Movers and Shakers: Creativity

A positive Parkinson's side-effect

We are now nearing the end of the second series of Movers and Shakers and although we have had plenty of laughs along with the moans, we have struggled to find much that is positive to say about Parkinson’s. But this week is different. We are celebrating one unexpected side effect of the drugs we take - a burst of creativity.

This is something a number of the Movers and Shakers have themselves experienced. The most striking example is Gillian Lacey-Solymar who has written a musical about the indomitable Emma Hamilton, Lord Nelson’s mistress, and seen it performed to great acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival. Paul Mayhew-Archer has toured the country with his one-man show about Parkinson’s, Mark Mardell tells us he is writing poetry and as for me, well I may not have mentioned this, but I have written a memoir about my mother and my childhood, Ruskin Park: Sylvia, Me and the BBC.

Nicholas “the judge’ Mostyn and Jeremy Paxman seem less convinced that Parkinson’s has got their creative juices flowing. But it is only fair to point out that this podcast only exists because the judge bullied and browbeat us into it and that Jeremy’s mordant observations have been a key factor in its success.

So is there any science behind the idea that Parkinson’s drugs can spark creativity? We are joined again by Professor Alistair Noyce who told us in last week’s episode that drugs called dopamine agonists, designed to help us move better, could affect other “pathways” of the brain producing negative side effects such as compulsive behaviour. But this week he said there could be positive effects on the brain too:

“When you throw a dopamine agonist into that you improve the movement, but you overcompensate in some of the other pathways and, and the happy side effect of that may be increased creativity.”

And we have two brilliant guests who have both achieved amazing things since being diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Samuel Smith was a high flying BBC News producer, then an executive at a ritzy PR firm, but his secret passion was music - he was what you might call a serious amateur, a singer-songwriter occasionally playing in a band, and from a family with several professional musicians.

Samuel Smith

But when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s aged just 44, the music just stopped: “The six months after I was diagnosed, I couldn't play. I’d look at my arm and it just wouldn't move.” He says he felt he had lost the biggest part of him. But the thought that his new baby son might never see him play made him pick up the guitar again - and then it became an obsession: “I was playing 14 or 16 hours a day when it started coming back. Part of that was the reality of I don't know how long I've got to be able to do this….So there I am, six months after diagnosis, I can suddenly play again, it's like being pulled out of the water,”

He had to learn to play differently, not so fast, and physically he reckons he is at about 70% of his capacity before Parkinson’s . But that too had its upside: “I adapted musically, I was suddenly playing rhythms and styles of songs that I'd never even thought of before. And my songwriting is 10 times stronger than it was when I had all the freedom of the full palette….’This is where you can play’ my body is saying, ‘this is what you can do’. And I've pivoted to that, and it's unlocked something completely different.”

It also gave him the confidence to do something that he would never have dared do before his diagnosis - contact some of his favourite artists, Grammy award winners, to ask them to record an album with him. “And honestly everyone said yes, 27 Grammys on the record.” Sam sums up his remarkable achievement as “creativity coupled with I don't give a damn.”

Martin Pickard, Parky Poet

Our other guest would probably agree with that. Martin Pickard has become a poet since his diagnosis and launched a site for fellow poetic Parkies. He was diagnosed over the phone during a Covid lockdown and had no access to any Parkinson’s support services or anyone to talk to about it. “I took to poetry as a form of therapy to start trying to get my head around it,” he says. “It just started flowing out of me.”

In his former life as a. management consultant he had ambitions to write something rather different - a book about facilities management: “But sitting down, having had to give up work, I couldn't write a book to save my life, I just can't organise my thoughts sufficiently. But I can do a page - so my thoughts went on a page because that's how long a poem is. I was grieving for the business life that I had before, stuck at home doing jigsaws and watching ‘Cash in the Attic.’ Now I'm writing poetry.”

Soon he found others like him:”I discovered this whole community of creative people with Parkinson's.” Martin started a website, Poets Wall, and has built a thriving community with all kinds of Parkinson’s poets. Some who had never written verse, others like Martin, who remembers that back in the 1960s “he used to scribble out some hippie nonsense”, had written before and were rediscovering it:

“Whether you're driven to it by the obsession that had you waking up at night trying to think of a rhyme for dystonia, or whether you're doing it just to get your head around this amazing dramatic change that's happening to your body, it's worth doing.” 

There are probably other reasons than just a side effect of the drugs that many of us become more creative after a Parkinson’s diagnosis. Insomnia means I often find myself writing in the early morning and in our WhatsApp group Gillian will often pen a limerick at 4am. Then there is the idea that all great art comes from experiencing trauma - and being told you have an incurable degenerative disease certainly counts as traumatic.

But I hope you will agree, having listened to Samuel and Martin’s inspiring stories, that Parkinson’s can be the inspiration to take your life in a creative direction you never quite dared to go before.