Tag: creativity and madness

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.”

For me, writing is a powerful tool for wellness and healing, whether that involves an escape into science fiction or simply putting my dreams, emotions, memories, and observations on paper.

The Writer has outlined a significant work through my hands, dictated by the voice of someone who lived at some point a long time ago, such as London in 1682 A.D.

If the drugs I am prescribed did not benefit me overall, believe me, I would no more take them willingly than I would swallow rat poison. I went through many attempts to wean myself, but invariably the loss of my ability to do art brought me to the place where I went back on them. I remain on them and I want to remain on them.

I was told that I had only two choices: Do not have children, or take lithium while I was pregnant—the drug that posed the least amount of birth defects, and the very medication that had killed the painter in me years ago. I refused both options and set out on my own, and luckily found a willing psychiatrist to help me taper off the meds.

The roots of modern psychiatry go back to the Age of Enlightenment when madness was reduced by scientists to an ‘object’ of mind — an object which could be studied, analysed, and as some of them claim, even understood. Not only does psychiatry deprive madness of its mystery, it also makes it extremely boring. But madness is never boring, and shouldn't be.

From Wellcome Collection: It has long been assumed that great writers and artists must be touched by madness. However, no link between artistic talent and...

Just “recovering” one’s previous way of functioning is not so likely to work, because usually something wasn’t working prior to the psychosis. It was that which set off the psychosis, and if that isn’t changed, any “recovery” may not be worth much, as the problems, and so the need to transform, will likely still be present.

I have lost interest in making sense. Insofar as anti-stigma entails a reassertion of my apparently forgotten humanity via the retelling of some personal narrative in which I generalize my unique experiences toward some universal wisdom, I have lost interest in the reduction of stigma. I would much prefer it if you didn’t need me to be comprehensible.