Nubuke Foundation, Accra
Is mental health merely the absence of mental illness?
Are all mental illnesses madness?
How does it feel to live with a mental illness?
Who provides the best care: the psychiatrist, the pastor, or the shrine priest?
Can the creative arts help us prevent or transcend mental illness?
Twenty-five percent of us, according to global statistics, are likely to experience serious mental disorders such as depression, substance abuse disorders, psychosis, and schizophrenia. In Ghana, individuals suffering from serious disorders do not get the quality treatment they deserve. The entire country is served by three psychiatric hospitals, all of which are located in the south. These compete with the more accessible, but clinically problematic, religion-based services such as prayer camps and traditional shrines.
We do not have enough mental health professionals. At last count, in 2005, the entire country (population: 21,029,853) was served by 15 psychiatrists, 468 psychiatric nurses, 132 community psychiatric nurses, 1 psychologist, 6 social workers, and 1 occupational therapist. Health policymakers continually marginalize mental health, allocating approximately 1% of the health budget to mental health. This budget is largely allocated to the psychiatric hospitals, leaving community mental health services with virtually no funds. Yet the hospitals face constant financial crises so extreme they are often forced to borrow money to feed patients. This state of affairs presents great challenges for preventing mental illness in the general population or helping mental illness sufferers to recover and rehabilitate their lives.
This exhibition has two aims. First, it aims to facilitate dialogue on the personal, medical, and political challenges in mental health through art. It focuses on what comes to the minds of many when they hear the phrase “out of your mind”: madness, the mad, danger, otherness, self-protection, fear, pity, and other mixed thoughts and emotions. Psychiatric patients, artists, mental health researchers, and professionals explore these issues through paintings, sculpture, sketches, photography, printmaking, prose, and poetry.
The second aim is to examine what role the creative arts can play in mental illness prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation in Ghana. There is increasing scientific evidence to suggest that creative arts improve mental health status in concrete ways. Music reduces levels of anxiety, depression, and epileptic seizures. Dance aids the healing process for trauma and psychotic illness. Visual arts facilitate emotional expression and neuro-cognitive regeneration.
The core of the exhibition focuses on collaborative work by the visual artist Bernard Akoi-Jackson and patients at Pantang Psychiatric Hospital. Through this work, we enter the experiential worlds of the mentally ill and explore the ways in which engagement with the creative arts transforms their lives and the lives of the therapists who work with them.