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Joseph Cartin is from Brooklyn and actively lives with bipolar disorder. He has been active in the Mental Health Consumer Movement since 1990 and considers himself a “psychiatric survivor”. He has won numerous art competitions and does corporate design work in addition to his art.

ipekinlondon

Art therapy is a mental health profession that uses the creative process of art making to improve and enhance the physical, mental and emotional well-being of individuals of all ages. It is based on the belief that the creative process involved in artistic self-expression helps people to resolve conflicts and problems, develop interpersonal skills, manage behaviour, reduce stress, increase self-esteem and self-awareness, and achieve insight. Art therapy integrates the fields of human development, visual art (drawing, painting, sculpture, and other art forms), and the creative process with models of counseling and psychotherapy.

American Art Therapy Association (via ipekinlondon)

art-feels

TASK 12 - Body Contour Draw an outline of your body. You can do this full scale, on a very very large piece of paper if you like, though I’ve found it easier to do a smaller representational outlines, which are easy to photocopy and replicate. Now think of different emotions that you commonly experience, both positive and negative (see Task 8 - Dealing with Emotions). Try to use colours and patterns in the outline to illustrate how various emotions feel to you, physically and emotionally.

art-feels

TASK 12 - Body Contour Draw an outline of your body. You can do this full scale, on a very very large piece of paper if you like, though I’ve found it easier to do a smaller representational outlines, which are easy to photocopy and replicate. Now think of different emotions that you commonly experience, both positive and negative (see Task 8 - Dealing with Emotions). Try to use colours and patterns in the outline to illustrate how various emotions feel to you, physically and emotionally.

ego-assassin

kambriel

Brava Madame.

downlo

For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia–and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887.

I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again–work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite–ultimately recovering some measure of power.

Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wall-Paper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.

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