| An artist who is
a former psychiatric patient and a psychologist discussed how art
can be used as a resistance against psychiatry and conventional mental
health care. Art can generate and convey a new vision of how to understand
and respond to the emotional crises and disturbance, experiences that
are currently constructed and discussed publically largely in medical
model, psychiatric terms. Unlike the media that can trigger feelings
of being small and helpless to make a difference in the world, dream
and art carry the potential to emphasize our oneness and ability to
create change by changing ourselves. When she entered into her first
romantic relationship with a woman in 1969, the psychologist recalled
that her life experience was either invisible within the arts or portrayed
as psychiatrically disturbed and morally repugnant. She explained
how the lesbian-feminist literature, music and visual arts of the
1970s enabled her to name her experiences differently and to contribute
to a movement that changed social attitudes, practices and laws. She
saw her co-presenter's art as offering similar possibilities. She
explained how the lesbian-feminist literature, music and visual arts
of the 1970s enabled her to name her experiences differently and thus
contributed to a movement that profoundly changed laws, practices
and attitudes. The Public Hospitals Act was discussed as an example
of a law that entrenches medical model care, blocks the development
of new possibilities, and could be a target for change. After a 1969
psychotic break that was treated for eleven years solely with anti-psychotic
drugs years, the artist committed to healing and to painting a record
of her dreams as her mind and body healed. Through Suzi Gablick's,
The Reenchantment of Art, she became interested in socially engaged
art, and took steps that led to her paintings being exhibited first
at a general hospital and later at a major university-affiliated psychiatric
hospital where they remain on permanent display. The artist described
these projects as radical individual offerings to world-making that
Gandhi described as, "Be the change you want to see in the world." |