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Minds Matter Magazine Volume II Issue I Arts & Media
Theme
Advisor
As an educator, there are few things more gratifying than stepping back and enabling students
to independently realize their own creative academic projects. As Theme Advisor, I have had
the pleasure of witnessing the assembly of an issue by a remarkable team of undergraduates
at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Over the past year, Minds Matter Magazine’s student
journalists, graphic designers, illustrators, and editors have worked hard to explore the vast
and challenging issue of mental health. I commend their dedication to presenting some of the
many ways that the arts and media influence perceptions of mental health and illness.
Why “Arts and Media”? For some readers, this issue’s focus on creative activity may
seem like a whimsical, maybe even trivial, approach to the topic of mental health. However,
the growth of arts-based health research methods and interdisciplinary fields of study
like Health Humanities indicate how the human imagination—that is, how we imagine what
mental health and illness is or could be—can enrich conventional therapeutic approaches for
people living with conditions like depression, or enhance health care relationships by making
research accessible beyond academia. In this issue, several articles and creative contributions
address the therapeutic benefits of the arts, including an interview with Workman Arts, a
Toronto-based organization dedicated to empowering artists with mental illness and addiction
issues. A growing evidence base further indicates that participation in the arts is a low-cost,
low-risk, and practical enhancement of conventional mental health care. Arts- and humanities-based
approaches to health may even have benefits for health care workers and informal
caregivers themselves, a phenomenon that UK-based health researcher Paul Crawford calls
“mutual recovery” (2013).
The arts hold the potential to delight,nourish, soothe, and heal. But the therapeutic potential
of the arts must not overwhelm another equivalent reality: that the arts are a powerful
mode of communication that shape, for better and for worse, what it means to live with mental
illness. A range of critical and creative contributions to this issue therefore attend to art’s
unsettling potential to confront, antagonize, intimidate, even traumatize its audience—effects
that may be enhanced by popular art forms that are widely disseminated through media platforms
old and new. As someone with a research background both in the humanities and the
health sciences, I have always been mystified by people who describe the arts and humanities
as “soft” (as opposed to the so-called “hard” sciences). Make no mistake: art is spiky, barbed,
and caustic just as often as it appears otherwise. The essays, poems, and articles of this issue
grapple with this risky reality of art’s relationship to mental health. I encourage you to read on
and consider how we might take better care of ourselves—and each other—as a result.
Dr. Andrea Charise
Assistant Professor of Health Studies,
University of Toronto Scarborough
Associate Faculty,
Graduate Department of English,
Core Faculty, Collaborative Graduate Program in Women’s Health
University of Toronto
Reference:
Paul Crawford, Lydia Lewis, Brian Brown, Nick
Manning. “Creative Practice as Mutual Recovery
in Mental Health.” Mental Health Review
Journal, 18.2 (2013): 55-64.
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