Critical Mental Health and Arts

This course examines critical approaches to the field of mental health and the points of contact with artistic expression and creation. The sections covered concern the history of the anti-psychiatry and asylum abolition movements, official psychiatric diagnostic practices and modern approaches to their undoing, the recovery movement and the means of demedicalizing social suffering, new models of treatment focusing on the social environment, the new narrative and experience of community, social stigmatization, exclusion and inclusion, modern models of care with an emphasis on advocacy and empowerment, the relationship of creativity with the mental world. How do people diagnosed with mental disorders express themselves creatively? Is contact with the unconscious and freedom of the mind stronger than conventions? The biological mechanisms of creativity may not have been identified, but the way in which it finds expression in people with psychiatric experiences is spectacular throughout history (visual art by people diagnosed with psychosis). The artistic movements that are freed from logical thinking (surrealism, dadaism), and the desire for artistic creation as an attempt to give meaning to strange experiences are also thematic units of the course.