I tried ‘therapeutic screaming’ to improve my mental health

“The scream was loud and sharp, and my throat instantly felt rough and scratchy. But god did it feel good.”

As my mum always tells me, “Better out than in”. Usually, she says this in reference to my chronic IBS and constant illness. I don’t like going to the toilet in public when my gut is making me sick, because of the embarrassment it causes. My IBS can make me quite unwell, and let’s just say that I prefer to save that level of intimacy for when I’m locked up in my bathroom at home. 

My mum says I shouldn’t be embarrassed because going to the toilet is a very human thing to do. Although I am well aware of this, (thanks Mum), I’m quite a self-conscious person, and I just feel weird about it. 

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In the same way that I hold on when I need to go to the toilet in public places, I have a strong tendency to hold onto my feelings. People in my life wish I could just let go a little bit and release my anxieties and frustrations, rather than bottling them up. 

I wish I could do this too but my pathology (and history) indicates that I hold onto things until it feels physically impossible not to. I’ll bottle up every worry, every frustration, until, usually at just the wrong moment, I’ll explode. 

I’ve been full of anger lately. My IBS is flaring up and I’ve been basically stuck at home. I’ve seen GPs and specialists and tried new medications, all with little improvement. I’ve also discovered a really tricky part of the health system: getting doctors to actually listen to me when I tell them how much I’m suffering from my illness. With all this sickness and not much resolve, I’ve spent too much time crying on the couch, wiling away my days watching trashy TV and gulping down Hydralyte. 

I realised that all this anger needed a place to go. Sobbing on the bathroom floor is definitely an effective release, but I was sick of it being a part of my daily routine. So I decided to apply the ‘better out than in’ principle when it comes to my mental health by trying therapeutic screaming. 

There isn’t a lot of evidence backing screaming as an adequate type of psychiatric treatment. It was big in the 1970s when it was called ‘primal therapy’ but this type of treatment isn’t widely used today. There is, however, evidence that points to screaming as an effective short-term release of emotions. It’s looked at by some as a useful form of self-care that releases endorphins but with few other benefits. 

But I’m always game to try something new, so I made a conscious decision to try therapeutic screaming. I was on FaceTime with my mum after being sick again, and I was feeling a little hopeless. No amount of Real Housewives or cups of tea can truly comfort you as your mum can, and her gentle voice brought another round of tears. By the time we hung up, I was sobbing. You know, that kind of crying so hard where you think you’re going to throw up. 

I got up off the couch and walked around the room, not sure what to do with all my distressed energy. Eventually, I remembered that I was supposed to be trying out screaming, so I ran back to the sofa. I was home alone but I still felt strange about screaming so I dug my face into the cushion and the crease of the couch and screamed as loud as I physically could. 

Oh, the release. I felt all my anger, rage even, rise up and expel itself out of my mouth. The scream was loud and sharp, and my throat instantly felt rough and scratchy. But god did it feel good. The tears dried up. The shaking stopped. I no longer felt like I was going to throw up. I felt a genuine release. 

Throughout the following week, whenever I felt overly frustrated, I went back to screaming. As I said, I’ve had a lot of anger lately, so a dramatic release of feelings felt great. It’s not a fix-all, but it’s satisfying, and it almost brings some humour to my darker moments, because it just feels a little ridiculous.  

Women are often taught to repress their rage and we frequently feel it’s our responsibility to make those around us feel comfortable and at ease. I imagine many of us are walking around with anger that we’ve long ignored so screaming could be a practical way to expel it from our bodies, at least momentarily.

Of course, one loud, long expulsion of emotion can’t fix all your problems. I attend regular therapy sessions and have practices that keep my mental health in check. I drink lots of tea (in the name of self-care) in my garden, and I do things to look after myself when I’m not feeling great. But after a week of trying this practice, I’m convinced that adding it to my arsenal of self-care tools to use when I need to release some pent-up emotion is a wise idea. Better out than in, right? 

For more on therapeutic screaming, try this.