Recently, I heard about an art related documentary called “Crazy Art” that I really want to see. It is about three different artists from California that all have Schizophrenia. The film follows their lifelong struggle with the illness, but it also focuses on how art has helped them cope and find a voice.
For those of you who don’t know what Schizophrenia is: it is a mental illness that causes delusions, hallucinations and constant bombardments of voices. For the three artists, they originally turned to drugs and alcohol in order to stop the voices, but these methods often made them destructive and suicidal. This documentary shows how they’ve each found solace by creating art.
‘Without art, I wouldn’t be alive,’ is something they all believe in. Art provides them with a distraction from their chaotic world, but it is not a cure. They still hear voices and need strong medication. But there is something about art that “organizes” the brain. This concept is still fairly confusing to doctors, but not new. Many people believed that Vincent Van Gogh suffered from several medical and mental disorders, but at the peak of his psychiatric symptoms, there was also a peak in the artistic world. Why do you guys this is the case?
Art can be such a powerful medium and it is wonderful to see an example of this.
For those who may want a really intensive view into schizophrenia, I would recommend watching this video, in which you the viewer are the schizophrenic: http://www.janssen.com/mindstorm_video.html
It is very scary, but very insightful, and certainly provides a truly incredible look into this mental condition.
Wow. I would have never guessed how extreme schizophrenia is. Thanks for the video!
Wow that’s amazing. I found all the artist very inspiring. Schizophrenia is truly a terrible thing, and I love how they found something in their life that makes it better. This just proves that the arts are for everyone, they have such an impairing condition and yet they still have the ability to make such beautiful artwork.
This is amazing.
Mental “health” is not as simple as “you have it’ or “you don’t.” Recently, psychologists and other mental health professionals have begun to define the way to make a mental health diagnosis along a “spectrum” of a particular disorder, or series of disorders that are characterized by specific symptoms. People with depression, for example, don’t all have the same symptoms or severity of disease as all people with diabetes, for example. Occupational therapies (like art therapy, music therapy, exercise therapy, etc.) have been found to work very well together with drug therapies to give relief to people whose symptoms interfere with living a “normal” life (whatever that is.) The case of Van Gogh is famous as an example of a tormented artist who nevertheless creates beautiful art. Other famous examples include composers Robert Schumann and Hugo Wolf and writer Edgar Allen Poe. One wonders what would have happened if they had sought treatment for their disease?
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