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Mental Health and the Arts

As Morningside Hospital psychiatrists grappled with the then-new DSM-I (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in the 1950s and early 1960s, they played out a collision between older psychotherapeutic methods and an emerging medical model. This newer model defined mental illness as based in neurology and looked for treatment less in talk therapy than in the pharmacological cupboard.

Yet, as we can see in the Podcast: Psychiatrists’ Roundtable, mid-twentieth-century clinicians found that actual interaction with patients often led them to see those diagnosed with mental illness as living within myriad social contexts that affected them deeply and often superseded concerns about neurology. Given these interactions, the patients emerge in the discussions as full human beings with complex lives, thoughts, and emotions, even when we don’t have direct access to their own voices.

We wanted to include this section on creativity and mental health because looking through this particular lens at responses to mental and emotional distress gives us another framework that’s very different from the medical model. Within this framework, mental and emotional distress, rather than marking a distinct neurological difference, emerge as part of the human condition. We don’t wish to diminish the fact that for some people that distress is much more severe than for others, and may indeed have some roots in neurological differences. We do think that by looking at artistic responses to and expressions of what some (but not others) would call “mental illness” or “mental disability,” we can appreciate the human capacity to create in the face of fear, anxiety, depression, and altered perception.

As Annie G. Rogers writes about art by those diagnosed with psychosis, “The artist makes an expanding projection of unspeakable experience. As we look, the horizon between the image created and the world experienced comes towards us” (Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language, Karnac, 2016, p. 46).

For centuries, and across many cultures, “madness” has been associated closely with art and the artist. In the West, this association has since the 19th century been a romanticized one; often the artistic temperament is represented as teetering on the brink of mental and emotional instability. Edvard Munch, whose 19th-century painting The Scream has come to represent this connection perhaps more than any other work, famously wrote, “Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My sufferings are part of self and my art” (The Private Journals of Edvard Munch:We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth. J. Gill Holland, ed. UWisconsinPress, 2005).

One of the best-known artists associated with madness is of course Dutch post-impressionist Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). Van Gogh famously became mentally ill while painting in the south of France. He spent time is psychiatric hospitals before committing suicide in 1890. His life and work lead us to ask,

Do we find his art more interesting because of his story of mental illness?

Do we then read his mental illness into his artwork, thus interpreting it differently than we would have otherwise?

Vincent Van Gogh

In this painting, Wheat Field with Cypresses, painted in 1889, only a year before his suicide, do we see madness in the swirling clouds and rolling hills that look like waves?
If we didn’t know about his suicide, would we see joy rather than suffering in those clouds and bright yellow fields?
We might also ask, did painting help relieve his madness?
Was it painting that allowed him to live and create as long as he did, despite his suffering?

The romaniticization of art has persisted into the present day. So-called “Outsider Art,” art by untrained artists identified as “mad,” often residents of psychiatric institutions, became increasingly popular throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first (see Daniel Wojcik, Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma. UPress of Mississippi, 2016).

Yet such romanticization can obscure the actual pain of mental distress, pain that often is so intense that it can find no outlet in art or anything else. Contemporary discussions of the relationship between art and “madness” touch on both the dangers of such idealization and the potential of art to call into question definitions of “art,” “sanity,” and “insanity,” pushing beyond a clear divide between sanity and madness and between insider and outsider art.

For example, contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has lately taken the international art world by storm, is hardly an

“outsider” artist, but her work and persona make no attempt to hide the effects of mental distress on her work. In an interview with Japanese poet and critic Akira Tatehata, who refers to her as a “magnificent outsider,” Kusama remarks openly that “The art world of Japan ostracized me for my mental illness” and insisted, “I rely only on my own imagination. I am not concerned with whatever they want to say about me.” In that same interview, Tatehata reflects on the ways art works and artists that have grouped together as belonging to particular schools in modern and contemporary art such as Surrealism, were “methodically legitimizing the world of those who possessed unusual visions such as yours” (Akira Tatehata et al. Yoyoi Kusama, Phaidon 2000). Tatehata’s interview with Kusama blurs the boundary between outsider and “legitimate” artist and raises the possibility that all art, in some way, plays at the edge between socially-agreed-upon “sanity” and “madness.”

Kusama’s work might lead us to think about how art addresses the boundaries between sanity and “madness” across cultures. Scholars have debated to what extent psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia cut across cultural boundaries and what form those conditions take within various cultures (Tanya Luhurmann and Jocelyn Marrow, Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures. UCPress, 2016). One question we might ask is,

When, if at all, do experiences of the unseen world fall outside the bounds of normally accepted spiritual beliefs and practices?

Katsuhiko Hokusai

Think about this question in relation to this woodblock print by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), titled The Ghost Kohala (Kohala Koheiji):

This image draws from a tradition of Japanese ghost stories. Yet today it might be interpreted as representing experience on the edge of sanity.

If a tradition about the unseen or spirit world is shared within a culture, is it then wrong to consider such an image as a representation of madness?

We might say that much of art engages with an interplay between the socially defined world and what lies beyond it. Much art represents a conversation between order and chaos. Take, for example, this image of passenger and freight trains by an unknown artist (Library of Congress). While at first glance, you might not say this illustration had anything to do with madness, it clearly shows an interplay between order (the lined-up boxcars, the straight lines) and chaos (the bright colors, threat of near collision, possibly endangered tiny human figures in the foreground).

Unknown Artist

Is this an illustration about madness after all, or is it doing what so much art does—hold the viewer in the balance between control and utter mayhem?
And, if we then see the image this way, could we also say that perhaps the artist, by creating such a work of art, is managing their own threatened derailment?

Here are some links where you can explore these questions further:

Detail of a sculpture of a mother and sons

Works from the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art University of Oregon

The following works of art are from the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art physical collection, online collection, or exhibits.

Creative Growth Studio, photo by Diana Rothery, courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center.

The Creative Growth Center

The Creative Growth Center in Oakland, California, provides a space for artists with disabilities:

https://creativegrowth.org/artists