Dr Mark Deeks is a TEDx international Speaker with a PhD in heavy metal. He uses music to improve wellbeing, mental health and success.
"It’s been a bit of a weird existence.
Constantly taking one hat off and putting another on.
Moving from box to box for my entire adult life.
And a long road to find my purpose.
On one side of my life, I’ve been a piano teacher since I was 15, a musical director, choir leader, I’ve worked in education as a music lecturer and had a pretty “normal” musician’s life.
On the other side, I’ve been obsessed by heavy metal and rock music since I was a teenager. The phase my parents always hoped would end one day and hasn’t. I’m in two signed metal bands, have a PhD in heavy metal (national identity in heavy metal to be precise), and make a lot of music that gets a lot of the stereotypical reactions.
You know the ones: “it’s just noise / angry / violent / loud” (delete as appropriate).
So, for more than 25 years, I lived a very compartmentalised existence, and no one in either of my musical worlds really understood why I did the other. When I’m with my choirs, where many of the singers are often retired (or let’s say playing the second half of their game!) they don’t understand why I enjoy all that noisy music. When I’m on tour with one of my bands, they don’t understand why I make music with “a lot of old ladies”. (There are men too, but you get the gist…)
In my late 30s I started to have occasional low periods. Not necessarily what I would call “depression” as such, just short bursts of feeling less than happy without any obvious explanation. They weren’t frequent and would usually pass in anything from a few hours to a day or two. Nothing drastic, and not majorly life affecting.
After a number of years where I focused on other areas of my career, I was doing an increasing amount of piano teaching (especially online) again. I was really starting to focus on why so many people would talk for decades about wishing they could play piano but then never did anything about it. And, in contrast, what those who did take the first small steps get out of it other than the musical skill itself.
I started to notice that when I asked clients (and also members of my choirs about singing) what having a musical hobby affected their lives, the first answer was often nothing to do with music: reducing anxiety or stress, having some time just for them, increased confidence, someone had told them as a child that they would never be musical and it had stuck with them, a break from a fractious work or home life; whatever it was, the first impact for them often had nothing to do with “I like the music”.
It became increasingly apparent to me that in many ways the benefits the people were describing were wellbeing based, and it led me to really start to think more about my own relationship with music, which had been both my hobby and obsession as well as my career for my whole life.
In 2020, my wife and I were presented with the hardest time of our lives when the twenty-week scan for our first daughter Laurie went as badly as it can, and we were left facing a Termination For Medical Reasons (TFMR). For someone as in tune with and obsessed by music as my wife and I, you can imagine our reaction when we both noticed that at the exact moment we were given the bad news by the consultant, the song that was playing in the hospital department was the first dance from our wedding. In a split second the song associated with our happiest moment was now also associated with our worst moment.
Going through a TFMR comes with a particular form of guilt: you are given the bleakest of bleak prognosis for your child, but it is legally your choice as to what to do. 10 days later the whole of the UK was in a pandemic induced lockdown, and we were left to deal with the mental fallout of the situation with little of the same support that might otherwise have been made available to us.
Initially I think I went into fight or flight mode and gave a lot of my attention to the fact that thousands of pounds of music related work had disappeared overnight, so I needed to find new ways to generate income quickly for me and my family. But within a few months things started to catch up with me mentally, the anxiety and panic attacks started to get worse, and I realised that I hadn’t properly faced the overwhelming grief of losing Laurie.
At the time I was writing an album for my solo doom metal project Arð. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law had arranged for a star to be named after Laurie as a surprise that we didn’t know anything about until a beautiful ornate star chart arrived in the post showing us the coordinates of the Laurie Deeks star in the Andromeda system. The numbers of those coordinates are the numbers on the tattoo on my arm – my heart on my sleeve that I can see when I play the piano and guitar that has become hugely important to me.
One night at 3am, I suddenly awoke in bed with an idea: what if those numbers weren’t the coordinates of a star? What if they were the numbers of the notes of a musical scale – what does it sound like if you play them as a melody? (To the music theory geeks reading, yes I know there isn’t a note 0 in a scale, I hope you’ll forgive me the creative licence of making those a 1!).
That melody became the final one at the end of the first Arð album on a track called “Only Three Shall Know”. The lyrics are not about the story at all – I didn’t want to write words about what I was going through – and so many of the people who have bought that record have no idea that that musical “nod” to Laurie is there. But to me, it means the world. If she had never existed, that melody would never have existed. It’s a huge comfort.
Around the same time the audio only social media app Clubhouse had become hugely popular as a method of people all over the world being able to communicate and connect with each other to talk about any subject imaginable at a time when many were locked in their own houses. I increasingly took the opportunity to join and lead discussions around mental health, sharing my story, and was struck at how people responded to an infrequent male voice, especially the rarity of a man who was openly talking about the pain of baby loss.
I started to be invited onto podcasts from a huge range of backgrounds, and it gave me a huge sense of purpose to feel like I was honouring Laurie and trying to make something positive come out of an awful situation. SO many people go through the sadness of baby loss in one way or another, some on multiple occasions, and it remains one of the great hidden subjects. All too often people bury their pain, and no one really knows what to say on either side of the conversation.
So fast forward to 2023, and the seemingly disparate worlds of piano, choirs, heavy metal, mental health and baby loss all came together in one 15-minute window, as I delivered my TEDx talk: “Could Heavy Metal Music Help Maintain Your Mental Health?”
In one talk, and seeing the reaction afterwards, I realised that I no longer needed to keep these different worlds apart. They all form part of who I am, and the thread is to help people be reminded of the power of music and what it can do for us other than be “just entertainment” or, worse, “background noise”.
Now I go into businesses and conferences and deliver talks and workshops on the connection between music and wellbeing, mental health and success, and as well as a professional career it is also a very personal mission. I feel like all of these very different elements of who I am have led me to this, and whilst I clearly wish that we had never gone through the pain of losing Laurie if I can make something positive come out of it and help others to deepen their relationship with music and help their mental health, that’s a comfort.
And best of all, we did eventually get our happy ending and now have our 3-year-old Nola safely with us. She knows all about her sister in the stars and couldn’t be more loved."
