Art and Mental Health Interview with Writer / Artist Helen Conway
"Mental ill health is undoubtedly helped by art making but it also makes the art making harder."
I love to interview smart people about the complex relationship between art and mental health. I have plenty of my own thoughts but it’s through conversations with others that I really develop those into more nuanced, layered understanding of the true complexities. So, I’m very happy today to have an interview for you with
of .From her About Page: Encore is for anyone who is fascinated with the creative mind and who wants to see the process behind the art and writing. It is for anyone who wants to change their own life to bring their own creativity to the fore. It is for you if you believe that creativity is much more about the way we move through the world than the artefacts we sell.
And here’s something she shared with me directly for this interview:
Being creative to me means acting as I was created to be. It is a way to be in the world, a gift I can give. It is an active threshold between me and the darkness of depression. Making things is the making of me. Creativity is exploration, discovery, both external and internal. It's opening myself up to allow the Universe in. I see it primarily as practice, a way of living rather than a business skill, though I do sell work. It's a mental state as well as a physical act. It is an instinctive response to ask myself : What can I do with what I am seeing? How can I respond? What can I say about it?
Intrigued yet? Let’s learn more …..
Hi Helen. Thank you so much for joining us today. Let’s dig right in …
What are you open to sharing with us about your personal experience of mental health?
My issues with mental ill health crept up on me. After a long career in law, I took a job that was supposed to be the pinnacle of my career and became a Judge. I went in very early - part-time at 34 and full-time at 39 at just the time I was growing most as an individual. I had always been a writer and was first published when I was 16 but took up visual arts when I was 34 at the same time I sidled into this new role. Once I was fully committed to it the job changed radically and became very underfunded but with increased work and an increased level of aggression from the service users. The terms and conditions and culture of that job also clashed with my desire to have the freedom to create. Depression and anxiety began to creep up on me. I realised eventually that crying every day in the shower before work, on the commute, in my private bathroom at work was not normal. I sought therapy but just as it was getting underway experienced three very aggressive incidents in my workplace. After the third one I was shaking so much I could not write. I was given a couple of days off but did not return for 11 months.
I fell into a deep depression with suicidal ideation and rampant anxiety. Medication and therapy made me feel able to have a go at returning to work but the symptoms almost immediately returned. One day I simply blacked out in the street from stress, breaking a bone, yet still I didn't listen to the message my body was telling me because I didn't understand fully what I was experiencing. It was only once I got a diagnosis of, and explanation of burnout and also PTSD, that I realised I had to leave that job.
There was certainly an occupational element to the mental ill health in that I was not fully resourced to do it and the management of my illness was such that it exacerbated the symptoms considerably. However, I also recognise now that whilst I had all the ability to do the job and did it well, I did not have the aptitude for working in the type of organization I was in or in the time and resource pressurised way that was required. I now see that my mental ill health was partly done to me by workplace conditions ( and incidentally done to others in the same way) and partly caused by me placing myself in an environment that was so very close to being a good place for me but actually wasn't good at all.
I would say that I am now substantially recovered from my mental illness but that I still need to do a little more work to recover full mental health. There seems to be a neutral zone between the two when things are 'fine' but yet there is still a veil over the experiences of full joy and vitality, sense of purpose etc. It's not a diagnosable illness but rather what I have decsribed in my own Substack as 'a malady of the soul'.
I answered your question which asks about 'mental health' by using the term 'mental ill health' . Mental ill health for me was the symptoms, the medical diagnosis, the treatable way in which my brain and body went awry. Mental health however is more than the presence or absence of those symptoms though it includes those things. It is the presence of alignment and is deeply related to self-understanding and the bravery to live the way that you are designed for even if that is not the same as following the obvious career or life path. The challenge for me right now is achieving the fullest possible mental health in that sense whilst still dealing with the lingering aftereffects of the symptoms of mental ill health. The worse has abated but the experience has left artifacts that challenge me still.
Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I keep trying to find a better word for mental health, myself, because mental illness has so many historically stigmatized connotations and mental health seems a little broad/ overused … Mental ill health makes sense to me.
I find that there’s almost always a relationship between individual mental health and the communities/systems we are a part of it, so your description of how it was the job but it was also you also makes a lot of sense to me.
You’re a writer and visual artist. Tell us more …
I am a writer and have instinctively written words since being a very small child. When I was 16 I read an American magazine frequently ( I am in the UK) and saw the same byline crop up over and over. I became rather jealously inspired. If she could do it then why not me too? My father brought home a typewriter he found in a skip and I decided I was allowed to write. I wrote four articles and secretly sent them off and the magazine took all four. My father was rather surprised when after the postman arrived with the acceptance slip I banged desperately on the bathroom door. He emerged with shaving foam on his face totally bemused at how his daughter had managed to acquire a cheque in US dollars and unable to answer my questions about the exchange rate! Writing is inseparable from who I am.
What an amazing story!
My visual art, however, was more recent and more accidental. I used to travel for work a lot and for a short time took up hand piecing quilts for stress relief. I soon got fed up of following patterns and began to do improvisational quilting. I was blogging at a time when blogging was becoming a thing and I was invited by a reader to form an international art quilt group. I remember my husband asking. "Do you make art quilts?" and I said, " Well I do now!". That group really took off - we exhibited all over the world and published a coffee table book with Lark Publishing - and it was the foundation of my art making. It gave me a community and an initial identity and what we would now call a platform as well as lasting friendships. When it ended after 5 years I moved into doing big solo shows. By that time I was full-time in that final law job and the art became, in hindsight, a defence of myself against the pressure to be someone I was not. It was the counterpart to the public image I was required to hold, the indirect expression of the real me behind the mask I was forced to wear at work. It was also a way to destress and to grow, to become someone interesting and and even a little bohemian behind the black suits! It rounded me out. I was dealing with much material that was harmful and dressing and art was wholesome and nourishing.
Much of my art is graffiti inspired. I don’t actually do graffiti (though one day surely I will!) but I have photographed it all over the world and have develeoped a layered style with asemic text and graffiti 'tag' inspired marks. I don't think it is any accident that while I was so silenced by my day job I was so captivated by anonymous public writing.
What a powerful way to express yourself and maintain some semblance of your own identity, even subconsciously. Let’s get into some more of the details about how mental health, for mental ill health, as you say, has impacted your creativity.
Let’s start with how your creative content has been impacted:
I'm not 100% sure of the link myself but now, as I ponder this question, I think back over my work over the last 12 years or so and I see a lot of fragmentation, uncertainty, secrecy, asemeic text which one could say is about being misunderstood. I cover a lot up, have multiple layers, many hidden and only partially revealed.
Recently my art contains Hebrew letters which is very linked to me forming a new identity, to rebuilding myself. Would I be making this work anyway had I not been so ill? Maybe. But I can see a connection and certainly the crisis of mental health was closely entwined with a decision to convert to Reform Judaism, which I had wanted do since late teens. ( I was 49 when I finally did so having blurted out that need in a therapy session to the surprise of both me and my therapist!)
Layers in work have so much to say about our mental health!
They certainly do! I was amazed recently that a piece I made for a show (the piece shown below) that appeared simply abstract with no reference to mental health sold to a psychologist who had never seen my work before. She said she kept being drawn to it, saw something in it. Eventually she said that it was the layer in the middle which was substantially empty compacted to the rest of the work and had some indistinct graffiti marks in it that compelled her to keep returning to it. She said that if she was doing art therapy and someone made this piece she would be asking them what was going in in the centre because 'thats where the personal development is’. She had no idea that when I painted it I started out simply doing an exercise for an art class but by the time I painted the layer she referred to it was very much for me about my nascent emergence from mental illness and feeling towards a different healed life. I though it was amazing how she somehow divined that from an abstract work with no idea of my history.
Wow. Art is amazing.
How has your creative process been impacted?
Originally I had a highly organised routine. I time recorded and was very goal orientated and efficient in the same way I was in law. I worked on my art as a semi-professional studio routine in the evening after work, time recording as good lawyers do! I was driven, confident and productive and sure of what I was doing. The depression and anxiety ultimately gave me more time and freedom to work creatively as it resulted in an ill-health retirement so I had all the time in the world and no financial worries.
However, the depression and anxiety also attacked that confidence and sense of purpose. I had more time but now - some 3 years on from the peak of the illness I still struggle to create a routine the way I did. I still have the lurking voice that says "Oh what’s the point? You know this was never your proper job. It doesn't really matter. No one needs this the way you were needed in law..." It's a cruel destructive voice combined with a certain flatness, a lack of essential vitality that I am left with. Together it makes it hard to feel I am making any meaningful progress. I dabble more, have more periods of unproductivity and avoidance, am much less sure about my place. Much more existential angst. More time in the doldrums.
On the other hand, knowing that I needed to tackle this and recognising that I was a writer before I was an artist, I turned to Substack as a way to resurrect both those glory days of blogging that had given me so much and also working to a routine. I set myself a very easy twice-a-month commitment to get a Substack out and I have been so heartened and built up by the response to it.
My latest post speaks to the some of the answers I am finding as I ask myself how to mage this anxiety that comes with a freedom to create.
I have long found it interesting how many writers end up in law. It seems to be a pretty common thing - people who are good with words get channeled into that career. I spent a semester in law school myself before realizing that it wasn’t what I truly wanted. And for me maybe this relates to the struggle to see your art as equally valid to your work in law - because society doesn’t typically value them the same.
I also find it interesting the way that you describe the routine and the timekeeping that worked in law and how it worked for you at times in your creativity but then hasn’t quite worked. I think sometimes the things that appeal to us about one thing can be applied in a new way to something else, although figuring out how to adapt to our changing needs is often tough.
Do you need daily routine in order to overcome the inner critic or do you need spaciousness for your creativity? A twice-monthly Substack writing routine sounds like a good happy medium to try.
It has been but interestingly I have been experimenting with having a spacious daily routine! I’m not at all sure there is a dichotomy between routine and spaciousness.
Some of what we’re discussing here is productivity … do you have more thoughts to share on how your mental ill health symptoms have impacted your productivity as a creative?
When I was slipping down the slope of combined depression, anxiety, burnout and PTSD, I had two very big shows scheduled with an exhibiting partner. I was off work from the law job but still producing art and loving doing it. Until one day I wasn't and I rang my partner to say I needed to pull out. It felt like the art was where I put the residual determination until one day it just ran out. I was like a cartoon character who runs over the cliff and keeps on running in thin air until suddenly they plunge down the ravine. Leah, my partner, came round the next day and persuaded me I could indeed meet the commitment. I dropped some ambitious plans, switched from time-consuming textile art to quicker print methods and the shows went well. Then I had a deep fallow period with little production. Subsequently, I was asked to do a solo show at a new gallery and in response rallied and produced about 70 pieces of work in 7 months but then again slumped.
I hope this is simply a much-needed rest and recuperation process - one that was extended because of having to cope with two very serious health situations with my husband who needed full-on care in what would have been my recovery time. I am much less motivated by sales, or external forms of success measurement than I was because those were very much mirrored in the law job that made me so ill. On the one hand I want to throw myself wholeheartedly into creative work and have so many ideas and possibilities and no reason not to embrace it. But I am also afraid that hard work will once again hurt me. So I retreat. The press to productivity has become associated with harm to my mental health in my mind to the extent I recoil from it. But without it, the tag end of the illness seems to make it harder to activate the desire to create for the joy of it, for exploration or experimentation. To play, to set goals... I am flattened and my concentration has definately been diminished. Though I know play and creativity are a medicine to me, the symptoms make it harder to take that medicine.
You have articulated that so well. I do love that you were able to change the medium to keep your commitments and finish your show. We often have to adapt our creativity to the realities of our health.
Do you have any other thoughts on the impact of mental ill health on your medium?
I was aware that the law job was squishing me and my instinctive reaction against that was to insist that I expanded in the one area I was in control of - my art. I decided to move from textile art, in which I had been using some acrylic paint on cotton to learning full-on acrylic painting.
I had not been writing much all the time I was in that job but the need to warn others and express what had happened to me drew me back gradually to my words.
I’m so glad it did!
Have you experienced any stigma when sharing your mental health experiences in the creative world?
I have never perceived any stigma or discrimination. I've always felt accepted and if I tell my story often described as 'brave' to tell it and thanked for helping others. When my mental ill health threatened my art shows, I was able to explain how I felt and received immediate and effective support.
What about your own self-perception? How are mental health and your creative identity linked?
These two are so entwined in complicated ways! I do think my growing identity as an artist burgeoning at the same time as I took a job that required limited personal expression contributed to the symptoms of mental ill health. Yet, having the art still there when every other part of my professional identity was lost saved me in a way. It gave me dignity. My title in the law job often put a barrier between me and others and being able to embrace the new identity was a joy. It made me able to be someone new at a time when I hated the depressed person I was. I remember a counselor early on calling me bohemian even as I sat there in my black work suit and I both laughed and rejoiced.
However, once I had burst out of the law the symptoms caused this flattening and lack of concentration and now it means that whilst I love that other people see me as an artist - there are people in my Jewish community who haven't even realised I was a lawyer beforehand - it also means the imposter syndrome is rampant. I am flattered that people tell me I am a talented artist but at the same time am anxious and sad that my moods mean I can't seem to perform as an an artist the way I would want to. Yet. I'm telling myself it will come!!
We’ve discussed a lot about the complexities of the relationship between art and mental health. But ultimately, you keep coming back to art, as do most of us, and that’s because there’s probably a net positive.
So in what ways do you most think art helps/heals you?
At my worst stage, it gave me a retreat. I remember my symptoms being so bad that I couldn't remember how to use a car parking machine at my away-from-home-studio, yet I went there because it felt like the only place in the world I was safe and where no one (except my husband) knew where I was or could get to me to place demands on me. I produced nothing of merit there but it was just enough to stop me having nothing in life. If I was an artist, I was not nothing, which is how the depression made me feel.
The physical movements of paint on a canvas were elementally soothing. The repetition maybe. But definitely the solitude, the opportunity to be alone and have the exact opposite of excessive demands flying at me all day. Later the sense of achievement at building up the body of work for the shows was a way of building me back up too.
One of the worst parts of the mental ill health was losing all the legal community when I left and the sense of having crashed and failed and lost everything. However, I was able to join an online art community and found I could use my coaching skills and exhibiting experience in there to informally answer questions in the Facebook group. Some days I was still in bed, feeling there was not much to get out for, but I'd answer a question and the artist who posed it would say they were going to print my words out they helped so much and I'd think, "yes, today I still did something good, that's enough". In that way art indirectly allowed me a sense of continued worth and also allowed me to be self-caring, to allow that one Facebook comment to another artist who needed it was equal in worth to an over-demanding day in court.
So it wasn't the art alone that was therapeutic but the art community too. Now when I am struggling with these continued flat feelings I find art harder but writing is a way to guarantee falling back into flow state and that takes me out of that flat disprited state. At the moment it is not altering it so much as I am transported out of it temporarily and that is good enough.
Thinking all of this over, would you say that art has harmed your mental health in any way?
I don't think the art-making did at all. However, my desire to show it and to be very public about it, when combined with a job where the pressure was to be very invisible, caused a real conflict that was emotionally very hard to deal with. The feeling that I could not be fully myself - that my personal integrity was threatened - was explained to me by a psychologist as part of the resulting PTSD. However, I'd say it was not the art creation that harmed me in that way but the obstruction to my artistic expression from my job that caused the harm.
That makes so much sense.
Wrapping things up, how would you now articulate the relationship between art and mental health?
Mental ill health is undoubtedly helped by art making but it also makes the art making harder. If the art making is threatened that will also threaten mental health. It's not about physical threat - it's much about being silenced and having your sense of internal personal integrity threatened. If you don't feel safe to express yourself or feel that you will be suppressed if you do, then that is detrimental to mental health but the exercise of self-expression especially when it is accepted in the world in some way is supportive of mental health.
And lastly, paying it forward, who is someone else I should be reading next in regards to this topic?
Have a look at my friend Christine Hager-Braun who makes art directly about mental health and her experience of depression with a view to helping others.
Thank you!!
Be sure to connect with
here on Substack. You can also find her on Instagram and Facebook @studioconway and there’s more on her website.A few of my favorite posts that Helen has shared to get you started:
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Such a relatable story, thank you for sharing your Words, Art, and Mental-ill wellness. It gives me hope my creativity will return 🎨