The Art of Healing: “Pretty Pictures”

I saw the “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas” exhibit on a chilly, gray day in Pittsburgh last week. It felt good to be in an art museum looking at “pretty pictures.”

Those two words are in quotes because that’s how I think of them—a singular concept evoking thoughts of my daughter, Elly, who likes to draw. I especially remember her drawing pictures for her father when he was in the hospital. My husband, Steve, had a mental breakdown when Elly was five. She’d sit at her little table in the kitchen “making Daddy a pretty picture,” which I’d bring to the hospital when I visited. (This was 1995, and children weren’t allowed in the psych ward where Steve was.)

Elly frequently turned to art as a way of processing the turmoil that periodically erupted in our home. Steve began having mental health problems shortly after she was born, and it took almost eight years before doctors found a cocktail of medications to stabilize his mind. Tough going for all of us, but well beyond the understanding of a young child

Even after the acute stage of Steve’s illness passed, Elly explored the subject of mental illness through art. One of her high school art class projects is called “Chutes and Lithium.” It depicts a child’s board game with a pill-lined path that winds between a house and barn, similar to where we live. Near the barn is the silhouetted figure of a man. When Elly was eight, she saw her father hiding behind the barn because he thought the police were coming to get him.

Another of her school art projects is titled “Bipolar.” It’s is of three brains made from clay and connected by a rusty wire. They’re on pedestal of varying heights and depict the fluctuating moods of bipolarity: The first brain is smooth and intact; the second, cracked and broken; and the third, with pills scattered around its base, whole but misshapen with deep fissures.

Elly is twenty-nine now, and an artistic thread continues to run through her life. Not professionally, but in a way that allows her to decompress from her job as a physical therapist and to explore her thoughts on the world. She’s particularly drawn to sketching people’s faces, pensive-looking older men and women with a lifetime of living reflected in their features.

Creativity was also an important part of how I dealt with Steve’s illness, although I explored the experience through writing. Initially, I wrote in my journal, and after Steve was stable, began writing Rambler: A Family Pushes Through the Fog of Mental Illness. In it I explore the many facets of Steve’s illness: How having young children in the home affected the situation. The role Steve’s and my upbringing played in dealing with our challenge. The critical support of others in overcoming an illness that people didn’t talk about openly. Why our marriage survived and thrived, when so many others fail.

Although I thought of my book as a way of offering insight into the complex and confusing nature of mental illness, writing it proved far more important to my own well-being. Thinking about the experience forced me to look inward, and in doing so, I gained a better understanding of what happened, and of myself. Through writing I came to appreciate the connectivity of the intersecting communities in which we live—families, neighborhoods, schools, hometowns, the workplace—and in the healing power of looking at and drawing “pretty pictures.”