Professor Jim Lucey: My experience is that mental health can be lost and found

While we may all be mentally, emotionally and physically depleted, now is an opportune time to formulate a new way of living, according to Professor Jim Lucey's new book

Young woman at home longing at window. Spring landscape outside, blue sky with clouds and trees. Cozy pink pajama. Self isolation concept illustration

If there was ever a time we needed hope in our lives, it is now. And Professor Jim Lucey is doing his best to give us some. His cheerful and pragmatic manner certainly helps to lift my own mood when he chats to me from his home office in the garden of his Dublin home, where he has just completed his ‘virtual’ rounds.

In his latest book, A Whole New Plan for Living, Lucey, a consultant psychiatrist at St Patrick’s University Hospital, Dublin, and clinical professor of psychiatry at Trinity College, focuses on how to achieve balance and wellness in a changing world. He says while it is difficult to look forward in the midst of so much uncertainty, it is imperative that we still continue to plan for the optimisation of our health — physical and mental.

The word ‘unprecedented’ is one that we hear often these days to describe the situation we find ourselves in due to the ongoing pandemic. However, as Lucey points out, it is nothing new, and like the pandemics that have gone before, this too shall pass.

“We know from history that this has happened many times. In a sense, our knowledge of history is terribly short-term. Pandemics are not new. Wars are not new, and this is a war against an unseen enemy,” he says. “What is different about it is the scale of the social isolation right across the country,” he says.

While the book was written during the pandemic, the idea behind it had been percolating in Lucey’s mind for quite some time, since before his father died in 2010.

When he found out he was dying, he asked his son to give him ‘a whole new plan for living’.

Prof Jim Lucey, author of A Whole New Plan For Living.

“When Covid came, lots of people were asking me for a guide that was sensible, scientific, reliable and helpful. I couldn’t really find one. My brother suggested I write something myself and make it happy, useful and practical. My previous books were for people who might be considering seeing a psychiatrist (In My Room) or a therapist ( The Life Well Lived). I wanted to write a book that was for everyone. Then I recalled — it was the unconscious at work — my father’s instruction to me, to make a new plan for living.”

Lucey writes that the key to wellness is better mental health, and that this is something we can actively plan for, by following the characteristics of successful recovery, which can be remembered by the acronym CHIME, which stands for connectedness, hope and optimism, identity, meaning and purpose, and empowerment.

While all of these things are under sustained pressure, Lucey says that doesn’t mean we can’t still plan for a healthy present and future.

“No-one says you can spin all the plates all the time, but if you are maybe making attempts at whole health that haven’t worked, you just need to lower the hurdles. In terms of connectedness, that means reaching out to each other in whatever way we can. It might be connecting within ourselves, across boundaries, in the space between us and within us. Connecting is a visceral and a physical and a thoughtful act.”

Hope is also essential in planning for a new way of living, says Lucey.

“There is no doubt of the effectiveness of the measures we have taken in terms of reducing the prevalence of Covid in our community. And the vaccines are coming, it is extraordinary. So there is hope.

“There is also hope in the way people have managed it. I think people have been astonishing in the way they have coped with the losses, their grief, caring for each other. I have been really uplifted by that. Our human spirit has been so impressive. I don’t think we are acknowledging that because we are quick to see the negative.”

Lucey says that in one way, while we may all be mentally, emotionally and physically depleted, now is also an opportune time to formulate a new way of living.

A Whole New Plan For Living.

“While the book helps us to find a way to get through what is happening right now, it also speaks to a time after Covid. This is surely a time to reappraise our plans — are we going back to two-hour commutes, rushing to the office, chasing some illusory goal or are we going to have a new plan for living?”

When it comes to resilience in the face of mental health struggles, Lucey is very much inspired by his patients and he shares some of their experiences in the book to highlight what is possible.

“My experience is that mental health can be lost and found and that recovery is the most common outcome of mental challenge. I think every day they lift me up.

“I see people whose challenge is simply to get up in the morning, and they do. I see people who deal with the perennial difficulty of stigma and negotiating whether they tell people at work, whether their friends should know and they deal with these things with bravery and courage and they succeed.” Ultimately, Lucey says he hopes the book helps people move towards a commitment to wellness.

“That is enhanced by an understanding of self-care, by a recognition of our emotional and physical life, by a discovery of our identity. Then it is moved forward by a realisation of our essential need for each other. That is what empowers us. The meaning of our lives is in our collaboration, our connectedness.”

• A Whole New Plan for Living, by Prof Jim Lucey, published by Hachette, is out now. Jim Lucey will be in conversation with Evelyn O’Rourke as part of Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival on Sunday March 28 at 12pm. Tickets available here.