisis happens, they must respond quickly.  Conversely don’t force people to appointments when they have nothing that they need to discuss.

3. Make people create recovery plans as well as crisis plans.  The services always insist you make a crisis plan for what they should do in an emergency.  It forces you to think about the past and your ill health and then, at least in my case when a crisis hits, is not followed anyway.  There is currently no concept of a recovery plan.  Allow people to think about a positive future, allow them to define the steps they need to take to experience good mental health again.  The mind is an incredibly malleable organ, the viewset that once you become ill, you will always be ill is in my opinion not only wrong but self fulfilling.  If you do not have positive encouragement from friends and family, you need it from the services and this is something they currently don’t provide.

8. In preparing the show you must have come across pockets of best practice. Which trusts or units seemed closest to “care that empowers recovery,” and what lessons do they offer?

The most positive thing I experienced in a ward was one ward that held weekly patient and staff feedback meetings where you could give your opinion on what had been good and bad the previous week and what you would like to see going forward.  There was also a particular nurse one time who always seemed genuinely pleased to see me and was always available for a chat and who even came in on her day off because it was the day I was being released just to say goodbye.  Her kindness has stuck with me to this day.

9. Underfunding and staffing shortages are chronic issues. How might frontline practitioners advocate for incremental improvements—say, in ward layout or daily routine—that cost little but yield outsized benefits?

They say they are understaffed but there are loads of staff on the wards they just sit around.  We do not need more staff, they need to change the way the staff are trained and the processes they have to follow.  Staff sitting around all day just watching the patients does nothing.  I once saw a nurse on 1 to 1 sitting by and watching a patient hitting her head against the wall till it bled.  There is a never ending stream of people wanting to work in mental health, let them actually help.

Neurodiversity, Performance, and Stigma

10. Winning the neurodiverse performance award at Brighton Fringe must have felt momentous. How has that validation shaped the way you frame the show’s themes for audiences unfamiliar with neurodiversity?

I touch on the topic of my autism during the show and indeed it is the autistic neurodiversity that I most associate with. At the time it was given and to some extent, to this day, I am very uneasy with the bipolar diagnosis that I also have.  It is a very common misdiagnosis for autism.  I try to show the positives of autism, I was a natural at maths and physics in my youth and I liked my honesty.  As I say in the show, I fail to see how an intense interest in subjects and difficulty lying can be considered negative traits and not attributes to aspire to.

11. You’re reaching people who’ve never spent a night on a psychiatric ward. How do you tailor your language and imagery so that lived-experience audiences feel seen, while newcomers remain engaged without feeling overwhelmed?

I focus on a few key moments in the process, particularly on the initial greeting and the overwhelming boredom that is the most prevalent emotion in the wards.  The poetry adds depth to the descriptions as they are poems that were written at the times of the stories so show the emotional impact.  I am trying to show that wards don’t often feel like places of recovery but places where distress is exacerbated by a system that says it cares but where the staff tend to seem aloof and disparaging, which is the opposite of what someone going through trauma needs.  There are good sides, the craft groups that are sadly becoming rarer especially providing some respite to the monotony.

12. Performance art can crack through stigma in ways policy papers never will. What moments in the show do you think resonate most in shifting public empathy?

This is a tricky one, I think the most impactful poem in the show is one called help

Don’t tell me that you’re helping

When your help is nothing thus………….

Don’t tell me you don’t see them

The hopeless, disenchanted mass………

I’m hoping that this will encourage people to open their eyes. The same actions with different motivations can be good or bad. That we live in a society now that seems to support the bullies and those that shout loudest rather than the gentle and those trying to obey the laws.  There are thousands of people struggling and when the care criticises and leaves you alone it does less good than kind words and practical assistance.  

I have tried to make the show as light as possible but I hope it shocks people into realising that the “care” provided by the acute services is very different to that provided for less intensive situations and that there is a significant difference to receiving help you have requested than having help you don’t necessarily want thrust upon you

Just let me lick my wounds in peace

And somehow make it through at least  .

Future Directions and Impact

13. You’ve said that after Edinburgh you want to use your birth name, Robyn, and move into standup comedy. How do you envision translating your poetic confessions into a comedic set—what stays, what goes?

The poetry and standup I think will become separate. I love poetry but social reform is really what I’m aiming for. My recent poetry is much lighter than the stuff included in the show, in part because my mindset is much lighter now.  I have one called “we’re doing AI backwards” which is a piece about wanting AI to help me search and categorise existing human made art rather than create art for me and I even wrote my first love poem a few months ago.  I’ve signed up for a comedy course starting in October. I do not know yet how successful it will be but I’ve done a lot of absurd things in my struggle to survive and I hope to uplift people by being vocal about the rubbish I have done and showing that the past is not the future.  We all deserve a fresh start.

Of course if Edinburgh goes well, I will consider touring this show, I hope to do a London date in the autumn.

14. Beyond moving seats in Laughing Horse’s Little Cellar, what change in policy or public mindset would you love this show to catalyze over the next year?

I want to blow the doors off the whole system, though I know this can not be done in a year. There is a brilliant book called Fragile Minds by a mental health nurse called Bella Jackson who sees the same problems that I see with judgement, disbelief and lack of care. I’m hoping together we can start a movement for reform. 

I am also hoping to get actively involved as an expert by experience or peer worker within the wards, my dream is to run poetry groups within wards and within time to publish and anthology called “Poetry from the wards” to show the world that many of the people detained in mental wards are gentle, good people trying to get their lives back on track.

15. If you could pose one urgent question—about rights, resources, recovery—to a mental health commissioner, what would you ask, and what would your ideal answer sound like?

Good question.

Why are there more opportunities for convicts in prison to upskill and start again than there are patients in mental wards?

My ideal answer would be:

Many people in wards are only there for short periods, (but this is not true, many people are there for 6 months going onto years).  I would like them to recognise that heavy sedative medication prevents people from really engaging in meaningful recovery, to acknowledge the empty craft and therapy rooms and suggest that a move towards more holistic therapy and practical help and guidance could have better results.

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