Email to M - mental health "issues"

With regard the mental health systems and stifling creativity -
I speak regularly with my supervisor and colleagues the fine line between challenging peoples denial as they want to move away from addictive processes and then humanistically following their lead and exploring self-efficacy etc.
Finding a comfortable mix of prescriptive methods when it comes to dealing with the control addiction and often working with dual diagnoses - such as bi-polar, depression etc etc. I really firmly believe that the labels are very useful for a person to make indentifications with others with similar symptoms and some treatments vary according to symptoms. However, I also beleive that the way forward is what actually matters. So here are the symptoms but what actio is taken from then on is the key.
With knowledge individuals can make healthier choices. And change is only required when something is not actually working anymore. Sometimes though people do not see the extent of the consequences. I rarely see the depths I have gone to when I am in the middle of it all. IN hindsight I see much more clearly. And I am much more open to finding different ways to get out of the quagmires I create.
I really like the open debates I can have with different mental health workers on ways to improve the support we give to clients. I also am liking the support I have started to receive from the psychiatrist I have seen. I marvelled that he held a similar philosophy to my own. It is useful learning about bi-polar from the inside of me. It all makes so much sense and creating that narrative of my past with new insight. Just like the earlier days of Step One and seeing the patterns - now with added knowledge I can see how everything was so interlinked and still is.
Helpful hindsight - but how I go forward is todays importance. Finding new ways of enhancing and embracing more of me that I have discovered  - without dampening the real me.
Dr Greeson agreed with me when I said the label is helpful but it's just life and my version of life.

Anyway always interesting debates. Oh and having learnt about bi-polar in my course this year it holds a lot of interest and also a lot of reality. Every brain is wired with imperfections - it's blinking well incredible any of us survive at all. Such a complex, awesome structural creation is our brain and the central nervous system. Wows me with every little thing I read and learn.

Bliss
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Outsider Art - Childish Billy and Dargering the Henry

Henry Darger. I can't recall how this artist was brought to my attention.





A very interesting discovery nonetheless. Outsider art - as just about everyone is labelled this was a completely new one on me. Linked with art produced in the insane-asylums and also particularly linked with autism. Wow! How awful that autism was ever considered mentally insane. It is horrid actually how different mentalities are labelled as issues and the prejudices that are conjured with the use of words such as mentally insane. Everyone will have defective wiring's int he brain just differently defective. That does not mean anyone is a problem. Of course the consequences of the defective wiring can be problematic. There is a belief currently that paedophiles can not be cured. Addicts can not be cured, psychopathology is not curable, autism is not curable, Parkinson's disease is not curable - and these are just a few examples of conditions that are all in the brain.
Henry Darger apparently behaved strangely. What does that mean? Eccentricity or any deviation from the greater norm is uncomfortable for the masses. And because of differences people tend to shy away - fear of the differences I guess.
So Outsider Art is also known as Naive Art. Billy Childish might be considered a Naive artist perhaps? Artists never institutionalised. This is interesting actually as I think that I do not have techniques and therefore cannot be creating real art. But actually I am simply doing it for my own pleasure and therefore developing my own techniques. It is valid art simply by the fact that it is created. Original artists didn't have teachings necessarily so techniques had to evolve. Experimental - jut going with the flow.
So Henry wrote in the Realms of the Unreal. It sounds worthy of reading. I picked up connections with Philip Pullmans Dark Materials Trilogy with references to religious systems through fictional analogies.
So it seems I have been interested by Henry Darger.
Also Billy Childish mentioned by J today.



I would like to have the courage simply to paint and just let the image be what it is. I am thinking I can just use basic colours. No need to mix and get accuracy. Just go for it.

Both prolific creators - books, poems, paintings.

Bliss
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