Mental illness in young people gets more intense with each generation that goes by, this generation is no exception. The pandemic came full force and traumatized a young generation by robbing them of everything that keeps kids going; socializing with friends, milestone experiences, and sometimes taking away loved ones.
I've struggled with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and I thought I had made real progress until the pandemic hit. Before I knew it, I started to develop new symptoms, and fear kept me from the outside world for months, as it did to many. For my own sanity, I made art.
Art is no stranger to mentally ill individuals. It can be a safe space to express feelings when there are no more words to describe them. It will suck you in for hours and by the end, you feel a weight lift off of you for the first time in a while.
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As an art therapist I cannot emphasis enough the importance and value image making has to mental health - I wish more people would have the courage to express themselves in this way. Your images are fantastic for themselves and for what they tell you about yourself. Thank you for posting them.
I'm a STEM kid, so I have been absolutely fascinated with skeletons my entire life. I used to want to illustrate for science textbooks when I was younger. As I learned anatomy, I started taking some artistic liberties as I went.
I love using bold and bright colors whenever I can, which is quite opposite of my sometimes petulant, Back & White thinking.
Cryptic symbols are a good tool for adding some mystery to a piece and making people wonder "Why the heck is this here?". I'm a fan of allowing people to draw their own conclusions.
Lastly, I feel like I use animals most of all because of how society treats mental illness. Like it's a wild bird that needs to be shoved in a cage or a horse that has to be locked in a paddock. It captures some of my feelings perfectly.
This represents to me the attempts of trying to let these internal characters we have created in BPD coexist. There is no sense of self and sometimes I have half cooked up personalities. The goal for me is not to try to merge and create a core sense of being but to connect them up, coexisting side by side as represented by the arrow intersecting each skull.
