An insight into madness...

As part of my Develop Your Creative Practice funded year, I'm taking a deep dive into mental health, so was drawn to this book that looks both into the historical treatments of madness and how who we see as sane and insane is tied to the society in which the definitions and labels belong. After all what is a mental health diagnosis but a judgement by an external person on the inner, ultimately unknowable workings of another's mind? We judge the externally presenting behaviours, and those behaviours are rooted in a time and place, at one time socially acceptable, at another, abhorrent. Like other books I've read as part of this research project, Cracked among them, this book is unsparing in its scrutiny of 'Big Pharma', repeatedly saying that the pills we take for mental disturbances aren't the same as taking penicillin for infections in the body, ie we take the medicine but there's no cure, we are simply treating, and not always successfully doing that, the symptoms.

This book was another reminder, if one were needed, that I still don't believe that we are having the big conversations we need to be having about mental health, and destigmatising issues. We need to be more honest about our ways of living, while materially abundant, have a big payoff, and one of those is our mental wellbeing.

One of the saddest takeaways for me from the book were the lines about de-institutionalistion, and the closing of asylums, which, while well meaning, has simply shifted those with some of the most severe and challenging conditions on to our streets. #dycp #artandanxiey #artandmentalhealth