Eating Yellow

The mental health unit I was admitted to forms part of Wonford House, which first opened its doors on 7th July 1869 as a ‘hospital for the insane’. No doubt, much has changed since then but the daunting facade of that big Victorian manor has not. The first time I saw it was in the back of an ambulance thinking what a good start to a horror movie it would make.

My ward was Delderfield and inside its walls, behind its locked blue doors, were some of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever met. One of them (a fellow patient) told me a story about Vincent Van Gogh, an urban legend that tells how the artist believed that eating his yellow oil paint would help him become happier. I didn’t know whether the story was true, but I did know what it meant to want to change your inner state so much that you’d try anything.

What follows are the poems I started writing on the ward.

This book is a collection of 20 poems and 17 photographs, written and captured from inside a psychiatric ward. Eating Yellow is being published in support of Central London Samaritans, to whom a donation of £1 will be made for every copy sold.

Author Biography

Born in Italy, Florence Duff-Scott is the daughter of artist Robbie Duff-Scott and author Lisa St Aubin de Terán. Following a mental health crisis Florence ‘found her voice’ while undergoing psychiatric treatment as an ‘informal patient’ on a mental health ward in the UK. It was on the ward that she began writing poetry as a means of coping and healing. Florence now lives in Devon with her family. Lisa St Aubin de Terán was born in London in 1953. She left England at the age of sixteen and, with her exiled Venezuelan husband, travelled extensively through Europe for two years before returning to his family home in the Andes. For seven years, she ran her husband’s sugar and avocado estate, drawing on these experiences in her first novel, Keepers of the House (1982) which won the Somerset Maugham Award.In 1983 she was named one of twenty Best of Young British Novelists by Granta and won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize for her second novel Slow Train to Milan.She later moved to Italy with her third husband, the painter Robbie Duff Scott, describing her experiences in Venice: The Four Seasons (1992) and A Valley in Italy (1994).A prolific writer, over the past thirty years St Aubin de Terán has published further novels, including Joanna (1990), The Palace (1997) and Otto (2005); the short story collections The Marble Mountain and other stories (1989) and Southpaw (1999); and a volume of poetry, The High Place (1985). She has also edited two collections of women’s travel writing, Indiscreet Journeys (1989) and The Virago Book of Wanderlust and Dreams (1998) and an collection of imaginative writing on Italy, Elements of Italy (2001).She currently divides her time between the Netherlands and Mozambique, where she runs the Terán Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation working in the underdeveloped villages in the north of the country. Her experiences are described in the memoir Mozambique Mysteries (2007).