Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me
I first got to know about this book from a post on Brain Pickings and the illustrations just drew me right in, that I had to find out more about this amazing woman who drew them.
Her name is Bobby Baker, a performance artist. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in 1996 followed by a breast cancer diagnosis. She began her diary drawings in 1997 when she became a patient at a day centre. The book showcases 158 of 711 drawings she did over the span of 11 years as she struggled with the illness. I find the drawings very witty, personal and painfully honest.
I don’t want to get analytic here but drawing everyday seem to help improve mental illness on two levels. Firstly, you face what you really feel - you express your pain outwards, and then you take a step back and look at what you have just expressed. This might help understand your own situation better, rather than just remaining immersed in that dull misery. Secondly, by drawing every day, it results in a sort of logbook of your progress. It allows you to visually monitor and gather feedback, which may become a continuous experiment where you keep the habits that make you feel better, and discard those that don’t (regardless of whether this process happens consciously or not). This ‘logbook’ also allows you to encapsulate the particular intangible feelings, which in my opinion makes them more like objects which you can control and manipulate as you wish.
Daily Flow of Consciousness
For instance, that good feeling Bobby had is nicely captured by this particular drawing, titled “The Daily Flow of Consciousness” on Day 711. Feelings which are intangible can now be bounded by this particular drawing instead of being formless. True, the feelings that are felt and the feelings that are expressed through the drawing are both the same ones, but now how we organize them in our mind has changed.
If you’d like to know more about Bobby’s drawings (and have a snippet of what went in her mind as she drew them). The Guardian has several very good clips narrated by the artist herself:
- Bobby Baker at the Wellcome Collection (Mar 18, 2009) - a short introduction into how she started drawing and slideshow of some of her diary drawings accompanied by the artist’s description (3 minutes)
- Diary Drawings - audio slideshow (Oct 10, 2011) - more diary drawing descriptions (5 minutes)
- Suffering and strength: Bobby Baker’s portraits of living with mental illness (May 12, 2010) - closer look at the artist herself, and a glimpse into some of more disturbing diary drawings (in my opinion. 7 minutes)
There’s also small image gallery at Wellcome Collection site, where you can also listen to a recorded conversation (Apr 16, 2009) by Kamaldeep Bhui, Professor of Cultural Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, where she joined in to talk about her life, art and work (1.5 hour).
