Group Therapy

I was really thrilled when I received an email from Alexa Wright last month, introducing me to her current project: a photographic collection on the subject of mental health called A View From the Inside. Alexa stumbled across this blog online and noticed that I had written about her project Killers. She liked some of my references so she asked if I would be interested in meeting up for a chat.

A View From the Inside will be a series of eight large-scale digitally manipulated photographic portraits of people with short-term psychotic disorders or episodic conditions like schizophrenia. Alexa hopes that the images can readdress some of the common stigmas around mental health.

Interestingly she will use the symbolism and techniques of eighteenth-century portrait painting as a means of representing the psychotic experiences of her subjects. She will undertake a long period of consultation with each person, in order to create photographs that represent both outward appearance and their internal experience of what is ‘real’.

At first I found Alexa’s reference to portrait painting problematic, as these types of techniques would suggest that she intends to enter into an hierarchical relationship where the artist asserts a perspective on the subject which is definitive. But after talking with Alexa I see that her process is actually deeply discursive and very creative for the subject. One of her participants has written a blog post about her participation here http://fluffernutter.co.uk/?p=127 Alexa showed me some of the sketches and early mock ups of the images, which I think will be intensity detailed and rich portraits.

Alexa’s previous work has dealt with perceptions of ‘normality’ as a reoccurring theme. Having approached the stigma attached to physical disability, she now feels that mental health is the next taboo to be overcome.

Alexa is still searching for one or two new participants for the project and is particularly interested in hearing from men, older people or people from ethnic minorities with experience of conditions like schizophrenia or bi-polar that lead to an altered sense of reality. She can be contacted on [email protected] and her website gives more information about her previous projects http://bit.ly/iXI4PB

People really seem to be enjoying the two video posts. My favorite response on twitter was this one from Emily Speed:

“@VanessaBartlett I’ll tell you what’s intimate: being in bed & holding phone up to my shortsighted face and watching you talk/slurp wine.”

I guess this is the thing, the level of intimacy depends both on the person who is talking (me) and the viewer and how/where they are when they engage. Something to keep in mind I think.

I got an email yesterday with a video reply from Sid, the artist who I mentioned in my previous post. He’s changed his voice and his face in the first part, which raises interesting questions about self and identity and what individuals might chose to portray of themselves online or elsewhere.

I like that he is talking about wearing masks, as I think this is something that we all do in everyday life, but maybe particularly if we are put in front of a camera or a virtual audience. I get the sense that the internet affords lots of potential to manifest different versions of the self, creating the possibility to know people intimately at the same time as not knowing them at all.

Sid has a website here www.sidvolter.co.uk

Sid’s reply

So I did post the video in the end. I wish that it wasn’t so obvious that I am wearing red lipstick. Yes I did check my hair in the mirror before I pressed record!! How self conscious of me.

This is a very fast post. On Monday I have to post the final version of my AHRC application off to the London Consortium, for consideration for a grant. They pick one person from each year for said grant, so the competition will be huge!

I’ve done a complete overhaul of my proposal – because I did not think the last version was strong enough to qualify. Here it is. If anyone has an suggestions on how it could be improved in the next two days – please give me a shout!

The dissolution of the linear mind? Archiving mental health symptoms using new technology.

A man nurses an erection through his trousers, while waving out of his window. On a rooftop outside a group of builders go about their business, oblivious. This autobiographical clip, shot on a shaky hand-held camera, documents a moment of desperate isolation and a failed attempt at communication.

It belongs to the huge archive of video footage, emails, text messages and recorded telephone conversations that is at the heart of Kim Noble Will Die, an acclaimed work of performance art/comedy, subtitled by one critic as ‘a multimedia suicide note.’ Within Noble’s pathological index there are unanswered emails to the self-help guru Paul McKenna and a telephone recording in which his ex-girlfriend confesses infidelity. Not only is Kim Noble Will Die a record of one man’s mental health symptomatology, it also represents a zeitgeist in which technology is becoming understood less as a simple tool for communication and more as an aggregate of human psychology.

In her new book Alone Together, academic and psychologist Sherry Turkle, employs empirical case studies to frame technology as a placebo for satisfying the deepest need for human symbiosis. Technology, she says “proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.”[1] Her words are part of a wave of recent speculation about the impact of technology on the human brain, which finds its zenith in journalist Nicholas Carr’s prophesising the “dissolution of the linear mind.” [2]

Historically there is a myth of fear that stretches from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to Stelarc’s flesh hook artworks and draws association between technology and deviant or pathological behaviour. Writing in the Guardian in August 2010, Tom McCarthy has linked technology and depression, beginning with Freud’s book Civilisation and its Discontents. He says that “for Freud, all technology is a prosthesis: each technological appendage, to a large degree, embodies an absence, a loss.”[3] But beyond the artistic imagination, these speculations find some solidity in scientific practice. In the 2004 Journal for Clinical Psychology, Michelle G Newman’s essay on email psychotherapy asserts that: “when questioned about sensitive areas such as criminal history, alcohol blackouts, sexual disorders, and suicidality, clients will disclose more substantive information to a computer than to a clinician.” [4]

I propose a dissertation in two parts:

Part one: The historical relationship between technology and pathological behaviour

· How is Nicholas Carr’s prophesy of the “dissolution of the linear mind” embedded historically within the artistic imagination?

· Where is the point of contact between artistic speculation and scientific practice?

Part two: Archives of mental health symptoms, made using new technology

· How are communication technologies being used to document pathological behaviour and symptoms of mental ill health?

· How might these documents function in opposition to more conventional archives of mental health symptoms such as medical records and doctor’s notes?

Case studies of mental health archives covered in part two:

· Hans Bernhard, an artist who blames a psychotic breakdown he suffered in 2002 on his use of the Internet

· Kevin Whitrick, the first British man to broadcast his own suicide online

· Kim Noble artist and stand up comic with bipolar disorder

[1] Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together, Why we expect more from technology and less from each other, p1

[2] Carr, Nicholas, The Shallows, How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, p1

[3] McCarthy, Tom, ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ The Guardian 24.07.10

[4] Newman, Michelle G, ‘Technology in Psychotherapy: An Introduction.’ Journal of Clinical Psychology Vol 60 Issue 2