Guest Post: Exploring the Connection Between Art and Mental Health by Kathryn Vercillo

Part of Kathryn Vercillo's virtual book tour for her new book, The Artist's Mind.

This is a guest post by Kathryn Vercillo, author of The Artist’s Mind: The Creative Lives and Mental Health of Famous artists, and is part of the month-long virtual tour for that book. Recent stops on the tour included a book review from Samantha Rose McRae of I Have Thoughts and a guest post on Shinjini’s Studio Diaries. Coming this week is a guest prompt on Resurface with Tamzin Merivale and an author interview on Wolf by RadicalEdward.

Photo by Uday Mittal on Unsplash

Every time I sit down to write about the complex relationship between art and mental health, I realize that I don’t really know where to begin. I’ve devoted myself to deep research into this topic for over a decade, and yet I feel like I’ve just begun to scratch the surface of understanding. Through interviews with contemporary artists, research into artists throughout history, graduate level education in psychology and my own lived experience as a full-time writer with recurring depression, I have come to believe that creativity and mental health are inextricably linked … but that link is really nuanced and complicated.

I came to this work first through deep research into crochet as therapy, spending the first part of my research learning about the therapeutic benefits of crafting by hand. There is no doubt, and really no dispute that I’ve come across, that creativity offers healing. From the meticulously designed practices of art therapy in clinical settings to the simplicity of finding solace in the strokes of a coloring pencil or the stitches of a crochet hook, art provides an avenue for emotional expression and healing. But what I came to realize was that there’s another side to this.

First, I began to realize that as much as art helps us, sometimes it doesn’t help. Sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes because of health symptoms, we can’t create, even if we know it might help us. And sometimes, creating art can actually be harmful. This intricate interplay is exemplified when individuals with conditions such as OCD inadvertently channel compulsive tendencies into their art, or when those plagued by performance anxiety find the act of public creation triggering. Trauma, too, casts its shadow, potentially leading to distressing flashbacks or symptoms during the artistic process.

From there, I began to get curious about how mental health itself impacts creativity. For me, living with depression, I often experience extreme fatigue, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, memory challenges, low self-esteem and high self-doubt, feeling like work is pointless … all of which leads to not creating. Or at least that’s what I was telling myself at first. But then I realized that’s not the full story. Sometimes it leads to not creating. But actually, even in deep depression, I usually do journaling and often spend time crocheting, collaging, creating handmade cards and scrapbooks. So, productivity changes, but more than that, symptoms can change medium, content, and creative process. And it’s been helpful to me personally to look at the details of that in a non-judgmental way. To not assume that “I’m not productive in the way I want to be - writing books for example - therefore I’m not creative” but instead to get curious - “what are my symptoms and how are they affecting my art and what’s the resulting art that does emerge?”

And also, even when it’s hard or sometimes actually harming us, we still want to create. We feel this deep need to create. We don’t know why that is, but it’s a really powerful, amazing thing.

So that’s the lens that I used when approaching my research for The Artist’s Mind: The Creative Lives and Mental Health of Famous Artists. What can we learn about the mental health history of these artists and how it did or did not impact their art? The answer is that it’s very different for each of them, as it will be different for each of us, but that we can look at their experiences as stories that might add understanding or meaning to our own experiences. For example, you have Joan Miro, whose work has sometimes been described as humorous but who felt like he created that work to try to escape the misery of depression. Mark Rothko was also a painter living with depression, depression often exacerbated by negative reception of his work, which then made it hard or impossible for him to paint at all for a time … but then eventually he would return to it. Agnes Martin didn’t believe that her art was related to her experiences with schizophrenia, but she did practice meditation and found that her art was a tool that assisted her in that, which means that it provided some kind of healing for whatever was going on in her life and mind. Frida Kahlo created self-portraits related to her own experiences of trauma as a means to process that trauma. Yayoi Kusama uses repetition in her work as a means of working through the repetitive thoughts in her own mind. It’s different for everyone, but there’s some kind of link, it seems.

It’s hard to sum it all up, but here are some conclusions I’ve drawn, so far, as I’ve done this research:

●     Creativity is often cathartic or therapeutic for people, including people who don’t necessarily see themselves as “creative” (although I believe we are all creative).

●     It’s frustrating when creativity is blocked, which can happen due to life stressors, mental health symptoms, burnout and more. This can change if, what, and how we create but usually we do find some way to keep expressing ourselves creatively.

●     In fact, if we are not allowed to create as we are healing, we may not heal. Several of the artists in the book and others I’ve researched over time were in asylums or institutions … when they were in ones that didn’t allow them access to art supplies, they didn’t do well, whereas when they had access to art supplies, it typically aided in their healing, even if it was only one small part of the overall wellness plan.

●     Medications taken to improve mental health symptoms can sometimes also block creativity … but sometimes they make it possible to live more fully which enhances creativity. Often, there’s a trade-off and a balancing act in terms of figuring out what’s right for the individual.

●     It’s helpful if we as artists apply our creative thinking to our own minds, trying not to judge either our art or our mental health but instead to be curious about what each of them mean for us and how they might be related.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts. The first comes from a recent interview I did with psychiatrist Martin Greenwald, M.D., in which he said:

“I have seen how helpful making art can be for those suffering from mental illness, and I have little doubt that it can be an important part of treatment for many people, especially those who may not think they have it in them to create something. Being productive is an absolutely essential part of mental health, perhaps the most overlooked of our era, and making art is such an easy way to start.

But also … The sad truth is that, at least in my experience, the relationship between mental illness and art is much more often one of frustration and inhibition than inspiration. Most of my patients who are artists or have artistic inclinations find their efforts at creation hampered or totally destroyed by psychological difficulties or outright mental illness. I’ve had a number of psychotherapy patients who were artists or academics whose output has ground to a halt because of depression, crippling anxiety, or other problems that don’t fit neatly into our diagnostic categories.”

And this excerpt from my chapter on Jacob Lawrence from The Artist’s Mind:

“Art does have therapeutic value, and when artists are allowed to work with it in therapy, it can make all the difference in whether their creative impulse shrivels or thrives. For Lawrence, it was a helpful means of self-expression. His hospital therapist, Dr. Emmanuel Klein, believed that despite the persistent myth that art comes from mental anguish, it actually derives from “the healthiest part of the personality.” This returns us to the ongoing historical debate about the “madness/ genius myth.” On one side are the people who believe that the two are inextricably linked, that the most innovative creative work comes from the same place as mental health challenges whereas his doctor is on the other side with the belief that it is the healthy part of the brain or soul that is able to create, not the part struggling with psychopathology. The “truth” is probably somewhere in the middle and much more individual than an either/or perspective would allow.”

Continue my journey into deep research about the relationship between art and mental health by following my work on Substack.

Thanks so much to Kathryn for this really interesting post. I speak so much about the benefits of creativity for mental health, but I’ve never spent much time thinking about the reverse. It’s certainly true for me, though, that when I’m struggling with my mental health, creativity can feel particularly difficult. But then also, some of the times of greatest mental health struggle have also been my most productive creatively. There’s a fascinating dichotomy in the relationship between mental health and creativity, and the more we can understand how it plays out in ourselves, the more we can integrate creative practice, in whatever form works for us, into our self care and healing.