This book was long-listed for the 2019 Margaret Scott Prize, one of the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes.

It was released by Ginninderra Press in mental health week 2018. Going Down Gordon Brown is a fictional account of the final day of Andrew Mackirdy who was on incapacity benefit in the UK in 2006 for a mental health condition. In that year, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, set a target of one million people be taken off incapacity benefit and redirected to the dole office.

Andrew had been on incapacity benefit for 35 years. So long in fact, that no-one in social security or the health system had bothered about him for years. When he was called to the inevitable interview, he did what he generally did in stressful situations, which is tried to appear normal. He was found to be capable of work and his income support ceased.

His previous attempts at suicide occurred when he was about to enter the workforce in his early twenties. He ended up in a mental hospital receiving ECT. All of his life after that was a retreat from engagement with the world. As he expressed it in his poetry:

This will not pass.

A year of pain

when everyone who touched me cut

into me with a blade. The world

was a box of glass.

The narrative is interspersed with his poetry which is sometimes humorous and sometimes despairing. Eventually he ran out of money and his body was recovered from the foot of cliffs on the east coast of England.

Alice Nunn, the author, is his sister.