Introduction
By Professor Maud Casey + English 378K
“How’re you doing?”
“I’m doing good, how about yourself?”
“Good!”
A short conversation we’ve had hundreds, if not, thousands
of times, a simple courtesy. As we know, the human experience
is so much more than good, bad, or okay. Similarly, when it
comes to the experience of mental illness, diagnoses indicate
broad categories, not the depths of human experience. Who we
are cannot be captured in a diagnosis. How does art plumb the
depths?
English 378K began by looking at the various editions of
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Diagnoses are a variety of narrative, influenced as all narrative
is, by culture, history, and politics. But, as Ian Hacking writes,
the “DSM is not a representation of the nature or reality of
the varieties of mental illness.” It is useful for lots of things—
insurance, treatment, as a manual for clinicians, a feeling of
community. Art shifts the question from what is wrong to
what is the experience. Together, we read Leonora Carrington
and Bhanu Kapil, we listened to music by Gnarls Barkley
and Daniel Johnston, we looked at art by William ven Genk
and the Prinzhorn Collection. We looked at so-called
outsider art, which raised ethical questions about the art world
and dynamics of power and money, about what it means
to categorize art according to the mental health status of its
maker, about the potential for fetishization, objectification,
or otherwise romanticizing the lived pain of another human
being. We considered the stereotype of the tortured artist, and
the stigma of addiction. How might art allow for the complexity
of the in-between? Not right, not wrong, not judgment,
but empathy and respect for the mystery that is every human
being. We were meant to visit the artist Leslie Holt at Red Dirt
Studio in order to see her art and make art of our own, and
the BookLab in order to work with the letterpress, but the
pandemic meant we all went online, wherever that is. Leslie
visited us virtually and some of us made collages. We found
imaginative ways to make something that might stand in for
the letterpress “translation” exercise (a translation of a diagnosis
into a three-to-six-word phrase that spoke to an experience
of mental illness). With the onset of the pandemic, we found
ourselves managing our own anxiety, our own mental health,
in uncertain circumstances in which people were losing their
lives and their jobs, which led to more questions about the
value of art and the value of the imagination. In the pages
that follow, we offer evidence of the value of art and the value
of the imagination, inspired by diagnoses, but never reduced
to diagnoses—fiction inspired by historical figures (writers,
musicians, artists). Art can be a form of communication for
people who might not be able to express themselves otherwise.
Art doesn’t answer any questions, or provide explanations.
It creates space to hold questions; it offers the sound of chaos,
the sound of peace, the texture of a troubled mind. Most of all,
it asks us to see the world differently, more expansively.