No Heads, and While You’re at it, Throw Out the Pill Bottles

I started teaching students how to think and work creatively before I had the confidence to take my own creative practice seriously. My first teaching job was in the team-taught course

“History of Madness,” in Ryerson University’s Disability Studies undergraduate program.

Groundbreaking in both pedagogical style and content, this course taught from the framework that grew into Mad Studies before the field was named as such. As written elsewhere, the creative elements of the course have been integral to its very makeup. For instance, creative work is carefully woven into the lecture material. Students engage with anti-stigma campaigns, culture jamming ads, zines, and documentaries as a way to discern the prevalence of the

biomedical model in the world around us as well as to recognize examples of how to respond to this through a Mad Studies framework. Throughout seminar work, students are encouraged to use creative practices such as visual mapping, drawing, zine making, culture jamming, and button making in order to work through concepts, think about things differently, and approach the classroom in a way that is non-normalizing. For some students this is exciting: an opportunity to approach their thinking, learning, and working through academic spaces and ideas differently.

For other students this element of the course is confusing, uncomfortable, and is what I

understand to be unintelligible. In my early years of teaching, this was baffling to me: why were students so upset about a shift in the status quo? Through the years I have come to learn that there are many reasons that students do not find the integration of creative practices as comfortable within academic classrooms.

The students are given an option to complete their final assignment as a creative project instead of a written essay. Providing students with the option of a creative assignment has many benefits. First, the use of creative assignments in humanities courses is seen as a way of

approaching assessment strategies in a more open and flexible way. Allowing the students to develop a creative project, with guidance and support, is a way that creates more universally accessible spaces. Working in a Disability Studies program has me aware of the impossibility of creating learning environments that are entirely universal in terms of access and

accommodations. However, creating such openness in a final assignment allows students to work from a space of what Carmen Papalia (2018) describes as “open access.” As such, the student and instructor develop a trust that provides the student space to shape their knowledge translation in a way that makes sense to them. However, beyond notions of access and inclusion, the use of creative practices in a Mad Studies classroom is significant in other ways.

This, however, is all a bit of an aside, context to get into what I am really thinking about here. Information, because if I had started off this section by simply stating “no heads!,” you would probably be just as confused as my students often are when I make this declaration in the parameters of the creative assignment. The course has been taught by a succession of

mad-identified and mad-allied instructors. For a variety of reasons, most of which can be related to the reality of the neoliberal university and the increasing reliance on precarious contract lecturers, there are constant shifts in the makeup of the team. With these shifts come academics with different research, academic, and pedagogical specialties, which help to build on and adapt the delivery of the course (including but not limited to the final assignment structure). A benefit of having taught the course for over ten semesters with my various team members is that I have seen a wide range of final creative projects. And one thing that has become overwhelmingly clear is that two of the most common aesthetic markers of art that explores issues of madness is 1) the imagery of the head (materialized in many different formats and mediums) and 2) pill bottles and/or pills. At the outset, these ideas can seem too simple, derivative, and cliché.

This is not a section about teaching or pedagogy. However, the above context is necessary in understanding the strength of cultural markers of madness that focus on the individual

experience, contested scientific claims of the biological nature of madness, and the role of the psy industries in shaping how we frame mad people and our responses to them. Art made by and

about mad people needs to be examined for the ways it has been mobilized as what Foucault (1977) describes as a biopolitical tool. In essence, art can be understood as a method employed to control the lives of mad people. Further, we can see how art is used to inform how we define and respond to mad experiences. The connections between the psychiatric gaze, through art and occupational therapy, and the mad artist develop an inextricable link between the biopathography (the pathological biography) of the mad artist and their artistry. As a result, both the artwork and the artist are interpreted through biomedical models of madness. Through these efforts, we can come to see how mental illness is reified through the construction of the mad artist, as well as through societal responses and reactions to mad people’s acts of creative production. In these ways the art is not simply representational of the mad experience but materializes mental illness into our social consciousness. As a result, the signs, symbols, and signifiers of the biomedical model become inextricably linked to our cultural understanding of mental illness through

creative work. Mad art, as I interrupt with the following outlining of my project, destabilizes the continual referencing of mental illness by calling on new signs, symbols, and signifiers.