Art for the Ill

(First written as an assignement on 04/11/2020)

Mental illness. What a concept.
The representation of mental illness in art has been a frequent topic of discourse, especially in the last few years during which a lot of mentally ill people started, more and more, taking back their voice of which they had been robbed of for so long. And naturally, they used their newly reclaimed voice to push back against certain trends when it came to representing their diagnostics in art. Those debates, though important and necessary, are very much focused on more social and political matters, which once again is very important and which we’ll discuss later. However, I will try to consider the issues with how a lot of art pieces represent mental illness in a broader way, I.e. I will try to question those representations in regards to actual artistic and aesthetic value.

Generally speaking, there are two major trends when it comes to representing mental illness in art; most works are either demonising or patronising mentally ill people.

If we choose to examine how art can demonise people with a mental illness, there are little to no more explicit works than horror movies. Obviously, some names are probably already popping into your head, like Psycho (A. Hitchcock, 1960) or Split (M. Night Shyamalan, 2016). (The latter of which we’ll come back to.)
However, one example I would like to discuss is Still Life (J. Knautz, 2005), a short horror movie which presents mental illness in a very peculiar way in as soon as it’s opening shots. The film opens this way: First, we get a shot of a road, probably in winter, with a car passing through it. Then, a shot of the driver; We learn that he’s blonde, wears warm clothes, and drives the car. Very basic exposition so far, with a lot of basic informations: someone drives down a road. Then comes a shot of a bottle of medication, from which he takes an undetermined number of pills and takes them with coffee. I’d like to pause for a second and really think about the implications of this specific shot. Because so far, everything has been very descriptive and straight-forward, so I feel like it’s fair to assume that this shot is meant to bring us some form of objective information about the main character. And to be fair, medication can be a very interesting way to convey information. Typically, there are a number of different reasons for taking psychiatric medication, which can range from needing help managing a panic attack or a crisis to, for example, be several years into therapeutic work and using medication alongside all of the ways you’ve learned to cope with your mental illness to not fall back into that place. Medication can basically a lot of different meanings, some of which can even be very positive in a lot of ways.
However, the way Still Life uses medication has nothing to do with the actual experience of mentally ill people. The movie basically cuts the medication bottle, as an object, from any and all context. What the film basically tries to tell us with this bottle is “this character takes medication so this character is mentally ill”, and very clearly frames it as a fault of sorts, which becomes painfully obvious when, a few shots later, the main character downs a bunch of meds directly from said bottle. The rest of the film builds on that idea, and basically depicts the main character as a murderer because his mental illness makes him a danger to everyone around him, without anything else as far as context goes. Basically, in nine minutes, the film walks the spectator through an equation that could be summed up as “psychiatric medication = mentally ill = dangerous”, which is more or less demonising mentally ill people.

On the other side of the spectrum is a more complex issue, which is the very paternalist tone that some works of art seem to take. The reason why this is more complex is because it would be very easy to argue that the people who use that tone don’t use it for bad reasons, and to explain the extent to which this paternalist attitude is a problem, I have to argue against this idea.
What I’m talking about specifically are works that are typically based on mentally ill people being saved, often by a neurotypical person, and sometimes despite themselves.
There is obviously a lot of overlap with what a lot of people call romanticising mental illness, I.e. those situations where a neurotypical person sees a mentally ill person as “broken” of sorts, and still sees them as beautiful and does all they can to “fix” them. Most people would agree that this is a pretty disgusting attitude in general, but you can still find this core belief that a mentally ill person needs to be “saved” in a lot of works, only not necessarily as obvious and that much more damaging.
A good example would be a very common real-life occurrence, which is trying to make a mentally ill person realise that their mental illness is hurting the people around to make them realised they’re loved and cared for. A more explicit situation would be to, for example, scream at a mentally ill person to “cut it out”, physically restrain a mentally ill person against their will when they’re not at actual risk of physically harming themselves or punishing a mentally ill person for exhibiting symptoms of mental illness. (Think isolation rooms in mental health inpatient wards.)
All of those behaviours are often glorified, not only in art, but in media at large. The problem here being that all of those situations are actual abuse, ranging from being emotionally manipulative to denying mentally ill people basic human rights such as bodily autonomy. And in all those situations, there is this notion of having to “save” a mentally ill person, which is to say to “cure” them of their mental illness “whether they want it or not”. Except that’s not a thing that actually happens. Truth is, mental illness is not a thing that gets “cured”, neither is it a problem you can solve by occulting completely the mentally ill person as a human being. As a matter of fact, most psychiatrists and medical professionals in general will accompany with the person to work on their issues, and even in that regard, mental illnesses are not created equal, and though some can resorb after enough work, there are a lot of mental illnesses which are lifelong things, and people eventually learn to cope and live healthily with them.
So there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here, of both mental illness and mentally ill people. Why is that though? One very interesting body of work to analyse with that question in mind is that of Shawn Coss, specifically two articles he wrote for boredpanda.com showcasing his art, titled “I illustrated mental illness and disorders for Inktober” (Published in 2016) and “I illustrated mental illness and disorder to fight the stigma associated with them” (Published in 2018). The title of the latter article is already deserving of discussion and criticism. There is obviously an intent to “figth the stigma”, which, on a surface level, would seem very nice, and it cant’t really be a bad thing then, right?

To properly explain my position on this, I have to take abit of a step back and talk about from which perspective I’m coming from.
Obviously, I am thinking about those issues as someone who produces art myself, which means I am already coming from a place of personal conviction and possible bias, but I’ll admit that I am coming at this from a place of being a mentally ill person myself. And though I do not feel comfortable sharing my exact diagnosis, it is important, for you to understand why I take issue with this body of work and a lot of representation of mental illness in art, to know that I do have a personality disorder.

Going off from this, the first time I saw those illustrations, I had a very visceral gut reaction which was that the illustration was so incredibly far removed from the actual experience of living with that disorder, and I felt quite frankly insulted that this artist pretended to fight the stigma surrounding my illness by reducing the fact that I have a complete and complex personality which largely built itself in reaction to trauma and affects almost all aspects of my life to what pretty much looks like a Halloween costume.

And there’s the rub: this artwork was, essentially, not made for me. Both in the sense that it was not necessarily intended for me, but rather for neurotypical people to potentially help them understand what my disorder can be like; and also in the sense that it was not based on my illness, but rather what the artist thought my illness was like.
And that’s precisely where those two tendencies that we discussed earlier come from. It essentially stems from the fact that most of the art that we discussed previously was made by neurotypicals and for neurotypicals. And the fact is that, outside of the medical world, neurotypical people don’t really care about mentally ill people. There’s this definite sense of “other” when it comes to mental illness, like there are the normal people and then there are us, the crazies, which are separate from normal people. What results of art is that most art pieces are performative at best, and doesn’t even try to seem like it cares about mentally ill people at worst. And honestly, both are equally bad. First off, obviously because it perpetuates stigma, which has been discussed times and times again, and has been illustrated in the worst of ways recently, when the movie Split got released on Netflix for several regions, including France.
For those who were not aware of what ensued after the announcement of the movie being available for streaming, people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (which I will refer to as DID) started a campaign to get the movie of the site, explaining how the movie was demonising DID and how similar media always gave way to very heavy consequences for people with the diagnosis, launching a hasthag on Twitter to reach more people at the same time.
What happened then was 24 hours of non-stop verbal abuse, gaslighting and genuine dehumanisation of people with DID, which exclusively came from neurotypicals. What this illustrates, to me, is how Split is a movie made by a neurotypical, for neurotypicals, in which a genuine horror trope is reduced to a cheap horror trope, to the point where the only connection with the actual disorder is a name that has been abandoned by the entire medical community half a decade ago.

The one common trait between all those works is that they are not art talking about mental illness, rather they are art that use mental illness as a cheap excuse to comfort both the artist and the spectators in their conception of mental illness, no matter how wrong or damaging it may be. And this is where I have to step in as an artist, because as it stands, such works are not only problematic on a political/social/moral ground; they are works of art which subordinated their object to the preservation of all people involved from feeling too uncomfortable or challenged, they betrayed their objects, and in that sense are simply bad art.

So obviously, the question that we’re now left with is: how to make good art about mental illness? An answer that would be both easy and correct would be to let mentally ill people take care of it. A more complex answer would be that said art should be rooted in total and boundless empathy, which is to say that all choices you make should be made specifically because they make sense to people with the disorder you’re talking about.
This may seem very theoretical, but it is actually something that already kind of happens. A good example would be the use of the Yami Kawaii aesthetic by the Menhera community.
Keeping this concise, Menhera is a japanese term, which is an abbreviation for “Mental healther”, which itself is a derogatory term for mentally ill people in Japan. The term was reclaimed by people in both the fashion and art scenes who had the explicit intention of lifting the taboo surrounding mental illness in Japan, and chose to do this by adopting the aesthetic of Yami Kawaii, which I’m not necessarily going to get into because I am not nearly knowledgeable enough on the topic. However, there is something to be said about how actual mentally ill people are fighting the stigma surrounding mental illness by using a particular aesthetic specifically because said aesthetic makes sense to them ad resonates a lot with other mentally ill people. Just like it’s not unheard of for people with Borderline Personality Disorder to latch on to certain interpretations of the Yandere trope in Japanese media, because it makes sense to them, or, going back to a more personal example, it would only make sense for a story about dissociation and how it can make you doubt basic notions of life and death to not be about someone dissociating, but to be about a ghost.

Basically, an art piece about mental illness has to make sense to mentally ill people in order to make sense at all. So quite simply put, the point is to stop making art for neurotypical people and their comfort, and start making art for the ill.