Tag: art and mental illness

Chris Bullard is the executive-director of the Sound Mind Live Festival which uses music as a connective force to bring people together to help address mental health stigma.

Many enthusiasts of heavy metal will say things like "Heavy metal saved my life," and there is a fairly established narrative amongst fans of the wellbeing benefits.

My book is a memoir written around the denial of my medical certificate required to fly light aircraft for mental health reasons.

A poem can be destroyed when psychiatry treats a poet without reverence and honor for their creativity and their diversity of mind.

Poets with lived experience with mental distress are invited to perform their poetry live at MIA's Mad Poetry Slam on Zoom on May 7th, 12PM EST.

I wanted to explore how time and sequence work when memory is disrupted, in my case due to traumatic brain injury. I needed to document and reclaim my own sensorium.

At times I tend to feel invisible. Sometimes I don’t feel like I fit in with everyone else; I feel like an outsider.

Meet another talented teen behind the pieces in MIA's art exhibition. She writes: "This poem was written in my first year at a queer-positive school and is processing the new forms of guilt and shame I experienced and was exposed to."

Meet another talented teen behind the pieces in MIA's art exhibition, who says: "I think art is underrated sometimes because of its seemingly uselessness, but I highly believe it can cure many minds."

This is the first of 4 spotlight interviews with some of the talented youth behind the pieces in MIA's art exhibition. HoJin states: "The original idea for my drawing started with the brain. The complexity of its sudden twists and curves fascinates me."

28 teen artists share the power of their creativity in this collection of profoundly moving, courageous, and beautiful artwork.

An upcoming conference focuses on the perspective of artists and activists in answering what it means to have a just mental health care system: Who decides who is labelled as mad?

MIA's Family Resources and Arts sections are co-sponsoring an online teen multimedia art exhibition with the theme “Beyond Labels and Meds: What It Feels Like to Be Me.”

Mark Lipman made the album he wished his 23-year-old self would have heard. He needed a way to tell an integrated story instead of one of stigma and diagnosis, and here it was in music.

I want to share the journey I took to find a new language, a new story, around my experiences and how that journey impacted my survival.

From Don't Try This Alone: "Patterned, repetitive, rhythmic somatosensory activity… elicits a sensation of safety" and is key in bringing down the high stress levels of traumatized people, says Dr. Bruce Perry.

The German museum of the Prinzhorn Collection, which opened in 2001, exhibits the stolen art of those considered by the Nazis to be "degenerates."

From National Empowerment Center: MIA Arts Editor Karin Jervert gives a talk on the role of creativity in the healing process as part of the "Compassionate Approaches to Crisis" webinar series.

Researchers have calculated the dose-response benefits of ordinary hobbies, habits, and lifestyle practices that are available without any trip to a doctor or a drug store.

In "Mud Flower," Meghan Caughey seeks an ethics centered on the valuation of madness—and on art as one communicative pathway for values—for the muddy waters discarded by society.

The intensity of demand faced in the acute ward is exhausting. No one has a clue what I’m supposed to be doing, least of all me.

In the wake of psychiatry, there was a fracture, a gulf that opened between me and the authentic sound of my voice when it is connected and resonates with my truth.

The pandemic lockdown last year afforded me a precious gift of time to explore my creative spirit, and that, in turn, gave me a powerful way to cope.

Music is an ancient and omnipresent tool for wellness, a carrier of peace for individuals, and a bonding agent for communities throughout history and the world.

What can science tell us about music’s impact on our cognition and on our mood, on our capacity for empathy, and our sense of connection with others? How does it change the brain? How does it change us?