| Subject: The laughter lady |
Author:
Lavenderstar
|
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
Date Posted: 03:41:45 10/09/04 Sat
Laughter lady joyfully patches up her patients
CLAIRE SMITH
WHEN she was a child at school, Margaret McCathie was always getting told to stand outside the class for laughing. Today, the 59-year-old grandmother is still forever on the edge of giggles, which frequently and noisily erupt into huge guffaws.
But the infectious laughter that once got her into trouble has now become Margaret’s trademark. As a laughter therapist, she leads courses in rediscovering your inner joy, using humour and joy to break down barriers in workplaces and offices.
Dressed in a bright rainbow wig, she visits hospitals, children’s centres and nursing homes as Bubbles the Clown, helping sick and isolated people rediscover the joy of living.
As The Laughter Lady, Margaret has featured in a film with Patch Adams, the unconventional US doctor who pioneered laughter therapy and hospital clowning. He was portrayed in the Hollywood film Patch Adams by Robin Williams. Earlier this year, Margaret - from Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire - travelled to Tibet and China with Adams and she has an open invitation to join him on his clowning tours around the world.
These days, it is hard to picture Margaret McCathie without a huge grin across her face. When she poses for The Scotsman photographer, wearing a huge purple wig and rainbow glasses, she laughs so hard you can imagine her taking off like the children in Mary Poppins. What makes her joie de vivre all the more extraordinary is that just seven years ago, she was in a clinical depression so deep that doctors feared she would be hospitalised or sedated for the rest of her life.
At the beginning of her laughter workshops, Margaret always tells the story of her illness and recovery. "Seven years ago I was in a very difficult place in my life. I tried two times to kill myself. I was in a locked ward. I spent a year in hospital in a very, very deep depression.
"My husband was told I would not be well again, that I would be in and out of hospital all my life and that I would be on medication all the time. One of the doctors told me I was one of the worst cases of depression he had ever treated."
The illness began with chronic insomnia and spiralled to the point where Margaret was convinced she would be better off dead. After her suicide attempts, she was sectioned against her will and given electro-convulsive therapy three times.
"I was breathing but I wasn’t alive," she recalls. "I couldn’t feel a thing.
"If somebody had come in and machine-gunned everybody down in the ward, I wouldn’t have been bothered. I had no emotion, no feeling."
The wife, mother and grandmother was so depressed that she believed her own family (she has four children and six grandchildren) would be happier without her. "My son brought his new baby to see me. I tried to look interested but I had no feelings at all.
"It was as if there was a world going on and I wasn’t a part of it. I really felt that I was of no use the way I was. I thought I was a burden on my family and I thought the best thing to do was not to be there. I thought that would be better for everybody."
Margaret, who is originally from Fife, had always had a keen interest in alternative therapies and spirituality, but could find no answer to her depression.
She even travelled to Brazil on a whim to see the spiritual healer John of God: "I hopped on a plane thinking I would get a miracle and I ended up back in the ward."
Today, Margaret McCathie has no bitterness towards the doctors, whom she believes did their best to help her. But for her, psychiatric drugs, hospital treatment and ECT were not the solution.
She now believes her illness was a spiritual journey, which enabled her to cast off her old fears and move into a new phase of life.
One of the turning points came when she decided to contact Patch Adams, whose laughter workshops she had attended in the past.
"I had been to two of his workshops but I had never spoken to him one to one," she explains. "There had always been hundreds of people around.
"I faxed a letter to Patch Adams saying I was in utter despair. I had had so much medicine and electric shock treatment and nothing was changing.
"He faxed me back the same day saying his hospital wasn’t built yet, but he said go out and serve and see your depression lift."
Adams, who trained as a doctor after a bout of mental illness in his youth, is the world’s most famous laughter therapist. His approach relies not on drugs or conventional treatment, but on creating a safe space for people in extreme mental states.
Margaret was stunned that he replied to her fax within hours; the gesture touched her deeply.
"I really felt this man who didn’t know me cared," she says. "It made a difference."
Her recovery began in earnest when she made a decision to accept whatever her illness threw at her: "I had a conversation with God and said, ‘I can’t fight this illness any more. You take me wherever I want to go.’
"Three weeks later I was off all my medications and I began to feel a wee teaspoonful of joy."
After she was discharged from hospital, Margaret began three years of Jungian psychoanalysis, which she feels finally allowed her to understand the factors which had driven her into the long dark night of the soul.
"I was very much brought up with fear," she says. "The Catholic Church teachings were very much that I would go to the burning fire.
"I had a lot of fear around the devil and being bad. I was always trying to keep in God’s good books."
These days, Margaret no longer goes to mass. "I realised I went to church out of fear, and I no longer want to do anything out of fear. I feel closer to god but my god is no longer that man in the sky pointing a finger at me.
"I feel my work with Patch is sharing that love in the world and that’s what I want to do."
Margaret’s first face-to-face meeting with Patch Adams came in 2000, when he ran a workshop in Edinburgh.
"At the end of the workshop, Patch said: ‘The lady with the orange shirt, you have got a very infectious laugh. Don’t leave without giving me your name and address."
The Swiss television crew who had been filming the European tour got in touch and told her she had become famous in France and Switzerland as the Laughter Lady. But it was only when Patch Adams invited Margaret to join him at a laughter conference in San Francisco that he discovered she was the same suicidal Scottish housewife who had sent him the fax.
"He couldn’t believe I was the same woman and he asked me to speak at the conference and tell my story."
On the same visit, Margaret accompanied Patch Adams and his troupe of clowns to a local children’s hospital and discovered a new vocation.
"At the end of the visit, a doctor asked how long I had been a clown. I said: ‘Today’.
"He said: ‘You’re so good at this, you should do it.’"
Since then, Margaret has visited hospitals, children’s homes and old people’s homes across Scotland as Bubbles the Clown. She has an open invitation to accompany Patch Adams on his clowning tours and earlier this year went to China and Tibet. She has led laughter workshops for health and local authority workers across Scotland, using techniques developed by Adams, the laughter yoga of Dr Madan Kataria and by British laughter guru Robert Holden.
By playing children’s games like musical chairs and encouraging workers to laugh together, she believes co-workers can develop more understanding and tolerance of each other and learn to work better together.
"There is a lot of fear in the workplace and that doesn’t help set up a warm feeling," she says. Laughing together helps relationships and helps people to connect more comfortably with each other and let down their barriers."
Margaret is the first to admit that laughter therapy is not for everybody and that some people will never feel comfortable clowning around with their office mates.
But she knows that by telling the story of her own journey through depression, she has inspired many others. "Always at the end, somebody comes up to me and says, ‘You have given me hope’. Somebody always says, ‘I’m going through a difficult time myself’.
"For me, depression is nothing to do with your head, it’s to do with your soul’s journey.
"I see the depression as a great blessing because out of the darkness has come who I am today, which is a much healthier and happier person. My life is so rich and I am grateful every single moment. I am more contented now than I have been all my life."
• Margaret McCathie can be contacted at caringclown@hotmail.com
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
| |
Feedback: 