Originally released as an audio slideshow in January 2012, Dominic Lyne talks candidly about his work and mental health to documentary photographer Marc Vallée.
The slideshow is no longer available, so only the audio is featured on this page. You can view the photographs of Dominic taken by Marc on his official website: www.marcvallee.co.uk.
Please take the time to take a look at the talented Marc Vallée’s other work at his official website as well.
“…photographer Marc Vallée and the writer Dom Lyne, one of whose books was featured in one of my ‘books recently read and loved’ posts a while back, have collaborated on a short video/slideshow that is both beautiful and very touching, and it is very highly recommended to you.”
— Dennis Cooper
Transcript
Dominic Lyne: Hi, I’m Dom. I’m an author. I live in Camden, London. Generally I write about mental health issues; obviously I write about them because I have fuckloads of them, so in a way it helps me get through the day, and also gives me the opportunity to help others. If they feel the same stuff I do then hopefully it can inspire them to go and get help or help themselves like so many of us do. Obviously I don’t write it from a professional kind of view, I write from having lived and experienced it; the only way you can write about something is from your heart.
Marc Vallée: What conditions have you been diagnosed with?
Dominic Lyne: I’ve been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Dissociative Disorder, and Schizotypal Personality Disorder, and have also been referred to psychosis assessments and all that lot. A lot of my problems are due to hallucinations, seeing and hearing things, and in a way that’s the main parts that effect how I live my life, because being strangled by a shadow in the middle of the night isn’t sort of a nice thing to put you in a good mood for the next day. It’s the sort of stuff people don’t understand and when you try to explain to them they dont get the fact that what they’re saying is fake, is infact for me the realist thing in the world. That kind of comes out in my books, and especially in my paintings there is always some element of a shadow or a darkness. My aim in a way is that, yeah although I believe all that stuff is true, I want to make other people believe it. So turning it on its head where you have a psychiatrist saying that what they say is true and I’ve got to believe it, its doing a flipside of that and saying well what if this psychiatry is wrong and what I’m saying is the reality of it, but you’re so structured in your textbook lifestyle that you can’t see it.