Dissertation complete 2

Beyond Words: Discovering the Bipolar Impaired Self through Visual Imagery A Visual and Textual Narrative Dissertation by David A. Feingold, Ed.D Disability and Equity in Education National Louis University, Chicago

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BEYOND WORDS: DISCOVERING THE BIPOLAR IMPAIRED SELF THROUGH VISUAL IMAGERY

Copyright © 2013 David A. Feingold

by

Disability and Equity in Education Doctoral Program

David A. Feingold

Approved:

___________________________________ Chair/Co-Chair, Dissertation Committee

_________________________________ Program Director

_________________________________ Co-Chair/Member, Dissertation Committee

_________________________________ Director, Doctoral Programs

_________________________________ Member, Dissertation Committee

_________________________________ Dean, National College of Education

_________________________________ Dean’s Representative

_________________________________ Date Approved

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Abstract Bipolar Disorder has profound negative effects on the individual and his/her family and friends due to erratic behavior and unpredictable mood swings. The emotional pain and negative behaviors associated with bipolar disorder are well known characteristics of one’s personal struggles with this illness. Through qualitative Art Based Research, incorporating visual and written narratives of my lived experience with bipolar disorder, the concept of a ‘bipolar impaired self’ rises to surface of conscious awareness, enabling it to become an independent phenomenon of study. Awareness of the impaired self along with understanding its characteristics and contribution to one’s feelings and functioning provides the opportunity to integrate and embrace bipolar disorder as not only a valid but positive aspect of one’s being.

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In Memory !

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Amie Hirsch Cohen !

1958-2005

My Dear Friend Who Valiantly Battled Bipolar Disorder !

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“...whilst disability studies has been excellent at theorizing the structural dimensions of disablism, the psycho-emotional dimension remains relatively understudied.�

- D. Reeve

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Dedication I would like to recognize friends and family who provided me with practical assistance and encouragement. Dr. Robert Greendale, my psychiatrist who steadfastly believed in my ability to meet and overcome life’s challenges. To my 94 year-old mother Frances, who eagerly read every page of my narrative as I wrote them. To my friends and fellow doctoral students who believed in the importance of my work: Carole Brandwein, Becca Buchalter, Margaret Higgins, Jenn Hull , Merle Jones, and Beth Roscoe. Special thanks to the late Professor Paul Grobstein of Bryn Mawr College, who elevated my artwork to the level of neurobiological importance.

Appreciation to Professors Elizabeth Grace, Laura Lorenz, and Sadia Warsi, who always provided key suggestions with a spirit of enthusiasm. Penultimate thanks to Professor Terry Jo Smith, my Dissertation Chair, advisor, teacher, and mentor, who left no stone unturned in preparing me for high level scholarship. Lastly, I’d like to posthumously ‘present’ my dissertation to my father Philip, who always wanted to have a doctor in the family.

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A Penchant for Pondering

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Inspiration: Disability Blasphemy

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Introduction

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Psycho-Emotional Relevance

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Psycho-Emotional Disability or Vulnerability?

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I’m Talking

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Relevant Literature

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Recovery: Fact or Fiction?

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Recovery: Road...

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Or Destination?

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Pat the Bunny is Like Recovery Groups

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Disability Art

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Neurological Disability Art

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Educational Disability Art

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Financial Disability Art

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Recreational Disability Art

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Therapeutic Disability Art

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Political Disability Art

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Mad Art

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What is Outsider Art?

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Many Names, One Genre

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What the Experts Have to Say

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What a Scream

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Shedding Light on Thomas Szasz

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Should We Be Doubting Thomas or Mental Illness?

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Michel Foucault

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It’s Art That’s ‘Terapeutic’

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Methodology and Method

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Methodology

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Thinking Hard Not Hardly Thinking

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Art Based Research Primer

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Is it Research or Art?

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The Story Behind Narratives

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Don’t Just Do Something. Stand There!

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Method

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A Wild Goose Chase

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My Story Begins Here

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My Narrative

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Chapter 1 Bipolar in the Making

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Chapter 2 I Have Bipolar Disorder?

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Chapter 3 What’s Happening to Me?

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Chapter 4 People in My Life

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Chapter 5 Coming Out

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Analysis

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Theoretical Underpinnings

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The Impaired Self: (Cracked) Window to the World

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From Impaired Self...

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...To Integrated Self

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Transformation

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Conclusion

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Where to From Here?

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Recommendations

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Why Poetry?

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References

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About My Images

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A Penchant for Pondering I like to ponder-thinking about things differently. In fact, I have a penchant for pondering, which coincidentally is the title of my image used to illustrate this page. I’d rather ponder than just about anything else. Just as in the image above, pondering puts me in an emotional place of solitude, where I can think, dream, solve problems, and reflect on my past, present and future, unencumbered by those and things around me. It takes me to the source, where visions and answers are more pure, more honest, more truthful, and more intuitive. Naturally, I would ponder how to produce my dissertation.

How to produce my dissertation was of vital importance to me. One writes dissertations by taking thoughts and putting them down on paper, using letters and punctuation in perfect combination and order.

However, I communicate best using either pictures or pictures and type. I think visually, so quite naturally I prefer to communicate visually, to get my thoughts across. Through the expanded wisdom and for stimulating cutting edge research, I had been given academic approval and freedom to pursue a dissertation

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using visuals and type in a format that worked for me as well as satisfying the criteria of a qualitative dissertation. Just as in creating art, I didn’t know from the outset how my finished dissertation would look or what it would even include, with 100% certainty. As I will discuss at a later point, it is not unusual for a qualitative research project to develop organically and spontaneously as opposed to being a blueprint etched in stone. Just like my life and just like my art, my dissertation has unfolded as I worked on it and created it.

It would not only be in fulfillment for my degree however, it would also be a work of art, where I would hope to achieve a Gestalt between all the elements working together to form a complete and meaningful whole including thoughts, images, text, etc. Using a visual construct for my dissertation has meaning beyond producing an effective communication piece. The act of creating visual imagery holds a special place in the process of arriving at this moment of preparing my dissertation. Several years ago I began creating artistic images of my “inner experience� of bipolar disorder. This was the origin of my interest in my personal awareness of journeying through and transformation within the lived experience of mental illness. Now my visual interpretation has continued quite naturally in an academic vein, where I have been pondering my diagnosis of bipolar disorder through the lens of academic research. It is within this context that I have laid the foundation for the purpose and question of this dissertation: What role does Arts-Based research and visual and verbal self-narratives help to understand the bipolar experience?

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Inspiration: Disability Blasphemy I would like to make clear one of the reasons for writing my dissertation. It is not merely to satisfy a prerequisite for graduating with a doctorate. The reason for writing my dissertation is the same as it was for embarking on and staying the course of this doctoral journey: I want to inspire and be inspired. I want to inspire myself to continually set and reach personal goals; I would like to (as a person with multiple disabilities) inspire others to do the same, notwithstanding, in opposition to, and/or despite the presence of one’s disability. Does anyone need me to be an inspiration for them? No. But can it help? This reminds me of a saying my father, who was a successful businessman had “Rich or poor, it’s good to have money.” I believe the same can be said of inspiration. Whether we have it or not, inspiration can be a good thing to have.

So what’s the problem? There really isn’t any unless you assume the traditional, contemporary view that to be inspired by anyone with a disability or hope to inspire anyone given your own disability, is for you to see them as less than normal, someone to be pitied or representative of an imagined supercrip. Either way it is seen as ablest and antithetical to the advancement of personal empowerment to the disability movement (Chrisman, 2011). Two concepts are often presented when making an argument pairing inspiration and

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disabilities; Chris Reeve and the supercrip moniker, and the “poster child,” also known as Jerry’s kids of MD telethon fame. The late Chris Reeve is now well-known for his alias as the silver screen’s version of Superman as well as becoming paralyzed from an equestrian accident. Reeve died in 2004 of pressure sore ulcer complications, but is best remembered for being an inspiration for people with spinal cord injuries. Wise Young, director of the Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University gave this eulogy-like credit in the obituary section of The Lancet: “I can tell you from the hundreds of patients we take care of, they lost a huge beacon of hope and their biggest fear is that rapid progress that has been made [in spinal cord research] will be stalled “ (Oransky, 2004, p. 1750). If anything can be considered ‘blasphemous’ about disabled people inspiring others, it isn’t disabled people being inspiring, it is disabled people being made into ‘clay gods’ by our media institutions. Consider time magazine’s nod to Reeve’s “all-knowing status” in the article entitled, “He never gave up: What actor and activist Christopher Reeve taught scientists about the treatment of spinal cord injury” (Goggen & Newell, 2004, p. 5).

Society’s view on disabilities can also lead to embarrassing derision, not only for the disabled, but for a newspaper’s editorial staff. A prime example of insensitive newspaper disability reporting lies in the title of an article about the special Olympics in the Oakland Tribune: “Special Olympics’ athletes win smiles: Races belong to not-so-swift, not-so-strong” (Storey, 2009, p. 135). It’s no wonder how people who try to do so much good to help people with disabilities wind up doing so much wrong to assist and acknowledge those with disabilities, especially when gratuitous and condescending gestures are offered. The Fresno Bee presents a stinging story in almost parody fashion when it relates the activity in which some spectators participate in at the Special Olympics: hugging the sports participants at the end of the races. According to the article, people

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get to hug the kids, indicating that both the huggers and the huggees love such inspiring offerings (Storey, 2009).

Whereas people ‘worship’ Chris Reeve’s bravery and fortitude, telethon viewers wring their hands over the ‘tragic’ condition of young poster children affiliated with massive fundraising events, such as Jerry’s Kids, who have Muscular Dystrophy. The message is that if one were inspired to send in money for research, a cure would be found to fix these damaged children (Areheart, 2008). No wonder inspiration is an anathema to the assertive disability movement. !

Coming full circle to my opinion of inspiration being a credible companion to the disability discourse,

I look to my own disability (bipolar disorder), which benefited from narratives written by people with bipolar disorder and other psychiatric disorders, as well as verbal narratives from those with whom I have been in hospital inpatient and outpatient group therapy sessions. I felt neither demeaned nor deflated by their stories, successes and struggles, but instead was hopeful, encouraged and supported. Chrisman (2011) brings reason to the inspiration discussion by pointing out that inspirational narratives for those with disabilities are not meant to overcome or conquer personal deficits and weaknesses, but to continue to do their own works as well as participate in and contribute to advocacy initiatives and struggles to achieve social justice.

Inspiration will likely continue to be a lightning rod for disability discussion, however, it seems to me that it is important to consider who is doing the inspiring, who is being inspired and the messages that are serving as inspiration. Simply stated, as long as humanity is being respected and those with disabilities aren’t being rejected, there is no reason the use of inspiration should not be accepted.

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...as long as humanity is being respected and those with disabilities aren’t being rejected, there is no reason giving and receiving inspiration should not be accepted.�

- D. Feingold

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Introduction

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Psycho-Emotional Relevance This section brings to the conscious level of awareness how psycho-emotional (i.e., psychiatric) disorders have not been a significant consideration in the disability studies movement and the proponents of the social model of disabilities (Barenes & Mercer, 2004). I feel that the hopes, needs and social positioning of people with mental illness are unwittingly marginalized compared to those with other disabilities, given academia’s primary focus on disability theories, policies, and polemics.

On another note, I want to make clear where my interest in psycho-emotional disability issues lies. My interest lies in endogenous and genetic psychiatric conditions, those associated with events related to the family, marriage, school, work, transitions, bereavement, etc. Psychiatric illnesses could manifest as anxiety, depression, panic, biological illness, and physiological stress response, etc. (Chatterjee, 2005).

Does the individual in my art piece, above, suffer from depression based on a biological underpinning or a genetic predisposition? Maybe it is a reaction to some life event, personal loss, or developmental crisis.

Maybe his depression might stem from a reaction to some other disability that he may have, or possibly from the pressures and stresses of living with a disability in a society, whose members may be unaware

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of the challenges as well as strengths of those with physical and mental disabilities with whom they interact.

This adds to the emotional and social isolation of people who already need to work extra hard and in many cases, struggle to compensate for their disabilities in many areas of their life due to their impairments (Anthony, 1993).

Mental illness is largely viewed as a weakness by society, a defect in one’s personality, making them “the other”, outside the realm of the “normal” population (Coutre & Penn, 2003). These are issues that face individuals with mental illness, beyond their diagnostic symptomatology and related debilitating sequela. In the most simple of terms, those with mental illness are forced to deal not only with having a psychiatric disorder and bearing the brunt of social derision, but its related personal fallout of poor self-esteem, shame, identity confusion, and self-doubt (Maree, et al., 2008). By the time you are through reading this dissertation, it is my hope you will recognize the uphill battle we face, and thereby win your encouragement and recognition of our strengths and not just our shortcomings.

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Psycho-Emotional Disability or Vulnerability?

What I have come to find in my research of the disability literature is that psycho–emotional disorders put people in the category of having a personal tragedy, unlike those with other disabilities, considered victims of an unfair system of social injustice. Within this context, tending to the personal plight of those with psychiatric problems, averts attention from challenging the faceless and pervasive oppression of others, disabled, from a society enmeshed in the medical model (Watermeyer, 2009).

Social model researchers have perpetuated a dichotomy of the individual condition versus pursuit of the social good since the 1990s (Turner, 2001). Unfortunately, people with psychiatric impairments become immobilized in seeking relief from social oppression, discrimination, and exclusion. Furthermore, there is a vulnerability to isolation from the rest of the disability community, wherein opportunities are squelched for attaining increased self-worth, and an opportunity to have otherwise felt more empowered by being part of a potent political movement. As a doctoral student in disability studies, I spent the first years of my program oblivious to my disability. I have bipolar disorder, not a physical impairment, so I never thought of myself as having a disability, and so didn’t consider myself part of the disability community. This was reinforced by

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classroom conversations of medical-related disabilities that were primarily identified with physical and cognitive attributes, as opposed to those psychiatric. There were a few adjunct courses dealing with the topic of mental illness in the general educational milieu, however mental illness was not given conversational status on a regular basis.

Along with my type of impairment being associated with a medical issue of a strictly personal nature and not part of the greater physical impairment conversation, I also felt estranged from the non-medical, social model discussions that were the key focus of my doctoral program. I didn’t identify with the social model, which focuses on infusing systemic change in the general environment by removing physical and social barriers to accommodate those with impairments (Shakespeare & Watson, 2002) and to facilitate equal rights and inclusion of the disabled (Thomas, 2004). This was probably because neither my bipolar disorder or seizure disorder posed an immediate threat to my employment, in that I had excellent work evaluations, except for the ubiquitous “room for growth in the areas of organizational skills and time management�, due to my cognitive deficits.

My position is that psycho-emotional disorders should be included in the disability movement discourse. Aside from being an impairment in its own right, there is established evidence of psychoemotional comorbidity with other impairments, illnesses and disabilities, in contradistinction to the social model of disabilities, which because of its mandate, maintains its focus on socio--cultural barriers, exclusive of experiential aspects of disability (Reeve, 2002). In that social-emotional disorders are associated with so many other illnesses and disorders, they deserve as much inclusion into the disability argument as individuals with disabilities deserve full inclusion and accommodation into the mainstream of society. Note the following sampling of maladies, that may incorporate social-emotional behavior and diagnostic components:

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- Neurosensitization (Miller, 2000) - Brain injury (Gilboa, 2000) - Spinal cord injury (Bombardier, et. al., 2004) -Amputated limb (Fisher, 1998) - Deafness (Kvam & Loeb, 2006) - Blindness (Meade & Hyde, 2003) - Autism spectrum (Ghaziuddin, Ghaziuddin & Tsai, 1992) - Intellectually disabilities (Stoker, Koedoot, et al., 2002) - Burn victims (Ranucci, 2008) - Dyslexia, ADHD (Maughan, 2006)

This section culminates in an explanation how I became interested in the manner in which mental illness is perceived by academicians, the disability rights community, and lay helpers, health care and other professionals who provide services to disabled individuals. My explanation is twofold. The first is that I have my own disabilities with which I must deal on a daily basis. I am particularly sensitive to and cognizant of how other disabled and non-disabled people relate to me and how I relate to them--within the framework of a society which tends to idealize personal perfection and reject in varying degrees, anybody and anything that falls short of that expectation. The second reason stems from my experience as a school social worker and personal observations I have made, regarding mental health and disabilities in our schools. I used to be tightlipped about what I saw in schools. But now, as my illustration on the next page suggests...

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...I’m Talking When I was a social worker in the elementary and middle schools, one of most interesting and challenging responsibilities was to attend Individual Educational Plan (IEP) meetings. The principal, a representative from the District Administration Office, regular and special education teachers, the school nurse, speech pathologist, school psychologist, any other in-school service providers, student guardians, and I would meet. the discussion pertained to whether a student is qualified to receive special education services and related services, based on psychometric testing and observations of the student’s overall school performance and functioning.

After all the members of the meeting provided their input, I would present my observations and analysis. The order of which we presented was based on team interest and a hierarchy of what aspect of the child’s functioning was considered to be most important. As I said, I went last. Social/emotional issues weren’t seen as salient as other issues, such as academics, speech/language, and physical and occupational therapy. I was a necessary evil in many cases as I attended many of the meetings because Special Education law required my attendance. Certainly, my presence was welcomed by the team members

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as long as I didn’t expect to take up time explaining how the child’s psycho-emotional vulnerabilities affected his or her school behavior, social interactions, academic functioning, and student/teacher relationship.

These issues often became too personal and irrelevant for the rest of the team to want to discuss in any detail or at all. It is seen as beyond the scope and purview of the school’s mandated charge to teach children “school stuff”. So, as “Spiderman”—my illustration on the previous page shows, I had a lot to say. However, I was expected to keep it to a minimum, as long as the child wasn’t in danger of harming him/herself or others, and unless there was extra time to talk. What much of the staff failed to realize, in no matter which school I was working, was how vital the student’s mental health was to their ability to meet the school’s social, behavioral and academic expectations. Furthermore, they were lightyears away from being aware of the students’ psycho-emotional components of their educational or medically identified disability, whether they be a learning disability, developmental disability, communication disorder, or a physical/structural impairment.

I have observed that school staff who have their doctorates are traditionally highly regarded and are given carte blanche autonomy at these IEP meetings. They are listened to, given as much time as they need and are quite influential in their recommendations. Unfortunately, I was three quarters of the way through my doctorate when I had to quit my job because of my own cognitive impairments. Perhaps a school social worker blog is in the offing as a viable alternative!

I would be remiss if I didn’t include the image on the next page at this point of the discussion. It is based on an actual student/teacher interaction I had witnessed one day at a school in which I was working. A third grade teacher (with a reputation for having a particularly crusty and gruff demeanor) was in the hallway,directly outside her classroom with one of her students. The image is entitled, “Teacher’s Pet.” As

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you can see there was a confrontation of a rather significant magnitude by the teacher to the student.

Through my previous observations and talking to this student, I was aware of his timid personality and cautious approach in speaking with students and teachers alike. When I asked the student why he had been yelled at, he said it was because he went to the boy’s washroom after recess without asking the teacher.

Remember, this child is timid and cautious and has difficulty advocating for himself. Was it really necessary for the teacher to scream at this child? My point is, a child’s mental health is affected by the school experience in addition to his/her school experience being affected by the mental health of the child. If this is not obvious to teachers and administrators, then our children are in trouble. If it is obvious to teachers and administrators but they ignore it, then the entire educational system is in trouble.

I believe that preservice teacher education has a role in this scenario that cannot be overlooked.

Knowledge and importance of a child’s mental health in the school environment should be covered thoroughly in the preservice teacher’s education so that their future students can benefit from mental health support and understanding in their education. Regarding college administrators needing to establish this kind of coursework in all preservice teacher education programs—obviously, students in our public schools aren’t the only ones who need to do their homework.

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Recovery: Fact or Fiction?

Psychiatrist, David Whitwell’s article, “The myth of recovery from mental illness” (Whitwell, 1999) was one of the first articles I read on the subject of recovery. I wasn’t sure if I should have read it so early on in my research as it had such a strong sense of judgment. I feared it might sway my opinion and what I thought about the topic. However, I stayed the course and accepted the challenge.

What helped keep me grounded was the title of the next article I was going to read: “What is recovery?

A conceptual model and explication”. For sure, this article wouldn’t lead me astray. If nothing else, I thought I would just let the two experts battle it out and then form my opinion based on whoever was left standing. So what’s the story? Do we with mental illness rise from the ashes like a Phoenix or do we stay on the surface of the ground, trying to avoid potholes? Let’s see what the experts say, starting with Whitwell.

According to Whitwell (1999), recovery is an everyday term, meaning returning to feeling better, before the patient had fallen ill. In the past, doctors offered patients the likelihood of recovery as opposed to accurate information. In truth, whether recovery will be achieved is variable and becomes clearer in time.

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What was clear however were the results of a qualitative study, conducted to find out how a group of self-

proclaimed recovered psychiatric patients actually fared.

Whitwell reports that the findings of the subjects’ questionnaires actually reflected continued symptoms and personal difficulties, “reduced tolerance of stress, restricted lifestyle, unemployment, stigma, and poverty” (1999, p. 621). The next results came from answers to questionnaires given to patients who their psychiatrist labeled as recovered. None of these “recovered” patients describe themselves as recovered.

These patients described themselves as not being the same as they had been before becoming ill. They too, experienced hardship, such as unemployment, divorce, housing problems, lack of money, loss of selfconfidence, etc. (1999). The point is, per Whitwell, recovery comes from a medical model that perpetuates false expectations that the individual will reach an endpoint of premorbid conditions when in actuality they likely will not. “Survivor” then, has become a more favorable term, referring to an ability to cope with the disability, its attendant disadvantages, as well as their negative experiences from being medically treated by psychiatrists (1999).

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Recovery: Road...

Whitwell’s article was certainly thought-provoking. It got me to thinking. If I was able to talk when I was born, upon first realizing that I was brought into this world, the first thing I would have said was, “How long will Recovery take?” That is quite a ride down the birth canal, but that doesn’t mean we should or could go back to the way we felt before. It is what it is, so the thing to focus on is the process of surviving and moving on, remembering that Recovery is a road and not a destination.

While Whitwell’s explanation, of Recovery related to system reform in policy and practice, associated with personal struggles in coping with having a disability (Whitwell, 1999), Jacobson & Greenley (2001), a social scientist and attorney, respectively at the University of Wisconsin’s Coalition for Advocacy, describe Recovery on two fronts.

The first front corresponds to what Whitwell’s view of individuals coping with their disabilities and related life difficulties (surviving) as opposed to making mental, emotional and physical recoveries to previous levels of functioning, due to related impairments.

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Or Destination?

Jacobson and Greenley (2001), also include a second front of Recovery, as a tool-oriented-service by the community . For example, what was supposed to be a clear path to a “recovery-oriented” Wisconsin mental health system, became a confusing morass of roads paved with good intentions, as “recovery” meant something different in different areas of the system, including outcomes research, personal narrative, services design and provision, and systems reform (2001). Picture the cloverleaf on page 27 and you will likely experience a visceral connection similar to the way this confusion felt by all involved--consumers, providers and policymakers. The authors addressed this problem in a collaborative research study, which strategically integrated services provided by professionals, consumers, family members, friends, and members of the larger community. The picture on the right is a visual metaphor of the improvement. In paradoxical terms, perhaps the road is the destination!

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Pat the Bunny is Like Recovery Groups Okay, this does sound a little odd, but then again, people with bipolar disorder often score high in creative thinking (Santosa, et al., Hare, 1987). So how is Pat the Bunny like Recovery groups? When my 30 year-old daughter was a child, one of her favorite books was “Pat the Bunny.” One page had a piece of sandpaper on a picture of “daddy’s” face, and it said to “touch daddy’s scratchy face.” Another page had a piece of soft fakefur on the surface of a picture of a bunny. This page said to pat the bunny.

One was obviously rough, and one was cuddly. Which do you think was favored by my daughter? It was the sandpaper. Why? Because every time she touched the sandpaper, she would touch my scratchy face, thinking that was the funniest thing since Pee Wee’s Playhouse. The medical model (rough) versus the Recovery model (soft and cuddly) is like that. That is to say that not all mentally ill artists would automatically relate to the soft feeling of the Recovery group, when in fact, some might relate more to the medical model. For example, it is hard to imagine Francisco Goya, with his syphilis, schizophrenia, and depictions of the savages of war-savage rapes, murders, famine, (Somasundaram, 2000)--participating in the tenets of Recovery. Not only Francisco Goya, but what about Jackson Pollock, Edvard Munch, Vincent Van

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Gogh, and Salvador Dali? If these artists were alive today, would they see doing their artwork as a form of Recovery? If I had the time, I would like to do research on the social behavior of the surrealist, expressionist and impressionist artists of the 1800s and 1900s and see if their get-togethers in art showings served as types of Recovery activity.

Inasmuch as I am treating this as an editorial of sorts, meaning my opinion, I am sharing my personal reflections of the Recovery readings. This is a perspective from someone who has a mental illness, is an artist, has participated in small gatherings with other artists and has participated in art shows. So I am bringing actual experience into my opinion. I like the idea of there being an alternative to receiving assistance to the medical model. But I will say that I owe my current level of successful day to day functioning to psychiatry, therapy, medication, and even psychiatric hospitalization. That’s not to say all those interventions are perfect, but it is saying that they help me through some very rough roads, some that were dead ends. Doing my artwork however was definitely not part of the medical model. For instance, I would occasionally bring in some of my “mad art� for my psychiatrist to see, during our 45 minute sessions. The artwork never became part of the discussion, only a sign of my state of mind, which he dutifully jotted in his progress notes. I stopped bringing them. Come to think of it, I suppose I am a proponent of both the medical and Recovery models of mental health interventions. As far is the Recovery model goes I benefit from doing my artwork (stress release, know myself and Self), I assert my needs, and try to maintain a relatively healthy lifestyle.

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Disability Art I have to admit, this topic is a tough one for me. I know what I’m supposed to think and say, that true disability art is a political and social act in the service of making the general public more aware of disability rights and issues, finding a voice and deflecting the societal gaze (Hiranandari, 2005). Who made this decree to the exclusion of other explanations?

So this is the first thing I wanted to find out about in my readings. Where did this “official� explanation come from? And why to the exclusion of other descriptions? I guess I know too much. I not only do art that addressed the impaired self of my psycho-emotional disability, my work has been in disability art shows and on display in disability websites. None of those sites nor art shows have defined disability art within the context of a political movement as identified in journal articles and academic circles. My intention is not to get off track from discussing disability art, but to attend to the nature of defining disability art as a political act as well as citing its pedagogical origins.

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Neurological Disability Art I do not agree with the idea that disability art is that which only addresses and incorporates political disability discourse, including ableism, social exclusion, and cultural marginality (Hiranandari, 2005). I think there are different components or directions that disability arts can take, all in relation to the artists and consumers. I assert that these components lie in the following six areas: neurological, educational, financial, recreational, therapeutic, and political. These components are the subject of this section. I have spoken to and personally know a number of disability artists who refer to their art as disability art but not in the classic sense of progressive academicians and grass roots organizers. Claiming politics and social justice as the reason disabled people do artwork can only serve to stratify, divide and isolate artists within the disability community. So the question for me is, not what is Disability Art, but what motivates people with disabilities to do their artwork?

The neurological component is one I can relate to very much because I have temporal lobe epilepsy. I find myself feeling compelled to do artwork, much to the chagrin of people around me. For instance, when I moved into my new apartment, I never figured out how to use the cable box for the TV. It’s not that it is too

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complicated, it’s because I prefer doing artwork to watching TV. Liu, Werner, et al., (2010) conducted research on patients presenting with temporal lobe degeneration and found a remarkable connection to elevated creativity and an increase in the production of expressive artwork. The same prolific behavior has been found to exist for those with bipolar disorder (Flaherty, 2005). Would our artwork qualify as disability art? My contention is, yes.

Educational Disability Art What is it like having a disability? I believe the answer depends on the particular disability, who is asking the question, and as non-disabled individuals--the ability to form an opinion, and clarify an answer.

The first issue of the magazine, “Canadian Theatre Review” (CTR), had an article entitled, “Theater and the question of disability.” Interestingly enough, the article pointed out that many in the disability

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community believe that the range of art in theater practices are synonymous with the term, “disability art�, and that their purpose is to in an artistic way, represent the disability experience (Decottignes & Houston, 2005), hence to educate the public.

Another example of disability art as education is provided by a public outreach program consisting of acting troupes within an organization in Chicago called, Erasing the Distance. Theatrical performances are provided by actors who have experienced their own mental illness, to teach, help create understanding and generate compassion among artists, mental health preservice students, mental health advocates and other professionals (O’Shaughnessy, 2009).

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Financial Disability Art Continuing along the lines of questioning why people with disabilities do artwork, another consideration would be for financial reasons. Karen Blair, who has schizophrenia, makes art but yields little money from it.

Yet creating the work without the monetary reward is no barrier to her being an artist (Blair, 2007).

Contrarily, disabled artists with intellectual disabilities in the Netherlands are very successful in selling their works. The difference is these artists are associated with service agencies that support their work by providing galleries for display in sales purposes (Schippers & Boudweijn, 2006). A qualitative study funded by the National Endowment for the Arts addresses disabled artists’ roadblocks to being successful in trying to sell their artwork. Even though the artists intend to do their work for monetary gains, there are established difficulties: higher medical costs; less spousal support, pressure to volunteer or to accept low pay, and waxing and waning of health and stamina (Gill & Sandhal, 2009).

This brings to mind my own story. Ever since I had to go on disability, my income has shrunk to barely subsistence living. Consequently, I sought out housing that I could afford. I came across a governmentsubsidized program that had turned a Racine, Wisconsin wagon wheel factory from the 1800s into domestic

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artists lofts. The building, which is housed by a community of artists, is open to art buyers at regular intervals. Low rent and an opportunity to sell their work is another way “starving artists” starve a little less.

Recreational Disability Art Like anyone else, people with disabilities enjoy life in participating in activities that challenge, excite, teach, spur personal growth, and contribute to self-esteem. The artwork above, called “County Fair”, is an example of my own disability recreational art. Can it be therapeutic at the same time? Yes, just like watching TV can be therapeutic in the right context, it wouldn’t necessarily be the primary motivation, as opposed to it being recreational. To think that recreational art for those with disabilities is basically a therapeutic activity, is to reduce the person to nothing more than a broken patient in need of fixing. In fact it is my contention that limiting the definition of disability art to political and social contexts is divisive and discriminatory.

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Therapeutic Disability Art As the Oxford Dictionary indicates, “therapeutic” is something that has a good effect on the body or mind and contributes to a general sense of well-being. Although “therapeutic” is comprised partially of the word, “therapy”, I am not referring to a psychiatric intervention, where there is a tapping into our inner artist and finding a cathartic release. It’s just good for us...period. Although it can be quite therapeutic, one does not have to be disabled, or view it from a medical or bio-physiological perspective to prescribe it, understand it or appreciate it. According to Heenan (2006), the health benefits accruing from participation in the arts, cuts across cultures, from participating in street theater in India to circuses in Brazil. A little closer to home, Reynolds & Prior (2002) share that artwork contributes to health and well-being of those with disabling illnesses in many ways. Individuals with physical limitations, who have secondary emotional effects, such as feelings of isolation, depression, and helplessness, benefit from increased self-efficacy, strengthening of selfawareness and self-esteem, enabling of expression voice and redirection of emotionally charged feelings.

People’s physical limitations contributing to the loss of personal control and choice can be bolstered by exercising choice and control over one’s art projects. Finally, in the most simple of terms, Reynolds (2002)

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cites some very practical offshoots of creating art by those with chronic illness and disabilities: the feeling of productivity, a healthy distraction and a sense of accomplishment. To me, this most certainly earns the credentials of being called “disability art�.

Political Disability Art The last type of disability art is political in nature. Generally, political art encompasses socio--political issues reflecting political problems. The artist presents his or her own or others’ viewpoints while creating propaganda and garnering public support for special causes and protests. This is a collective way to let politicians know that members of the disability community are not happy with decisions that have been made that affect their well being (Maddens, 2004). In disability art however, culture plays an important role in response to the widespread appearance of disablist imagery. In response, there appears to be an

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impassioned fervor to undo the traditional connection between disabled people and art activities associated with special schools, day centers and segregated institutions (Barnes, 2003).

I personally do not share the intense need of a cultural/political revolution, which calls for disabled artists (or is that artists who our disabled?) to rally around the paintbrush to make a point. I believe educating the public through art can be quite “political” and intersect directly with activism. Unlike world governments who have used art as propaganda in the past, I believe artists can educate without the need to intimidate, in order for society to capitulate. The following is an example of disability art in the form of a poster from the Syracuse University Archives Collection. One has to wonder if this type of disability art “draws” more antipathy or empathy towards our cause for equal rights.

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Presenting some well-known artists With Bipolar Disorder as an introduction, can provide not only an appreciation for their ability to harness their creativity and difficulty living with this excruciatingly painful disorder, but to place their art into context with their Top: Vincent van Gogh Center: Paul CĂŠzanne Bottom: Michelangelo

diagnosis and as artifacts of some of our most famous pieces of art.

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Mad Art That picture up there…I made it after my second psychiatric hospitalization. It’s an illustration now for this section of my dissertation, Mad Art also known as Art Brute, Outsider Art, and Psychopathological Art. There is a certain amount of status in being mentally ill. The big kids on the block are bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. In descriptions of mental illness, bipolar disorder race highest with schizophrenia in terms of dysfunction in pathology (Smith, 2003). I’ve also noted that Mad Art is usually associated with artists having bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Inasmuch as my research has to do with my artwork, and I have bipolar disorder, it would make sense for me to gather some information about Mad Art and present it in this paper. Make no mistake about it, you don’t need to know what Mad Art is in order to create Mad Art. I am proof positive of that. I’m taking an educated guess that becoming familiar with the concept of Mad Art would better help understand one’s own mental illness, the art one does and the connection it has with society and one’s place in it. We are about to find out. Keep in mind that the term, Mad Art is synonymous with Art Brute, Outsider Art, and Psychopathological Art.

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What is Outsider Art? Outsider Art has a fascinating story behind it. It seems to evolve and take on different properties over time.

Perhaps that is even part of the embodied mystery of the Outsider Artwork--it springs forth from someplace sketchy and not totally known or understood. What we do know is that it is associated with artwork of admirable quality by mentally ill and untrained people beginning in the early 20th century.

The name Outsider Art was coined in 1972 by an English art historian by the name of Roger Cardinal.

French painter Jean Dubuffet’s term, Art Brut from 1945 coincides with the name Mad Art. Amidst all the confusion and guesswork is the certainty of artistic expression, replete with colors, shapes and contents that one finds in Outsider Art and Outsider artists’ emotional circumstances and isolated marginality. By in large Outsider Art is not taken as seriously as mainstream art, nor are they largely represented in galleries or museums (Demirel, 2010). It seems as though not only are there images outside the realm of established galleries and art history textbooks, but those who create Outsider Art are themselves, “outsiders”, apart from the ‘normal’ population. Is it possible that the social stigma of mental illness is absorbed into the very fabric of the Outsider Art canvas, thereby gaining as little respect and recognition as their creators?

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Many Names, One Genre Mad Art, Outsider Art, Art of Mentally Ill, Asylum Art, Raw Art, Art of Madness: Interesting how there are so many names for the same thing. To me, everything means something. What can this mean?

I think that it reflects society’s discomfort with the subject of mental illness as well as a hegemonic attitude to people with mental illness, calling the art different names puts people with mental illness in a subservient position. The power elite will call them anything they like because they’re at the top of the social heap and those with mental illness are at the bottom. I feel the hegemony comes from calling it so many things that it ceases to have it’s own affirmative identity and therefore exists only in the mind of the observer.

I also conjecture that these attitudes are adopted and internalized by individuals with mental illness. That’s part of where we get our feelings of isolation, alienation, and poor self-esteem. These are all part of what I have adverted to earlier, as the impaired self. Therefore, from my personal vantage point, I do art not only to express my feelings and experience of having bipolar disorder, but as a way to speak out, talk back, make myself noticed and heard instead of just being written off. I believe this is one way to begin bolstering the impaired self.

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What the Experts Have to Say Allen Beveridge writes in the “Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine” about “the art of the mentally ill.”.

One of the questions he raises is, why is the art of the “insane” becoming more recognized and appreciated and taking its place in art museums after so many years of being seen as artistically worthless with little aesthetic value (Beveridge, 2001). In the early 1800s, madness was equated with genius. The mentally ill artists held a special role therefore, being in exalted position amongst other mad individuals. In the late

1880s however, a thesis was being shared by WAF Browne, the first Superintendent of an asylum in Dumfrees, UK, in which he believed the artwork of the mentally ‘disturbed’ was not any different than art made by “healthy people.” ( Beveridge, 595). This debate alone makes it seem as though mad artists were being put under a microscope and judged, not on the basis of the constitution of the individuals with mental illness, but by the will of those in the position to judge--the psychiatrists.

What better way to continue our journey through Mad Art, than with the work of none other than Salvidore Dali (next page). Even if you don’t know artists, chances are you have heard of this co-founder (with Andre Britton) of the Surrealist movement. I describe Surrealist art as bizarre, weird, strange,

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unnerving, and simply amazing. Here is where art and mental illness intersect big time. The Surrealists have a romantic view of insanity, characterized by an ability to venture into the unconscious and experience a process of liberation. Unfortunately, cold water got thrown on the excitement when fellow Surrealist artist, Antonin Artaud had a mental breakdown [sic] and experienced delusions about magical conspiracies, spending several years in asylums (Beveridge, 2001).

No wonder Art-Based Research is so open ended, when you consider the different ways of just looking at Mad Art. The following perspective by Jean Dubuffet tips the scales of least practicality. Dubuffet had a bone to pick with western culture in that he felt it was too stodgy. He then looked to the mentally ill to rewrite the rules on what is beneficial regarding one’s mental state of mind. Dubuffet (a famous artist in his own right) felt that madness “loosens” artwork (Beveridge).

Othon Bastos, psychiatrist and former president of the Brazilian Association of Psychiatry weighs in on the discussion, with a different point of view. Bastose asserts that there is no such thing as Sick, Psychotic or Mad Art. He also drives a distinction between psychiatric patients with and without artistic talent.

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According to Bastos, exceptional works of art occur not because of a psychiatric condition, but because of “talented psychotics” (Bastos, 2005). I concur with Bastos that good art is more a product of a talented person who happens to have a psychiatric disorder as opposed to being good art, merely because of coming from a person who has psychiatric disorder. I will concede however that it would be difficult to tell how much a piece of art would appear differently, if the artists did not have a psychiatric impairment. Consider my image below, entitled “Pyromaniac”. Notwithstanding the question as to whether the art is “good” or “bad”, the very existence of the image itself is in question...would the art piece known as Pyromaniac have been something different if I didn’t have a mental illness?

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What a Scream!

As luck would have it, a news article announced (at the time of writing this dissertation) that a record $120 million was just paid by a private collector for a painting at a Sotheby’s art auction. The painting? None other then The Scream, by Edvard Munch, the image on the following page. What I found interesting are peoples’ comments, focused only on the monetary issue. There was no mention within the comment section or in the article itself, of Munch having a disability--a mental illness. Instead, focus was on the ‘ridiculous’ selling price, which became fodder for jokes.

Ironically, the real joke is how our society ‘misses the big picture’, neglecting the important part of the story--the obviously troubled content of Edvard Munch’s paintings (See, right).

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“... as long as humanity is being respected Thomas Sasz aren’t being and those with disabilities rejected, there is no reason giving and “Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy receiving inspiration should not be developed in the service [to] help resolve accepted.” and relieve the psychological conflicts and emotional - D. Feingoldpain of secular life. In this manifestation, the psychiatrist is the heir of the priest, the moralist, the educator, and the critic. Szasz belongs to this tradition.”

- R. Liefer

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mm

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Shedding Light on Thomas Szasz Of all the complexities we can come up with for the description of Zsasz’s beliefs and perspectives on modern psychiatry relating to things medical, political, social, legal, historical, etc., we can look to just a few paragraphs of Szasz’ own writings to simplify things. In an article in The Psychiatrist (Szasz, 2011), Szasz simply delineates his controversial stance on psychiatry. Cutting through all ‘professional speak’ he explains that he rejects the moral legitimacy of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. He claims that what we call mental illness is nothing more than behaviors that disturb others. The patient [sic], to Thomas Szasz, is neither a helpless victim to some kind of pathobiological entity or someone who should be expected to engage in questionable psychiatric practices. Szasz thought it inconceivable to not only force someone into psychiatric hospitalization or treatment, but expecting them not to pay or for the government to pay the fees.

To collect fees from the government, according to Szasz, would put the government in an extraordinarily powerful position to hospitalize anyone they see fit (or unfit, as it were). Nothing more than a fee paying patient would be acceptable to Szasz. Even accepting payment from insurance companies would be

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considered offensive in that allegiance would be to the insurance company by the psychiatrist instead of the patient (Szasz, 2011).

Already steeped in the knowledge of truth being observable, measurable and verifiable-psychiatrists, sociologists and philosophers have followed Szasz' questioning of the foundational basis of mental illness for the last 50 years (Goldman & Grob, 2006)). Interestingly, it also piqued Bill Clinton’s interest. During his presidency, the 1999 Mental Health Report of the US Surgeon General, tipped his hat to the biopathological basis of mental health, which was key in informing mental health policy (Goldman) and challenging Zsasz’ assertion that if there are no lesions, there are no illness (Clark, 2007).

Convicted serial killer, Charles Manson was diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia. This is in stark contrast to Szasz’ No Lesion = No Illness policy of denying a biopathological basis for mental health.

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Should We be Doubting Thomas or Mental Illness?

Some may call it a mental illness, some may call it a sickness or a disease. You spend a day with one of us when we are floridly symptomatic and you may say, we’re just playing “crazy”. And I think you’d be right.

On the other hand, Zsasz, disagrees. Szasz, one of the primary critics of modern psychiatry, began poking holes in the ballooning concept of a biological basis of mental disorders back in the 1960s. In fact, Zsasz has declared mental illness to be so non--existent as to call it a myth (Zsasz, 2004).

Considering that Szasz’ background is psychiatry and medicine, one would have to give him credit for at least denying the very foundation of his professional stature and beliefs (Pies, Thommi & Ghaemi, 2011). So why is knowing about Szasz important to this dissertation? I have a mental illness, for which the medical model of psychiatry help me win over my bipolar demons. If Szasz is right and mental illness is a myth, and my illness is a myth, then my demons are a myth, my images are a myth, and my psychiatric hospitalizations are based on a myth! The upshot? I am a doubting Thomas.

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Bumper sticker during Clinton’s presidency, reinforcing the US Surgeon General’s mental health report that states mental illness has a biological basis.

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Michel Foucault “...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing.�

- M. Foucault

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Whereas Szasz’ disapproving stance on psychiatry was based on patients’ relinquishing freedom to the psychiatric arbiters of mental health and the lack of corporeal origins of mental illness, Foucault’s antipsychiatry leanings lie in the folly and fallacies of missing truths, absolutes in objectivity in framing psychiatric illnesses (Pies, Thommi & Ghaemi, 2011). Foucault viewed that as psychiatry’s hegemonic control over individuals and groups of people. By declaring individuals as having certain behaviors and conditions considered to be deviant or abnormal, individuation, power and control surreptitiously vanished.

I am particularly astounded at how Foucault was able to see the proverbial forest of power and control through the trees of biopsychiatric discourse. According to Foucault, in his doctoral dissertation no less, madness isn’t something with a natural, unchanging state. Rather, it is based on society, constructed belief systems, cultural, intellectual, and economic structures (Braken & Thomas, 2001).

Foucault’s reflexive thinking and critical ability to decipher subtle structures and substructures in society is astounding. He is the one lobster in a pot of many, who realizes that the boiling water in which he finds himself is to serve others at his expense.

My last psychiatric hospitalization was a little more than two years ago. It was for extreme depression.

A surrounding darkness, thick enough to blot the sun from the outside and a silence so deafening as to be

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isolated from the rest of the world on the inside. When taken to the hospital ER (via surprise intervention by my sister, who flew in from Florida for that purpose), I was immediately placed in a locked holding room, which was more like a cell without bars. Instead, it had a solid door that could easily withstand an F4 tornado. It had a window so thick that it appeared to be bullet-proof. A uniformed guard was placed directly outside my door and peered through the window every few minutes to make sure I was okay and there were “no problems”. It was the emergency room, so there was a lot of activity with nurses and doctors going every which way to take care of the injured in sick. No one came to help me, but they, along with family members and friends of the ER patients did view me in passing. They compulsively craned their necks to view me, the guarded ‘roadkill’ on the other side of the window as they passed by. I was waiting in the 8 x 8’ room for a total of six hours before anyone came to talk to me. There was even a shift change for the guard, which brought a fresh new face to check in on me. I knew from previous experience that I was not allowed to leave the room, nor see anyone by my request. I was not my own person anymore. I was more like a prisoner in their ‘ER panopticon’. (Above image: A 19th-century prison panopticon, which provides a governance of constant surveillance and ubiquitous gaze among the prison inmates.)

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It’s not...

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It’s Art That’s Therapeutic!

Sigmund is having a conversation with himself again. Let’s listen in. Maybe we’ll learn something!

It zeems to me zat vhat we are talking about heeyah is nussing more den art terapy, and it’s no big deal because it’s been around since zah late 1930s. Come to zink of eet, zah name, “art terapy” wasn’t used until 1942. If I remember correctly, an artist, Adrian Hill invented zaht term. I remember it as if it was yesterday.

Hill had tuberculosis and found zaht doing artwork while he was in a sanitarium, helped him, emotionally.

He also discovered zhat it helped express feeyahs and emotions. And before you knew it, zah psychiatrists over at the Menninger Cleenic got vind of it being able to help patients with their internal conflicts, so zay began using it as terapy (Cosentino, 2011).

Very good Sigmund, I appreciate your input, however you’re barking up the wrong tree. Why, I haven’t done zhat in yeeahs. I meant figuratively Doc. I’ll take it from here, besides, that cigar is really getting to me. So you might be asking, “why get so uptight if some people describe my encounter with my visual images as “art therapy?” Well, I wouldn’t exactly say I am uptight about it, but I would like to clarify the difference between them and why it matters. I’d start out by saying it’s important to be accurate just for the sake of accuracy.

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There is no reason to refer to my experience as art therapy, if it really isn’t. It confuses the issue and with all due respect to art therapy, it misrepresents what art therapy truly is.

What is art therapy? It’s not very complicated to understand, really. A little background information about “who is an art therapist” can help put the profession into proper context. Art therapists require a masters degree in art therapy, need to show an art portfolio that reflects the standard level of competency, studio art courses are taken along with psychology courses, including developmental and abnormal psychology, and art therapy techniques. These programs are quite sophisticated, professional and thorough, as they require a practicum and internship to qualify for the degree (American Art Therapy Association, 2012).

Now that we have a rudimentary familiarity with the training of an art therapist, let’s take a look at the functions of art therapy. One function is to help assess an individual’s behavior and emotions, especially by having the artwork open up channels of communication, where it may otherwise have been difficult to verbalize thoughts and feelings (Galluci, 2012). Working through fears, feelings and fantasies through talk therapy are seen by art therapists as an important psychotherapeutic benefit, along with coping with unresolved or hereto hidden issues and struggles. Where traditional art therapy and my use of art part ways is from art therapy’s biological basis and symbiotic relationship with the medical model (Cosentino, 2011). It is not my intention to dismiss or downplay the value of art therapy’s purpose, goals or techniques, but to emphasize and clarify that my use of artwork, as we will see through my visual narrative, had a very different purpose and end result. Moreover, my art was not grounded nor did it need validation and justification by being associated with the universally accepted and long-honored medical healing arts. Malchiodi illuminates

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art therapy’s special status by acknowledging its role in healing throughout human history and it’s key position in todays mental health, rehabilitation and medical treatment (Malchiodi, 2005).

Art therapy’s association with the medical model occurs with the ultimate biological connection-neuroscience. Kapitan, describes art therapy’s mental processes stemming from brain activity and its ability to build new networks “through imaging, patterning, somatic sensory cues, touch, and movement” (Kapitan, 2010, p. 159). Kapitan continues her argument of the elevated status of art therapy, by comparing it to an antibiotic restoring a person’s immune system, and reaching a homeostasis for good health (2010).

Why is this significant in light of my use of art in my narrative story? Because to see the use of art only as an “art therapy” psycho-emotional biologically-based intervention, is to confine one’s situation as an illness and the person behind the illness as someone who needs to be relieved of his suffering. This healing, it should be mentioned, does not take place on one’s own, but within the corrective emotional experience of an empathetic art therapist (2010).

I am proposing that, as experienced through my own bipolar artistic journey, there is an argument for doing the artwork without needing the input from and having to work with an art therapist to improve one’s own emotional state, problem solve or alleviate the effects of stressful life events.

Since my improved psycho-emotional functioning and transformation of the bipolar impaired self, I can personally attest to the potential of therapeutic art as opposed to the concept of art therapy. This would explain my fascination with the seeming catalystic role that artwork played in my interactive experience of impairment-related personal growth, understanding and integration between both the self and characteristics of the bipolar impaired self. Much to my enthusiasm, my gut feeling of my art having an adaptive role to play in living with bipolar disorder had been validated by archaeological scholar, Ellen Dissanayake, whose

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interest lies in the area of archaeological art. Dissanayake contends that art has and continues to play a role in human survival, specifically in this case as a means of coping with stress tension and anxiety (Dissanayake, 2008).

A study by Lorenz , “Discovering a new identity after brain injury” (Lorenz, 2010), reinforces the adaptive role that visual imagery can play in people’s lives. Narrative analysis methods were used to analyze photos taken by and of a brain injury survivor’s life. An illness narrative was generated from the photos and interview text which revealed that a new identity developed post brain injury, which included a new brain injured self, the old self with established strengths and a self that presently engages in meaningful activities.

This research reveals the significant role that visual imagery can play in understanding the lived experience of those with impairments. We have seen how creating art, whether for a therapeutic reason or for art therapy has been shown to be a very powerful force in countering and negotiating life’s most difficult challenges. In Section 5, entitled My Narrative, I will present my own images to elucidate the journey I took and the process I employed in the transformation of the bipolar impaired self. I trust that information covered thus far will be helpful in being able to follow, understand and appreciate the power of the visual in not only recording a dramatic occurrence in one’s life, but in stimulating and generating personal growth because of it. We will soon be crossing the precipice of background information, ready to take on my narrative adventure--my methodology of choice for sharing such a personal and intimate story.

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3 Methodology and Method

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Methodology

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Thinking Hard, Not Hardly Thinking I gave myself quite a task. Probe the depths of hereto unnamed possibilities in order to approach learning what my images had to teach me about themselves and me. How to carry out such an endeavor without being lead astray, but instead being pointed in the direction of meaningful discovery. Back to my readings to choose what made the most sense, what approach matched what I’ve done and what I want to accomplish in my search for meaning.

I wasn’t looking for hard facts, disembodied data, statistics or a chiseled truth, which would have led me to use a positivist, quantitative methodology (Furman, Lietz & Langer, 2006). I needed something far more personal and impassioned to bring me closer to finding out about my sense of self, my emotions, thoughts, and feelings associated with having the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The data that was needed to help me in this quest would naturally stem from a qualitative approach to research, where personal experience, hidden themes and unanswered questions, ultimately may lead to unexpected turns and corners, understanding, further idea generating, and spontaneous discoveries (Furman., 2006; Hoepfl, 1997).

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By the time I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I had no idea what I was doing half the time.

Between hibernating under the darkness of depression and feeling totally emancipated in the ultra bright sunlight of mania, there remained a holographic-like figure who used to be me. I could see him but I couldn’t feel him or touch him. He was ghostly, overshadowed by two extremes of mood and behavior. This was an experience that if it did not happen on its own, would have to be contrived by a team of writers and directors who gave us movies of the macabre, such as Silence of the Lambs, Friday the 13th, and Psycho. The whole time I was experiencing this part of my life, I was unknowingly storing each film take and wrap in virtual canisters deep within my psyche. They didn’t make themselves known until years later, after having been on stabilizing medication. I had a shadowy story within me, a vague narrative lying dormant beneath the trap door of my consciousness. How to investigate this once hidden personal cache of madness would be the quest of my dissertation. If there was a story to be excavated, then I would use the methodology of narrative inquiry to provide a basis for my historical, psychiatric dig, as a way to inspect, identify and interpret my uniquely personal lived experience (Shields, 2005).

As distinct as my years in the close company of bipolar disorder, is the particular narrative I am employing in this dissertation. I have paid close attention to the written portion of my narrative, using words instinctively, intuitively and discriminatively in order to be true to and descriptive of my lived experience in search of deep understandings and meanings (vanManen, 2006). Yet, no matter how determined I am in writing in order to retell and relive my life experiences, they fall short of the reality, the ineffable I lived in and through. VanManen accurately verbalizes of what I am speaking (2006): In this sense, every word kills and becomes the death of the object it tries to represent. The word becomes the substitution of the object. Even the most subtle poem destroys what it names (p. 719).

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If this is true, how do I compensate for the dead space between the desire to tell my story and my inability to do so without actually losing it? By using pictures. In fact, my pictures serve not to illustrate, but to elucidate, not to represent, but to present, not to suggest, but to insist, boldly, emotionally, and honestly.

The image above, is an example of my art that attempts to fill in the gaps between guessing and knowing what I am feeling. The title of this image, made in the hospital waiting room is, “My Mother Awaiting Surgery.� It was a direct and immediate conduit from the actual life situation to my emotions, creativity and praxis. I made the image in the surgery waiting room on my laptop computer. What is being depicted is not only my mother, but my inner experience of her tentative condition and extremely critical situation.

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Regarding my experience in utilizing images and the written word in my dissertation narrative, Willig and Stainton-Rogers (Willig & Stainton-Rogers, 2008) provide both insight and accuracy in explaining the function of images in qualitative ABR : Although a person is potentially able to talk about bodily experiences and subsequently conjure up a ‘representation’, it has been pointed out that identification with an image, presenting oneself through one’s ‘image’, can be a more powerful way of capturing emotions which may be more removed from verbal articulation. (p. 300).

Researching the human experience through art making takes the researcher to places of inquiry that otherwise may have been missed entirely. It is not only the product but the process of ABR that informs and educates as it unfolds in natural, organic and unexpected ways (McNiff, 2008). One never knows where the process will lead. There is no predetermined expectation or solution. Only the unfolding of possibilities that not only surround, but lives through the researcher. It reminds me of looking at pictures of the back yard of a house over time, where all types of activities have taken place. Before looking at the pictures, you remember the back yard as a part of the outside of the house, having grass, a chain link fence, a border of flowers, and a metal shed. But when you look at the pictures in an old shoe box that contain images of the backyard over the decades, you see much more: long gone relatives and friends enjoying a 4th of July barbecue together; in the next photo, you can observe a young father patiently teaching his daughter to throw a baseball; another picture depicts a roto rooter service clearing out pipes after digging up the lawn with a power driver; yet another picture shows your son standing proudly in his boutonnièred tuxedo next to his

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high school prom date; and finally, another photo, laying to rest the family’s deceased pet in a makeshift memorial grave. Before looking at the photos, you didn’t know exactly what you would find, let alone how you would feel. It was a participatory unfolding of research and discovery. Each of those scenarios are accompanied by a feeling, a way of experiencing one’s relationship to the circumscribed area of the yard and associated activity. Each one generating its own source of memories and instances to be felt, comprehended and experienced once again, and in a unique way through the process of interacting with the photographic images (Weber & Mitchell, 2006) .

Just as the person didn’t exactly know what he would uncover by going through the shoe box of old photographs, other than knowing they were pictures of the house, the artist researcher may have only a vague feeling of what is to be explored, but it isn’t until he or she is consumed in the creative process that meaningful insights and surprise discoveries present themselves (McNiff, 2008).

It is with appreciation and enthusiasm that I have been able to apply Art Based Methodology to my dissertation research, inasmuch as the visual images I have created were my primary vehicles for achieving reflexive insight to my psychiatric diagnosis. From the depths of my visual images, created in and through the landscape of mental illness, I hope to communicate the uniqueness and profundity of living with a mood disorder. It is also my hope that those who view my images will develop an empathy for those with bipolar disorder, if not all people with disabilities and impairments, who would benefit from a more open, understanding and accepting society (Black, 2011).

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Art Based Research (ABR) Primer

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Art Based Research...is a wide-ranging term that, due to the tolerance immanent in its methodology and the intentional openness of its content, is difficult to define in concrete terms. (stageofparticipation, 2013)

I have found the above to be true. When you think about it, positivist methodologies are supposed to be understandable, predictable and knowable.

Ask yourself: Is art?

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Shaun McNiff 1. Art Based Research is a primary way of understanding and examining experience of both the researcher and those involved in the studies. This is done through the artistic expressions in various forms of art.

2. Art Based Research as well as science incorporate systematic experimentation to obtain knowledge about life.

3. A significant characteristic of Art Based Research is beginning with a question and being willing to design methods in relationship to the situation versus the tendency in the human sciences to match the question into a fixed research method.

(McNiff, 2007)

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How it Relates to My Research

1. I used my artwork and a written narrative as a way of understanding and examining my experience of bipolar disorder.

2. My systematic experimentation used writing my narrative based on my images, which helped me to learn how bipolar disorder affected my self and life.

3. I started out with the question of how did making my images help me to understand my life experience with bipolar disorder. From there, grew my research method of writing a corresponding narrative derived from the information contained within my art images.

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Sally Berridge

1. Art Based Research includes creative writing, visual art, electronic and digital art, by those attempting to express themselves in unusual ways within an academic institution.

2. Applied creativity can yield different meanings related to an idea or concept.

This contributes to creating new perspectives.

3. New ways of expressing oneself, such as fiction writing, poetry and visual images, are ways of communicating one’s lived experiences.

(Berridge, 2007)

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How it Relates to My Research 1. I was seeking ways to express myself in a way that I felt was unique and appropriate for the task, even though my education institution is more traditional in its methodologies. In fact, used writing, or art and poetry as my vehicles for self expression.

2. My creativity yielded different perspectives regarding living with bipolar disorder: contributes to empathy and understanding; seen as an illness, a source of creativity, and an impaired self.

3. The optimal way to share my lived experience was with art, including writing, poetry and visual images.

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Alison Black

1. ABR is personal and engaging, while generating meaning and empathy.

2. As opposed to positivist approaches, the human experience is explored through aesthetic and artistic qualitative modes from the humanities and the arts.

3. Art Based Research confront complex and difficult questions that aren’t easily dealt with in stories told in a linear fashion

(Black, 2011)

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How it Relates to My Research 1. My artwork and writing are very personal reflections of my lived experience with bipolar disorder. Two offshoots of the dissertation is to expound on the way it feels to have bipolar disorder as well as for people to be more empathic for those with mental illness. My video of my images have actually engendered empathy by those who have watched it.

2. I have explored the human experience of living with bipolar disorder through the use of writing, poetry and art. These are representative of the humanities and the arts as opposed to the hard sciences.

3. A great deal of the populace have heard of bipolar disorder, but could use a user friendly method to impart accurate information about it, as does my dissertation.

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Tom Barone & Elliot Eisner 1. Art Based Research seeks to increase awareness and interpretation of certain human activities through artistic activity.

2. Art Based Research uses everyday language in its text, as opposed to technical jargon. This has the capability of reaching a much broader audience.

3. Art Based Research doesn’t seek to provide specific answers and guidelines, nor offer ways to proceed with predictable solutions. Rather, it opens up the discussion and dialogue to see the phenomenon in new and unique ways.

(Barone & Eisner, 2006)

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How it Relates to My Research 1. The internal, complex and extremely dense experience of living with bipolar disorder is a phenomenon known only to the person with the affliction. My artwork reveals and gives expression of this experience to the observer.

2. I have purposely used an informal, narrative style text to appeal to both scholars, professionals and the lay public.

3. My dissertation does not purport to convey quantitative findings or yield results of research to prescribe a set of methods or applications to some existing problem.

Instead, my dissertation presents an opportunity for its readers to come closer to sensing the bipolar experience and gaining insight into related issues and challenges.

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Is it Research or Art? We have seen that Art Based Research (ABR) is researching human experience by way of and through the process and product of making art, and in addition to intellectuality, ABR requires participation of the senses, emotions and reflections (Barone & Eisner, 2006). Extant research suggests that ABR reflects the breadth and scope of the arts, which will continue to be a viable force in the academic research community as opposed to a shy newcomer, avoiding making waves in the staid waters of traditional quantitative and qualitative research.

There are some researchers who are fine with ABR, but call for fixed quality criteria for evaluating arts based work. Others are saying comparisons of ABR and traditional scientific research shouldn’t be made at all and that a clean break should be made between the two (Finley, 2003).

Distinguished scholar, Susanne Langer makes the claim that people need to express themselves in ways that transcend linear speech and texts, and that relying on discursive reason alone is significantly limiting as a way of knowing (McNiff, 2004). The argument for and against ABR maintains a dichotomous view that there is a difference between what counts as “knowledge.” Thus, there remains a conflict in academia between those who think the only valid type of research is that which pursues absolute knowledge and truth, and those who think there is much greater substance in the concepts of sense and perception, such as in ABR. ABR professes that the processes and products of art can legitimately contribute to research and those involved in their research (Bressler, 2006; McNiff, 2004).

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Let’s try an analogy to put this into focus: picture the subject of domestic abuse. The poem on this page, by Heather-Forhan (2012) combined with my illustration, demonstrates an example of an element of research of domestic abuse using ABR. Learning from traditional, quantitative research would be like reading an article in an academic journal on the subject, replete with experts, statistics, demographics, and psychiatric diagnoses, whereas ABR would be like hearing victims’ personal stories of abuse, reading their poetry and viewing their artwork, while fortifying awareness, empathy, and stimulating social change and community advocacy.

Certainly one would expect there to be a disagreement as to whether art can be research not. I would expect nothing less than the theoretical arm wrestle between those who insist on and those who deny that ABR is a legitimate form of inquiry. Determining the winner of this debate however, likely lies in one’s personal perspective rather than the realm of either art or science. Perhaps Tom Barone’s sage advice will calm the rhetoric on both sides of the aisle by suggesting that ABR isn’t looking to replace or be a substitute for other standard research methods, but that it is actually an alternative way of seeing, knowing and perceiving for the researcher (Barone, 2008). I have only one thing to add to Barone’s statement. Art Based Research is also an alternative way of seeing, knowing and perceiving by the observer.

The following examples of ABR reflect this engaging inquiry (red type emphasis, mine):

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“Disrupting privilege, identity, in meaning: a reflexive dance of environmental education. (Neilsen, 2006).

“Photo/synthesis: Photography, pedagogy and place in a northern landscape” (Haggerty, 2003).

“The wrong shoe and other misfits: Fiction writing as reflexive inquiry within a private girls school.” (de Freitas, 2003).

“Listen to the (in)mate” Life history, readers theatre (re)presentation of women in Ecuador jails, accused of drug trafficking. (Bastidas, 2001).

“Masked” A visual arts-informal perspective into gay teacher identity. (Durocher, 2009).

“Getting it together” Relational learning in a jazz performance context. (Grant, 2003).

“Moved by the spirit” A narrative inquiry. Karsemeyer, 2003).

“Garden as phenomenon, method, and metaphor” An arts-informed life history view. (McIntyre, 2000).

“Thinking through our mothers: a sampler quilt of Kleine Gemeinde Mennonite women in country homemakers.” (Plett, 2006).

“Music at a time like this: Music therapy and cancer support groups.” (Rykove, 2006).

“Using narrative analysis of a patient’s photographs and interview text to understand living with traumatic brain injury from the patient’s perspective.” (Lorenz, 2006).

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Everyone’s got a story to tell.

- The White Stripes 85

The Story Behind Narratives Choosing to use a visual format for my research was a no-brainer inasmuch as the material or visuals I have made was part of a visual journalistic self-narrative, which began several years ago. What started as one piece of art, now numbers a collection nearing 300. Together, the images portray a timeline of my life that is rich in experience and meaning, embodied in my visual and textual narrative. A narrative is a story that is told.

According to the rock band, The White Stripes, a line in their song, 7 Nation Army reads: “Every single one’s got a story to tell.” That is so true because stories are what gives meaning to and helps us to understand our lives (Trahar, 2009).

Besides giving meaning to our own lives, when we tell our stories to others, meanings can then transcend our own boundaries and reach into communities of people to promote empathy, collaborate, and mobilize social movements (Riessman, 2004). Sometimes our stories are sweet, sometimes bittersweet and then it other times, just bitter. This is when life provides us with lemons–more than we want or need. In this case, we don’t actually make lemonade, we make narratives. Narratives become very relevant in coping and attaining personal growth. They help us to understand ourselves, they sustain us, re-examine us and re-fashion us when we experienced major threats to our everyday life (Bury, 2001).

I personally didn’t need to experience major threats to my everyday life nor did I need to read this in an article or book when I began my visual narrative several years ago. I did it out of a felt need to help process

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living with the effects of having bipolar disorder. It was good for me, it was healing and it is the subject of my research. Roberts explains:

Stories give cognitive and emotional significance to experience, they are a means of constructing in negotiating a social identity, and give moral weight and existential significance to actions and events. (Roberts, 2000, p. 434).

It is easy to see how narrative inquiry is not a method for making objective observations, tallying data or to prove one’s theory as being right or wrong, as in positivist research. It’s a totally different ballgame. My pictures tell a story, yet only half the story. They’ll make you think, they’ll make you wonder, and in some cases, they’ll even make your consciousness wander. This is all wonderful in that the images could light a fuse to one’s imagination and bring out unique interpretations and meanings. In this case, however, I would like the textual narrative to intertwine with the visual images like strands of mooring rope to strengthen the potential of the observer to formulate insights, and experience snapshots of my life and in their own way offer themselves as an emotional proxy in the service of generating sensitivity to those with mental illness and be a force for societal awareness and change.

How does writing one’s narrative do this? What a daunting task! It’s not like copying numbers and statistics or tallying behaviors, it’s more like painting, extracting essences of ones past, selecting significant details, and leaving the “non-essentials” out. It’s standing on a precipice and jumping off at the beginning of every sentence in a darkened, starless night, hoping you’ll miraculously land on your feet on a cushiony bed of

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moss instead of a craggy, dried up river bed. Van Manen (2006) describes this experience in a similar fashion, with the writer entering the “space” of the text and hoping to find something there that really isn’t, only to find oneself in the darkness. My perception is that my written narrative does not look for light with which to choose its words, but by risking it all by putting thoughts down on paper, a glow of truth is created, showing not just words, but vestiges of life, experienced at a level of heightened emotion and understanding.

The results are always uncertain but never without a modicum of potential for expanded communication.

The concept and process of narratives is establishing itself as an accepted, if not respected means of portraying reality through the use of stories. Mitchel and Egudo (2003) provide a succinct summarization regarding the benefits of narratives:

The approach is said to enable capture of social representation processes such as feelings, images, and time. It offers the potential to address ambiguity, complexity, and dynamism of individual, group, and organizational phenomena. (2003, Executive Summary).

So what about the fact that I’ve used a multimodal approach to communicate in this dissertation–the written word as well as the visual image? Is it considered to be an effective application of two communication devices or is it a convenient way to utilize my artistic skills? My gut tells me it can only help to impart my story using text and visuals. After all, I think in words and pictures and find it to be far superior than just using words or pictures alone. Am I representative of the ‘average person’? According to Mayer and Anderson (Mayer & Anderson, 1992), the contiguity principal reinforces my experience, wherein multimedia instruction improves when words plus pictures are presented contiguously, rather than separated by time and

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space. Moreover, in line with my visual/textual narratives, identification with an image has been found to be an effective way to identify with emotions, even when textual information is absent (Willig & Stainton-Rogers, 2008)

Don’t Just Do Something. Stand There! !

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- Guatama Buddah

The “Story Behind Narratives� continues by working its way closer to my own topic of narrative research. It has been established that narratives are foundational to our existence, to the point that they contribute to the basic understanding of our lives. Narratives integrate universal, cultural and individual levels of human experience. It is how we understand ourselves and sustain our identity (Burry, 2001, p. 264).

If we understand ourselves by our narratives, then we understand our illnesses, especially those that are chronic, by our illness narratives. Our illnesses may be so disruptive, that the quality of our lives are compromised (Bury). We are no longer crossing the terrain of grand explanations in scientific truth that is

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“out there”, we are examining the personal individual experience that is “in there”. Riesmann (2002, p. 2) asserts: Embedded in the lives of the ordinary, the marginalized, and the muted, my personal narrative responds to the disintegration of master narratives...people make sense of experience, claim identities, and get a life by telling in writing their stories.

Placing illness narratives within the context of the bio-medical domain of healthcare, reveals an interest in the patient’s embodied experiences and not just a diagnosis and treatment regimen of a disease ((DiMatteo, Haskard, Martin & Williams, 2005). This is where my story and narrative connect with my interest in illness narratives. When I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder 10 years ago, I became a diagnosis. It didn’t matter who I was, it mattered only that there was an accurate diagnosis so that the appropriate medication and level of care were provided (Corrigan, 2005). I internalized that priority at the same time and lost who I was. My identity vaporized as symptoms, characteristics and prognosis replaced my daily functioning, personality and future goals.

If the psychiatric clinicians wouldn’t have been so anxious to create a file in my name, fill out forms and write case reports, they might have realized there was a person sitting in front of them. Instead of feverishly “doing” things, they could have been getting to know me and my bipolar experience in a more relaxed and personable manor, while building a positive doctor/patient relationship.

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A Wild Goose Chase Even though this dissertation highlights a narrative study of my “self” over an expansive period of time, it turns out to be a little more complicated than that. You see, the narrative is made up of different time frames, activities, contexts, and interpersonal interactions. I was puzzled at first as to how the narrative would all fit together, given the disparate parts in the context of time and space. I was plagued with the following question for several days and nights : “How am I going to structure, order and place these different parts of the narrative (visual and textual), so that they fit together to make sense, as if they were pieces of a completed puzzle?” I was on a wild goose chase in my head. It felt like I was surrounded with possibilities but couldn’t make total sense of it all. I tried thinking out of the box, in the box, next to the box, and even under it! All the pieces seemed out of place to me. That was it! My method needed to put everything into place. What made better sense than to put it in chronological order as it happened.

I knew that there was a a number of incidents that contributed to my everyday experience as I lived it throughout the years. Without obtaining any specific directive, or “how to” either by mentor or journal article, I proceeded to lay out my narrative according to the linear sequence of my images. That was the first time I realized that my images were telling a story–and telling it in sequence, at that. At the time of making my images, I had put them together spontaneously and without much conscious thought of what to make or depict. What a surprise to see in retrospect that it was creating a visual narrative the entire time that I was creating my artwork. Take a ‘gander’ at the next page to see how the pieces came together in a rather seamless process.

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v

1 I created a body of art as part of my lived experience with bipolar disorder

Process of my Narrative Method

2 I selected the pieces of artwork to use in my dissertation

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I further distilled my experience into narrative poems

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I sequenced my artwork chronologically to illustrate my progressive lived experience from traumatic brain injury to my EdD

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I described and interpreted the images and my experiences 94

My Story Begins Here A hit-and-run accident that led to Bipolar Disorder, changed the course of my life forever. The following pages display a portion of my collection of digital art images and accompanying narrative text. Together, they reflect my method of coping with and making sense of living with this psychiatric impairment.

An offshoot of making these images was the awareness that they depict an innermost struggle of a hidden entity behind my impairment and disability. It is called the impaired self. The impaired self stands bravely behind my impairment and disability. Like a soldier fending off physical attacks, the impaired self takes the hits, sustains constant pummeling in my life of impairments to keep me from succumbing to the ultimate desperation--giving up, giving in and checking out, figuratively and literally. Through my narrative, you may even come to recognize that you or someone you know has an underlying impaired self.

As we approach the narrative portion of this dissertation, the information presented up to this point, will jettison this journey to the next level of presentation and understanding. Like a package of information it has provided us with a broad landscape of both general and specific topics upon which my visual narrative is based and the context in which my bipolar experience is situated. Like a true journey, we have viewed a number of significant sites, including Art-Based Research, Recovery, Narratives, the Impaired Self, Mad Art, Psycho-Emotional Disabilities, and Inspiration. My personal narrative relating to the above core topics, provides a broader and deeper understanding of my life with bipolar disorder. This phenomenon is the basis of my dissertation: “Beyond words: Discovering the bipolar impaired self through visual imagery.�

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4 My Narrative

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My Narrative Chapter 1 “Bipolar in the Making”

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My Narrative, by the Book

I generally enjoy writing, but there is something about getting started writing my dissertation narrative that is somewhat unnerving. First, there is an audience, whose job it is to review and evaluate what I write, otherwise known as a dissertation committee. The other mousetrap waiting to snap is the content of what I'm writing about.

Although I'm pretty free about admitting out loud that I have bipolar disorder, there's something a wee bit more threatening when you're putting it in writing for all to see. It's like the difference between a streaker running 20 miles an hour across a baseball field compared to an exhibitionist standing in place in front of curious onlookers. So here I am standing in place, stark naked for all to see---I mean, read.

I'm no dummy (two masters degrees, in close sight of a doctorate and knowing how important it is to maintain an amicable relationship with my ex-spouse), so I realize this isn't the best time to cower or change the subject from bipolar disorder to something more innocuous, like global warming or the recent surge of prices at children's Kool Aid stands. Instead, I will stay the course and tell my story of how I came to write this dissertation, including this very page.

Not only am I no dummy, I know you're no dummy because you wouldn't want to waste your time reading something that wasn't important. Surely, there other pressing things you could be doing right now, such as throwing in a load of laundry, calling to make dinner reservations, or perhaps conducting your own scholarly research. So why is this narrative important enough for you to read?

The truth is, it may not be that important for you to read. That's right, I said that this dissertation may

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not be important enough for you to read, unless that is, you are interested in gaining an understanding and crucial insight into your own or someone else's experience of having to live with mental illness.

I chose my words carefully in the sentence above, like I do all my sentences, but on this one, I went back and forth trying to decide whether to say, "living with mental illness", or "having to live with mental illness." Saying "having to live with mental illness" sounds antithetical to the disability studies and disability advocacy movement. It's a sign of strength and independence to own your impairment with pride and not relegate it to a sign of being ripped off in this lifetime, an element of bad luck, an unfair trick played by the 'creator', or just a fluke of nature. I disagree with Tom Shakespeare, who strongly advocates for the positive stance, as opposed to acknowledging the validity of negative connotations associated with having an impairment. Says Shakespeare:

Previously there was a limited range of narrative devices and themes available to people with impairment: Now new stories are being told, and we are creating ourselves for ourselves rather than relying on the traditional narratives of biomedical intervention or rehabilitation of misery, decline and death. Doing it for ourselves, perhaps we can reconcile tensions and produce alternative, happier endings."

(Barnes & Mercer, 1996, p. 95).

Whereas Shakespeare rides this wild precept like a mustang, Liz Crow's approach is a sauntering maverick, confidently citing the need for the expression of more personal feelings of impairment:

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The experience of impairment is not always irrelevant, neutral or positive.

How can it be when it is the very reason used to justify the oppression we are battling against? How can it be when pain, fatigue, depression and chronic illness are constant facts of life for many of us?

(Crow, 1996, p.3)

The name of this image is Vortex. It suggests Liz Crow’s view about disabilities, wherein we must consider the reality of our personal feelings associated with our impairments. In this case, I have depicted a person who “wants out� of his wheelchair.

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Bull’sEye!

If this were a target, Shakespeare would be the outer ring, Crow would be the inner ring and I would be the bright red bullseye. Why? Because this dissertation has Crow's sentiments right in its crosshairs and my story of having to live with bipolar disorder is spot on with her valiant call for the expression of more personal feelings of impairment.

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Hit-and-Run It was a steamy summer night in the Chicago summer of 1967. Humidity wasn't the only thing hanging in the air, however. I recall there was an eerie silence of impending doom, much like the frightening deja vu feeling after an absence seizure. Oddly enough, at the time, I felt as though the reason for that feeling was my decision to go the 7-Eleven convenient store with my friend. As was the tradition in our family household back then, my job would be to pick up some milk, when needed, on my way back home after a night out with friends. (Something about not having milk in the house left my parents feeling vulnerable to our family suffering from malnourishment and vitamin D deficiency.) I used to get scolded, however, when I went to 7Eleven, instead of the regular grocery store--something about milk costing an arm and a leg for the convenience of having to wait behind a man in a ski mask, planning a holdup.

Ironically, I never made it to the other side of the street to the 7-Eleven. I awoke the next day, confused as to my whereabouts. I was duly informed by one of the hospital staff taking my blood pressure that I was involved in a hit-and-run accident, while crossing Devon Avenue. The story was confirmed by my parents, who according to my friend, described me as flying through the air, my head slamming the pavement when I landed, as the anonymous car screeched to a halt, paused momentarily and sped off to points unknown.

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Left for Dead

I don't remember much more about the accident, other than the bittersweet news the neurologist shared with me as I waited word of my imminent health evaluation report. I was alive, but I would forever have to bear the heavy burden of never bringing home the milk for my family that steamy, summer night.

It turned out that going to 7-Eleven cost me more than the proverbial arm and a leg. It wound up costing me my head, specifically the amygdala, on the right side of my brain. A closed head injury developed scar tissue in that area, which led to temporal lobe epilepsy. I would come to find that as I aged, that neurological trauma would lead to significant cognitive and emotional impairments and disabilities in the form of memory loss, forgetfulness and general disorganization, with which I deal on a daily basis.

Sometimes I find myself thinking about the driver, who's brakes screeched to a halt and whose head darted out his open car window, craning to see what damage might have befallen the person once standing.

He may have sped away, as my friend described, "like a bat out of hell�, yet my conclusion remains always the same. Not knowing whether he had just committed vehicular manslaughter and leaving me for dead, the direction he faced was certainly not away from hell, but toward it.

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Back to School

Bits and pieces of my life are suspended like a colloidal solution in a mason jar. I can look at one of the bits of my life and if I want to see another, I just give the jar a slight shake or swirl and some other bit of my life comes to my awareness. Just as my hit-and-run accident is one of those bits, so is my life as a student. I was never a great student even before the accident, earning mostly C's and B's and a fair share of D's. If I was to guess, I had some pretty significant ‘learning differences’. One of the main differences was that other kids were learning and getting good grades and I wasn't doing either! At least it seemed that way.

Try as I might, I never could keep up with teachers during lectures and lessons. The teachers and students were invariably at least two steps ahead of me while I was still trying to make sense of what was just said or demonstrated on the chalk board. No extra help from teachers, family members or friends were successful accommodations for a brain that just didn't work the way everyone else's did. Eventually I gave up and gave in. I was tired of being a forever struggling student. Each school day felt like torture.

Schoolwork, homework, oral reports, and pop-quizzes were frightening and eroded my self-esteem and feeling of well being. Rod Serling couldn't have written a better script for my grade school experience, which felt more like a bone-chilling, Halloween funhouse than a neighborhood ‘schoolhouse’. The worst memory?

Those dreaded "Back to School" ads in newspapers and TV commercials.

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Early Premonition

It didn't take long for me to figure out that if my formative education years were difficult, then my post high school academic experience would be no cake walk. For me, entering my freshman year at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, was like starting over from Kindergarten...I felt that prepared. SIU was no Harvard to be sure, (to my knowledge, Harvard didn't accept ACT test scores of 19), but I knew that any institution of higher learning would require even more than what was expected of me from my teachers and parents when I was in public education .

I had this early premonition in my junior year in high school that it would behoove me to identify a major that could not only sustain my interest, but promise even a modicum of success in college. Art, of course--I always did pretty well at that! I had remembered my mother heaping praise on me as a young child, as I showed her sculptures I had made out of Ivory soap and anonymous faces I had drawn onto plain paper plates. However there was the time I had filled in embroidered crescent half moons on our living room couch with a blue ball point pen and decorated my homemade skateboard on the garage floor, with what I thought was black paint I found in a can, covered with spider webs in a dark corner of the garage. My father's eyes looked like saucers when he came whistling home from work and saw me using his old liquid resurfacing tar as paint and his garage floor as a drop cloth. Heck, it certainly wasn't my fault I thought the word "Tar" was the name of a color instead of a highly toxic, flammable substance. Well, at least I was building up the right kind of background to be an Art Education major.

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Dominoes!

What does a line of tumbling dominoes have to do with a re-cap of my story? Well, just like other experiences in life, the elements of my story, in retrospect, can be seen as one thing leading to another. As one element or event has been experienced, it leads to (or as in the case of standing dominoes, leans to) another element of experience. And doesn't it seem like as we get used to one domino in our life, it begins to lean toward another and drop, so we have to experience, readjust and deal with the process all over again?

See if the re-cap of my story so far doesn't remind you of a line of tumbling dominoes: My hit-and-run accident led to my head slamming against the street, which led to damage of my amygdala on the right side of my brain, which led to scar tissue in that area, which led to temporal lobe epilepsy, which led to seizures, which led to cognitive impairments and which also led to bipolar disorder.

So here is where my story picks up again--at the element (or domino) of temporal lobe epilepsy. Here we go, a short course in temporal lobe epilepsy. (Don't worry, this will be painless!) Actually, have you seen images of brains lately on the internet? Lots of them are the real thing, so I passed those up for something a little more tame, so as not to make things, hmmm, uncomfortable...

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Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Credit for information in this section goes to a very clearly detailed dissertation, called "Psychiatric Comorbidity in Epilepsy", which basically means mental illness that coexists with epilepsy. It was written in 2006 by psychologist, Miranda Swinkels, from the Division of Clinical and Health Psychology of Leiden University and the Department of Psychiatry, Vrije University, Amsterdam (Swinkels, 2006). My goal is to present the information as clearly to you as her dissertation did to me.

We'll start from square one, which is the broad umbrella term, epilepsy. Epilepsy is defined as a brain disorder. When normal brain functioning is recurrently and unpredictably interrupted, it is referred to as "epileptic seizures". In my experience, I would never know when my next seizure would occur, but one thing was certain...it would reoccur, in other words, it would continue to come and go unexpectedly. The symptoms of seizures is brought on by abnormally excessive neuronal activity in the brain. I suppose you could describe the neuronal activity as, "too much of a good thing." When you think of it, too much of anything isn't good for us, whether it be neuronal activity, exposure to the sun, exposure to McDoanlds, or running too many miles in marathons that exceed our level of physical training. My epilepsy is referred to as symptomatic or secondary epilepsy, which is due to such things as a head injury or brain tumor. If the epilepsy is not symptomatic epilepsy, then it is simply genetic epilepsy.

Simple so far, right? Ok, let us continue! Seizures, like ice cream, come in two basic flavors: vanilla and chocolate. The 'vanilla' seizures are known as Partial (or focal) Seizures and the 'chocolate’ seizures are known as Generalized Seizures. In a generalized seizure, there is no specific location where the seizure

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activity started or is taking place. The neuronal discharge is doing it's thing literally anywhere in the brain, whereas in partial seizures, the neuronal discharge is localized in part of one hemisphere of the brain. Hang on, this is when we put the goodies on top of the ice cream!

Generalized seizures are characterized by whether or not the person has convulsions or not. This was like my Uncle Al. When I was a youngster, I remember him having what appeared to me at that time as having an internal and external earthquake. It was at breakfast time and he started to shake and wiggle around uncontrollably, like a squirrel struck by lightning. His coffee cup went flying and he slipped off his chair to the floor like a buttered noodle off a spoon. I had thought that Uncle Al was invaded by an alien, but it turned out to be convulsions brought on by generalized seizures.

Partial seizures are characterized a little differently. With partial seizures, you either maintain consciousness or you lose consciousness. Simple, partial seizures are when you don't lose consciousness and can continue to interact in the environment. Complex partial seizures are when consciousness is impaired by amnesia or confusion , either during or after the seizure. Here is an actual example of a complex partial seizure that I had when I was finishing a Master's degree Social Work program at Loyola University. I earned a consistent straight A average in my graduate program and had no reason to believe that I would not be able to maintain it any time soon... until the morning of a final exam for which I had prepared very well. As I went over my notes one more time and was putting them away, all the familiarity associated with a complex partial seizure overtook me. Just a few moments of that particular seizure, rendered my memory useless for the final exam I was to take, just a few hours later. All the information was jumbled. I couldn't remember terms, authors' names seemed unknown to me, and following the meaning of text questions were like trying to follow the paths of mercury across a porcelain plate. Not only did the seizure cause me difficulty retrieving

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the information I once knew, it created a tremendous amount of anxiety. Consider again, the title of Miranda Swinkel's dissertation: Psychiatric Comorbidity in Epilepsy. In my case, the psychiatric comorbidity was anxiety. Piggybacking on Swinkel's dissertation, research indicates that individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy have a higher incidence of psychopathology than those with other types of epilepsies.

Regarding suicide, there is four times greater risk for those with epilepsy and up to 25 times higher for those with temporal lobe epilepsy (Perini, et al., 1996).

So that's it. My temporal lobe epilepsy is a type of partial seizure, where the seizures are localized at the area of the temporal lobe. Remember at the beginning of this section, I mentioned how I would become foggy and confused after my seizures? Makes sense now, doesn't it? This is actually referred to as an impairment of consciousness. In fact, the picture on the following page, is my visual interpretation of the feeling of confusion and impairment of consciousness. It's entitled, Post Ictal. Post Ictal is the period of confusion after the seizure, when the brain is adjusting itself back to normal neuronal functioning.

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My Narrative Chapter 2 “I Have Bipolar Disorder?”

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From Temporal Lobe Epilepsy to Bipolar Disorder Remember that ‘footbridge’ I was talking about earlier? Well, we’re about to cross it--we now have one foot in the landscape of temporal lobe epilepsy and the other foot about to touch ground in bipolar disorder territory.

A quick look ahead at the hypothetical map of our journey indicates that after this current section, we will be ready to enter the very crux of this dissertation--my visual narrative of the bipolar impaired self. What is required at this point, is to go over some background information on bipolar disorder, in order to provide a richer context in which to view my images. Without this information, my images might still be able to share a personal aesthetic and afford the ability to spark interesting conversations and interpretations, however without knowledge about bipolar disorder, some particularly valuable connections and unique insights might tend to be overlooked.

What I would like to do first is to provide you with a brief, first-hand account of the bipolar disorder experience. Then I would like to follow that up with some preliminary clinical information about bipolar disorder, using a straight-forward and resourceful medical report called, Treatment of Bipolar Disorder: A Guide for Patients and Families (Kahn, Ross, Printz & Sachs, 2000). It is distributed by NAMI, The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, www.nami.org.

Now watch your step while we cross this footbridge, because similar to coming off a manic high, it’s a long way until we hit rock bottom.

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Hitting Rock Bottom

One of the worst things about having bipolar disorder is hitting rock bottom in a major depressed state. Ever wonder what happens to a body when it falls to the ground from a skyscraper? Well, the physical result of that fall, is equivalent to the way you feel when you hit rock bottom in a bipolar depressed state. There's as much emotional life in that depressed state as there is physical life in an abrupt 60 story landing on pavement. You are empty, void, and nowhere to be found by yourself or others--there's just the vacuum of a life you used to have, a name you used to claim, a person you used to know, now depleted of everything you used to be and have, like planets, stars and light itself being sucked into a black hole in an abandoned, endless universe.

This condition is usually referred to as an illness or a disorder. That's like calling WWII a spat or the Holocaust, bullying. Manic depression, as it used to be called is a monster, all the horror stories you used to know as a child combined into one entity that actually breaks through your consciousness and comes to live inside you. It takes over...in the form of emptiness. All that's left is the smoldering,

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Mania

Ah, mania, sweet mania. It's a 'natural' high that can't be measured by ordinary means. Why? Because it is the opposite of it's evil twin, depression. How do you describe the opposite of total personal emptiness? How do you explain the feeling that what was previously dark and void and totally, emotionally painful is now incredibly freeing, with limitless happiness, confidence, creativity, and the amount of energy, the equivalent of chugging a gallon of Red Bull, twenty Starbuck Grรกndes and downing two dozen Krispy Kremes, all in one sitting. Now, just like its opposite, depression, mania can last hours and days. Days without sleep, and days filled with doing things you likely would never have done, had you not been blessed with presence of bipolar disorder. Typical behavior and vices associated with manic phases of bipolar disorder are pressured speech, feelings of grandeur, overly confident, belief in one's ability to accomplish things that would otherwise seem unrealistic, shopping and spending sprees, sleeplessness, drug and/or alcohol binges, extreme impulsivity, irritability, verbal aggressiveness, sudden obsessive interest and immersion in religion and spirituality, social inappropriateness, and denial of one's own malfunctioning behavior. By the way, my visual interpretation of mania is depicted in the image on the left. It's how I feel when I somehow manage to escape the black hole of depression, just anticipating making up for lost time. So now that you have a smattering of what it is like to experience both ends of bipolar disorder, let's see what the experts have to say about it that can further prepare us for viewing more of my images and hearing more of my stories relating to this relentless illness.

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So What If I’m Bipolar, I’m Just Like Everyone Else

The title of this section may be the name of my art piece to the left, but it certainly isn't my actual belief.

There is something disconcerting about having a mental illness and feeling different than everyone else, but there is something even more disconcerting about pretending or living in denial about not being like everyone else. The word, "phony" comes to mind, as well as identity confusion. When I'm manic, I feel how the picture on the opposite page looks--different. There's no confusing this for a regular-looking person or a manic person for a regular acting person.

What is bipolar disorder, anyway? You hear about it on TV and radio reports of some deranged shooter that had it, you read about it in newspapers and magazines as part of special interest stories, and you hear anecdotes about 'crazy' parents and students that have it, in the school staff lounge. Let's get a preliminary picture of it from our experts, of whom I mentioned a few pages ago.

Quite simply, bipolar disorder is considered to be a biological disease in which there are abnormal shifts of elevated and depressed moods, caused by alterations in brain chemistry. Bipolar disorder is a treatable illness, which can be controlled by medication. I have already described the major characteristics of symptoms of bipolar disorder from my own direct experience with the illness, so I won't repeat that here.

Instead, I'd like to present the different episodes of bipolar disorder. In addition to the depressive episode and the manic episode, there is the mixed episode.

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Bipolar patterns present themselves in different ways to different people. For example, without medication, initially infrequent episodes can progress to more frequent occurrences. Seasons of the year can find some people becoming more manic in the spring and more depressed in winter. Individuals with rapid cycling can experience such mixed episodes continuously all year long. The episodes can also last anywhere from days to months, to years. Some with bipolar disorder can go years without symptoms while others can have continual or frequent mild mood swings.

It is important to seek a diagnosis as soon as possible should you suspect you might be having bipolar symptoms. The reason for doing so is to best avoid the fallout of having bipolar disorder, which includes suicide, alcohol and substance abuse, problems with one's marriage and work, and the illness is harder to treat over time without early intervention.

Bipolar disorder is found to be either genetically inherited or brought about by a problem with brain chemistry that triggers the bipolar disorder through stress, lack of sleep, substance use, and difficult life events. Medication, education and psychotherapy helping one to deal with the illness has been found to be the most effective way of treating the disorder. For additional information, contact your physician, in addition to checking out the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance http://www.dbsalliance

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For Information on Bipolar Disorder and Obtaining Support: Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance http://www.dbsalliance

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Can’t See Past My Depression

This is as true now as it was 10, years ago, when I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder. You can't see past it because you can't see, period. Everything is murky, muddied and blanketed in darkness. Every once in a while, there is a momentary sliver of light to "see" your pain, but not beyond it. You can't see out and it's nearly impossible for others to reach in. I know they're there trying to make contact with me, but I may as well be light years away. It's that futile.

Without an emotional tether or human connection, we're like a lost asteroid out of orbit and on its way to nowhere. Depression is a lonely place. If it was located on a map, it would be on the edge, in the margin, outside of anything existing on this Earth. Medication is like cut and paste on a word processing application.

It can take you off the margin and put you on the map. But where on the map is not known straightaway.

You might find yourself on a floating iceberg wearing nothing but a scarf, in a tropical rainforest without so much as insect repellent or at the bottom of the ocean near a fault spewing steaming hot lava. But at least you're somewhere. But for how long?

Being depressed at home is one thing, but being depressed at work was quite another. There were times I would drive halfway to work and then back home again when I was depressed, because I couldn't face the faces. Especially the children. Most of them smiled and giggled and expected good humor from me in return. I either had to avoid them by taking another stairway or force a smile out of thin air. And I hated celebrations of any kind amongst the staff. It invariably meant being in the staff lounge and sitting next to people chowing down on homemade fare that may as well have been scooped up from a kitchen garbage

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disposal. The smell of hot tuna mixing with chili and pork sausage was enough to change my depression into a manic frenzy. Even on the best of days, it would be a mistake to eat that stuff. Heaven forbid trying to force it down during a major depressive episode. It was bad enough being there singing happy birthday, clapping for baby shower gifts or trading homemade Christmas cookies and fudge. Half the time I'd show up to be social and then leave before anyone successfully engaged me in conversation. Other times, I would avoid going altogether and catch up with paper work. It works, unless the principal comes hunting you down.

That's just what happened to me, which I captured in the image on the facing page, "Chewing Me Out".

It was a Magnet school where all of us were expected to work ten times as hard as anybody else in the district, no matter what the task or activity. Our school had a an outstanding reputation for superior teaching and learning, in the community. One day I was at school and feeling particularly comatose. Despite my warped brain chemistry daring me to make it to the end of the school day, I had a ton of paperwork to do. It happened to be Halloween and all the children wore costumes for their annual parade down the halls.

Teachers, specials and parents applauded and waved as each "whatever-they-were" passed by. I suddenly heard the echo of steps coming down the hall, as a a feeling of dread overtook me. In addition to having to deal with my already vulnerable emotional state, my intuition told me things were about to get worse. And they did. It was my principal, reading me the riot act for being holed up in my office, instead of being a team player and cheering the children on. She was beyond angry to the point of being hostile, shouting, “Our previous social worker participated!!!� Thank goodness, in this instance, my emotional numbing from my depression insulated me from any further damage that could have been cause by her bitter acrimony.

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My Narrative Chapter 3 “What’s Happening to Me?”

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Losing My Grip

I was the garden variety family man who was happy being at home, whether it be grilling in the back yard, installing shelves in our home office or scooping up dead leaves from our gutters in fall. I was a dedicated father, attending school orientations and holiday concerts, driving my daughter to and from friends houses for play dates and accompanying my son to guitar practice on Saturdays, then out to lunch at Tony's (a local sub shop, where I once unconsciously poured a bottle of iced tea over my sub, thinking it was hot sauce).

My family was truly my life and our warm, extended families only made a wonderful situation even better. I had what I thought was everything I ever needed or wanted: a loving family, a house, a job that I liked and good health. Or so I thought.

It was springtime and the trees, with their heady flower blossoms celebrated the end of a frigid winter with the return of geese in V formation, that had flown south just months ago. In the meantime, I had developed a terrible case of allergies, which was a totally new experience for me. Before that time, I rarely had seasonal sneezes or coughs even while smelling fragrant blooms in our backyard flower garden. This particular springtime was drastically different however. I couldn't breathe through my nose at all, nor could I turn the faucet off of my constant nasal drip. A trip to my general practitioner scored me multiple allergy medications, which included tablets, capsules and samples of nose spray. My medication regimen turned out to be a tragic, two-edged sword. (Strangely enough, I would later come to find that according to my neurologist, bipolar disorder can be brought out of dormancy in some individuals with high doses of allergy medications.) After a short while, my allergy problems cleared up. I was able to breathe again without having

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to spread my nostrils apart with that adhesive strip contraption, which for some reason brought a lot of attention to my n0se (something about its purpose of having to be worn in the privacy of your own home to help you sleep at night).

While still giddy over fooling mother nature with my potent array of pharmaceuticals, I began to experience sudden onsets of emotions that were rather alien to my temperament. For no apparent reason, I would feel out of sorts, down and hopeless. I then faced crying spells, loss of confidence and interest in things that previously brought me joy. Everything from doing my usual share of chores at home, to finishing paperwork at my job became meaningless and overwhelming. Ultimately, life became a life sentence, seemingly without parole. I began to withdraw both as a husband and father at home and as a social worker and co-worker at school. It took everything in my power to be somewhat lucid and alert at home for my family and at work for my students. It was like walking in the dark with a flashlight with a weakened battery, dimming increasingly by the minute. What became apparent to me was that as days came and went, I was nearer to losing my grip.

If I was losing my ability to hang on, if I was indeed losing my grip, to where would I be falling? That's part of the terror involved with this type of illness. One doesn't know how deep or where the depression can take you, or how it will devolve and manifest itself. One thing's for certain. You, the actor has changed, your script has been re-written, and the plot re-vamped, all you can do is recognize that this has become the new story of your life. And you can't exchange stories because..

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There’s No Librarian

Who do you ask for a different story when there is no one around to ask? Simple. No one. You're stuck with the story you've been thrown. In fact, you hurt from having had the book thrown right between your eyes.

Before having this illness, you could anticipate what life might be like in the next few hours, days and even weeks. With bipolar disorder, that type of thinking is presumptuous and unrealistic. You never know how you might manifest some of the characteristics, such as being extremely depressed, anxious, impulsive, speaking inappropriately for the situation, self-aggrandizing thoughts, pressured and run-on speech, poor judgment, taking on responsibilities without following through, being sexually provocative, etc. It's like Russian Roulette. You never know which symptom is in the next chamber of the barrel.

The plot thickened as this story continued to write itself. Yet all I want it to do was end. Far from ending, little did I know that the story was just beginning. I had yet to experience the manic phase of bipolar disorder.

Even with the early depressive stages of bipolar disorder, I knew that something was not quite right.

Not so with my manic phases. It was like a thousand suns had broken through the darkest cloud cover imaginable--the kind that destroys the Earth in sci-fi movies for lack of light and warmth. Why would anyone coming out of hours, days or weeks of feeling depressed, think there would be something wrong with feeling good and rejuvenated? But, as the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it is.

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Crossing the Line

My manic phases would last days and my less intense hypomanic phases, weeks (picture the difference between a sword and a knife: they differ in size, but they both can cut rather deeply). You cross impulsivity with hypersexuality and skewed judgement, and you've a perfect storm for destruction (self and otherwise).

No matter how many years pass, it remains a raw and perpetual source of heartbreak in my life. Suffice it to say that I crossed the line and it took me to a shadowy, horrific place known generally as divorce. It also meant I hurt my wife tremendously and likely stole her belief in trust. I no longer lived in our family home, unable to experience our children grow into teenagers and young adults. Visits aren't exactly the same as living together. My transgressions caused me to miss half my life as a husband and father. It happened before I was on medication, in fact it happened even before I knew I had bipolar disorder, even though I was displaying its symptoms. An excuse? Maybe. A fact? Definitely.

The concept of a future is totally nonexistent when in the throws of mania. The profound energy flowing through body and mind seem to overshadow the power of karma; cause and effect; as you sow, so shall you reap; what goes around, comes around; and an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. It overwhelms your senses, credibilities, intuition and intellectual ability. It is an elixir of folly and an aphrodisiac of irrational behavior. You have no insight into your behavior because you have no life outside of the manic moment. You live for it, you serve it until it abandons you in your human errors.

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Remorse

When you are in the thick of mania, there is a disorientation of what you previously discerned to be right from wrong and helpful from hurtful to one's self and others. You know this as the spatial disorientation of a scuba diver who loses track of direction under water with only seconds before running out of oxygen or an airplane pilot who can't tell up from down in an attempt to avoid colliding with a quickly approaching mountain peak.

The results of losing or maintaining one's personal bearings in the face of the most alluring of human temptations, can make or break a relationship, a friendship, trust, honor, devotion, security, and even one's lifetime. It's irreversible, irretrievable and opens only one way: inward. Once you enter, you never come out, at least not the same as when you walked in. Given the negative way you feel about yourself and the way other people who knew you when, avoid you now, you're hardly the same person as you were before you were manic and before you walked through the door that not only heightened your senses, but stripped you of them as well. There are times when you wake up from this nightmare only to realize you're still in it, but now with clarity. In my case, somewhere between mania and depression, reality of my behavior broke through the haze in which I had been living, leaving me with more remorse, guilt and shame than I could handle. I crumbled to a heap on the floor, a lone island encircled by a flood of my own tears, confessing the unthinkable by a garden variety family man. Another ambulance ride to the hospital ER ensued. Last time, for being hit by a car. This time, for being hit by reality.

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Asylum

I was placed on a stretcher and carried out of our house by what seemed a full crew of our local fire department's emergency medical team. Voices were all around me, mixed together like radios set to different stations, with words coming from all directions, sounding garbled at best. Animated bodies, uniforms and faces appeared as thick smears of acrylic paint hastily applied to a canvas with a trowel. I was strapped to a stretcher and lifted up as if a sacrifice to the gods of spiritually fallen husbands and fathers and carried out of our house feet first to the waiting ambulance. Men in uniforms hovered over me, taking my vitals, talking into a crackling radio and finding my vein for a saline drip with a needle, the girth of a telephone pole. A couple of tries with the needle came up empty. Another guy took the syringe and took a stab at hitting pay dirt. This was a real pro, within a minute, I remember distinctly feeling the sleek, thick shaft of the needle sliding deeper into the back of my hand, with the sharp, burning pain welcoming me back to the world of the living.

The blaring sirens drowned out my thoughts as well as their questions that were being shot out, like clay pigeons. After repeated attempts, I understood their questions and eked out my name and date of birth in rote fashion as if from an auxiliary speech apparatus.

The ambulance snaked through the streets of Highland Park like a steel ball through a labyrinth game, picking up speed as we drew closer to the ER, the crew members holding on to railings to keep from slamming into equipment and to each other. Although there were a number of us in the ambulance, I felt alone but not as vulnerable as when I was with my family. Little did I realize at the time, that I would be

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spending the rest of my life in that same condition--alone.

We screeched to a halt, the back door opened almost as quickly. It felt 'other worldly' to me. I saw myself more as a hitchhiker than as a patient. I wasn't bleeding, I wasn't hit by anything, no broken bones or lockjaw. I was whisked to the bowels of the ER, where bright lights and people darting back and forth in white medical and blue surgical garb resembled moving as in the path of a strobe light.

Individual rooms, blocked off by curtains, contained people with all sorts of maladies. A wrist band with one’s name on it and a brief introduction from a nurse and physician assistant provided an instant transformation from a nameless person to a doctor's patient.

For me however, I was wheeled into a 8 x 8 room with a heavy wooden door, with a window to see out and especially in. There was a uniformed guard standing just outside the door, who's job it was to make sure that I didn't try to do anything drastic, like escape, string myself up by my bedsheets or smash my head against the wall repeatedly until i either passed out or died. I didn't do anything however, other than lay on a hospital bed, looking at the four walls and catch the guard dutifully glancing my way. The solitary wait in that austere room was enough to drive anybody crazy. I was in there several hours before anyone came to talk with me. After a few questions, it was back in the ambulance for me and off to another hospital, where they were better equipped to deal with my kind of problem--whatever that was. This ambulance ride was different than the last one to the ER. Now, I was lucid enough to know what was happening and where I was going.

Was I a prisoner or a patient? I couldn't tell.

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How do you decide which thing is number one in your memory bank? Simple...by writing down all the possible entry points on scraps of paper and putting them in a pile on a table. With eyes closed, merely select a scrap of paper. Whichever topic is written on that scrap of paper is the starting point.

I chose "routine" as a starting point. Routine, what's that? Ever since I went on disability and no longer working, my concept of routine has faded into oblivion. I generally live by the seat of my pants, working on my dissertation when I want to work on it, eating meals whenever I feel like it and falling asleep at night at "who knows what o'clock." In the psych ward, however, everything is done by the clock. Everyone wakes up at a certain time. That freedom is taken away. Then when it comes time to eat, we eat whatever they give us. That freedom is taken away. Rest times are at a certain time. That freedom is taken away. You wear only hospital garb. That freedom is taken away. Bed time is at a certain time of day. That freedom is taken away. What if I'm not tired? What if I'm not finished writing in my journal? It doesn't matter what you're doing or with whom. Still, it's time for...

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Lights Out

I just came up with a hospitalization joke. "What's the difference between being locked up in a prison ward and being locked up in a psych ward?" "I don't know, but when I find out, I'll tell you." Hmmm... t's not very funny, is it? Well, neither is being in a psych ward. It strips you of your identity, puts you in the midst of people who may be more pathological than you are, singles you out as needing special "treatment" and separation from the rest of society, and reduces you to a diagnostic label. "Hi, my name is Charlie, I'm a schizophrenic, what are you?" "How many times have you tried to kill yourself? Only once?" Then you feel like an underachiever.

I've seen the psych ward scenario before--the power relationship between the staff and the patients. It happens in our schools. The more compliant and complacent our students are with teachers and our teachers are with administrators and administrators are with the superintendent and the superintendent is with the board and the board with the community, the more one gets what they want and avoids what they don't want.

It's playing the game, working the system, being one step ahead of the person above you, it's being crazy...like a fox. Act in an oppositional or simply in an assertive manner no matter where you are in a subordinate position and you're asking for trouble--whether it be a school, psych ward, prison, or corporate headquarters.

I think my favorite part of being hospitalized for just under a week, was my 1:1 time with the psychiatrists. I had the pleasure of talking with them for 5 minutes at a crack. And to imagine that is enough time to get to know my situation and my psychopharmacological requirements. My most memorable moment was the question posed to me after several days of following orders and instructions to the letter: "So, do you

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think you're ready to go home now?" I was always puzzled by this because it was the first time in days that I was given the opportunity to make my own choice or decision. And it was a biggy. It was like not letting someone drive a Chevy Cobalt, but all of a sudden giving him the keys to the Lear Jet. I don't know, YOU tell me if I'm ready. Measure me against whatever you use to tell if I'm ready or not. Oh, it has to conform to what my insurance determines is the optimal amount of time spent as an inpatient?

So after several days of group therapy, individual micro sessions with the psychiatrists, arts and crafts, exercises, and mingling with some of the most interesting and unique people I've ever met, it was time to go home. After all, I was relaxed, out of my immediate crisis and no longer practicing tying nooses.

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Don’t Question Our Responsibility

In retrospect, I think about the jokes that are often made about people being committed to a psych ward, to the "funny farm", "loony bin" or "mad house". If outsiders who make light of these experiences could just feel the pain and distress associated with psychiatric illness placements in a locked ward for a minute, I think we could have less ridicule and more empathy, less teasing and more understanding.

I recall in my job as a school social worker, the children I would have to visit in the psych ward or whose parent or sibling were psychiatrically hospitalized. The amount of coping it takes for these elementary through high school-age students to make it through the school day is tremendous. It's sad and it can be tragic. But it doesn't have to be hopeless--teachers only need to be sensitive to their needs, understanding of their challenges and respectful of their plight. Considering our mandated responsibility for the care and well being of our students during the school day, we’d be crazy not to.

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S W E

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Computer Bug: Loss of Dissertation in Progress!

Computer Crashes After Work is Redone!

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Tune In To Find Out “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, we bring you this breaking news report. According to our news sources, doctoral student, David Feingold recently lost his entire dissertation file, due to a bug in the application.

What makes this story of particular interest is that Mr. Feingold has bipolar disorder. To our knowledge, there was no aftermath of violence or evidence of psychotic reactions. The student had no weapons either on his person or at his residence when he discovered that all the work he did on his dissertation in progress was lost. Feingold fell into a major depression for several days. During this time, we learned he did very little but sleep and avoid discussing the subject with those wanting to help. After several days, he researched many applications that could substitute for the one previously used, but to no avail. Instead, he used a rudimentary desktop publishing program that came with his computer and created templates that closely resembled the previous application. To Feingold’s relief it worked. He then re-did the missing pages, facilitated by having had a considerable amount of information backed up online.

Then the unthinkable happened...Feingold’s computer crashed. At that point, family, and friends questioned Feingold’s emotional stability, hoping that this fiasco wouldn’t send him into an emotional tirade or tailspin. Did he survive this latest setback? Was he able to draw upon his coping skills and shear determination to persevere? To learn whether Feingold rose to the occasion by buying a new computer and redoing pages yet again, thus providing a good example of rising above the limitations of the bipolar impaired self, tune in at ten o’clock tonight and join us for this and other timely stories. We return you now to our regularly scheduled programming--and to his dissertation.”

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My Narrative Chapter 4 “People in My Life”

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The Doctor is In

After my psychiatric hospitalization, I needed a psychiatrist who could manage my medication, provide therapeutic support and evaluate my progress toward premorbid functioning. (I like to throw in some technical words once in a while, just to let you know that if I wanted to, I really could make this dissertation more difficult to read.) I found Dr. Robert Greendale as a recommendation from my then-wife, Susan, who is a clinical psychologist specializing in Postpartum Mood Disorders as well as other women’s issues. Susan referred many of her clients to Dr. Greendale, was pleased with his services and so recommended that I contact him. To make a long story short, I was fortunate to have hooked up with Dr. Greendale. Aside from being extremely insightful and knowledgable in his field, he sent me to a neurologist to check out symptoms that I described to him as what I thought were panic attacks. According to Dr. Greendale, the symptoms of panic attacks are very similar to symptoms of seizures, which according to his assessment, my symptoms appeared to more closely resemble. Sure enough, a neurologist diagnosed me with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and to my chagrin, I found out that all these years, brain cells were being deep six’d every time I had a seizure.

You don’t have to be a neurologist to know that doesn’t sound good.

With Dr. Greendale’s consistent help and support, I went from a barely functioning amoeba slumped in his patient chair, to being able to work again, enjoy life and even return to school to pursue my doctorate in disability studies. I can say with confidence and certainty that without this lover of symphony music, traveling the world and capturing his adventures in large-scale wall photographs for all to see, I may perhaps have evolved from an amoeba to a paramecium, but certainly not a doctoral student.

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Out of the Picture

So what’s it like having bipolar disorder for the family? I guess you’d have to ask them, but short of that I can say that people seem to act differently, at least in my own experience. On one hand, there is my ex-wife,, who was so devastated by my actions, she didn’t talk to me about bipolar disorder or ask me questions about how it felt to have it. Her experience with my bipolar disorder was extremely painful, due to my marital infidelity and changing her life dramatically without permission, and the other reason is her desire to maintain healthy boundaries. She has continued on with her life and I have with mine. However, it does add to the sense of isolation, loneliness and emotional weight in having to bare this illness without the person with whom was once in love with me and I with her.

The good news is we have both survived my tumultuous bipolar past and our tortured marital breakup, and she has taken the situation of my changing her life for the negative into her taking control of her own life for the positive. She has devoted her time since our divorce to self-growth, spiritual exploration, seeking out new social contacts, participating in walking marathons for charity, traveling, learning a new language, cooking fine cuisine, teaching at a university, publishing a book on her specialization of postpartum depression and women’s issues, and lastly, accepting me for who I am and truly forgiving of my past transgressions. I include her story in my narrative for two reasons. The first is that I am very proud of and happy for her ability to spring back from a major setback in her life. The second is to provide hope for those individuals who have been hurt by the actions of their bipolar spouses, and to let them know there is the potential for a better life bathed in a powerful light on the other side of darkness.

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It’s a Family Affair

My daughter of 30 seems to have become more empathic, if not more sympathetic. She checks in on me with a phone call from across the country, every so often and always encourages me to take good physical care of myself, to get a social life, become more positive, and exercise. In other words, stop acting like I have bipolar disorder. She means well and never seems to give up on me. It can’t be easy seeing your father missing out on so much that life seems to offer. A few years ago, when I was having what I would describe as an emotionally detached reaction from overreacting to something my ex-wife said to me, my daughter (then in her early 20‘s) called for an ambulance and had me taken to the emergency room. As she cradled my head in her arms, waiting for the ambulance to arrive...through the white fog and diffused light of my consciousness, I heard her say, “I love you daddy.” When she was a little girl, I used to be a guiding light for her. Now, I feel I’m barely a flicker in the night.

I never thought to ask my son what it was like having a father with bipolar disorder. Being ten years younger than his sister, I don’t think he knows what life without a bipolar father is like, since I was diagnosed when he was five. He never has been one to share much of his feelings, although he is quite verbal and liking to talk about things that are of interest him. Apparently, bipolar disorder is not one of his interests! He has witnessed me in major depressions and likely being inappropriate in the content of my speech, including unsavory passing remarks about people, sexual innuendoes in mixed company and claims of feeling cut off from the family--which I know in retrospect was really not an issue to have taken up with him. He has always been close to me growing up until he hit the developmental milestone of being an older adolescent. Like

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most kids that age, time spent with parents becomes more of an obligation than an event. A few years back however, my son was faced with the direct challenge of having a bipolar father. I was on my way home to my apartment with him after he finished with a doctor’s appointment. His mother was also there, with whom I discussed the co-pay. We came to words resulting in me being overly sensitive, reacting in a belligerent manner and walking away, feeling despondent and let down. I could sense a dark cloud forming over me, following my every footstep to the car. That hollow, empty, painful state of mind and body as if a potato peeler repeatedly scraped out everything from inside of me. I was left raw with nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide, no cave to enter, in which to lick my wounds and comfort myself. I was driving in a car in broad daylight with my son sitting next to me. I instinctively pulled over to the curb, turned off the ignition and wept from my toes to the top of my head. Tears and pain were streaming out of a shell that used to be me.

My son, who was used to growing up with a bipolar father, calmly called 911 as his sister had done several years earlier. I cried out to him as the paramedics removed me from behind the wheel, but I have no recollection of what I said. I do remember what I screamed to the paramedics as my hands were being pried off the steering wheel: “Don’t take me away from my boy! I love my boy, don’t take me from my boy!” He rode up in front of the ambulance, while I was being restrained in the back. This time I was manic and depressed at the same time.

On the inside, I was totally vacant, but emanating from my mouth--the gateway from absolute lifelessness to the world outside of me--were blood curdling screams and hysteria. The mixed state of mania and depression created a disconnect, where it tore me in two, leaving behind a single identity...of madness.

My son accompanied me into the emergency room, never showing outward signs of panic, fear or confusion. He waited there with me, faithful to his duties as a son until his mother came to pick him up. She

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called for him from the outer waiting area. I suppose what just occurred, reinforced in her mind, why her firm boundaries were so important to maintain. I believe she had to protect herself emotionally, from the demons that took residence in a ‘stranger’ that at one time, she called her soul mate.

“ On the inside, I was totally vacant, but emanating from my mouth--the gateway from absolute lifelessness to the world outside of me--were blood curdling screams and hysteria. The mixed state of mania and depression created a disconnect, where it tore me in two, leaving behind a single identity…of madness.”

- D. Feingold

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Family Matters

That’s my paternal grandparents, my older sister and brother, and me in the image to the left. I was the baby brother then. Being the youngest of the children, I was used to growing up being both coddled and picked on.

Sounds sort of bipolar, doesn’t it? My siblings and I maintained a family-type attachment all through adulthood. We all lived in different parts of the country, so spending time at each others’ homes having barbecues on weekends and joining each other for holidays and birthdays weren’t part of our adult experience. The lure of the dollar and ‘a better life’ never appealed to me, so I stayed put in Chicago, while my parents and siblings picked up stakes and never looked back. At the time, I was fortunate enough to have my immediate family to absorb some of the feeling of all of us being left behind. When I lost my immediate family due to bipolar disorder, the absence of my family of origin resulted in intense gloom. My parents and siblings loved me from afar, but there was only so much they could do to help, considering the long distances and having lives of their own. A local, close knit support system certainly would have helped the years go by more smoothly for me, but whatever karma got me into this situation in the first place, apparently included my life alone with a few opposite sex relationships that lasted anywhere between one and 8 years. Telling a potential lover or mate that I have bipolar disorder is the kiss of death, except for those special empathic women I have known that have their own disabilities and are focused on their own well-being as much as I am on mine. I admire these women. They seem to have a special knowledge and insight into the world of survival that other woman I have met, don’t display. They are particularly humble, understanding of their own suffering and pain as well as those of others. They are extremely grateful for moments of physical and

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emotional relief in the face of seemingly insurmountable hour-by-hour challenges. Thus, they are a continual source of wisdom and inspiration, for which I am very fortunate to have.

My birth family has been and continues to be concerned about my general welfare, including my emotional state, tendency to be socially isolated and most recently, unemployment due to debilitating cognitive impairments stemming from my-hit-and run closed head injury. As I’ve aged, my cognitive impairments have not only followed me, but managed to take the lead, often leaving me behind in a whirlwind of confusion, faulty memory, difficulty focusing, inability to multi-task, and increasingly low frustration tolerance. Considered by many to be the best social worker in a school district that had dozens on staff, I had to walk away from a profession and life that took me years to establish. My decision to terminate my employment was a slow death of several years, as I was given opportunities to move from one school to another, hoping to find one where I could manage the ever increasing influx of government paperwork, caseloads along with the usual responsibilities performed by a school social worker. Then one day in the blink of an eye, I found myself receiving a paltry disability income, barely capable of survival, losing social contacts at work, and estranged from a profession where a dedication to helping students and their families were my primary reason for getting up early every morning.

Getting back to my birth family, I am cared about as much as I ever was growing up. In my mother’s eyes, I’m still the baby of the family and in my brother and sister’s eyes, I am still their little brother. I feel in their estimation, I never quite grew up. I didn’t become the adult who was interested in making a lot of money and driving an expensive car and having a big house. I always had long hair, a beard, had mostly jeans and t-shirts for a wardrobe, and exhibited a sense of innocence and non-conventional thinking that became a permanent part of my psyche since the 60‘s. How does this manifest itself, regarding the way my mother and

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siblings relate to me, having bipolar disorder? I’m not sure they separate my bipolar disorder from their traditional view of me as the youngest child of the family. There is something seemingly immature about my behavior as an adult with bipolar disorder. I tend to be impulsive, reactionary, sensitive to criticism, emotionally labile, and with my cognitive impairments due to seizure disorder, I am forgetful, shun bank statements and paperwork dealing with finances, loans, medical records, tax information, and require automatic payment for bills, due to lost statements and forgetting to submit payments on a timely basis. I also have a fatalistic approach to my life, which removes me from the realm of individuals that take the bull by the horns, pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, make big plans, have big ideas, know big people, and either dream about or having succeeded at living large. So I’m infantilized. I’m reminded to take my meds, make regular visits to my general practitioner, call my psychiatrist and dentist for appointments on a regular basis. Get out more, get more sleep, get more exercise. They’ve also made contingency plans for my future when my now 93 year-old mother passes and I no longer have her living nearby me in Chicago to care for and visit. In major losses such as this, a depressed individual with an unaddressed mood disorder may sooner consider “whether to live” as opposed to deciding where to live.

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ByePolar

I have just gone through some painful moments in writing this narrative, as I have previously. At times I wondered whether it was worth having to go through my experiences again, especially in depth. Or should I say, at the surface. Keeping my experiences deep, outside of my conscious awareness is definitely more safe and less threatening. But I couldn’t write a narrative that way. I’d have nothing to say. And people would have nothing to read, at least about the bipolar impaired self.

My narrative is about me. It’s totally personal to my life with this illness, my experience with this mental and emotional behemoth of terror and fright. But it needs to be told, to let people know that this place exists. So that just maybe they will understand that the bipolar diagnosis is more than a flimsy, transparent sheet of lacy verbal technology, but a dark, heavy, brutalizing burden, which may cause one to crawl through life rather than truly live it. To suggest that someone you know may have this illness or any other mental illness might be having to deal with their own impaired self, now deserves your understanding, now deserves your empathy, now deserves your respect, now deserves your caring. Because now you know.

No excuses are valid after reading this narrative. You have been made aware. You can’t go back to a state of not knowing and pleading ignorance to the struggle. Are you your brother’s/sister’s keeper? No, but you can certainly show concern, express acceptance and provide support. You can listen and not turn your back. You can look the person square in the eyes instead of avoiding them. And you just might cast a light of hope where before there was only darkness. And a shield of love to help protect them from themselves.

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My Narrative Chapter 5 “Coming Out”

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It’s a Disability Thing

If the picture on the left was a person, it would be a mother giving birth, for this picture is the birth of my collection of images, depicting my inner experience of bipolar disorder. This is the very first image I made, and who’s ‘progeny’ numbers today in the area of nearly 300 pictures. The experience of bipolar disorder is never ending so neither are my depictions of it. They just keep coming and coming. Like bloodletting, making pictures helps me heal and and maintain my sense of control over my disability.

This section is a concise account of the genesis of my images,. But not only my images, mind you, for without the circumstances leading up to this image, there would be no story, no narrative and no dissertation--well, at least not this one, anyway. So what’s the story? Read on.

It all began in one of my doctoral classes. There was a rather intense discussion going on among the ten or so students sitting around a rectangle of tables, joined together for the purpose of communal verbal exchange. At the head of the tables was our professor. The discussion was of a personal nature, involving a few of the students. I believe the theme of the discussion was race relations and the professor was attempting to steer the class back to the original topic of discussion. Some of the students felt stifled by not being able to continue their dialogue. The air was thick enough as to need CPR to breathe. The overall mood was quite unsettling, as if a lit fuse was steadily reaching a tanker truck of nitroglycerin. Actually, pressure was building up in me as well. I was perturbed at the professor for trying to lasso the free flowing debate among intelligent adults. My feeling was that she was uncomfortable with the students discussing the topic rather than encouraging them to draw it to a healthy conclusion, so like a two alarm fire, she extinguished it. Well, her

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intransigence really got me hot, and there was no putting out my flames. I generally fight for the underdog and have righteous indignation for those who are controlled by some individuals simply out of a position of political power, economic status, academic credentials, IQ, social stature, race, ethnicity, and Hollywood looks. I had about as much as I could take, so I gathered up my belongings, blurted out something about not standing for this bullshit anymore, and stormed out of the classroom, making a beeline for my car. I assume I inadvertently changed their topic of discussion, and they shortly returned to the lesson at hand.

What drove me to react in that fashion? I believe it was the stress at work, taking two night classes a term, having to work harder to compensate for my cognitive disabilities, and irregular sleeping patterns. This was a perfect storm for a manic episode.

To say I was impetuous was an understatement. I was impulsive to the nth degree, acting on sheer adrenaline and messed up brain chemistry. I was confident all the way home that night, that I took a brave stance for freedom of speech and supporting the underserved, underprivileged and under-appreciated. I was their standard-bearer, their self-appointed Joan of Arc! Until the next day when I woke up.

Thinking about the night before, I wasn’t sure if I had a dream or was currently in one. Reality is sometimes hard to discern in transitioning from mania to depression. It was then I realized that I had outed my bipolar behavior and exposed the ‘me’ that previously was unknown by my fellow grad students and professor. I think I generally came across as an outgoing, intelligent and creative individual who was passionate about the education he was receiving. Now I thought they saw me as a nut.

What to do? Drop out? Pretend like nothing happened? Tell them it was my evil twin? No, I would do what any ‘normal’ person would: make an appointment to see my professor and beg for forgiveness.

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We made an appointment to see each other that week. We met in her cloistered office, barely enough sitting room for her, myself and the surprise presence of the Department Head. The chairs were close and so was the air. !

You could cut it with a knife. Just then, my professor sliced through the silence like a box cutter,

declaring the beginning of the discussion. It was a pretty simple, straight-forward inquisition. I handed my explanation to them on a silver platter. No hemming or hawing, no excuses or alibis. My explanation was that I simply over-reacted, I was inappropriate, I disrupted the class, and I have bipolar disorder. I was expecting their jaws to drop but instead they said, “Oh, we figured that.”

“Huh? I beg your pardon?”, I thought to myself, but instead I asked in a matter of fact way how they knew. Their answer was, “Oh, we could tell for a long time.” So I was sized up a long time ago--and apparently made the topic of conversation. Silly me, thinking I could pass for ‘normal’. And shame on me for snickering at my dilemma along with them. But I was unprepared for coming out, especially when I was outed previously before I even realized it. So I gave my word that from then on I would try to control myself and act in a civil manner.

Upon everyone agreeing that it was good to talk, I subserviently stepped out of the office with my tail between my legs, reminiscent of the degrading 1930‘s racial stereotyped, Stepin Fetchit. There I was, Stepin Bipolar, with a whole new identity and forced to face the music of being known as someone with a mental disorder. The cat was out of the bag, the genie was out of the bottle, Pandora’s box was opened and no matter how frantically I tried, I couldn’t put the outing experience back into any of them, so the ‘scarlet B’ on my forehead remained firmly entrenched for all to witness.

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School Daze Before returning to school for the next class that week, I was as nervous as a stuttering 3rd grader, about to give an oral report at the front of the room. (I used to stutter in elementary school, so I can say that.) I really wasn’t sure what I would encounter when I stepped foot in the classroom. And I wondered the best way to accomplish the least embarrassing entrance: Should I make direct eye contact with the window? Perhaps sneak over to an empty chair a few minutes after class began so I wouldn’t have to engage in conversation?

Walk in smiling and whistling as if nothing happened? Or throw everyone off guard by wearing a Bill Clinton mask and saying in an Arkansas twang, “I know what y’all are thinkin’, but the truth is: “Ah-did-not-run-outof-the-room-at-our-last class-meet’n”.

Something far more strange happened, however. As if possessed, a voice emanated from a seeming alter identity, stating that I would like to apologize for my behavior at the last class. I heard myself explain that I have bipolar disorder and they had witnessed me experiencing a manic episode. But instead of me feeling the need to run out of the room, my fellow students understood, accepted my explanation and protected me from harsh judgement. I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, they were doctoral students in a disability studies program with an emphasis on advocacy and social justice. And I learned they were my friends--friends who helped me feel so empowered, that I then began coming out far beyond the walls of that one lone classroom.

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Eternal Connection

To my surprise, I was gathering some rather favorable feedback from fellow students, family and friends on my images and unexpectedly garnered validation and appreciation for my artistic efforts. I particularly enjoyed a comment of my visual work, where someone described my images as both ugly and beautiful. It was then I realized that the artwork I was doing, reflected its own characteristics of bipolar disorder!

Depressing and dark, yet compelling and stimulating the senses.

As if peering through a translucent gauze of thought, I noticed that although my images have a specific purpose for me-- in terms of coming to grips with my illness and understanding my mixed feelings and identity, they seemed to generate interest outside of myself. Could a level of feelings behind my personal experience of the images, that when viewed by others, tap into their current impaired selves or perhaps a universal potential that lies within us all for an emotionally vulnerable impaired self, given the right set of circumstances? Moreover, is there a universal concept of the impaired self that connects all of us in ways that can yield compassion and empathy, tolerance and understanding, and move us to consider our assistance as opposed to neglect, our concern as opposed to our apathy and our sense of responsibility as opposed to our emotionally detachment and the specter of indifference?

Answers to these questions began to show themselves almost immediately after asking them. I placed a good number of my images in into a video I created, called Inside Out, the name given to one of my early “coming out images,� which represented my secret diagnosis and attendant behaviors being exposed to the light of day and to the gaze of those who (thought they) knew me.

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Inside Out

The video, Inside Out was an inadvertent bellwether suggesting its ability to be a catalyst for connecting my art images to the unconscious and conscious awareness of its viewers--not only of the bipolar impaired self, but an overarching general concept of a disabled impaired self, experienced by anyone with an impairment or disability. What does this mean, exactly? It will help to understand the significance of this statement if we become familiar with what the Inside Out video is.

As I previously pointed out, Inside Out is a collection of my art images that I made when processing my experience of having come out as someone with bipolar disorder during one of my graduate classes, while it was in session. After completing about 80 or so images relating to my overall experience with bipolar disorder, I decided to put some of the images to music to resemble the depressive and manic states I had experienced with bipolar disorder. I was to use this video for a classroom assignment dealing with mental illness. Not only did I want the video to provide an open curtain to the inner experience of bipolar disorder, I intended the video to be used as a teaching tool, regarding the heartbreak it leaves in its wake as well as associated practical, textual information.

Quite simply, the video is divided into four parts. The first part represents depression by showing my images slowly transitioning against the backdrop of a very somber music track. The second part takes the previous images and places them with faster, more visceral music track along with much faster transitions from one image to another. This part represents mania. The third part consists of some sobering quotes and demographic statistics relating to bipolar disorder. The fourth and final part of the video continues with the

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same somber music but this time as a backdrop to the memory of a friend of mine who completed suicide, due to bipolar disorder, leaving behind a husband, two adolescent daughters, and a goodbye letter. The music fades out to silence as the screen goes black.

When I completed my video, I had shown it to some family and friends who all felt it was a very dramatic and moving presentation of my direct experience with bipolar disorder. A very palpable silence was present from those viewing the video, before giving their feedback. I didn’t pay much attention to the silence until I noticed the same reaction from the students to whom I showed it in my graduate class. I sensed that again, it wasn’t just the lack of talking, it was the deafening silence of thinking and feeling. After class, some students came to me and thanked me for showing the video, as it showed them how their loved ones with emotional or physical disabilities also seem to have an impaired self. In another group of students, one student said watching the video changed her life, because she can better understand her uncle with bipolar disorder, who killed himself in the not to distant past. A women in another group, upon seeing the video came out of the closet on her own, for the first time stating in public that she has schizophrenia. There were additional instances of people who were affected, most notably a mother, who in tears stated that she is better able to understand what her child on the autism spectrum might be feeling when he is frustrated, depressed or having difficulty communicating.

To view the Inside Out video, please use the following hyperlink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwHk88OoNP0&feature=youtu.be

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Professor Paul Grobstein 1946-2011 183

An Unexpected Mentor The year was 2008. I had this impulse to share my images with the academic world: my newly found discovery of my internal bipolar self, turned outward. I spontaneously began looking up web sites on the Internet, seeking a home for my artwork. I wasn’t sure where to look, but feverishly flipped through website after website with search terms containing the words bipolar, creativity and artwork. I came upon a website called, “Serendip”.

Serendip is a neurobiological website, previously hosted and founded by the (recently) late Harvard University trained Neurobiologist, Paul Grobstein, a professor at Bryn Mawr College. Serendip is a unique think tank and education exchange that amazingly surpassed the 5 million unique visitor mark in 2011.

There are more than 30,000 pages and averages more than 20,000 unique visitors per day--more than 99% of its visitors are from off-campus. Serendip is referred to as a “digital ecosystem” for exploration and a collaborative learning community in the areas of education, science and the humanities.

Serendip is also the ‘birthplace’ of my concept of the Bipolar Impaired Self. This communal, intellectual playground enabled me to discover the connection between my artwork, impairment and the self through interactive online dialogue with students and other visitors to Serendip.

It all started when I took a chance and sent in some samples of my artwork along with the explanation of its connection to my personal experience with bipolar disorder directly to the Serendip “contact us” link.

My work struck a chord with Professor Grobstein, who immediately returned my email, inviting me to contribute my story and images to the Serendip website. My work has since found a permanent home on

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Serendip, for which I feel incredibly honored and proud. I must add that Professor Grobstein struck a chord with me as well. An embodiment of creativity and the quest for enthusiastic discovery, he was the consummate academician and teacher. He was the Chair of the Bryn Mawr Biology Department and wellknown as a “scientific storyteller.” Consider a colleague’s remembrance of Professor Grobstein in an obituary notice from the Journal of Research Practice, of which Grobstein was an Associate Editor from 2005 to 2011:

“At the top of my mind is his notion of "getting it less wrong "! What a wonderful way to describe research! He speaks of "local stories " (not data) and "global stories (not theories), and both "story telling" and "story revising" as essential processes in research.” Professor Debiprasad Dash (2011)

Please follow along in this fascinating excursion through my “serendipitous” discovery of the impaired self. The beauty of the process was its elegant simplicity. Quite innocently and with no knowledge of any further use of my images, I posted my artwork on the website, accompanied by my personal, verbal descriptions and insights. The story behind Serendip and my discovery of the impaired self broadened when to my surprise, I noticed comments left by students and visitors to the website, responding to my art images.

It turned out that Professor Grobstein had utilized my images as part of a teaching assignment for his university students. The students’ immediate assignment was to view my images and provide comments and insights, based on their interpretations, and deciphering of symbolic representations within the artwork. My comments are in white type, and the students’ comments are in red type.

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“If you knew me personally, you probably wouldn’t see me as impaired as I sometimes feel. I don’t appear crazy, but sometimes I have crazy ideas that can often be reframed as creative or originating from the absolute.

Ideas that are actually appreciated and admired by others. “ d.feingold

An understanding and an acceptance of the self, and a realization that there are others out there with whom community is possible. However at the same time a sense of dissatisfaction, a sense that the author knows he is being judged by the “normal” community. submitted by “k”“

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“At their worst, neurological and mental disorders can make you feel like you’ve been stripped of your authentic self and replaced by a mere shadow…of your shadow. When it gets this bad, it feels as though I inherited my genes from ‘something’ outside my real family.” d.feingold

This picture makes me aware of the social stigma surrounding mental illness. You are “bad” if you have one. submitted by ryan

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“My life is a room in which I dwell. It’s been beaten down, battered and tattered. I do leave the premises and enjoy the outside world, but I only stay out so long. Then I return home where it’s familiar comfortable, albeit sometimes...unbearable.” d.feingold

There is some light coming through the window, perhaps a sliver of hope amidst chaos. There is a sense of isolation in a world of chaos, but there is someone watching over. submitted by sophie

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“My

‘inner eye’ sees the world differently than does my outer eye. It’s a

different kind of observation and vision--more sensitive, intuitive and perceptive. People see my outer eye and if they look closely enough, they may see my inner one as well. Then sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.” d.feingold

When any part of yourself is hidden or unacknowledged the whole self is limited in every way. Self-acceptance means not only acknowledging the less desirable parts but also allowing every aspect of the self to realize its full potential. submitted by “a”

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“...not all disabilities are obvious. Which is more problematic: when your disabilities are heated from those around you or when they are hidden from your self?” d.feingold

… We all have shortcomings, but our ultimate purpose in life is to reach self-awareness… i. e., to acknowledge where and what we would like to improve/better ourselves and go about making/facilitating this change.

This, according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, refers to trying to attain self-actualization. submitted by “a”

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To my amazement, I saw patterns of negative and positive concepts emerging in my narratives and in the students’ interpretations of my images. Standing out from their descriptions, as if soldiers at attention, there were obvious descriptions of feelings, talk of identity, allusion to societal gaze, and integration of characteristics of bipolar disorder with the self. The following are the key extrapolated concepts from the students and my comments relating to my art images:

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In the midst of negotiating meanings and significance from what immediately appeared to be data--as if totally dominating a conversation and not letting the other person get a word in edgewise, my own inner voice screamed “STOP!” at the top of its quasi-existent lungs. It was deafening and so was its message to me: My inner experience of bipolar disorder was exposed to the world on the internet. My images were exposed for others to see, evaluate, and judge. What an incredible thought that someone’s lone existence can have relevance and merit beyond one’s boundary of circumscribed self. And not only were my story and imagery gaining exposure, they were teaching tools used by a brilliant academician.

All of a sudden I emerged from total obscurity to partial obscurity! And with the possibility, no less, of contributing to the knowledge base of (hu)mankind in some even minuscule way. It made me realize the potential of each of us to contribute to our world of knowledge and functioning. A quote by Margaret Fuller, the 19th century journalist and advocate for women’s rights and equal educational opportunities expresses what I felt then, was my epiphany of purpose : “If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.”

And so my contribution to Serendip was burning brightly with the potential for lighting the way to further understanding the internal realm of the bipolar self. I then returned to my data at hand, to kindle the flame that a short time earlier, sparked the imaginations of a university professor and his students.

Not only was I impressed with the students’ insight, but their interpretations helped “give birth” to the concept of the impaired self. The intersection of my images and student’s imaginations generated a meaningful discourse about the self within the framework of the personal and experiential nature of bipolar disorder. From the key extrapolated concepts of our collective comments, I could reconstitute a theoretical construct associated with having bipolar disorder. The bipolar impaired self presented itself as the totality of

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emotional and social adversities which I, as a disabled person have had to deal over and above the day to day challenges and limitations generally associated with my impairment.

Identification of an Impaired Self, separate from myself, opened the possibilities for putting into words and understanding, what were before, only vague feelings and a phantom sense of my personal struggle behind my impairment and disability. With a literal understanding of the Impaired Self-originating from my artwork, came the ability to transform myself through self acceptance and mastery of positively integrating the features of bipolar disorder impairment with an overall, balanced sense of who I was. In essence, the negative art image concepts transformed--through my awareness, understanding and acceptance--became the positive art image concepts, which I ultimately internalized and integrated to form my positive and more vital sense of self. It was at that point I could look beyond past doubts, failures, and disappointments, and instead see a future in which my artwork could continue to set a path before me of learning how and awareness of surviving and thriving the bipolar experience.

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Journeys Don’t End. They Change Course.

I move forward by glancing at the future, but I’m looking backwards to see where I’ve been and how I got here. And where is “here”, exactly? “Here” is the final pages of this narrative journey. What started as a single step, has now become an inquiry to the meaning of a series of events and happenstances that pockmarked my life with disparate challenges of unexpected emotional obstacles and traumas, beginning as a hit-and-run victim on a darkened city street, some 45 years ago, and winding up as a doctoral student with bipolar disorder, writing a dissertation today.

This journey reminds me of when I would travel with my parents during summer vacations when I was younger and the world in those trips seeming like post cards coming to life. It was as if the place didn’t exist in a postcard, it didn’t exist on earth. Kind of like the sound of one hand clapping or a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear its dubious crash.

Going on family vacations were a great learning experience. The least little thing caught my attention and transcended the moment. Dirt by a picnic roadside was special because it came from a far away place where thousands of people from all over the world may have walked or even spit on it. A single wildflower growing on a mountainside seemed to have a spirit and a purpose, otherwise, it would have been somewhere else, like a cinder strewn alley or empty lot with saw tooth weeds and baritone frogs near our modest suburban home. And there were weathered-looking men who washed our windshield and sold high test gasoline from a pump with a dinging sound for every gallon emptied into our non air conditioned car with tail fins, and ladies with pencils in their hair, serving up biscuits and gravy for our road weary stomachs, with

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their distinctive southern accents. They sounded other worldly, yet exotic, being so far away from my home and having a peculiar twang, compared to my white bread, midwestern accent.

Soon, my summer traveling escapade faded into the beginning of the school year and suddenly disappeared like November’s fallen leaves. I intuitively feel to this day that those memories are still in me somewhere and influence the way I think about things. I’m reminded of those times and learning experiences by sounds, smells and sights that kindle a spark, tucked away in my mind’s eye.

I mention this because my narrative journey in this dissertation seems to be no less adventurous or memorable an excursion than were my summer jaunts in my youth. Instead of states, cities and towns however, the memories of this journey relate to a round trip exploration to the inner realm of my bipolar impaired self. I didn’t collect souvenirs in this trip, but I did come back with a collection of knowledge and fresh insights. Whereas a school teacher may have asked us to write an essay on where we went or what we did over the summer, I am now thinking about those questions as they relate to my narrative journey. I didn’t have a map or a GPS. I went as the crow flies to free myself up for spontaneous explorations and unencumbered side trips. All I had was a simple “inquisitive inner compass” to stay the course, maintain my motivation and and stoke the flame of curiosity from one instance of my life to another, since the time of my accident and resultant brain injury.

Initially, I had intended this section to be a conclusion to my narrative. But in thinking about it, I see there really is no conclusion, at least not in the traditional sense of there being an official ending, finish or final outcome. Instead, I see a continuation of what I’ve been doing all along the way in this narrative: being in the moment, displaying my art images and recording where I’ve been, how I’ve felt and who I was at any given time with a diagnoses of bipolar disorder. There is a momentum that has developed since writing the

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first page of this dissertation that perpetuates self-reflexive thinking relating to my bipolar disorder and identity of the self. I am left however, with no grand theory, dictum or rule of thumb that should be applied to the situations of other individuals. My visual narrative however, has yielded a bird’s eye view of the emotional terrain of day to day life with a major psycho-emotional disability, which has made this dissertation more than an academic exercise.

My visual and textual narrative has unearthed the idea of “change” in my life. I’m thinking about the change in my newly acquired reflexivity of thinking; identifying myself as someone with impairments and disabilities; a change in locus of control and assuming responsibility for my well being as it relates to the knowledge and understanding of the impaired self ; the innumerable changes stemming from my head trauma: specifically fluctuations in brain chemistry, emotions, energy levels, everyday cognitive functioning, social behavior, productivity and subject matter of artwork; and overall quality of life, including inconsistent ability and desire to engage in interpersonal relationships and recreational activities, and the ability to tolerate highly stimulating indoor environments. Lastly is the paradox of that which didn’t change, which is quite a change.

I’m referring to my increased ability to cope with disappointment, frustration and major challenges, since creating my artwork and becoming more aware of my life stories through my narrative. Just recently my 93 year-old mother was rushed to the emergency room for congestive heart failure. She was near death, but is now showing improvement in a rehabilitation center. My mother’s ability to stay alive finally came down to getting stronger through exercise and eating, the latter of which she lost complete interest. Two things motivated her to begin eating again, however--blintzes and tuna salad sandwiches. Even through this experience, I was able to keep my bipolar impaired self in check. I was motivated to process her predicament...and mine, as her concerned caregiver. How? Making pictures, of course. Turn the page.

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“I Had a Dream About Blintzes and Sour Cream”

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“Spawning Tuna”

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5 Analysis

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Theoretical Underpinnings You have just viewed and read my narrative, in which I discovered the Bipolar Impaired Self through my visual images. I have attempted to provide you, the reader, with a proximate emotional facsimile and understanding of what it means to live life accompanied by bipolar disorder.

The purpose of this part of the dissertation is to explicate the theoretical underpinnings of this personal narrative. More than just a story, my narrative is grounded in various subject areas which are imbedded in my visuals. My artwork is thus not only a window to my emotional experience of the bipolar impaired self, it is a threshold to current scholarly studies, social trends and academic knowledge. It is a different lens with which to become familiar with my story and journey. It places my narrative within a wider context and broader scope of universal understanding. You may recall seeing the image above, in the narrative portion of this dissertation. It is atypically bright and colorful. It’s a cheery, face-like figure. The art piece is entitled, “So what if I’m bipolar, I’m just like anyone else”. The idea is that I am really not like everyone else. I’m not even like others with bipolar disorder. I am more than a diagnosis. I am a person with characteristics that although might be shared with the other 2.6% of adults in the U.S. ( 2012) population with bipolar disorder, but I’m still unique. One aspect of my uniqueness is the ability to express my bipolar-related feelings and experiences in a visual manner.

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I sense that my artwork originates from the dark, dank, echo-walled cavern, depths of my brain, steeped in the influence of mental illness. Essentially, my artwork turns my bipolar affected self, inside out for observation. “Inside Out,” the image on the next page, was one of the first pieces I made in this genre of dark, psychological art.

The concept of the art piece, “Inside Out,” centers on how mental illness affects the inner self, as evidenced by my dark, looming images. Have you ever seen a burn victim or picture of a burn victim? You can readily see their external physical scars. My artwork enables people to see our internal emotional scars, which are often overlooked, due to our focus on outward behaviors, eliminating symptoms, and society’s expectation to appear as “normal” as possible (Farah, 2002). Pages 217 and 218 provide examples of my interpretation of the internal scars of the bipolar impaired self and the external, physical scars of a burn victim. Just because we don’t see the internal scars of the impaired self on a person with psychiatric impairments, like we do, say a burn victim’s external scars, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. I have made full use of my artistic skills to make you certain they are there.

It is my hope that viewing my artwork and reading my narrative will bring to people’s conscious awareness that those with impairments and disabilities deal with an entirely deeper level of pain and challenges beyond the surface of their challenges to which we observe on a daily basis.

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Internal Emotional Scars (Bipolar Impaired Self)

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External Physical Scars (Burn Victim) 206

I did a topic

search for “impaired self” on the internet, and found there to be countless entries. Interesting point though, there was always a connecting term after the word, “self”. There was never just an “impaired self”. There was

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The Impaired Self: (Cracked) Window to the World When I was a kid, I was a Little League catcher. I didn’t like it very much, however. I had the impression that it was a position for fat kids who couldn’t run very fast, which described me then. My dad, probably secretly agreeing with me, provided some sage advice. He told me that it was actually a privilege to be a catcher. Ever the self-esteem nurturer, he told me–with the seriousness of a heart attack–that it was one of the most important positions of the game because they participate in every play. I never did believe his explanation, but it did come in handy for this dissertation in helping to explain the self. A catcher and the self have one thing in common. The self is involved with every move...it’s there all the time, even if you don’t notice it (Epstein, 1973).

It would be helpful to familiarize ourselves with a variety of ways in viewing the self, in the service of ultimately discussing its impaired condition. The self, to which I am referring, is the part of us that is beyond what we can objectively describe or whose presence can be verified. How do I define the self? Simply, the self is the “me” which cannot be understood or known in the cognitive sense, but only intuitively experienced (Tanenbaum, 1995). Hood describes the self as an illusion, made up of past memories and present unconscious mechanisms and processes. Hood further details that the self is a manipulatable, temporary construct which can change over time, due to contextual modifications. His belief of an absence of core self helps explain how one’s self image can change by competing urges and impulses, and how others see him or her (Hood, 2012). Strawson provides a similar view that the self is not a “thing”, but a distinct mental phenomenon (Strawson, 2003). Another interpretation is the awareness of one’s own physical self as being

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distinct from others as well as the ecological self, which perceives the self as a separate person within the context of one’s environment, i.e., “I am me and not him.” In addition, we are introduced to the concept of the person’s private inner self, which is known by one’s own dreams, inner thoughts and feelings (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). I believe that to understand the impaired self, it is not as important to choose a particular view of the self, as it is to have the awareness and understanding that an impaired self is the self in an impaired state, and is an underlying concomitant of a bodily, cognitive or intellectual impairment with which a person must deal on a daily basis.

The impaired self is a term I have been using in discussing my artwork, writings and experiences, all related to my life with bipolar disorder, seizure disorder and ADHD. It is as if my very self is impaired along with my cognitive and emotional impairments. When I did a topic search for “impaired self,” there were countless entries. Interesting thing, though; there was always a connecting term after the word, “self.” There was never just an “impaired self.” There was “impaired” self-monitoring; self-awareness; self-perception; self-association; self-esteem; etc., but no impaired self. How do I define the self, which is vulnerable to impairment?

The impaired self is what makes the self so apparent. Imagine a sparkling clean window--so sparkling that you don’t even know the window is there . You just see through it to the world outside. The self is like that. We don’t even know it’s there most of the time (Finlay, 2006). Now picture giant cracks in the window.

‘The impaired self is now like that cracked window . It is an incredible source of anxiety because you know it’s just a matter of time until the glass shatters. Not only do you now notice the window, you notice the unsightly cracks and how the cracks spoil the view of everything through the window. That’s the fallout of the impaired self. That’s the stuff that interferes with everyday activities that affects one’s quality of life. I posit that the

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worse the physical and nonphysical impairment, and the less internal and external supports, the

greater the impairment of the self. The bigger and more pervasive the crack in the window, the more it blots out of what life has to offer. When the glass shatters, many a bipolar’s life he has ended. Fact is, up to 20% of people with bipolar disorder die of suicide (American foundation for suicide prevention, 2012).

The impaired self is the emotional cuts, bruises and scars that reside on the inside of those with disabilities. Szasz claims that there is no mental illness because unlike other physical illnesses or diseases where there are the presence of lesions, there are none in the realm of psychiatric issues (Szasz, 2011). Just because we cannot see them however, does not mean they are not there. Consider the world’s most powerful telescopes and microscopes. They have the technology to see into the deepest images of space and in the deepest images of cells. Take the technology away and you don’t see them. My artwork is the technology of the self. Through these images, you can see into the darkness of the deepest levels of the impaired self, as if they were microbes or DNA particles.

What are some common signs of the impaired self? You likely have seen them in others or may be experiencing some of them yourself: anger, self loathing, rejection, humiliation, shame, negative self-image, fear, confusion, vulnerability, feeling exposed, and worthlessness (Reeve, 2002). Knowing that these feelings and issues are being experienced by people with disabilities, it is amazing to consider that these are on top of the actual physical cognitive and/or emotional impairment(s) with which they must negotiate on a daily basis.

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From Impaired to Integrated Self

Impaired Self

Impaired Self Stigma

Internalized Societal Prejudice

Impaired Self

Passing ăƒťPsychoeducational knowledge of diagnosis ăƒťAcceptance of diagnosis and self

Integrated Self 211

From Impaired Self...

In my personal experience with bipolar disorder, three conditions have largely been associated with the impaired self, as indicated in the diagram to the left: stigma; internalized societal prejudice and passing. If anything cracked my window to the world, it was these characteristics associated with mental illness, including bipolar disorder. What a heavy burden it has been to carry this psychological baggage of societal and self condemnation, which contribute to the impaired self like a flu virus to lethargy. Remember, this is along with and on top of the behavioral and emotional challenges that accompany mental illness (Byrne, 2000). I have found that despite the personal growth and adaptations I have made since first displaying the features of bipolar disorder, these are no mere vestiges of a past diagnosis, rather, they are always waiting in the wings, ready to strike and influence my identity and comfort zone. They are not like cuts that are prepped with antibiotic salve and bandages, with an expected healing time. These are open wounds that no first aid kit will eliminate, nor will the passage of time.

It is noteworthy that the word stigma comes from the term, stigmata, which are the marks of martyrdom on Jesus’ body, created by tortuous means (Gray, 2002). In my interpretation of Jesus on the cross (above), He cries out for answers to His newly found abandonment in a time of supreme difficulty, complete with the markings of the stigma of shame and disgrace and defect, three descriptors that are used by the

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word, stigma to this day (2002). Likewise, there is feeling of isolation and abandonment in our darkest moments of depression. As demonstrated in my collection of artwork, these scars are not visible on the outside, they languish in silent desperation on the inside.

To live with the stigma of mental illness is to feel like you are on ‘just this side” of humanity, a razor’s edge of being cast into a sea of ignominy with other lower life forms, undeserving of a world in which “normal,” worthy people inhabit. In more real time, a study of social stigmatization reinforces my take on the social position that individuals with bipolar disorder are considered outcasts. Lazowski, et al. (2012) report that, “...many people want to distance themselves from someone who has a mental illness as much as they would with someone with a drug dependency or someone who has been convicted of a crime” (p. 1). The person with mental illness is also more likely to live like someone who is drug dependent or has a criminal record; they have a smaller income, a lack of a sense of self, and fewer social supports (Markowitz, 1998).

Not only must someone who is mentally ill exist within the boundaries of stigma created by society, the mentally ill person internalizes this destructive mentality and makes it his or her own, a phenomenon referred to as self stigma (Oral, 2007). I know in my own life, there are times when I am very assertive and will stand up for myself without hesitation, but then there are times when my awareness gets blinded by a negative inner belief system, originating from without, reverberating in my mind, that I am flawed, subnormal and undeserving of equal treatment and respect. In response to and in defense of the possibility of receiving social rejection, my tendency is to generally hide my illness, isolate myself and avoid social interactions as a way to keep my bipolar disorder from being exposed (Perlick, Rosenheck, Clarkin, Sirey, Salahi, Struening & Link, 2001).

How does this dissolution of spirit and positive thinking happen? Have you ever noticed that when you

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hear people saying things enough times, you start believing it, even if you may not have initially? The idea of political propaganda comes to mind. The same is true for when you start to believe and internalize society’s perpetuating view of mental health stigma, prejudice and stereotypes. This is a very powerful and devastating outcropping of society’s dehumanizing and judgmental beliefs about those with mental illness. It is quite disruptive, as it leads to diminished self-esteem, decreased self-efficacy, isolation and social withdrawal (Watson, Corrigan, Larson & Sells, 2007). According to Watson, et. al., some common stereotypes that are attributed to people with mental illness are being dangerous, incompetent and the cause of their own illness (2007). The unfortunate irony is that these actions and beliefs are in and of themselves, known to contribute to depression (Crocker, 2002) and identity loss (Michalak, Yatham, Kolesar & Lam, 2006) to an already vulnerable population.

I’ve never been a good liar. I’m too naive to see the benefit of twisting the truth, too transparent to hide the truth and too cognitively impaired to remember the truth. Yet, I am forced to lie through my teeth whenever I am with people that don’t know me on an intimate, personal level. This is because I have a secret that if was let out of the bag at the wrong time with the wrong people, could cause anything from discomfort to disaster. I’m talking about choosing if and when to disclose to people that I have a mental illness--and a generally feared one at that. In fact, too many people with bipolar disorder are considered dangerous (Angermeyr & Matschinger, 2003). Interestingly enough, the range of “dangerousness” varies within certain contexts, i.e., what is dangerous about me and how big a problem it is for the situation. For instance, I believe that as a school social worker, staff and parents of children I see for counseling, would likely have second thoughts of referring their child to me for assistance, knowing I have bipolar disorder. Meeting a woman on a blind date may not occur, if she knew I had bipolar disorder. Being hired as the spokesperson for a major

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Fortune 500 company that manufactures war machines, isn’t very likely, nor being offered the position of being the only adult to take a group of children on a wilderness overnight trip, hundreds of miles from home.

In short, it is not unusual for individuals with bipolar disorder to face personal, social and vocational fallout (Byrne, 1999).

To me, the typical response to public shaming, discrimination, isolation, and exclusion--keeping one’s bipolar disorder a secret (Byrne, 2000)–-is tantamount to being deceptive about who one is. It is easy to understand how even this aspect of bipolar disorder can contribute to an impaired self, through personal discomfort, guilt, stress, and anxiety of having to be less than honest. The complexity and chronicity associated with having to manage public disclosure, which Goffman refers to as “passing” (Watson & Helou, 2006)–hiding one’s defective or spoiled identity, adds to the intensity of self-consciousness and stress in having to scan the social landscape to guard one’s identity, protect one’s reputation, and to maintain one’s overall psychological well-being (Beals, Peplau & Gable, 2009). One of the primary stressors with having to withhold information about my bipolar identity from someone is the double bind of disclosing now versus later. For instance, back to the blind date example. If I tell the person I have bipolar disorder prior to going out, it could impede my chances of actually meeting the person for fear of scaring them off. On the other hand, if I wait to disclose my bipolar disorder the next time we meet or long enough to establish my positive character and identity as a person, it could make it seem I was withholding important information, and therefore I would be deemed untrustworthy and a schemer.

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...To Integrated Self Now that I have presented the concept of the impaired self along with its attendant negative characteristics and effects, what remains is describing the path I have personally taken from the “cracked window” of the impaired self to the “clear window” of the integrated self. As indicated on page 215, my conduit to an integrated self consists of: (1) psychoeducational knowledge of the bipolar diagnosis--having an understanding of what the bipolar disorder diagnosis is, (2) acceptance of one’s diagnosis of bipolar disorder and (3) general acceptance of who one is. General acceptance of who one is, includes the diagnosis of bipolar disorder and realizing that having a bipolar disorder diagnosis is only one aspect of who you are as a person. These three elements are important because they represent and determine the extent to which a person dealing with stigma can lead a high quality life (Mancini & Rogers, 2007).

Psychoeducational interventions have been one of the more powerful resources for my continued growth and emotional stability, coinciding with my bipolar disorder diagnosis. Instead of being in the dark and left clueless about the influx of cognitive and emotional challenges and changes, I made myself more knowledgable by reading up on bipolar disorder and questioning my psychiatrist instead of just receiving medication. It’s been all about taking responsibility and taking control of what I need to know about symptoms, exacerbations and improvements, waxing, waning and recurrence of emotional states , prognosis, etc., to help me not only to survive, but thrive, having a mood disorder ("Evidence-based psychological interventions," 2010). Another intervention I have found to be extremely valuable was attending a several week time-limited psychoeducational group, led by psychiatric clinicians in an outpatient hospital setting.

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These types of groups offer psychotherapy plus education in an environment that is positive, competencebased and empowering. Social support is a natural function of the group as well as various models of psychoeducational interventions, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (problem-solving, role playing, stress management and coping techniques), ecological systems theory (helping to understand the illness and personal experiences in relation to other environments and situations, such as your partner, workplace, school, etc.), and the narrative mode (individuals share personal stories in group, recognize strengths and resources, generate action oriented interventions, and attain personal growth (Lukens & McFarlane, 2004).

Although I have a faulty memory due to my temporal lobe epilepsy, I’ll never forget the time I first went to my psychiatrist and he informed me that I had bipolar disorder. I felt numb, as if I was having an out of body experience. There must have been someone else standing behind me who the doctor was talking to because surely, it wasn’t me that could have bipolar disorder. But I was the only patient in the office, so it was I who had the diagnosis. I felt labeled immediately, as if a grade 2 potato, when only grade 1’s are good enough for fine restaurants. Not only that, I felt half-baked, half a person and half alive. I couldn’t hear what the doctor was saying after he gave me my diagnosis, since I was surrounded by a haze of confusion and disbelief. Thereafter, my identity was in a state of limbo. Like a teen with arrested development, I felt adulthood was a skewed experience, unclear of my place and status in a non-bipolar disordered world. My self esteem and self-efficacy plummeted to low levels. It was difficult to trust my judgement because I was now a mentally ill person--a pariah to others as well as myself. I then had society’s stigma, prejudice and harsh judgement running through my veins. It was part of me and no more able to be eliminated than stripes on a zebra. Until that is, I inadvertently came out in class and was forced to confront my demons. Lo and behold my demons weren’t my bipolar disorder, they were my acquired shame, embarrassment, low self-

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esteem, and paranoia in the context of being exposed for who I now was. Once faced with the reality of exposing my bipolar behavior in class, I struggled to make sense of the experience and my reaction to it by making pictures. Through the process of making the pictures, I was processing the coming out event and putting myself in the higher position of wanting to understand and comprehend the illness and the effect it had on me, instead of prostrating myself before its emotional and functional hold on me. I began to accept my diagnosis (Russell & Browne, 2005) so that I could then get to know it personally and learn to live with it and my self, without the prejudice, stigma and harsh judgement that society had placed on me.

Once I accepted my diagnosis, a whole other world of possibilities opened up as well, such as learning that bipolar disorder is associated with higher levels of creativity, and I can have more control over my bipolar disorder than I thought by maintaining a healthy lifestyle. My attention was placed on good food, sleep and stress management habits, as well as ways to ward off depression and mania before they happen. I’m happy to say that it was then I began to see things clearly, not only through my own eyes, but through the sparkling clear window of the integrated self.

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+ ! !

+

=

!

Transformation We are not talking about storybook transformations from caterpillars to butterflies. We’re talking about wooden emotions, deadened feelings, slothful activity levels, one-cylinder cognitive functioning transforming into rapid thoughts, grandeur, limitless ideas, over the top shopping sprees, risky behavior, heightened sexuality, spontaneous spiritual awakenings, rushes of creativity, flights of fancy, social prowess, then transforming into irritability, anger, emotional turmoil, poor judgment, impulsivity, broken relationships, lost employment, and then transforming back towards wooden emotions. These are the transformations of bipolar disorder, called shifts are called cycling. These transformations can be slow, where the depression and mania can each last for days and then there are times when the transformations can occur multiple times a day, which is called rapid cycling ("Bipolar disorder," 2012). It is easy to see how these transformations could raise havoc in the life of someone with bipolar disorder, including one’s self, family, workplace, social circles, and business dealings. This can be hell on earth. This is bipolar disorder. As someone who has bipolar disorder, an artist and a student of disability studies, I am extremely interested in the concept of transformation given I experience it in all three contexts. From my perspective, successful transformations are about three things: progression, change and growth. I believe if any one of these elements is eliminated, its ability to be a successful transformation is questionable.

We can have transformations within the cycles of bipolar disorder, but without growth, they cannot be

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considered successful. As an artist, I can change and grow, but without continued progression, I will come to stagnate and not feel successful. Finally, as a student of disability studies, if I grow in my knowledge of the field but do not change anything for the better in peoples’ lives, I would not consider my graduate school undertaking to be successful. .

I conjectured that there must be others who have experienced the phenomenon of achieving personal transformation through art, so I looked into what the literature had to say about transformations in the arts.

What I found, appeared to be a paucity of work in this area of research. Nonetheless, there was enough information to provide some context behind my ability to see personal transformation through my artwork .

My readings in the area of transformations uncovered a surprising discovery about the literature. It appears that authors see personal transformation in the arts, not only from different perspectives, but as totally different ideas, with transformation and the arts having different purposes and meanings. Instead of looking at transformations from a single idea, each author looked at transformation from a totally different point of view. What this provided was a well-rounded 360° picture of personal transformations through art, as opposed to a scholarly debate. Baum (2006) discusses the transformative quality of art within the

context of individuals with disabilities--not only those with psychiatric disorders, but with developmental disabilities, autism spectrum, deafness, and cerebral palsy--having their artwork bought. According to Baum, the monetary worth of the individual’s artwork contributed to the individual’s “personal worth.” The individual had a viable identity as an artist and the ability to accomplish success after being used to feeling incapable by him or herself and others.

I can personally attest to the power of success in my artwork. I have won awards, been published, had my work in art shows and displayed in a number of Internet venues. I have gone from feeling like a lost

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identity, looking for a body to inhabit, a social accident waiting to happen and a view of my memory and organizational skills as disintegrating at best, to someone who is ready, willing and able to take on life’s challenges and joys.

Fraser (2008) provides us with the idea of transformation as having to do with society needing to see it’s part in making those with illnesses and physical imperfections as the “other,” rather than blaming the “other”’ for being different. Artwork that represents these concepts include photographs of imperfect bodies that challenge the ideal bodies around us; photographs of peoples’ birthmarks and scars; mini cakes decorated with teeth, scabs and skin as decorations, all with the idea being to highlight our physical mortality and that we are more than just our bodies. Transformation we experience here is one of self-knowledge, introspection, acceptance, and the realization that we may one day become the “other”.

I can relate to this article on several fronts. The first is that I recall myself coming to the realization that I was now the “other.” This happened when I went to the pharmacy to get my first prescription filled for mania and depression medication and seeing my name on the vials. From that moment on, there was no more me and “others,” just we. Another way I can relate to this article is when I started to “out” my artwork.

By “outing” my bipolar disorder and exposing my psychiatric scars, were then able to expose and share their own psychiatric scars. Finally, I was able to relate to this article from the standpoint that I no longer needed to blame myself for my ‘otherness’ but instead understood it was society’s decision whether to position me as an isolated other.

Yet one more interpretation of transformation in the arts, is represented by a veritable rainbow of health benefits afforded to individuals who took part in a study by Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). A 2007 consultation report, provided by MMU, a Department of Health and Arts Council England,

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stated that–based on validated measures of questionnaires–participation in creativity, culture and the arts has a marked positive transformation on individuals’ overall well-being (Kilroy, et al., 2007). The report was a culmination of research, undertaken to generate more innovative ways of improving public health and well-being, by shifting responsibility for healthy behaviors from healthcare professionals to individual citizens. In the end, a panoply of personal improvements were attributed to participation in the arts, garnering a “stamp of approval” for widespread dissemination of the findings through interactive events, the media and conferences (2007). The results come as no surprise to me however, given my own emotional and practical improvements after engaging in art making. In thinking about it, it’s quite amazing that all that time I was initially creating artwork with obvious dark “bipolar undertones,” I was tapping into an activity that has been proven effective to transform one’s quality of life. I suppose that’s one reason I keep doing it.

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6 Conclusion

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Where to From Here?

Very early on in this work, I was thinking how it would be extremely valuable to put my time and effort into a dissertation that could meaningfully contribute to the landscapes of knowledge and praxis in education, among other fields. This was my intention before even knowing what would unfold from my research. At least I knew I wanted it to make a difference and not just satisfy a degree requirement. On page seven of this dissertation, I made the following statement: “Surely there must be some good to learn from this experience [my journey through mental illness] that I can share with others.� I am pleased to say that in my estimation, my original desire to contribute to the legacy of academic and scholarly works in disability studies has come to fruition. I believe my dissertation provides new insight and understanding to not only the role of creating art to reveal the inner emotional scars of impairments and disabilities, but its offshoot, highlighting the discovery of the concept of the impaired self, associated with facing the challenges and living one’s life with an impairment or disability.

I would like to share now, four personal vignettes which serve to illustrate the concept of the impaired self within the context of a few areas in life in which I have personally been affected and influenced by those in positions of power and control, as I suspect others have as well. These are instances where the dignity and self-respect of the individual, especially those with a disability, can be acknowledged and nurtured as opposed to neglected and overlooked. As previous, I draw upon my own experiences through the telling of stories to bring an immediacy and sense of reality to the situation. What better way for us to be an authority on a given topic than to be the subject of experience and author of its description. Following these vignettes, I end with a summative conclusion, using yet one more dramatic and creative form of ABR--poetry.

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Education

Professionally, as a school social worker, my interests lie largely in the social/emotional functioning of students. How can my experience with bipolar disorder and the information contained in this dissertation’s narrative begin to take seed and germinate growth in how we help our students not only cope, but thrive in school? I say when children are seen and dealt with not just as a set of behaviors to be eliminated and reinforced, but as humans to be understood and an amalgam of feelings to be considered. They come to school with problems that to them, dwarf the importance of finishing homework, eclipse the social expectation of turn-taking and minimize the need to ask for extra help with a math assignment. How as adults in the school system can we help students with disabilities, who come to school day after day with an impaired self? We could certainly start by recognizing the idea of an impaired self. Then we can all be on the same page with acknowledging the extra challenges that these children with disabilities face. It’s not just their disabilities. It’s the impaired self behind the disability that should begin to capture our attention and

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imaginations. Maybe it will bring more patience to a teacher who has to handle difficult situations with a student with anxiety disorder being afraid to step in the classroom. Maybe it could lead to empathic understanding and more appropriate teacher responses to the behavior of the “problem child.” Maybe it could cut down on the amount of staff venting about kids with disabilities and more attention paid to feeling for their major challenges in daily living and how to address their needs. And just maybe, it could motivate school staff to honor those students with praise when they make the slightest improvement in whatever area of functioning, whether it be letting someone cut in line without acting upset, handing in an incomplete assignment that showed a sincere attempt to do well, holding the door open for a fellow classmate, or trying to read a sentence out loud, when before there was only his or her strict avoidance of taking on such a task.

I recall when I was a student, I just wanted recognition for trying and even more, for just being me.

There was an instance that happened in grade school that I will never forget. I was struggling in most of my classes, but didn’t realize that I showed potential in being able to write. I think that is because more attention was being paid to the mechanics of writing and grammar as opposed to the content of the written pieces.

Until one day, we had to write a paper on a book we read. I can’t remember the book, but I do remember being moved by the story and peering into its depth of meaning and symbolism. I took it upon myself to let loose with everything I felt about the story. I broke through all hesitation and barriers of fear--of making mistakes or not doing it the way I thought other kids would. It was as if I didn’t have an impaired self and just soared through the assignment with confidence. Then I got the paper back. It had a big red “F” with a circle around it at the top of the page. Next to the F was a question left by the teacher to me: “Did You Write This???” I no longer soared, in fact I crashed and burned. I was immediately reintroduced to the effects of the impaired self. It was not until the experiences in my doctoral program and personal awareness through

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my art images, that I realized a cracked window of the impaired self was behind ill feelings and effects from my cognitive and psychiatric impairments, -resident in my psyche with the potential to shatter given the right set of negative circumstances.

Psychiatric Hospitalizations

It was my second psychiatric hospitalization. I was wheeled into the hospital emergency room on a gurney with all the dignity of a damaged UPS package. Just as in a previous hospitalization, we passed by rows of individual curtained rooms, where patients were being treated or attended to by any number of hospital personnel, including doctors, nurses, physician assistants, medical students, intake workers, etc. I, on the other hand, found myself in a guarded 8x8’ locked room, empty of everything, except my hospital bed and anybody--except me. I waited alone in what amounted to solitary confinement for no less than 6 hours, until some obscure hospital employee came to tell me about an additional ambulance ride I would be taking to

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another hospital for treatment about a half hour away. What does this type of detached, laconic attention do to someone experiencing a psychiatric crisis? It doesn’t take a Sigmund Freud to realize it wouldn’t be in their best interest, and would more likely have benefited from prompt information and empathic concern.

Waiting a total of 9 hours with only an afterthought delivery of spare hospital food to break the monotony, hardly prepared me for a largely disinterested hospital worker. I remember the empty food tray languishing under my bed with the neglect of a patient waiting for a bed pan. On the surface, we can easily imagine what an experience like this could have done to me in the throes of a bipolar depressive or manic episode. What about the deeper, internal psychological plight of that which we are now well aware–that “cracked window” known as the impaired self?

What about when finally placed in the psych ward? (Now commonly referred to as the Behavioral Health Unit.) Applying the concept of and investigating one’s impaired self could make all the difference between a patient relegated to a diagnosis and symptoms, to recognition of an actual person, properly identified by a temporary hospital wrist band. How was I, a psych inpatient supposed to have been motivated to develop a positive sense of self when my given identity was an American Psychological Association DSM diagnosis and a medication regimen to subdue me?

How interesting it is when the patients appear to be more on track with regard to an impaired self than the hospital staff. I recall having a few dialogues outside of mandatory therapy group sessions with some patients, talking about our illnesses and how it effects us with our family, friends and c0-workers. One of the more powerful stories was a patient who was a member of a family who is a major player in the excavating business. Their last name can be found in large letters on trucks and behemoth moving equipment by highway construction worksites. He talked about how his siblings and cousins were all part of the business

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but that he was an outcast and not given as much as a broom for sweeping because of his bipolar diagnosis.

In retrospect, I can see how much of our conversation dealt with themes related to his impaired self–feelings of alienation, family shame, anger, disappointment, and personal failure. I asked him if there was ever an opportunity to discuss such an important issue during his stay in the psych unit, either in group or 1:1 with a therapist, to which he replied, “no.” What a haunting irony that our brief discussion excavated so much “critical dirt” about his impaired self, given his issue of being unable to excavate dirt in the family business.

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A Vital Beside Manner

I dislike going to my general practitioner. She’s personable and takes an interest in my health and is also one of those rare physicians that doesn’t rush you in and out the door or takes care of more than one patient at a time. I’ve seen doctors who could really benefit from roller blades. Not mine. Sometimes I wish she would rush me out of the office though, so I don’t have to feel so rotten listening to her quietly chastise me like a ten year old and observing her crinkled facial expressions of disapproval. She doesn’t like the fact that I’m about thirty pounds overweight, have a high cholesterol count, high blood pressure, get hardly any exercise, and miss appointments. Well, she does have a point about the missed appointments. I can’t help it. I forget...kinda.

So anyway, I’m on four medications to counter my physiological shortcomings (and as many psychiatric meds for my bipolar disorder, seizure disorder and ADHD) and a three month period for losing weight and bringing my cholesterol count down through healthy eating, which to me is a Chicago style spinach deep dish pizza. Hey, it’s got tomatoes and spinach in it plus dairy and enriched wheat flour. How bad can it be?

So between the medicine, the looks of disappointment, and the “do you want to live or die?” lecture, I usually

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scamper out of her office with my tail between my legs. I high tail it to my car and drive toward the street while hearing my tires roll over crunchy gravel stones on her driveway, as I begin my emotional recuperative efforts. I think the noise from driving over the gravel is the doctor’s way of telling me not to get another kidney stone, like I had a few years back. She told me to save it for analysis when it finally passed, but I somehow misplaced it. That was a real disappointment for both of us.

So where does the impaired self come in to play within this scenario? Well, I feel there is a disconnect between physician care and physician caring. Just as in the educational and hospital psychiatric unit milieus, the doctor’s office is ground zero for highlighting symptoms and behaviors to the exclusion of personal feelings, emotional challenges and confused motives. As a disabled person with an impaired self, there is an entire realm of issues and obstacles that come into play the minute I begin listening to my physician’s critique of my health status or prescriptive health plan. Perhaps it’s more than just laziness, lack of interest, selfdestructive tendencies, or denial that makes me impervious to my physician’s firm directives. Maybe it’s the still small voice of my impaired self. It wrangles between disability-related, internalized weakness, failures, frustration, and disappointments and my physician’s firm expectations for vital health achievements I am supposed to reach through my own shear will and determination, despite any hinderances.

The impaired self is not an excuse for failure to conform, follow through or adhere to medical orders, but it can be an entry point at which a physician and patient discourse can occur to arrive at a mutual understanding, empathy and a coalescence of efforts toward reaching patient health objectives. Compared to repeated disaffected physician and patient interactions with limited benefits, while considering the potential good that can be realized through a physician’s understanding of the impaired self, following through with doctor’s orders by patients, need not be a bitter pill to swallow.

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You Can Hide but You Can’t Run

My final thoughts take me to a place I visited 47 years ago. It was a hiding place, to be exact, in the attic of our family’s one-car, unattached,

wood frame garage. The only way up

was to use our massive, 10ft

wooden ladder that to me, looked like a

giant Redwood with steps. Its a

ladder that had years of paint splatters

and spills marked on its uprights

like so many rings in a tree, marking its

age from one paint job to another.

I recognized the Periwinkle pink from

my older sister, Bonnie’s bedroom, the stately, flat ivory from our living room, the light blue Twinkleberry from our upstairs bathroom and the new fangled avocado color from our kitchen that fit the futuristic domicile of the Jetsons more than it did the modest suburban, post WWII home in which I was raised.

Besides its size, this ladder was somewhat intimidating because when I was younger I got a bad sliver from it on my hand, while holding on to it as my dad was climbing down from painting the ceiling. I remember my dad having to dig the minuscule dagger of wood out of my hand with a needle. It was so small that he had to use a makeshift magnifying glass, which was the lens off of an old slide projector. My father was quite the Renaissance man! Not only did I have to sustain going “under the needle” from my father, who resembled Redbeard probing for buried treasure, his followup intervention once the sliver was liberated from layers beneath layers of skin, was that dreaded, over the counter, now banned red alcohol and acetone-based tincture of Merthiolate that my dad applied with all the mercy of Marquis De Sade. My father’s feeling was that if the cure didn’t hurt, it was sissy medicine. No Bactine for this family, in its major battle against minor

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skin irritations! Although this was hell for me, I always had the feeling situations like this were what my dad considered spending quality time with his youngest child.

So, the only way to truly hide up in the garage attic was to pull the ladder up with me. You know, to cover my tracks. This was no small task, considering the ladder was way more than twice as long and seemingly twice the weight that I was. There must have been a good reason for me to go to that much trouble to hide from my parents. Not only the trouble to get up there, but the environment that surrounded me once I was stowed in my makeshift, high altitude bunker. There were the usually creepy crawly things, spider webs, decades of dust, and greenish, mossy-looking insulation material, culled from what looked like a brackish, backwater bog from a parallel universe deep inside the far reaches of space. (Hopefully not extra strength, flame retardant asbestos.) It was a hot day, nearing the end of the school year, so there were easily dozens more comfortable places to hang out than the garage attic, which could easily add 20 degrees to the outside temperature. So what was I doing there and what has it to do with the impaired self? Well, I’m writing this as jazz music, not classical or baroque, so there is a free flow of thoughts, blending of ideas and feelings, informally directing the choice and combinations of words that are providing full expression to themselves, as opposed to being mere inscriptions on paper, so please bear with my meandering.

I’m flooded with emotions as I write this portion of my dissertation because this hiding incident incapsulates the identity I grew up with, not only in my youth, but well into adulthood. As the saying goes, “you can run, but you can’t hide.” In my situation, it is “you can hide, but you can’t run”. You can try your best to keep the world from officially knowing you have bipolar disorder. You can maintain a vow of secrecy to protect yourself from shame and your relatives and friends from humiliation, should others come to find that you--their close connection--has this embarrassing sickness. You can’t run and escape from it

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permanently. It’s constantly following you, creeping up on you from behind until it leaps and pounces on your back, adhering like industrial strength Velcro, refusing to let go until it determines to do so.

This reminds me of a story my daughter told me just yesterday about a neighbor that used to live across the street from us. She’s a woman in her 50’s. A wonderful soul, mother of two fine young men. She had bipolar disorder before I knew I had mine. She had it under control with medication when she lived near us and had since moved to Colorado with her talented, soft-spoken cabinetmaker husband. He came to visit the neighborhood the other week and dropped in to say hello to my ex-wife. The story goes that his wife went off her bipolar medication and got heavily into drugs. She spun out of control and crashed from mania into a depression that nearly claimed her life. She is now confined to a nursing home and to no one’s surprise, they have since divorced. He has started his life anew with a woman he had recently met. Our dear neighbor however, is another story. While her husband has been finding a new life for himself, she has been slowly losing hers.

The pain emanating from within the impaired self can be more than excruciating, as we can well imagine. It was this pain that took the life of one of my friends of 25 years, who finally succumbed to her bipolar disorder. She went to sleep forever in the back seat of her car with the motor running, inside their closed garage. I had mentioned her earlier in this dissertation, when describing the “Inside Out” video I had made and dedicated to her. The pain from this disorder is relentless. It’s like a baby bunny, clamped in the muscle bound jaws of a Rottweiler, being swung from side to side until passing out or dying...or worse yet-being left bleeding, fully conscious and alive.

So take this pain and picture it in my impaired self as a young boy, hiding in the garage attic. It started when it was near report card time. I noticed an envelope from my school, addressed to my parents. It was

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thin and so didn’t appear to contain a form to fill out or an information packet. So I did what any selfrespecting kid would do. I opened it. My blood drained from my face as I read the letter. It was a “failure notice” from my basic math class teacher. I panicked, as my heart started pumping as if in the final hundred yards of a 24-mile run marathon. I felt the sweat pouring from my forehead and my breathing becoming labored and pronounced. I anticipated being yelled at by my father and made to feel humiliated for being too dumb to pass basic math. I was the subject of much chastisement and ridicule for my academic difficulties from a man who was a whiz with math and numbers in business. He had a low frustration tolerance for my academic “negligence” and short tempered when it came to what he thought was my “intellectual laziness.” I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. I didn’t know where or how to get there. So I escaped to...nowhere.

The way to nowhere was straight up to the garage attic–a place where no one would want to inhabit or visit for any reason. So it was the perfect place for me to just...disappear. It was how my impaired self saw myself. I was made up of skin, organs, cells, and tissue that more closely resembled dirt and spider webs, tucked away in a dark, nasty corner, where no self-respecting person would want to be, as opposed to inside a house that was shared by people who held down jobs and were able to succeed in school and be happy. I left a note that I was going to run away and that I would return someday. I even heard people looking for me in the garage from my hiding abode, above them. I felt like a Greek god amongst the clouds while the lowly humans were on the ground seeking answers to complicated life questions, such as “where is David?”

I finally had to go to the bathroom and had just enough self-respect left in me, to prevent me from going in my pants.

I made the rickety descent down from ‘Mt. Olympus’ to the cement floor of the garage and stumbled into the house as if nothing unusual happened. It was a combination of still being dazed from the failure

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notice, dehydrated from the heat and needing to hit the washroom before it was too late. As I gazed into the bathroom mirror, it looked as if I was dressed in camo gear. I was completely covered in dirt and grime, ready to blend in with any dumpster or garbage heap during a national invasion from some foreign aggressor nation. The only aggressor I ran into however, was my father. For the life of me, I can’t remember what happened once he and I made eye contact. To tell you the truth, I’m not digging deep to try to recall it, either.

I’m choosing to let sleeping dogs lie, because I know it was bad, don’t have the stamina to go there and besides, the salient part of this story has been told. That is to bring attention to the impaired self of children with disabilities, who’s even most caring and sensitive parents can overlook or fail to realize it exists within the heart and soul of their struggling child. Just as my bipolar neighbor hid behind drugs and my bipolar friend hid behind suicide, I hid in a garage attic. It makes you wonder where many of our hurting children hide from the pain of their impaired selves. Unruly behavior? Passive aggressiveness? Facial and bodily tics? Stuttering? Social isolation? Overeating? School refusal? Obsessive video gaming? Bullying? Being victimized? Procrastination? Somatic complaints? Bedwetting? Cruelty to other children and animals? Fire setting? Selective mutism? Obsessive-compulsive behavior? School refusal? I see these all as various problems and diagnoses. I also see them as potential expressions of an impaired self behind them all.

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“Nothing good comes from hiding in the shadows.�

- D. Broughton

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Recommendations If parents, guardians, teachers, physicians, and other service providers are to be part of the solution instead of the problem, we will benefit from the following: knowing more about the impaired self; how it affects our children; how the intersection between disability and society creates and perpetuates it; and how we can counteract it by helping our children in their struggles to maintain a sense of dignity, self-respect, honor, and joy in life. We can progress in this area with an outreach of practical knowledge and application. Outreach of the impaired self at the university level include disability studies, education, special education, psychology, psychiatry, social work, counseling, physical/occupational/speech therapy, and pediatric medicine. Parent and professional workshops would also be a recommendation to disseminate the knowledge and further stimulate dialog and exploration, regarding the impaired self.

We cannot afford to hide from the need or responsibility to share this critical information with those who are responsible for the welfare of our children with impairments and disabilities, who could otherwise use that knowledge to help build a healthy and vital sense of self as never before imagined.

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Why Poetry?

Remember at the beginning of this dissertation, when I had said one of the primary reasons for this undertaking was to inspire people? Well, that is one reason I am concluding with poetry. Note the following statement by poet, Marc Polonsky (Polonsky, 2001) ) from the introduction to his book, The Poetry Reader’s Toolkit: “Poetry is words, chosen and arranged in such a way as to inspire the imagination.”

How fitting to end this dissertation on the same note as it started, with a desire to inspire. In this case, my quest is to inspire you, the reader to give careful thought and consideration to the information and personal stories which I have so earnestly presented, so that you may not only be inspired to appreciate the role of art in discovery of the impaired self, but also its ability to help integrate a healthy sense of self with one’s disability characteristics and related challenges. In addition, it is my hope that you will aspire to inspire disabled individuals whether it be a student, patient, client or your own child to rise above the tendency to identify with and function from the limitations of one’s impaired self. And finally to inspire you to take part in championing the cause of choosing behaviors and actions that will support the positive growth of a healthy, integrated self for those with disabilities,.

For the reader who may be unfamiliar with Quatrain, the type of poetry I am using for this conclusion, it is constructed according to the following rules: The poem is comprised of 16 lines, divided into 4 sections of 4 lines each. Each line must be comprised of exactly 8 syllables. A refrain is also required, which originates from the first line of the first section. This line then becomes the second line in the second section of the poem, the third line of the third section and the fourth line in the fourth section. Finally, the use of rhyme is up to the

Some the note keythat words my follow discretion of the writer.ofPlease I havefound reservedin the usepoems of rhyme that primarily for my final poem in this series.

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Why Poetry?

Remember at the beginning of this dissertation, when I had said one of the primary reasons for this undertaking was to inspire people? Well, that is one reason I am concluding with poetry. Note the following statement by poet, Marc Polonsky (Polonsky, 2001) ) from the introduction to his book, The Poetry Reader’s Toolkit: “Poetry is words, chosen and arranged in such a way as to inspire the imagination.”

How fitting to end this dissertation on the same note as it started, with a desire to inspire. In this case, my quest is to inspire you, the reader to give careful thought and consideration to the information and personal stories which I have so earnestly presented, so that you may not only be inspired to appreciate the role of art in discovery of the impaired self, but also its ability to help integrate a healthy sense of self with one’s disability characteristics and related challenges. In addition, it is my hope that you will aspire to inspire disabled individuals whether it be a student, patient, client or your own child to rise above the tendency to identify with and function from the limitations of one’s impaired self. And finally to inspire you to take part in championing the cause of choosing behaviors and actions that will support the positive growth of a healthy, integrated self for those with disabilities,.

For the reader who may be unfamiliar with Quatrain, the type of poetry I am using for this conclusion, it is constructed according to the following rules: The poem is comprised of 16 lines, divided into 4 sections of 4 lines each. Each line must be comprised of exactly 8 syllables. A refrain is also required, which originates from the first line of the first section. This line then becomes the second line in the second section of the poem, the third line of the third section and the fourth line in the fourth section. Finally, the use of rhyme is up to the discretion of the writer. Please note that I have reserved the use of rhyme primarily for my final poem in this series.

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I did not know about the car I did not know about the car I was knocked unconscious-out cold I woke up in the hospital I wound up having brain damage

I should not have gone to that store I did not know about the car The results became my burden To deal with the rest of my life

I acquired seizure disorder And then bipolar disorder I did not know about the car I could not predict my future

It’s been a long road and climb There have been valleys and mountains I fell many times but got up I did not know about the car

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I always had trouble in school I always had trouble in school It was difficult to keep up I tried real hard to compensate But I still fell short of good grades

My self esteem was rock bottom I always had trouble in school My identity was tarnished I grew up thinking I was dumb

Things got worse for me in college I kept losing and missing things I always had trouble in school I would lose my way on campus

I started to feel out of it It became quite disconcerting It turned out I had seizures then I always had trouble in school

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Welcome to being bipolar Welcome to being bipolar Mania hit me like lightning Like a live lobster in a pot I didn’t know I was boiling

I liked feeling like a live wire Welcome to being bipolar With mania, anything goes Including your sense of reason

But then the polar opposite Depression sets in and it’s hell Welcome to being bipolar Feels like a dark place forever

An emptiness that can’t be filled One hundred lashes to the heart And massive lesions to the brain Welcome to being bipolar

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Erratic behavior ruled me Erratic behavior ruled me I was no longer in control I wondered what happened to me An alien overtook me

Like a bull in a china shop Erratic behavior ruled me I was bucking the social rules The whole time i was unaware

Being awake for days on end Crossing the line and spending sprees Erratic behavior ruled me I didn’t know what was happening

And then it struck me all at once Something was really wrong with me I found myself in a psych ward Erratic behavior ruled me

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I was a good husband and dad I was a good husband and dad And then bipolar disorder I became very short tempered I distanced myself from loved ones

Transgressions took them all away I was a good husband and dad I’ve always missed my family Missed the person I used to be Still not sure who I’ve become

Bipolar changed the course of time My children did not deserve it I was a good husband and dad My family suffered greatly

It’s been said that time heals all wounds But what if they keep opening?

A never ending tragedy I was a good husband and dad

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s

It happened in a class of mine It happened in a class of mine We were talking racial issues The prof tried to end our group talk She stifled our free flow of thoughts

I got mad and stormed out the door It happened in a class of mine I was manic and then exposed A side of me they never saw

I met with that same professor I was captive in her office It happened in a class of mine I then was told to tow the line

She wasn’t surprised about my rant She said ‘she had me pegged before’ Still now I think back to that time It happened in a class of mine

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I was left with such raw feelings I was left with such raw feelings I’ve never felt like that before Humiliation, confusion I felt like hiding from the world

I could have used an attic then I was left with such raw feelings I had to process what happened I had to rid it out of me

A demon hiding in myself Not where it was supposed to be I was left with such raw feelings I knew I had to set it free

I delved inside my feeble brain To grab that scary entity It was out and became my art I was left with such raw feelings

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I sensed my artwork was profound I sensed my artwork was profound It showed what was inside of me Like scars from stigma, pain and hurt I was not considered normal

I became a ‘crazy’ person I sensed my artwork was profound My artwork always centered me I had dominion over fear

The world needed to see this art What society does to me!

I sensed my artwork was profound This is what has become of me

Serendip posted my artwork Students then interpreted it-They arrived at major insights I sensed my artwork was profound

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Art depicts all my true feelings Art depicts all my true feelings Art reveals society’s gaze Art reflects my spoiled identity Art displays my innermost scars

Constant struggling impairs my self Art depicts all my true feelings Embarrassment and shame cut deep I make mistakes and have faux pas

People judge and have even sneered Lack trust in my abilities Art depicts all my true feelings And then they infantilize me

The worst part of being bipolar People praise me for being brave And then I see them turn away Art depicts all my true feelings

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f

You can make my burden lighter You can make my burden lighter Know you contribute to my mood Take a moment to understand Some of the things you say and do

Please try to think before you speak You can make my burden lighter Social policies can be made To give my disorder honor

And do remember artwork’s role It’s saved my body, mind and soul You can make my burden lighter You can be a ‘freedom’ fighter

In truth, sickness lies not in me It lies within society You can make the self glow brighter You can make my burden lighter

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Appendix Artwork Page

Title

Year

Artist

Medium

Cover

Bless You, Bless Me

2011

David Feingold

Digital

3, 4

Self-portrait

2012

David Feingold

Digital

5

A Penchant for Pondering

2009

David Feingold

Digital

7

Praying Hands

c1508

Albrecht Durer

Drawing

11

Self-portrait

2012

David Feingold

Digital

13

Judd

2012

David Feingold

Digital

15

Tightlipped

2010

David Feingold

Digital

18

Spiderman

2011

David Feingold

Digital

20

Teacherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Pet

2010

David Feingold

Digital

23

Phoenix

NA

Public Domain

NA

25

Cloverleaf

NA

Public Domain

Photo

26

House and Cloverleaf

NA

Public Domain

Photo

27

Pat the Bunny

1940

Dorothy Kunhardt

Book

29

Taking Oliver for a Walk

2011

David Feingold

Digital

30

Take What Used to Be Me

2012

David Feingold

Digital

31

Back to School

2008

David Feingold

Digital

33

How Much?!!!

2012

David Feingold

Digital

34

County Fair

2011

David Feingold

Digital

263

Page

Title

Year

Artist

Medium

35

Art Therapy

2012

David Feingold

Digital

36

A Brush with Advocacy

2012

David Feingold

Digital

37

Disability Poster

c1990

Syracuse Univ. Archives

Printed

38

Self Portrait

1889

Vincent van Gogh

Painting

C

Card Players

1892

Paul Cezanne

Painting

38

Sistine Chapel

c1512

Michelangelo

Painting

39

Code Red. Ward B.

2009

David Feingold

Digital

40

Trial By Fire

2012

David Feingold

Digital

49

Saturn Devouring One of His Children

c1819

Francisco Goya

Painting

43!

!

!

Geopoliticus! !

!

!

!

1943! !

!

Salvidore Dali!

!

Painting

43!

!

!

Sleep !!

!

!

!

!

1937! !

!

Salvidore Dali!

!

Painting

44!

!

!

Pyromaniac! !

!

!

!

2010! !

!

David Feingold!

!

Painting

45!

!

!

The Sick Child!

!

!

!

1885! !

!

Edvard Munch!

!

Painting

45!

!

!

Melancholy ! !

!

!

!

1896! !

!

Edvard Munch!

!

Painting

45!

!

!

The Dead Mother and Child!

!

c1897!!

!

Edvard Munch!

!

Painting

46 !

!

!

The Scream! !

!

!

!

1893! !

!

Edvard Munch!

!

Painting

48!

!

!

Thomas Zsasz!

!

!

!

2012! !

!

David Feingold!

!

Digital

49!

!

!

Shedding Light on Szasz! !

!

2012! !

!

David Feingold!

!

Digital

50!

!

!

Charles Manson!

!

!

!

NA !

!

!

Public Domain!

!

Photos

51!

!

!

Mental Hospital!

!

!

!

1953! !

!

Public Domain!

!

Film

52!

!

!

Bumper Sticker!

!

!

!

1996! !

!

Public Domain!

!

Printed

54!

!

!

Michel Foucault!

!

!

!

NA !

!

David Feingold!

!

Digital

264

!

Page

Title

Year

Artist

Medium

56!

!

!

Panopticon! !

!

!

!

NA !

!

!

David Feingold!

!

Digital

59!

!

!

Sigmund

!

!

!

2012! !

!

David Feingold!

!

Digital

! !

62

Arrangement in Gray

1872

James Whistler

Painting

66

Coming to Grips

2010

David Feingold

Digital

68

Mother Awaiting Surgery

2013

David Feingold

Digital

81

Arm Wrestle

NA

Public Domain

Photo

83

Domestic Demon

2012

David Feingold

Digital

85

Hopi Mother and Babe

NA

Edward Curtis

Photo

89

Doctors and Nurses

NA

Public Domain

Photo

92, 94

Goose

NA

Public Domain

Photo

96

Proposal Elements Box

2012

David Feingold

Digital

99

Dissertation Narratives for Dummies

2012

David Feingold

Digital

102

Vortex

2012

David Feingold

Digital

104

Bullâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Eye Diagram

2012

David Feingold

Digital

105

Bad Karma

2009

David Feingold

Digital

107

Left for Dead

2009

David Feingold

Digital

109

Back to School

2010

David Feingold

Digital

111

Early Premonition

2010

David Feingold22

Digital

113

Falling Dominoes

NA

David Feingold

Digital

115

Dancing Stick Figure

NA

Public Domain

Drawing

119

Post-Ictal

2011

David Feingold

Digital

121

This Is How We Found Him

2010

David Feingold

Digital

265

Page

Title

Year

Artist

Medium

123

Mardi Gras

2011

David Feingold

Digital

125

I’m Just Like Everyone Else

2011

David Feingold

Digital

129

Can’t See Past My Depression

2009

David Feingold

Digital

132

Chewing Me Out

2010

David Feingold

Digital

133

Losing My Group

2010

David Feingold

Digital

136

Story of My Life

2011

David Feingold

Digital

137

Memories of Jane

2010

David Feingold

Digital

139

Crossing the Line

2009

David Feingold

Digital

141

Remorse

2009

David Feingold

Digital

143/228

Asylum

2010

David Feingold

Digital

146

Seeking Asylum

2010

David Feingold

Digital

147/246

Code Red. Ward B.

2010

David Feingold

Digital

149

Lights Out

2009

David Feingold

Digital

152

Slip Knot

2010

David Feingold

Digital

153

Rite of Passage

2009

David Feingold

Digital

155

News Break

2012

David Feingold

Digital

157

Dr. Greendale

2012

David Feingold

Digital

159

Out of the Picture

2010

David Feingold

Digital

161/247

Always on My Mind

2011

David Feingold

Digital

167

Can’t Remember when...

2011

David Feingold

Digital

169

ByePolar

2009

David Feingold

Digital

173/248

Coming Out

2009

David Feingold

Digital

266

Page

Title

175

Year

Artist

Medium

A Disabled Doctoral Student Comes Out 2009

David Feingold

Digital

177, 252

Eternal Connection

2010

David Feingold

Digital

179

Inside Out Marquis

2012

David Feingold

Digital

182, 205, 225

Inside Out

2009

David Feingold

Digital

183, 250

Prof Paul Grobstein

2012

David Feingold

Digital

186-190

Serendip Images

2008

David Feingold

Digital

191

Art Image Concepts Organizer

2012

David Feingold

Digital

194

Far and Away

2012

David Feingold

Digital

195

Bipolar Impaired Self

2012

David Feingold

Digital

199

I Had a Dream About Blintzes

2012

David Feingold

Digital

200

Spawning Tuna

2012

David Feingold

Digital

203

So What if Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m Bipolar...

2011

David Feingold

Digital

206

Vietnamese Burn Victim

2007

207

Cracked Window

2013

Re-Surge International David Feingold David Feingold

211

Impaired/Integrated Self Diagram

2013

David Feingold

Digital

212

Why Have You Forsaken Me?

2010

David Feingold

Digital

233

You Can Run But You Canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Hide

2012

David Feingold

Digital

234

Running From Myself

2009

David Feingold

Digital

242

Word Cloud

2013

David Feingold

Digital

212

Why Have YouForsaken Me?

2011

David Feingold

Digital

219

Transformation

2013

David Feingold

Digital

226

Time Out

2012

David Feingold

Digital

267

Digital/ Photo Digital

Page

Title

Year

Artist

Medium

231

A Vital Bedside Manner

2012

David Feingold

Digital

246

My Tortured Student Soul

2009

David Feingold

Digital

248

Coming Out

2008

David Feingold

Digital

269

Sharon’s Leg

2010

David Feingold

Digital

269

Mysteries of Knee Replacement

2010

David Feingold

Digital

270

Attic

2012

Fair Use

Photo

270

You Can Run But Not Hide

2012

David Feingold

Digital

271

Mass “Appeal”

2012

David Feingold

Digital

271

Disappearance of the Angel of Light

2011

David Feingold

Digital

271

Her Mind is Definitely Twisted

2011

David Feingold

Digital

271

Window Pain

2011

David Feingold

Digital

271

Psychologist

2011

David Feingold

Digital

271

He is Healing Quite Nicely

2011

David Feingold

Digital

272

Put on a Happy Face

2011

David Feingold

Digital

272

Catacombs of the Impaired Self

2010

David Feingold

Digital

272

Master of His Destiny

2010

David Feingold

Digital

272

Outgoing Personality

2011

David Feingold

Digital

272

Reflection of the Impaired Self

2011

David Feingold

Digital

272

Post-Ictal Confusion

2011

David Feingold

Digital

272

Abandoned

2011

David Feingold

Digital

272

Primitive State of Mind

2010

David Feingold

Digital

272

My Guardian Angels

2010

David Feingold

Digital

268

About My Images Interestingly enough, when I first started making my images, I had no real preconception of how I would put them together. All I knew was, I had an overwhelming urge to make pictures. I remember distinctly sitting at my laptop computer, grabbing pictures and then melding them with surgical precision, and “working into them” with various photo enhancement programs. As I continued along, I learned the programs and developed my own techniques until I came up with my own visual vocabulary and aesthetic. The two images below, present a good example of how my artwork develops. The picture on the left is a photograph of my sister-in-law’s leg after receiving her knee replacement surgery. She sent me the picture and said, “Do something with it.” The picture on the right is my reinterpretations of the image she sent me. I I call it, “Mystery of Knee Replacement Surgery.”

Notice how the staples become the mouth on the right.

269

Additional Before and After Images

Photo of Attic

No Place to Run

270

Additional Images

The following are some additional images that I have done in the processing of my experience with bipolar disorder. What I find fascinating is that not only are my images capable of accurately illustrating the text and narrative stories of this dissertation, I see how as I was making the images, they were each contributing to a linear story about my bipolar experience.

Mass â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Appeelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

Window Pain

Disappearance of the Angel of Light

Psychologist

271

Her Mind is Definitely Twisted

He is Healing Quite Nicely

Put on a Happy Face

Catacombs of the Impaired Self

Master of His Destiny

The

Reflection of the Impaired Self

Outgoing Personality

Post-Ictal Confusion

are some

Abandoned

following additional

Primitive State of Mind

272

My Guardian Angels

273

D

F

A

E

I

V

N

I

G

274

O

D

L

D

275