I had hoped to update sooner but my hard drive died. I bought a new harddrive and and caddy and miraculously retrieved my data off the dead drive.
I bookmarked a load of links I’ve been reading on my phone as I couldn’t seem to copy and paste links into the blog interface without everything messing up so have stored up a few links for one blog post:
First it made sense to see what other a-n artists had written. I remember reading Alistair’s blog when it was first published and thought how refreshing his honesty was in discussing these ‘career suicide’ issues. https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/artists-mental-health-depression-neither-romantic-inevitable It’s a bit of a heavy label to say ‘this is about mental health’.
The link between creativity and mental health is in some ways well trodden, popularist ground, and google will throw up result like this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creative-explorations/201503/creativity-and-mental-illness but to find any indepth inquiry without subscribing to academic journals seems a bit hard to come by. Maybe this is a search term issue as it’s such a wide field.
You can find google results naming names of ‘artists and mental health’ eg http://www.hungertv.com/feature/five-contemporary-artists-exploring-mental-health/ but it doesn’t give much information further than a vague overview.
As a parent, my children’s mental wellbeing is now of utmost importance and these kind of headlines catch my eye: http://metro.co.uk/2018/01/08/how-should-we-talk-about-mental-health-in-schools-heres-what-the-experts-say-7164921
Emotional intelligence and emotional wellbeing starts from infancy, but mental wellbeing is lifelong. If we don’t learn early, these skills may be lost or hard to reach. ttps://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10156247468906407&id=638951406
I also found that there’s a Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival https://www.mhfestival.com/ and they have a few video uploads, the men’s mental health one was particularly interesting: https://m.facebook.com/mentalhealtharts/video_grid/
TED talks are also a useful resource and this on resonated in relation to our project: https://www.facebook.com/TED/videos/10159946160830652/
Finally, my co-curator Vanessa Haley found this gem by Virginia Woolf on illness:
“Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable.”
