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Slideshow of Vincent Van Gogh’s work set to the song “Vincent” by Don McLean, part of an art and creative writing lesson plan for the patients at Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield. Compiled by artist Anthony DiFatta, who also suffers from mental illness and teaches art to other adults with mental illness.
casa azahar 
I wish people would speak less of mental illness and more of pain, passion, vision.
I loved a man who was too gentle to live among wolves (a phrase from Rod McKuen, who has to be the crappiest laureate of the 20h century, but he nailed that one). If sanity means numbness and reducing everything to its objective value, I don’t want it either.
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Rod McKuen was a laureate??
My mother was in and out of mental hospitals all the time when I was growing up. They never found out what was “wrong” with her, though she underwent shock treatments and various other horrible things. After she left her abusive husband (my father) she lived a relatively quiet life until cancer took her at age 75. Smoke and drank til the end but nobody thought she was crazy.
It’s that labelling thing, isn’t it? I guess if you’re “mentally ill” and talented you get to be a “genius”, otherwise you’re just nuts.
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I use the term laureate ironically.
I think pain and confusion is the constant, and art is one of many ways people try to re-invent themselves. Doesn’t always exclude less lovely ways of coping, of course. What bothers me is the way that “help” often means “what you see, feel and say upsets us so we’re going to make it go away as fast as we can.” Shock treatments and the like being one manifestation of that. As is the fashion for drugs that leave people kind of emotionally stunned.
I had a best friend when I was in school, her mother was a special-ed teacher even, very bright but inconveniently (for her intellectually ambitious family) depressed and self-injurious — we found out later her older sister had beaten her for years and somehow gotten a pass for it. She killed herself during what should have been her third semester of college, after a vague breakdown and the formal assignment of a “mental patient” role, drugs, etc., which so far as I can tell made her miserable and strung-out where before she had only been prone to eating binges and conflicted about her family’s expectations. One of the last things she said to me was “I am sick and tired of talking to people who think they know me.” I was 18 and what the feck did I know, but I understood the screaming isolation of that completely.
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I loved that song.
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I still do. 🙂
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