Patients’ Art Exhibit Daubs Away Mental Illness Stigma

The 27 paintings, poems and collages that brighten the walls of an otherwise sterile hospital hall carry so many hopes and dreams, even more than the works of the average aspiring artist.

The artists are participants in a treatment program for schizophrenics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Therapists hope that the exhibition boosts the patients’ self-esteem. The patients and advocates for the mentally ill hope that by exhibiting their art and putting their names on it, they can lessen the shame attached to mental illness.

A tall order, but one that at least some patients say they’re up to.

“I want to abolish the stigma of mental illness, and the best way to do that is to take away this curtain of mystery,” said Ramell Moore, a patient and professional artist whose work is on display. “It’s no different from being diagnosed with diabetes or any other illness. There should not be a stigma attached, although we know there is.”

The works are part of “Brushes With Life: Art, Artists and Mental Illness,” an exhibition in the campus neurosciences building. Every six months, a new selection of patient art will be rotated into the display.

The artists are inpatients or outpatients in the university’s Schizophrenia Treatment and Evaluation Program, or STEP. Only two of the 27 works that line walls on the third floor were by artists who requested that their names be withheld.

The paintings range from those by Moore to ones reminiscent of first attempts by elementary school students. Future exhibitions probably will continue that range, said Wen Crenshaw, a senior recreational therapist with the schizophrenia treatment program.

One painting, done in acrylic, shows wingless birds falling from the sky and lying on the ground. “It just isn’t the same without wings,” the anonymous artist wrote in the picture’s sky.

Poems titled “Gamble Against Madness” and “Twenty-One” are printed and framed on a wall called “Poet’s Corner.”

“Twenty-One” tells the story of a young man’s stay in the STEP inpatient unit several years ago. “Untimely ripped/from a womb of warmth and half-light” and “Like a man broken in spirit/Like a wanderer, exhausted and yearning,” the poem eventually celebrates the man’s treatment with the words, “I sing of the third floor.”

Crenshaw came up with the idea for the exhibition after looking at the art patients created as part of therapy. “We asked what they did with it, and they said they stored it in their closets or under beds,” he said.

Having emerged from the shadows, the works cheer up the hospital walls and inspire some patients to return to art they had put aside to concentrate on treatment.

“For most patients, it was the first time they had displayed their work,” Crenshaw said.

The artists are taking a brave, necessary step because those who are mentally ill must shed any shame before the public is convinced that mental illness carries no stigma, said Paul Bamford, executive director of the North Carolina chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Bamford said he observed “that the stigma is decreased when those who have illnesses are willing to say that they do and are willing to show the world what they can accomplish and that a mental illness is not totally disabling.”

He noted that people were once embarrassed to say they had breast cancer or testicular cancer. Mental illness is at that same point, he said.

“Mental illnesses are physical illnesses and they are amenable to treatment and people can succeed, sometimes dramatically succeed, their illness notwithstanding,” he said. “And the general public needs to know that.”

The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 44.3 million Americans and 1.5 million North Carolinians--about one in five--have a diagnosable mental illness each year. About half receive medical help; embarrassment, a lack of insurance and ignorance about the source of their problems are the main reasons for not being treated, Bamford said.

There has long existed a much-romanticized notion of a connection between mental illness and creativity. Painter Vincent van Gogh produced one of his most famous works, “Starry Night,” while in an asylum in France. His “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” auctioned for a record $82.5 million in 1990, showed the therapist who attended him during the last months before Van Gogh committed suicide.

For Moore, diagnosed in 1994 with a mental illness that combines symptoms of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, that connection is real, at least in terms of productivity.

“I am driven to do it [paint]. I have to do it,” she said. “The medication I take for the illness causes me to feel differently and be different. When I was not on medication, I was painting like a madwoman. The medication levels me out and makes it harder to be in those manic, creative moods.”

Although there does seem to be some connection between trauma and creativity, mental illness does not confer talent, said Rebecca Hoffberger, founder and director of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

“What you do find when people are brave enough to portray life experiences that are too big for words in a visual way and have the further courage to put their name to it, my hat’s off to them because it permits a level of intimacy that is too rare,” said Hoffberger, whose museum exhibits works by outsiders or untrained artists, including psychiatric patients.

Rob Longmire, a patient with several works in the UNC exhibition, expressed similar thoughts about his work.

The work is “an expression of the mental illness,” said Longmire, diagnosed as schizophrenic. “They go hand-in-hand. With visual arts, thoughts are manifested in the works that are produced. With mental illness, there are thoughts, and with art, there are images.”

Longmire, who uses swirls and bright colors in paintings such as “Sunshine Horse” and “The Thing,” said the exhibition and the patients’ willingness to use their names goes a long way toward destigmatizing mental illness.

“It shows that some people can do things when they’ve been through a lot and recovered,” he said.