You may feel it’s one of those things experienced by others, but never people you know. Or you may have watched a close friend battle with one, but never quite got it.

You might have been told you have one, but despised the label. You may even feel ‘mental illnesses’ are handed out too easily to those who just feel sad.All these are perspectives Ifey – my co-director – and I have heard as part of our project entitled Grey Matters.

Like so many neglected subjects, the vocabulary used in the discourse around mental health is woefully inadequate: ‘he feels down today’, ‘she’s gone a bit nuts’, ‘I reckon he should see someone’. Frustration with these euphemisms and with the surface level conversation that takes place around mental health was what gave birth to Grey Matters.

We began by listening to others directly involved. Every person directly or indirectly involved with mental illness has a very different story to tell: they see things, feel things, and express things in very different ways. This is not surprising – to understand any human being, you have to try to enter and understand their mind.

The emotions expressed in the interviews were so varied; we had to come up with a form of presentation that allowed the audience to see the world through all these lenses.

And these are our lenses: every audience member will see six rooms, each based on a separate idea and interview. One will be a short piece of drama, another bustling to the brim with art installations and another piece of verbatim.

Why did we do it this way? Suppose you’ve acquired yourself a new crystal ball. If you stand in one place and look into the ball, you get one way of interpreting things. If you walk round to the side a bit, you see something quite different, but related. If you did this six times, from six different angles, you’d understand things better than you ever could by standing in one spot. This is our aim in Grey Matters.

By now your eyes may well have glazed over. It is never easy to read about mental health. But Grey Matters will not let you flounder: you will be immersed in six different worlds.

You will not be bombarded by statistics, you will not be forced to think anything, but you will not leave without having heard the truth and complexity of six different stories.

You will not sleepwalk through Grey Matters. We hope though, that it does something more: starts a conversation.

Grey Matters will be performed in Week 6 Lent Term. In the meantime, if you would like to submit artwork as part of the project, please email md585.