Art at Leeds Mind
Creativity can play a significant role in helping people recover and maintain robust mental health and the creative arts have always been linked to mental health. Inspiration has always been a fugitive spirit and a tradition insists on the instability of the poet or her eccentric behaviour.
Leeds Mind has a strong tradition of encouraging the creative work of people with mental health problems and some of the Artwork illustrated on these pages will bear testimony to that. It is our view that people with mental health problems may have additional abilities to “normal” people and that one form of expression of this is in the Arts. Above all we wish to make it clear that
- People with mental health problems can and do create great art
- The act of creating a work of art is a healing experience in itself
- It is cost effective to fund art projects as a form of intervention in the mental health field, because not only to people improve their mental health but they learn a useful set of skills as well
Chief Executive Julian Turner writes:
Creativity is a vital dimension of the well-lived life, and its links with positive mental health are close and important. There are clear parallels between the processes involved in the creation of "works of art" and the processes which help guide the journey towards recovery. Speaking from my own experience of writing poetry, the (partly unconscious) process of writing a poem involves the throwing up of uniting images or metaphors which integrate the different levels of meaning through which the poem achieves its resonance. Often, for the poet, there is a sense of "givenness about these images: I cannot often tell where they come from, nor how they come, but I am left with a sense of gratitude and joy which follows from the whole psyche working toether to create something meaningful or beautiful. For me, the integrative functions within my mind have at least metaphorical similarities to the process of "becoming more whole" which I have heard people with mental health problems use to describe their recovery. The drawing together of disparities, of fragmented parts of the self, is often accompanied by similar emotions of gratitude and wonderduring the process of recovery.
We all need to recover from something and creative activity provides a powerful tool in helping us do this. The arts projects we run are good examples of this, showing how the act of creative practice alone brings increased confidence and ability.
