Issue 7 - Writing - Mental Health

the visible invisible

by resident art writer Michaela hall

 
The stigma around mental health in 2020 is crumbling, more people are reaching out to each other for help, more people are talking. But this is what we see, the unnerving reality is that in most cases, mental health issues are invisible and for some there is no tangible way we can express these in words. So, what can art do for us in a time like this? Art is expression, in any non-judgemental form and provides an output for these feelings we just can’t put into words in our mental-scape, something so very important.

This release, this visual externalisation of the invisible in our minds is something that is so well communicated in the work of British artist Darren MacPherson.  MacPherson works with portraiture and identity; his portraits are figurative yet unique in that they don’t represent what we expect to see when we look at the subject’s face. We see chaotic, confusing, inviting and immersive representations of the inner human condition. When we look at these portraits that are delicate yet abrupt we are looking into the subject’s mind and its intangible products, these are new to us and provide a colourful and encouraging mental-scape made up of splodges, lines, drips, patterns and unfamiliar expressions of the paintbrush.  Macpherson was previously a social worker and is therefore interested in communicating his experience of others letting him in to their private thoughts and feelings.

Another artist infamous for externalising the internal in her works is Yayoi Kusama. The difference here is that Kusama is documenting her own struggles positively through the output of visual art rather than reflecting on other’s experience of this as MacPherson does. Kusama, now 91 years old, has long suffered with mental health in the form of serious psychological difficulties and uncontrollable imagery. Kusama has claimed she is assaulted by countless phallic visions and dots in her vision, busyness and chaos everywhere she looks. Kusama’s output for this is making these visions, which are invisible to the viewer, visible in surreal and fantastical paintings, installations sculptures and films. Perhaps most famous are her installations that engulf the viewer in a universe of intense repeated polka dot patterns. Kusama now lives in a psychiatric hospital and after communicating the importance of her ability to deal with her mental health by externalising this in her art, the hospital even built her a studio space.

The amazing thing about both artists’ work and indeed, all others that express their mental health and make it visible is that these artists are choosing to empower their minds and turn these invisible, bottled up thoughts and feelings into a beautiful expression of positivity and a confrontation towards mental health and its challenges. More broadly this creates a conversation. We are told more than ever that we should get talking about mental health, what we are not told is exactly how. Even though not in words, these artists are creating a conversation around mental health, making the invisible visible and in doing so encouraging others to share, talk and come together in awareness around mental health and looking out for one another.

Essay

i turned 25 this year

By Roma perla

BIO

Wannabe freelance writer, more a scrambler of words when time off from the full time job of mental illness allows. Diagnosed hot mess, professional patient, and first class over-sharer. Trying to find a way to dismantle the archaic pretence of who, what, where, why and how we communicate- for more selfish reasons than it sounds. 

I turned 25 this year, meaning my brain has stopped developing and my skins ability to produce collagen is now in decline. Both of which are an equally frightening mind fuck.
By 24 1/2 I had successfully invested in excessive or expensive or both, lotions and potions.

At 24 3/4 I found myself ‘bureaucratically’ discharged from Adult Mental Health Services, my therapeutic team, and into the sole care of my dedicated, but completely out of depth GP. This all, after investing nearly a decade into treatment, into surviving- so far the thriving part is all a bit cliché.

In the current Mental Health system I am the walking dead, ‘medically resistant’ with too much but not enough treatment, leaving me in limbo. Too complex to receive low rate therapy with an analyst in training, while not ‘ill’ enough to be considered for ongoing government funded treatment. In reality I, and countless others are in a system where failing to tick the right boxes, managing to stay alive, results in OAP status. I can only assume expected to self-fund treatment with the lucrative pension you have accumulated, beginning the day you climbed 5 flights of stairs at the local DWP HQ, which in their 7 year lifespan has never had a lift that wasn’t “Out of Order”. An anonymous civil servant with an equally anonymous handshake decides you are, in fact, degenerate enough to be paid your first PIP instalment.

Currently I’m missing a psychiatrist, therapist, and most days a will to live, or die. What I do have, is the title of my “If I’m gonna go down, imma go down glowing” skincare routine. My complicated ego- a consequence of childhood trauma, institutionalised adolescence and so far, pretty lonely semi-psychotic borderline adulthood- has convinced me is worthy of a phone call from the ‘Vogue Beauty Secrets’ team, or on some days Edward Enninful himself.

Typing this means I have dedicated these words to Mark Zuckerberg. The man in charge of the social network, obviously set up to become my pro bono therapist, Google my psychiatrist, Amazon, YesStyle, CultBeauty my chemist? Shout out to the actual chemist up the road who maybe, possibly, definitely love me just that bit more every month I turn up needing an emergency prescription, post “forgetting” to re-order my monthly haul. In reality my new favourite thing is being emotionally paralysed by fear of leaving the house.

Skincare finds itself the current metaphor for my mental illness, filling the boots of all those that have come before-

• Cillian Murphy’s life work

• Peggy an equally troubled Staffy at Northamptonshire RSPCA

• Male Characters in anything

• Male Nurse x2

• Male Teacher x GODKNOWS

• Male Dr

• Any man I perceived to have shown capability of fatherhood

• Any man who was nice to me + most men who weren’t.

Finding myself having to ask around for previous examples, cements a bygone therapists analysis, once one has evolved into the other and then the other and then the other, to remember my life doesn’t begin and end with my current obsessive metaphor is impossible. That itself, a metaphor for the rapid cycling moods I swallow pills for at 9pm every night.

I recently emailed a company about how their cleanser changed my life. After successfully ignoring their response, assuming it was an automated “so happy to hear from you, please allow us a millennia to reply with another faceless email address you can copy, paste and send again” + the 43 unread texts from the people who still love me.

I read it, it was short, like two sentences short-

“Hi Roma,

She had a good day actually and now a good start to the evening reading you, looks like you haven't tried Vitamin C Paste which we will send you if we can have your address. 

lixirkin x PS you should definitely consider writing as a career.” I’m writing, sharing information that feels more dangerous than my address.

But as I said Zuckerburg has offered this pro bono so, fuck it innit.

INSTAGRAM

@romaperla666 

MENTAL HEALTH ISSUE AKTION T4. (EUTHANASIA PROGRAMME FROM 1939- 1945 OF PEOPLE MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES AND PEOPLE WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES GERMANY) 2019

BY GRANT LAMBIE

Before becoming an artist I was a nurse for people with intellectual disabilities/ or then learning disabilities. We covered large amounts of information about the field and the people who lived in institutions and the community.
When studying, a group of carers, doctors and nurses came over from Germany to see how the UK was caring for elders with intellectual disabilities and mental health. This was because there were so few elders in Germany. At the time I never really questioned why, most of what we were doing was looking to the future.
This work is not to focus just on Germany but the whole world of care. In the United States low grade radioactive food was fed to people with intellectual disabilities (or using American term ‘mental retard’) to see the effects. Argentinian parents were told their child had die, only to find them in wards waiting to find the right person to give their organs too. In Britain institutionalisation was the norm with all its dehumanising aspects.
So what had happened in Germany:
Over 200,000 people died/ were murdered under Aktion T4 programme. The largest euthanasia programme on German soil during the Second World War. People with learning disabilities and mental health issues were given the title/ name “life unworthy of life”. This process had been the end phase of over 50 years of discrimination, and at times sterilisation. The major motive was a financial reward for Germany to reduce its economic obligations for the care of this group of people. Leaving a shattered population, it was 65 years later that the first groups of elders needed care in their old age.
A lot of the data comes the incredibly well-researched book by Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 1994.
Here is a map embroidery of many of the centres used in this euthanasia. Each place is given equal status, irrespective of the number of people killed there or by what method. It is made on Hessian, the same material used in making sacks from. The sewn-in yellow line at the bottom represents the final colour of the German flag. The outline is the size of Germany’s regional borders in 1939.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/186791904@N08/albums 

Bio:
Born by the sea. Primary school, great. Secondary school painful, severe dyslexia, still de-schooling. Helping with play schemes, children with learning difficulties, the highlight of the year. Year out worked in special needs school, enjoyed. Studied nursing, intellectual disabilities, in Brum, 3 years. Deinstitutionalisation. Staff nurse, charge nurse, community nurse, Hull. Helped with research, bored. Art foundation thrived. Studied fine art, Goldsmiths, great, met Gill. Had shows, professional artist, signed-on, broke. Play-worker, senior play-worker, building adventure playgrounds, fun, lost. Year at RCA Interaction Design learnt more. Demand for my play-scapes, milk float, 10 years passed, wrong, children should build their own play-scapes. Teaching, workshops, writing, talking, the right direction. Slavoj Zizek and Colin Ward, anarchy, helped. Past 3 years, making art again, not bored, becoming focused. Maps, mapping, power, equality, violence, ‘Coffee without caffeine’, mapping the hidden and unseen.