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Some of the Most Important Pieces of Art Show Mental Illness
One of the best ways to express living with mental illness is through art. In this article, I share a few pieces that offer a window into another person’s life. Conceptualizing how depression, obsessive compulsions, or psychosis might shape a person’s day-to-day life can be an abstract exercise. It can be hard to appreciate other people’s lived experience. That’s why art depicting mental illness is so important—and interesting!
I’d like to take this opportunity to share some of these windows. The more we see and understand our friends, family, and neighbors, the healthier our communities will be.
A quick note. As you’ll notice, every piece in the article is quite old at this point. There’s a couple of reasons for this. For one, mental illness is as old as humanity itself. More relevantly, modern art portraying mental illness is still under copyright. There’s a lot of great pieces out there, but I can’t legally include it in this post without artists’ permission. So, classics it is (for the most part anyway).
“Corridor in the Asylum”
Vincent van Gogh created art as a way to cope with his mental illness. He suffered from severe depression. Completely self-taught, he used his meticulous drawing skills and dramatic brush strokes to incredible effect. You’ve almost certainly seen his impressionist masterpiece, “Starry Night.”
What you might not have known is that van Gogh used art to cope with mental illness, but to communicate its realities. One of the most famous examples is his work, “Corridor in the Asylum.”
When his depression continued to worsen, Vincent van Gogh was placed in a psychiatric asylum for about a year in France. These asylums offered little in the way of actual treatment, unfortunately. In reality, they became more of a holding place for the severely mentally ill. Despite this, van Gogh became incredibly productive– over his year-long stay, he made 150 paintings!
“Corridor in the Asylum” gives us a look inside a place few people ever experience. The nearly-empty halls look eerie. The way everything fades into the background, it almost makes this room look haunted, doesn’t it?
Interestingly, art remained so key to dealing with his depression that he allegedly completed a new painting every day in the months leading up to his death.
“The Raven”
Anybody who reads Edgar Allan Poe’s work will not be surprised to learn he dealt with serious depression over the course of his life. It got so bad after his wife died of tuberculosis that he shared, “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
Poe’s work drips with melancholy. That’s no more apparent than in what might be his most famous story, “The Raven.” This narrative poem is an English teacher favorite, so it’s very possible you read it at some point in school. In talking about this story, it’s less important to think of it in terms of plot. Quite literally, it’s just a spooky bird visiting at midnight. The theme matters most here. While literary interpretation is undoubtedly subjective, academics have to come to believe that the titular raven represents unending grief.
Here’s the full poem for you to read if you’d like. Otherwise, I pulled out this passage to show how the narrator’s grief over his love’s death comes through:
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow– sorrow for the lost Lenore–
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore–
Nameless here for evermore.
“The Raven,” by Edgar Allan Poe
It’s worth mentioning that Edgar Allan Poe wrote this poem while his wife was struggling with tuberculosis. As she declined, he struggled understanding how he could survive without her. He also had difficulty paying the bills during that time. His depression shimmers through the text here. As the raven, representing grief, appears at his doorstep, it repeatedly says “nevermore.” Some literary critics believe this symbolizes everlasting grief and hopelessness.
Knowing Poe’s own suffering and the meaning behind his words makes “The Raven” a tough read.
“Henry Ford Hospital”
Frida Kahlo was one of the most famous painters of the 20th century. She produced works ranging from Renaissance-style portraits to surreal interpretations of Mexican folklore. One critic summed up her work as exhibiting “fantasy, naivety, and fascination with violence and death.”
Kahlo battled mental illness, so it’s not surprise it made it into her art. Her painting, “Henry Ford Hospital,” showcased her anguish with startling honesty. She’d spent the majority of her pregnancy on bedrest, only to have a miscarriage. She was rushed to Henry Ford Hospital, where doctors completed an abortion to save her.
As one can imagine, this loss sent Frida Kahlo spiraling into a deep depression. She captured her experience on the canvas below.
Every element of her torment gets representation in this painting. Many critics say this painting expresses Kahlo’s struggles with infertility. Others note her history of health issues. There’s no question those themes are here. However, it’s undeniable that Kahlo’s chronic pain and depression remain central to her art.
“They Threw Me Out of Church”
Unlike the other selections on this list, “They Threw Me Out of Church” was released only twenty years ago or so. Wesley Willis was an underground singer-songwriter in Chicago. He lived with schizophrenia. A diagnosis like that means he experienced hallucinations and/or delusions, as well as other possible psychotic symptoms like a narrowed range of affect.
In Willis’s case, he began hearing voices after his mother’s abusive boyfriend robbed him at gunpoint in the 1980s. He was hospitalized for two months and spent much of his life on the streets. Incredibly, he never gave up his dreams. While homeless in Chicago, he produced incredible drawings and recorded solo albums.
Willis’s art demonstrates his experiences living with mental illness. The lyrics in his songs are bizarre, loosely connected, and at times obscene. These features parallel one of the most common symptoms of schizophrenia: disorganization. Disorganization means that neural connections are made where they otherwise wouldn’t be, and that thought becomes nonlinear.
I doubt that most of what he sings– like in his song “Whip the Llama’s Ass”– actually happened. Nonetheless, his music gives a fascinating peek into how his mind worked.
Here’s one of his less obscene tracks. It’s still got bad language in it, though, so feel free to skip ahead if you’re sensitive to that.
His music was so startlingly distinct that he developed a cult following. He signed on with a record label in the mid-1990s and even began touring. One of the last songs he wrote even made it into the megahit documentary, “Super Size Me.”
“The Price”- Mental Illness
Having now covered depression and schizophrenia, let’s turn to trauma. In many ways, we’re only now beginning to appreciate the fractures violence and abuse can create in a person’s life.
The most common trauma diagnosis– post-traumatic stress disorder– only got its name in the 1970s during the Vietnam War. PTSD, if you’re not aware, often involves intrusive memories or feelings from horrible past events, along with a host of other symptoms, like avoidance, irritability, becoming easily startled, and disrupted sleep. Previously, everything trauma-related was viewed through the prism of military warfare. Before that, people coming back from war with those symptoms were said to have “shell shock,” “combat neurosis,” or “battle fatigue.”
As such, most historical art depicting trauma as a mental illness focuses on the horrors of war. This goes for my selection, too.
A quick word of warning— if you’re squeamish or in any way sensitive to blood or violence, you may prefer to skip to the next piece of art.
Thomas Lea was an American war correspondent. He traveled to the Pacific Theater to chronicle the events of World War II. At one time, he said, “my work there consisted of trying to keep from getting killed and trying to memorize what I saw and felt.” Unfortunately, this led to him witnessing horrific bloodshed and trauma. He captured his experiences in murals.
One of his most prominent works is “The Price.”
Lea said that this painting portrayed one particularly horrific experience he witnessed as the Marines invaded the Japanese-held island of Peleliu:
I fell flat on my face just as I heard the whishhh of a mortar I knew was too close. A red flash stabbed at my eyeballs. About fifteen yards away, on the upper edge of the beach, it smashed down four men from our boat. One figure seemed to fly to pieces. With terrible clarity, I saw the head and one leg sail into the air.
I got up… ran a few steps, and fell into a small hole as another mortar burst threw dirt on me. Lying there in terror, looking longingly up the slope for better cover, I saw a wounded man near me, staggering in the direction of the LVTs (Landing Vehicle – Tracked). His face was half bloody pulp and the mangled shreds of what was left of an arm hung down like a stick, as he bent over in his stumbling, shock-crazy walk. The half of his face that was still human had the most terrifying look of abject patience I have ever seen. He fell behind me, in a red puddle on the white sand.
Thomas Lea, in an interview with LIFE Magazine
You see the features of trauma coming through. Specific, salient details remained ingrained in Lea’s mind. The distant look in the soldier’s eye. An arm of blood. The rest of the painting may as well not exist, as it pales in comparison to these details. This phenomenon occurs commonly for people recalling trauma, where certain images pop while the rest feels gray and intangible. Of course, sometimes the reverse happens, where an individual might remember every second of a traumatic event as clearly as if it happened to them yesterday.
The Healing Power of Art and Mental Illness
Despite the improving conversation around mental health, it’s still really easy to think you’re alone when you are feeling badly. But you’re not! That’s why I’ve dedicated much of this blog to fighting the stigma that persists around mental illness.
If you’ve felt sadness, anxiety, or anguish in your life, you might’ve seen yourself or a family member in one of these works. On the other hand, maybe going through this art has helped you understand what it’s like to live with mental illness.
Of course, creativity isn’t just a tool for dealing with psychiatric symptoms. In fact, I wrote a post showing how writing fiction and non-fiction promotes my own wellness.
If you’d like more articles like this, consider subscribing to my blog! I have a lot of exciting content coming up on mental health, treatment, and creativity. And finally, if you know somebody who might benefit from reading this, please share this post with them.
