The Double-Edged Sword of Art as Therapy
During the years psychiatrists attacked my mental distress, bipolar, and all the symptoms those encompassed with drug after drug, combined with this drug and that drug, the part of me that accesses creating art for self-exploration and focus deflated, sucked into grey flatness, a dimensionless, endless plain. When the psychiatrist stopped the meds combination I’d been taking for 3 years (quetiapine, lithium, benztropine, gabapentin, desvenlafaxine, pramipexole, naltrexone) without taper, my mind freaked out. After weeks of manic psychosis, insomnia punctuated by graphic nightmares, and lonely despair, my head cleared, and my brain yelled out to make sense of it all. I needed something, but what, I didn’t know. However, I started leafing through my old art, stuff I’d drawn in journals while pursuing an art degree, paintings and photos of paintings I’d given away or sold, and etchings and collages packed up in a box. To be honest, I never considered my art to be worthy, my relation