Sanctuary for the spirit

Sanctuary for the spirit

15 May 2017

Art is the greatest asset to mental health that I have,” the artist Grayson Perry said in a speech in 2015. He described his creative practice as “obsession, voyage of discovery and therapy, all rolled into one.”

The event the artist was talking at was the formal launch of the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, of which he is patron, in March 2015. The museum is in the grounds of the famous Bethlem Royal Hospital, once known by its nickname “Bedlam”. Originally founded just outside the Wall of London in 1247, it now sprawls across 270 green acres in Beckenham, Kent.

An art gallery was established at the hospital in 1997 to showcase the work of artists who had received care there, and the Museum of the Mind now shares the same Art Deco building. It contains archival materials from across the hospital’s more than 750-year history, as well as hosting exhibitions by artists who have experienced difficulties with their mental health.

“Our overarching mission,” says museum director Suzie Walker-Millar, “is to destigmatise mental health issues and raise questions concerning perceptions about what’s normal and abnormal. We’re interested in breaking down the idea that there is a separation.”

As Perry made clear in his speech, there is an intimate connection between artistic creativity and psychological wellbeing, which has been probed and discussed throughout human history. Although it has proved difficult for researchers to provide clear quantitative evidence for the way that the arts provide a sanctuary for the spirit, studies have found positive links between creative activities and psychological resilience.

This, researchers say, is because of the way that creativity stimulates both the logical and emotional parts of our brain, and helps us practice confronting challenges head-on. 

George J Harding is an artist who paints distorted self-portraits, as though his face is blurred by water, and multimedia works that play with concepts like fragmentation, surface and depth. His work has been exhibited and collected by the Bethlem Museum of the Mind. In 2015, he wrote for the medical journal The Lancet about the links between his art and his own experiences of mental illness. He explained that he suffered from episodes of psychosis throughout his twenties and art played an important role during this time and is “something I have been able to rely on.” Like Grayson Perry, he describes his creative practice as “my therapy” and “the way that I can overcome my difficulties”.

This healing power can play a role in the stresses that every person must deal with as they navigate life, but it can also have particularly important applications in the treatment of various conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, dementia and acute mental distress.

Artscape, part of Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, was set up to help the users of mental health services to develop an artistic practice. Recently, Oxford DFAS, a local branch of The Arts Society, helped to fund a project where professional mosaic artist Becky Paton created a collaborative artwork with inpatients at the Highfield Unit Oxford, a specialist facility for young people with acute mental health needs. Artscape is one of many initiatives across the UK that use art to aid psychological wellbeing. An organisation called Combat Stress has used art therapy as a way of ‘unfreezing’ the traumatic memories that can become trapped in the nervous system of people who have experienced armed combat, while Arts 4 Dementia, which has been supported by The Arts Society, helps those suffering from conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease restore cognitive functioning, self-esteem and a sense of purpose.

The therapeutic role of the arts may play some part in attracting people with experience of mental illness to artistic vocations. Many studies over the years have suggested that individuals with certain mood disorders, such as bipolar disorder, are overrepresented in creative careers, and famous examples of creative geniuses who suffered from mental health problems, including Beethoven, Munch and Van Gogh, are often cited by those who believe in a correlation between fraught psychological health and artistic achievement.

There has also been a persistent belief, stretching back through the Romantic poets all the way to Ancient Greek philosophy, that the experience of mental illness itself can actually unlock creativity. The original understanding of the concept of ‘inspiration’ involved the notion of ‘poetic madness’, with the inspired person being transported beyond their own mind in order to receive wisdom from the gods.

This type of thinking can veer dangerously close to glamourising mental illness, and of course, psychological problems can be a blight on any artist’s career. The Bethlem Museum of the Mind is currently home to a solo exhibition by the artist Stanley Lench, a brilliant painter whose bright, bold works appear to draw on tribal imagery, stained glass windows and the Pop Art tradition. His art was acquired by New York’s Museum of Metropolitan Art during his lifetime, but he never attained the success of contemporaries like Sir Peter Blake. This fact is reflected in the exhibition’s title, Scaling the Citadel, with its suggestion of the art world as a closed-off fortress.

Despite these difficulties, many contemporary artists today affirm the idea that irregular psychological states have strengthened their work. In his The Lancet article, George Harding writes that “my experiences of mental health have changed my art for the better” as they have given him “new insight into what it is to be alive and human”. He continues: “I find the different ways the mind can perceive the world fascinating. It gives me a glimpse of what reality truly is.”

Yayoi Kusama, named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2016, provides an example of the ways in which adverse mental health can impose limitations, while also being channelled into valuable work. The Japanese artist has been living voluntarily at a mental health facility since 1977 and has been plagued throughout her life with hallucinations that take the form of dots scattered throughout her field of vision.

To soothe the anxiety this caused, she began turning these images into artworks, using mirrors and installations to create the illusion of bright spots stretching into infinity. Six of these ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’ are currently on a tour of the US and Canada, including Los Angeles’ The Broad from October until next January. “If it were not for art,” she is often quoted as saying, “I would have killed myself a long time ago.”

Visual art can communicate experiences, such as the feelings evoked by Kusama’s hallucinations, which can’t be neatly and logically expressed with words. As Grayson Perry said at the Bethlem Museum’s launch, when you contemplate an artwork, you are in the privileged position of “looking at someone’s unconscious speaking to your unconscious.” He will be working with the museum in September on a project regarding the ‘art of recovery’.

We may never be able to fully explain processes such as these in objective, scientific terms, but in helping to remove stigmas and taboos surrounding mental illness, institutions like the Bethlem Museum of the Mind allow the interplay of creativity and psychological experiences to be explored in imaginative and illuminating ways.

“We use our collections to bring mental health issues to the attention of the wider public,” Suzie Walker- Millar says. “We want to open up debate. We want to explore. We want to talk about how we can be healthy individuals functioning in an extremely complex world.”

It is clear that art can play an important role in enabling this type of wellbeing for both practising artists and art lovers, no matter what types of psychological challenges they face.

'Scaling the Citadel: The Art of Stanley Lench' will be on display at Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham until 30 September 2017.

Image caption: Stanley Lench, Widow with bird, oil on board

About the Author

Jessica Holland

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