The Stigma of Art

Two months ago I started working in the mental health field as a peer support specialist. I’ve been upgraded in my mission from Manic Pixie Dream girl, muse of a community cinema vanishing at the realization of our Xanadu (the movie, not the poem by fellow manic Samuel Taylor Coleridge) to a “fairy Godmother”, older and wiser but still full of the desire to empower artists who have been discouraged by the fatal combination of a capitalistic, individualistic society and a mental health caste system. Only five years ago, but a lifetime in terms of growth, I had my own brief experience with the mental health “system.” I can no longer refer to my brief stays inpatient or outpatient “partial hospitalization” as “institutionalized.” Ironically, from the privileged perspective of a white middle-class woman “spiritual seeker”, I found the experience of going inpatient as a vindication of my sanity. I was absolutely convinced that I would emerge stronger, more powerful, more integrated with my true self and in fact that turning point was the beginning of my desire to study the mental health field and bring the wisdom I had learned with other privileged hippy crazies from the workshops and the mountain retreats into the lives of the truly institutionalized, those who have been designated “mentally ill” and shelved into disabled housing, drugged into “med compliance” and stigmatized into learned helplessness

Browsing at the bookstore, I found myself drawn to a photography book of abandoned asylums of Massachusetts. Massachusetts has always been a haven for both mental illness and philanthropy. The doors of the asylums may be closed and the horrors of an earlier age reduced to peeling paint morbid history, but the mentally ill are still residing quietly among the shadows of the Danvers State Hospital, the gothic shape which graced the arm of a young female artist among the macabre vendors of Salem. Do artists romanticize madness, do biographers pathologize genius, or is there a connection between the so-called “artistic temperament” and the slide towards mental illness. I’m reading a book by Kay Redfield Jamison, psychologist and survivor of bipolar disorder, called “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.” Both those terms, manic-depressive, and artistic temperament seem quaint compared to our modern diagnoses of “bipolar” in its various types and the self-identified, nonpathologized “Highly Sensitive Person” — the book was written in the 1990’s after all. I can’t help but feel a kinship with the author, who describes some of my favorite poets in the 1990’s. William Blake, the Romantics — Byron, Shelley, Keats — (all of whom were know for florid moods and extreme behaviors), as well as modern poets of the 20th century had bouts with illness mingled with their brilliance. Diane diPrima, Beat generation survivor and den mother of the New York City arts scene, in her memoir “Reflections of my Life as Woman” describes the highs and lows of the art scene, its grim realities of poverty, discrimination of LGBT and people of color, and the extremes of personalities that were attracted to it.

In the 1990’s I discovered my own poetry scene in Worcester, MA. We called it the “Poet’s Asylum,” speaking the intuitive truth of our experience of simultaneous stigma and sanctuary. Both a haven and a madhouse, the lives and art of poets often thrived on genuine or contrived drama, intense relationships, explorations of lived experience of trauma, poverty and pain, racism and resistance. The successfully poets got MFAs, and there was about an equal amount of degrees and diagnoses among the poets who made up our enclave. It seemed to my adolescent self that some of the foment and revolution I envied in the 1960’s was alive in little-known coffee houses. I found my voice as a poet, and lost pieces of myself in the reality of my mental illness and the trauma of leaving an abusive marriage, in the poetry scene. I was driven by my brain chemistry to extremes of verse, hypersexuality, and recall many summers driven by delicious demons and vampire muses. “Watching frenzied sunbeams slice/Through manic panes of blue/Lust in my gut like a hard, tight, nauseous ball” were the words I used to describe that cyclical, seasonal madness.

Often during these peak experiences, I would start spontaneous relationships, rekindle old flames, or fall into unrequited obsessions and write a lot of poetry, sometimes until the wee hours of the morning. My literary heroes were trauma survivor erotics like Anais Nin whose ambiguity and seductive language fed my lust for the ineffable and mystical and troubadours like Bruce Cockburn who described the horrors of war with inspired language. I met other writers and visual artists who were no stranger to DSM diagnosis. One volatile art student introduced me to members of the Genesis Club, a “clubhouse” of mentally ill youth. I still remember the night I met once of these clubhouse kids on a hot July night. I don’t remember his name, but I know now I was sparkling and incandescent with the combination of a tortured relationship, the dissolution of my marriage and hypomania. He told me, after hearing my poetry, that I was drawn to water in a hypnotic, almost sexual way and rather than be shocked by this or offended I thought it was the most accurate thing a stranger had ever told me. He then described the mental fireworks of July as “tropical wasp candy”, a phrase that I have been haunted and enchanted by for most of my adult life. Amid hypomania, when poems seem to be breathed over my skin like a moonlit breeze, I could feel those buzzing, stinging temptations and dangers. I wish I knew the name or the full life story of my verbal benefactor. But he disappeared into that July night and I never saw him again. Maybe his statement was prophetic, in that I would finally reach the breaking point on the literal edge of the ocean, in Gloucester, MA.

In college, I was an English major, with a minor in psychology. Misguided computerized career tests said I should become a teacher, but I did not know the impact of the trauma of bullying that would turn the halls of a progressive liberal high school into a flashback nightmare. I did make a connection with the Advanced Placement kids, who, like me, took refuge in the playful intellectualism of Kurt Vonnegut who never lost his sense of humor when discussing the vicissitudes of the human experience. “Welcome to the Monkey House” was a part of the curriculum, and as a student teacher I had assigned them a choice of either responding to a quote from a critical analysis of Kurt Vonnegut or “writing their own Kurt Vonnegut story.” The creativity these kids showed could delight me, but sadly this was a small percent of the high school graduating class. I knew I was not cut out to teach high school and in mortification disappeared into various jobs in anonymous corporate America before my inpatient hospitalization in 2015.

Now, when I hear clients and providers talking about the need for “day structure” in the lives of my peers, I know exactly what those jobs were to me. They were the scaffolding along which I could prop up my sanity, either numbed and medicated or white-knuckled and high-functioning. Many artists describe how medication muddles the brilliant deep waters they need to be free to delve into in order to create. Kay Redfield Jamison’s book seems to vindicate the connection between seasonal cycles and mood cycles and the creative cycle of expansiveness balanced with more sober cycles of editing needed to be a successful writer. I called myself a “responsible bohemian”, living a double life between tax software and coffee house anarchy, intellectualizing my crazy and pouring it out breathlessly and unsustainably on stage. I both craved and feared my literary side, contemplating burning my poetry in depressive ends of the cycle. Now, when I read my older poetry I find myself a little dizzy, not just from stage fright but from the tsunami of syllables escaping from the page out of my mouth.

Hanging out with “slam” and performance poets, I absorbed their cadence and content, but I never could get “off page”, preferring the protection of the paper in front of my vulnerability. One on one with my peers at work, I find that intimacy, that ability to connect with their inner worlds that Anais Nin described as her sorcery. On stage I am just a bottle uncorked for the genie to escape, I am just a vessel for the violence and foment of the voice speaking through me. When I’m blogging, sometimes an entity seems to emerge bursting and sputtering with the force of the story it wants to tell. It transforms according to what I am reading or who I am spending time with. Brother to the boxcar clatter of the Beats, this pressured speech accompanies both illness and inspiration. Online, a co-creative “sense8” energy coalesces between the ones and zeroes and the zeitgeist of my artist friends. The artistic and empathic temperament is always with me, as poet and healer, a synthesis of opposite yearnings.

Sometimes when I am expressing myself with playful dress or a particularly inspired Power Point, I get asked by my fellow grad students why I did not go into Expressive Arts therapy. I answer with a quote from the Worcester expat Gloucester poet Charles Olson, “I had to learn the simplest things last.” I wanted to go to a school with people that were not like me, not white, not particularly artistic, the salt of the social sciences, and find the freedom that Olsen found in the blue-collar environment of the Gloucester fishermen. And I found at my school many social workers with Hispanic backgrounds who casually called each other “loca” and did not cringe under the shadow of stigma at that word. I also met a girl with a literal dragon tattoo and bonded with her by revealing both my own diagnosis the fact that the school where I was beginning my career change journey and the corporation that had laid me low mentally in the ego smackdown/re-construction were a mere 500 feet away from each other in the same reclaimed industrial mill building complex. Was this a “flight of ideas” from some subtle hypomanic state or is it the synchronicity beloved by the wild-and-wooly Jungians, who, thanks to the baby boomers, have reclaimed expansive mental states from madness to spiritual seeking and even Buddhist enlightenment?

After taking my class on Rogerian therapy I read Natalie Rogers book, “Emerging Woman A Decade of Midlife Transitions.” The creator of Expressive Arts therapy was a stone freak, experimenting with polyamory and drug-induced vision quests in the desert, a pioneer who had no concept of the privilege she came from as a white feminist, supported by education and a brilliant father, probably because no one was talking about white feminism in the 80’s when women were running with the Jungian wolves. I remember reading a book called “Meeting the Madwoman” where a description of an encounter with a bag lady was not an experience of a real person, just a symbol of our fears as women of ending up old and alone with no social supports as punishment for going our own way eschewing marriage and traditional womanhood. In 2009, The Occupy and other social justice movements woke me up to what an arrogant perspective that was. Maybe that was some twinge of real human suffering entering into this uniquely American dream of the artist as a rugged individualist, a Georgia O’Keefe in the purity of the desert, leaving her traditional employed but equally artistic sister behind.

In real life artists that are not white, not male, not privileged with education or business acumen are dying all the time. Brilliant women, artists visionaries and priestesses, are starting go-fund-me accounts to save them from the cancer that health insurance would have covered if they paid the tithe to conventional corporate America. My best friend’s cousin, a gifted artist, died of a type of cancer that could have been caught with a simple pap smear. Whether artists chose to be poor, like their mainstream parents proclaim, whether they struggle with executive functioning in practical matters like mood regulation and money management, it cannot be argued that the reality of living a life of isolation in an individualistic society is not self-sustaining, especially for deeply expressive and sensual people like artists. Artists have always had their own enclaves and tribes, but often those tribes struggle with mental illness and addiction, and despite the suicides of famous names and the collective shock and platitudes we express on social media, people are dying both in the spotlight and in the gutter. Meanwhile the sacrifice and passion of art is being monetized into jars of hopes and dreams and painted on inspirational rocks in mental health wards and group therapy sessions. While this is one valid use of the ritualistic power of art to transform experience, the experience of creativity is not the same as adult coloring book mindfulness.

If you are an artist, you may get famous, or you may eke out hobbyist gig income on Etsy or any of the other for-profit, mass production websites like Redbubble. Although I love the idea of cuddling up to an artist friend’s sunflower dragonfly pillow in my sunroom, I know she will not get the profit from the site like she would if I bought a $100 print. I suspect that they are using materials from some third world country and contributing to the junkification of the planet. At the local art festival, controversial artists with a powerful political or emotional message are pushed out by Etsy grandmas making jewelry that celebrates your favorite sports team, or sketch artists of Marvel or Disney characters. The line between art and craft is blurred by festivals that want to keep their status as free community events and thus seek out easy vendors of salable small items. Original art that can be miniaturized on magnets or coffee cups or T-shirts will always be popular. I try to buy small items like magnets to support the local art scene, but still I cringe a little at the gross commercialism.

In her landmark book “The Artist’s Way”, Julia Cameron coined the phrase “shadow artist” and I realized that my romantic word muse describes that person who hung on the fringes of the art world while someone else got the glory, usually a woman. Historically, many women who were muses were themselves unrecognized artists. I still remember reading the book “Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation” about women artists of the 1920’s in the hospital ward to escape the reality of mental illness with stories of artistic flourish and glamorous lives only to find just as much mental illness between the pages as outside them. The connection between artists and addiction, “sex, drugs and rock and roll”, the “forever 27 club” of Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, equally famous for talent and scandal, is one of those obvious elephants in the room when discussing artists and madness.

Julia Cameron got sober and lost her spark and looked to exploring art and spirituality in order to re-discover her muse. Now “Artist’s Way” workshops are being offered as for-profit classes which keep them out of the reach of those artists who do not have discretionary income to explore themselves. Despite the abundance of the art scene, the explosion of spirituality-themed shops and yoga studios, despite the connection between the highly individualistic personal growth movements and the collectivist society of AA and sobriety, there are no local Artists in Recovery or Sober in the Sun groups. Do we need to be in blue-collar towns like Worcester to find that kind of community? Now that sobriety is becoming a commodity, replete with its own Instagram pages and glamorous “mocktails” are the reality of addictions being dismissed, just as the tattooed young artist with a supportive father walks past the homeless addict on the street, unable to spare one of her precious dimes, knowing she might have to save for that cancer diagnosis someday?

All I know is that society needs artists, needs creativity, needs poets to inspire and instigate and trouble the waters of commercialism and complacency. Now more than ever, when brown and black children are traumatized in cages, when protest art has been reduced to memes and when social media has awakened a need in so many to fill a void and find a voice, we need the lovers and dreamers, those divergent thinkers and extravagant feelers to go out into the streets and start creating community and sowing the seeds of our mutual humanity. We need to reach out to each other not remain in separate silos of freaks and normies, witches and muggles, goths and “basics”, art makers and commercial interests. Every time I buy something on Amazon I dream of starting my own platform, “Labrys” named after the mythical Amazon’s double-headed axe to support women and marginalized artists and fund their future health needs. Every time I hear about the clubhouse movement in mental health, I want to create clubhouses for artistic minds who need safety and structure, sobriety and support and create tribes where community does not equal conformity. Every time another famous artist either crows about their success against or succumbs to mental illness, I know that we have not even begun to think about the real sources of stigma. And I dream of a different way and a different world.