I was mooching about on the Guardian website a few days ago and I came across this announcement that Bobby Baker’s diaries Mental Illness and Me have just won the Mind Book of the Year award. I saw the contents of this diary in an exhibition at at The Welcome Collection in 2009 and the experience was deeply formative for my early thinking about links between art and mental health.
The shortlist for this year’s prize is quite formidable, but I was particularly pleased to see Candia McWilliam’s book What to Look for in Winter featured. I hauled a huge dog eared copy of this book around with me for several months earlier this year and often sat with tears in my eyes on trains and buses while I read the author’s account of her struggles with alcoholism and blindness. I’d have awarded this book the prize in a flash, but I can see why the brutal and immediate visual style of Bobby Baker’s drawings came out on top. As former Mind Book of the Year prizewinner John O’Donoghue points out, this book is deeply powerful as a meeting point between thinking, writing and making visual art about mental health issues.
