Med students trade scalpels for paintbrushes
Art show looks at mental illness through future doctors’ eyes
TESSA VANDERHART STAFF
“Missing Pieces” by Jason Elliot, class of 2007.
The sixth annual medical students’ art show is about more than just mental illness: from the text to the truth, from stigma to spectrum, the show is a way for medical students to experiment with their perceptions of disease by creating art.
Show coordinator Larissa Seredycz, medicine class of 2009, said the show “allows us to be a little more creative — I don’t think doctors are very creative. So it’s a different way of looking at things.”
The show, titled Mental Illness: Perception versus Reality, attempts to address the realities of disease through art and includes a number of altered photographs and oil paintings.
“With any kind of illness, there’s some kind of symptom you can see — you see a quadriplegic patient in a wheelchair,” said Seredycz. “Mental illness is not something that’s seen, it’s something that’s acted out — and if you’re not there when the patient is acting out, you’re not aware of the personal and the societal impacts . . . all you see is a small glimpse of their life when they come to see you, or when you’re learning about it.”
For Seredycz, the highlight of the show was the Feb. 12 opening night, when Nigel Bart, Artbeat studio coordinator, U of M fine arts grad, and a schizophrenic, showed a video about his experiences with mental illness. Bart was wearing a straightjacket, which was untied as the video played.
Though 200 people were in attendance, “it was very silent after the video,” Seredycz said.
Before the students prepared their art, Bart came to speak to them, bringing along other artists with mental illness — “Patients with mania, depression, suicidal tendencies . . . every spectrum,” Seredycz said. “We had opportunities to speak with all of them.”
“Nigel was high-functioning, and we were able to get more out of it. He was able to express himself quite well,” she said.
For patients, art is a way of exploring all sides of a mental illness, Seredycz said.
“Art is a way of creatively expressing themselves, and a way of expressing how they’re feeling. It’s a new type of therapy that’s here in Winnipeg: art therapy.
“They actually have the child [patient] draw with them, and it’s very therapeutic, apparently — I’ve never done it,” she said.
Seredycz added that many of the medical students worked through their own experiences with mental illness — “a lot of medical students have suffered from depression,” she noted — and discovered emotional, physical, and spiritual side-effects.
“That’s all the components that are in a mental illness — it affects your behaviour, it affects your thinking — it’s not black and white,” she said. “It’s about emotions, it’s about creativity, it’s about people, not a label, you know?”
Peter Klippenstein, medicine class of 2010, submitted a piece to the show “partly just to submit a piece of art, because I don’t do that very often, and partly just to express something about mental illness, because I know people who have had mental illness.”
Klippenstein, who is considering a career in psychiatry, drew on personal experiences to draw about “prescribing a façade of normalcy.”
“A lot of it is really a spectrum: somebody is different, and you have to identify them,” he said. “The reality is that it’s important, because then you can better empathize with them” — people with mental illness, who are “really neat people.”
Mental Illness: Perception versus Reality will be showing at the Gallery of Student Art from Feb. 25-29.
