Irena Ellis
Age: 46
London, UK
Title of Artwork: Everyday Courages
Year Created: 2011
Medium of Artwork: digital photography
Statement: Arting…anything life brings and can be processed through throwing some art at it. That is my process and work. Arting on.
Steve Bates
Age: 70
USA
Title of Artwork: Liminal
Year Created:
Medium of Artwork: Acrylics
Statement: Short Biography: A biography of a lifetime, not in its greatness, but in its brevity. I did this and that for many odd years, and I’ve done that and this, and I’ve shed my tears. And now, speed biographing, 200 or less. Ah, a lifetime, gawd what a mess. I want to be known, but not defined. I will be honest, but not malign. Show me your wisdom, and I’ll show you mine. That’s what I’ve done, and who I am, in this life sublime.
Ulrike Griep
Age: 62
Norge – Norway
Title of Artwork: Noise
Year Created: 2018
Medium of Artwork: pencildrawing
Statement: The artwork titled “2. Noise” was drawn by my 19 years old daughter Birka Griep (1999-2023) on 20th august 2018. “Noise” is the second drawing in a set of two, titled “Mental breakdown”.
I’ve seen these pencil drawings, some others images and a couple of handwritten textes from Birka, first time after Birkas death.
Incredible, nearly incredible news.
I did have known and know something about lifeoccurences in our family which have been irritating the lifes of family members in difficulty, individually and personally ways.
I didn’t have known how strong Birkas life has been touched from the psychiatrian practises.
After a lonely, horrible and heavy experience which had happend inside the psychiatry, Birka obviously was able to react to the world outside herself in a artistic and directly way.
The drawing says something about feelings while the kind of the drawing is mediating some of Birkas artifically skills. It’s telling a heavy story from her lifetime – without words. A story from not inside a prison – but from inside a psychiatric clinic.
I guess such artistic skills helped Birka a lot to overcome a couple of stays in the psychiatry.
Birka was a smart individual of diverse talents and interests, deeply knowledgeable and highly sensitive.
Steven T. Licardi
Age: 37
U.S. New York
Title of Artwork: “2020 in Retrospect”
Year Created: 2020
Medium of Artwork: Collage on canvas
Statement: Steven T. Licardi is a mad / neurodivergent social therapist, science fiction writer, spoken word poet, multidisciplinary artist, and performance activist. His work sits at the intersections of art and social policy, wondering: How do we create the futures we want with the histories we have? He travels internationally using the power of stories to create empathic dialogue around, to confront the realities of, and to assist communities in confronting historic narratives surrounding mental health and madness. Steven maintains a monthly sci-fi newsletter – “Cross My Heart And Hope To Write” – that regularly appears in the Top 100 Fiction on Substack.
TikTok: @thesvenbo
Instagram: @thesvenbo
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheSvenBo/
Twitter: https://x.com/thesvenbo
Other: https://thesvenbo.substack.com
Heidi Wendell
Age: 65
Montana, USA
Title of Artwork: Where Wellness Begins
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Digital Art Concept Banner (AI-assisted digital illustration)
Statement: Heidi Wendell is the Founder and CEO of the Montana Wellness Project, a nonprofit initiative dedicated to strengthening whole-person wellness across the lifespan through education, community partnerships, and practical, science-informed approaches. Raised on a ranch in the Mountain West, her work is deeply influenced by the rhythms of rural life, the healing power of nature, and the belief that resilient communities are built through connection, compassion, and shared purpose.
Her creative practice blends photography, digital art, storytelling, and design to communicate hope, belonging, and possibility. Rather than creating art simply for decoration, she uses it to invite conversation, encourage reflection, and help people see themselves and their communities through a lens of dignity, strength, and renewal. Much of her work celebrates Montana’s landscapes, families, agriculture, veterans, and everyday people whose quiet resilience often goes unnoticed.
For Heidi, art has become both a personal refuge and a practical tool for healing. During seasons of significant challenge, creating visual stories has provided focus, restored calm, and transformed overwhelming ideas into meaningful expressions that inspire action. It has strengthened her ability to listen deeply, remain grounded in hope, and build bridges among people from diverse backgrounds. She believes art has the unique ability to reach hearts before minds, reminding us of our shared humanity and encouraging communities to imagine healthier futures together—one relationship, one story, and one creative act at a time.
Jeanet Johansen
Age: 49
Norway, Vestfold
Title of Artwork: Limbo
Year Created: 2023
Medium of Artwork: Collage, digital
Statement: When you create a collage with photos of yourself it is almost impossible to lie or embellish. This kind of work has really helped me in the process of becoming “real” with myself and my story.
This piece is called “Limbo”.
A big shift happened when I was 7; my parents went from being healthy to being flooded with their own childhood-trauma brought on by a marital crisis.
In the “big shift” I also went from believing that creativity, openness and autonomy mattered, to experiencing the horror of the school system where the reality was the opposite.
At 25, i found myself again in a “system” (NAV), once again experiencing horror as I was subject to the doctors and psychologists lack of knowledge about the body and the soul.
This collage is showing my limbo-state being stuck in the “system” (NAV) for 23 years, and it is showing some of my fear from experiencing people being an extension of the system; as if their psyche was made from the fabric of the system.
Kai Güthoff
Age: 57
Germany
Title of Artwork: Strommast II
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: lino print
Statement: After more than 20 years of working with traumatized children and adolescents as a special education teacher, I suffered burnout at the age of 57. While in rehabilitation—confronted with my own condition—I (re)discovered art as a form of therapy to help regulate myself during periods of high tension and reduce my reliance on medication. I adopted the motif of electricity pylons as a metaphor for the varying manifestations of my symptoms, expressing this theme through diverse techniques. The work shown here is a white linocut print superimposed on an expressive, cut-up painting created during occupational therapy.
Anna Maniex
Age: 58
United States
Title of Artwork: The Bench Outside My Window
Year Created: 2025
Medium of Artwork: photograph
Statement: I have always found ways to weave art in and out of my life. Over the years, I have explored many forms of creative expression, including performance art, painting, photography, and writing.
These days, I mostly express myself through photography and writing. I love to capture moments outside my apartment window that make me feel some sense of connection and comfort, and help ease my isolation.
How My Art-Making Practice Helps Me During Mental Distress
During times of mental distress, when I feel isolated or am too ill or tired to go outside, I find ways to still connect with the world around me. From behind my dirty apartment windows, I began capturing slices of life I longed to feel connected to.
What began as one photograph of a bench became an obsession with the life of the bench and all the people, animals, and stories that rested on it. I began capturing the bench through every season and time of day—with people seated on it, other times a dog or a squirrel, and sometimes the bench sitting alone under a blanket of freshly fallen snow. One terribly windy fall day, I woke up to find the bench had blown over onto the sidewalk, upside down.
The simple act of capturing these moments brings me comfort, joy, and a sense of being included in the world beyond my window. Photography helps ease my isolation by reminding me that I am not alone.
Nicole Corrado
Age: 38
Canada, Quebec, Beaconsfield
Title of Artwork: Shy On Camera
Year Created: 2020
Medium of Artwork: Colour pencil and marker
Statement: I am autistic and visual art and music helps express my thoughts, feelings, and creates metaphors for what I am experiencing. Blue Panda is like an alter ego. They express my playful and anxious side.
Instagram: @NicoleCorradoArt
Valerie Dalton
Age: 76
United Kingdom
Title of Artwork: Dirty Little Sinner
Year Created: 2018
Medium of Artwork: two-part foam and resin
Statement: This installation, depicting a dream in 2008, was made in 2018 for an MA in Authorial Illustration. I understood it represented my own dissociated, fragmented seven-year-old self, from when I was beaten by my father with his belt. While making the installation, I inwardly heard myself at age two, abandoned in an Irish fever hospital, repeatedly being called a “dirty little sinner!” by the nuns there. Thus it became the title. Art was my joy, purpose and meaning from the moment I could hold a pencil. I was told I never stopped drawing. Therefore, at age thirty-seven, after six drugged, psychotic, hospitalised breakdowns, I questioned why I could not remember ever feeling any joy. At twenty-five I had been told I had an incurable, hereditary chemical imbalance requiring lifelong medication. Later re-diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and now CPTSD, it took a car crash at age thirty-eight to shock the forgotten knowledge of having been sexually abused from toddlerhood to my teens into my awareness. Working with dreams and the unconscious in psychotherapy, and off all drugs since 2003, I drew countless terrifying flashbacks over forty years, healing, embodying and making meaning from lifelong deep depressions and a previously meaningless existence. This work also speaks to a lifetime of being silenced. Art gave me back my voice and saved my life.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/daltonvalerie91
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/valerie.dalton.589
Mile Lex Franke
Age: 35
Germany
Title of Artwork: Aus dem Häuschen/Leaving the comfort zone
Year Created: 2022
Medium of Artwork: Oil on paper
Statement: My artist name is Mile Fiori. I am a disabled, mad, queer artist and activist from Germany.
I am self-taught and mainly work with oil paint, but I also use polymer clay and like to experiment with different materials and media. My art grows out of personal emotions, lived experiences, and outside influences, all woven together in the black box of my mind. Turning my inner chaos into weird, colourful artworks feels liberating and empowering.
Making art has helped me cope with the experience of psychiatric violence, antidepressant withdrawal, and overwhelming emotions.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mile_fiori
Kamomilla Isaksen
Age: 50
Norway
Title of Artwork: Grådige hender
Year Created: 2025
Medium of Artwork: Papp saks tusj og lim
Statement: Jeg har hatt en lang reise i psykiatrien med flere diagnoser. Jeg har de siste årene fått god hjelp og støtte og trappet mye ned på medisin og da dukket det opp en historie jeg ikke var klar over at jeg eide. i min barndom var det flere nære voksne som forsynte seg av kroppen min. Noe som gjorde meg grenseløs i forhold til min egen kropp og førte meg inn i mange vanskelige situasjoner i årevis etterpå. Jeg har også vært fostermor til en veldig syk tenåring, noe som gjorde meg sekundærtraumatisert. På min reise i psykiatrien har jeg lært mye, men det å bruke kunst og ord for å akseptere min egen historie har vært forløsende i min prosess.
Hvordan kunstnerisk aktivitet hjelper meg:
Når jeg lager mine naive bilder med papp, saks og lim er det som om historien min siver ut i hendene mine og legger seg på papiret og når jeg har fullført det er det som om litt av historien min har flyttet seg fra meg å ned i papiret. Den nydelige tomhetsfølelsen jeg sitter med når bildet er ferdig er som en rus av ro. Nå eier bilde litt av historien min og jeg er ikke lengere så ensom i verden.
Jenna Ann Broderick
Age: 47
United States
Title of Artwork: Brave
Year Created: 2023
Medium of Artwork: digital collage
Statement: Jenna Ann is an artist, researcher, educator, and mental health advocate whose intuitive digital collages are grounded in her own lived experience of mental distress. For Jenna Ann, creating art is not simply a way to express emotion. It is how she survives, makes meaning, and reconnects with herself during times of mental distress. Her art-making practice is less about creating images than creating a compassionate conversation with herself. Each collage begins with a single word or feeling and unfolds intuitively, allowing unexpected relationships between images to emerge without forcing an outcome. Through this process, uncertainty becomes curiosity, and creating becomes an act of rediscovering self-trust when trust feels lost. This commitment to honoring intuition and lived experience also shapes Jenna Ann’s research in critical psychology, where she explores more compassionate, justice-centered, and humane approaches to mental health care. Whether through scholarship or art, she hopes to create spaces where complexity is welcomed with curiosity, compassion, and the possibility of connection and healing.
Instagram: girlpushespaint
Rebecca Gonzalez
Age: 35
Ohio, USA
Title of Artwork: Nostalgia
Year Created: 2025
Medium of Artwork: Mixed-Media
Statement: Rebecca Gonzalez is a Columbus, Ohio-based self-taught artist, advocate, and community worker whose practice centers on healing through art. Drawing from lived experience with addiction recovery, mental illness, and disability, their work explores grief, trauma, and the power of interpersonal connection through community. Living with mental illness for most of their life, their recovery journey has been deeply connected to art. Through their creative practice they learned self-worth, self-advocacy, and most importantly, how to heal. Creativity has given them a way to process trauma, communicate emotions, and reconnect with themself during periods where they felt disconnected from the world.
Instagram: http://instagram.com/rgonzoarts
Facebook: http://facebook.com/rgonzoarts
Other: http://rgonzoarts.com
Agnes Menezes
Age: 31
Brazil
Title of Artwork: Born From The Mud
Year Created: 2021
Medium of Artwork: Fabric paint on a denim jacket
Statement: Creating art feels intrinsic to who I am. During my most difficult period (amid the manic episodes and depressive phases associated with bipolar disorder) I dropped out of art school because I couldn’t handle all the suffering I was going through. A few years later, when I was determined to climb out of the depths of despair, I created this artwork as a symbol of struggle and resilience; I refused to give in. I wanted to transmute and purify myself through the wisdom of fire, and just like the lotus that grows from the mud and becomes a beautiful flower, I would heal myself, overcome all that suffering, and be reborn.
Today, I’ve returned to art school and I’m also a tattoo artist; living through art is what keeps me alive. Not every day is easy, but when I look at this piece, I remember who I am and my inner strength.
While I was creating this artwork I wrote this following poem as well:
Quando os pensamentos se atropelam
A arte é a cura
Quando a agonia me rasga
A arte me costura.
(When thoughts collide
Art is the cure
When agony tears me apart
Art stitches me back together)
TikTok: @flesh_mechanic
Instagram: @casa13ink
Moza Ackroyd
Age: 26
England
Title of Artwork: ‘I LOVE YOU’ two handed continuous line drawing
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Pen
Statement: I am a 26-year-old artist with bipolar disorder from the Isle of Wight, UK. Creating and sharing art has helped me find a sense of purpose when I felt I had lost it and has also improved my self-esteem. I feel so relaxed while I am creating art that hours fly by in a state of flow. My art is often inspired by music because I find comfort in lyrics that I can relate to. I also feel that I am bringing something new into the world that wouldn’t be there without me. Sharing my art on social media and connecting with others gives me a sense of community and belonging and contributes to my motivation to create.
TikTok: @paintingapictur3 & @visualisingmusic
Other: YouTube: @visualisingmusic
Rogéria Barbosa
Age: 58
Brazil, Rio de Janeiro
Title of Artwork: Little Eva (Pequena Eva)
Year Created: 2024
Medium of Artwork: Acrylic on canvas
Statement: Rogeria Barbosa is a visual artist, writer, lecturer, and activist in the anti-psychiatric struggle, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1967. With a strong presence in the national and international art scene, her work combines painting, drawing, collage, and embroidery in compositions marked by vibrant colors, emotional depth, and representations of Black women, female sexuality, and the complexities of human identity.
A member of Ateliê Gaia at the Bispo do Rosário Museum of Contemporary Art, Rogéria uses art as an expression of freedom, memory, and resistance. She has participated in important exhibitions and biennials, including the V Bienal de las Artes y La Salud Mental in Cuba and ArtRio, in addition to working as a curator on prominent projects in the contemporary art circuit and being the honorary president of the Zona Mental bloco.
In addition to visual arts, Rogeria is the author of the autobiographical book “A Journey,
A Life, A Choice,” released in 2022, where she transforms experiences, affections, and pains into poetry and artistic expression. Her journey is marked by social commitment, sensitivity to mental health, and the appreciation of the power of Black women.
Instagram: @rogeria3620
Debasnata Choudhury
Age: 30
India
Title of Artwork: Inadequate
Year Created: 2025
Medium of Artwork: Wax crayons, sketch pens, and soft pastels on paper
Statement: Introducing myself has always been a challenge; for over half my life, my identity felt clouded by everything I believed was wrong with me, including diagnoses of anxiety and depression. Worried that my art wouldn’t be ‘good enough,’ I didn’t pick up a crayon for over fifteen years. This piece was my way of finally putting my feelings on paper when I gave myself permission to create simply because I wanted to. It reflects that difficult internal battle: even when surrounded by beautiful qualities, my mind still kept trying to convince me I was inadequate.
Peishan Huang
Age: 55
Taipei
Title of Artwork: Loser: I am Not Me. I am an illusion created by your imagination.
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Digital Film Still
Statement: Born and raised in Taiwan, I excelled academically and achieved my dream of becoming a national television news reporter and anchor. However, marriage brought an unexpected erosion of my identity. Facing severe domestic emotional abuse and isolation from my children, I spent years desperately seeking validation, only to lose myself. The turning point came with a devastating diagnosis: breast cancer, with a 54% five-year survival rate.
I asked myself: If my time is limited, can I finally just be me?
To heal, I turned to filmmaking, creating the series “Loser: I am Not Me.” This 4-minute visual artwork is my reclamation of self. It addresses the emotional prison of being forced into an identity that wasn’t mine—as the title states: “I am an illusion created by your imagination.”
Art became my sanctuary and medicine. By translating my profound grief, illness, and marital trauma into moving images, I am actively deconstructing the stigma of being a “loser.” I am reconstructing my true self-identity, proving that art has the ultimate power to heal the deepest psychological distress.
Setayesh Azadidana
Age: 26
United Kingdom
Title of Artwork: Fathom
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Digital Painting
Statement: I am an Iranian multidisciplinary artist based in Manchester, UK, working across digital painting and traditional media. My practice explores memory, identity, displacement, emotional survival, and the private inner worlds people carry beneath outward stillness.
For me, art has often been the only way to express feelings I could not explain, show, or speak about directly. Painting became a private form of therapy: a way to externalise grief, numbness, and distress, and to find meaning inside pain rather than simply survive it. Through my work, difficult emotions become atmosphere, image, and symbol: something visible, held at a distance, and transformed through making.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/settazadi
Margin Zheng
Age: 25
United States, Pennsylvania
Title of Artwork: As Way Opens
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Vitreous glass mosaic
Statement: I’m a young adult with bipolar, autism, ADHD, and OCD. While these labels do describe my experience in some way, I find that art and spirituality are a deeper and and more essential way of understanding myself. Professionally I am a musician, but I find that making visual art is particularly calming for me because of not needing to be “good” at it. When I am in psychiatric hospitals, art-making using materials like oil pastels helps me to process what I’m experiencing. I created “As Way Opens” when I was in both a mental and spiritual crisis. The title refers to a Quaker saying that encourages people to move forward with patience and intentionality. One cannot rush healing; it comes in its own time.
Other: https://marginalnotes.substack.com/
Stephani Jones
Age: 38
USA, Maryland
Title of Artwork: Rebellious Chick
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: pencil
Statement: Well, I have been using various mediums for artwork since I began school at age 5. I was inspired at a young age by nature, colors, people, animals, and other forms of art to always have motive to improve. I like to freehand draw with shading, paint, sculpt, and use the potter’s wheel.
When I first began art I would do a lot of abstract neographic scribble work, with my ees closed and trace any abstract figure I could depict from it with my eyes open.
This particular exhibit I am honored to share. When I look at it, it makes me thing I would hang out with this chick. The artwork isa seemingly nude woman holding her knees to her chest. I have a tattoo on my mid-back that the “Rebellious Chick” does resemble. The drawing has a great amount of detail in shaded areas such as knees, knuckles, and shoulders. The entire artwork took about two hours. I do believe I gave the lady justice.
In closure, I would like to say, it is a great honor, this is the third exhibit my work has ever been in.
Karen Marshall
Age: 60
UK
Title of Artwork: Mission Boots in Suspended Animation
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Acrylic on canvas with collage elements
Statement: I started to be creative again during a period of acute PTSD whilst working in Afghanistan 4 years ago. Drawing familiar objects from nature & every day life was a great comfort to me during this time. Following many decades working as a surgical nurse in places of conflict with different humanitarian organisations, I could no longer stop the traumatic memories & had to stop the work I had found so meaningful for so long. I began to sculpt in clay & paint & draw subjects of resilience & humanity in an effort to heal through creativity. This was essential for me alongside some intensive psychological care. My work is now metaphoric in nature & my most recent work is a first attempt at an abstract piece
Eddie Kaitz
Age: 72
USA
Title of Artwork: The Rose
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Digital meme of original acrylic on paper
Statement: Misdiagnosed as schizophrenic at age 25, stuck on antipsychotics, 10 years, halfway houses, ridiculous controlled life, problem after problem, rebound art and music, got better help: Shamanism, Buddhism, Depth psychology. I work from internal and external sources, I wanted to be an artist before any mental health drama.
Instagram: Nest_o_passion_cool_art
Anne Hakestad Hansen
Age: 38
Norway
Title of Artwork: Frigjøring (Liberation)
Year Created: 2025/26
Medium of Artwork: Papier-mâché
Statement: I’m an artist from Oslo, Norway. I discovered papier-mâché during a creative workshop and was immediately drawn to its tactile, intuitive nature.
This series of sculptures emerged from a profound existential crisis and the inner transformation that followed. Creating these figures became a way of expressing what I could not yet articulate. Through the process of making, art became a space where suffering could gradually be transformed into meaning.
The sculptures explore themes of fear, innocence, compassion, and transformation. In my work, the Devil is not a symbol of evil, but of the parts of ourselves that become trapped in fear and shame. The child represents our capacity to meet even those parts with openness and compassion. Across the three sculptures, the relationship between these figures shifts—from embrace, to recognition, and finally to surrender and transformation. These symbols have gradually become part of a deeply personal visual language that have been central to my healing process.
For me, this body of work is a reminder that healing is not necessarily about returning to a former self or about becoming someone else, but about learning to meet what exists within us with compassion—and allowing that encounter to transform us.
Pere Galera
Age: 62
Norway
Title of Artwork: ALCHEMY
Year Created: 2025
Medium of Artwork: Liquid asphalt, motor oil, iron oxide, salt, hydrochloric acid and varnish on canvas
Statement: My name is Pere Galera, a visual artist born in Barcelona and based in Norway since 2006. My artistic practice explores the fragility of existence and the tension between progress and destruction. I work with painting, textiles, and industrial materials such as liquid asphalt, oils, and oxides, creating surfaces where processes of oxidation and corrosion function both as method and artistic language. The intrinsic properties of these materials and their unpredictable evolution become an active part of the creative process, revealing states of transformation, vulnerability, and resilience. Through my work, I invite reflection on the fragility of contemporary material, ecological, and social systems.
For me, the artistic process is a tool for reflection, balance, and inner connection. Through artistic practice, I find a space where I can observe, process, and transform personal experiences and complex emotions. Working with materials that evolve in unpredictable ways helps me embrace uncertainty and understand change as a fundamental aspect of existence. The act of making becomes a space of presence and transformation, where what is difficult to express in words can take on a visible form.
Instagram: peregalera_art
Sherri Levine
Age: 57
Oregon, USA
Title of Artwork: Frustrating Mess
Year Created: 2020
Medium of Artwork: Watercolor, Ink
Statement: Sherri Levine is a poet, educator, mental health advocate, and squirrel lover who lives in Portland, Oregon. She spent her career teaching English to immigrants and refugees at colleges and universities. She is the recent recipient of the Patricia Ruth Banta Award which recognizes an individual or group who has offered a significant contribution to Oregon poetry by the Oregon Poetry Association. She has won numerous poetry awards and has written and edited three poetry books and poetry anthologies: Stealing Flowers from the Neighbors, A Joy to See, and I Remember Not Sleeping which is dedicated to those dealing with mental illness or know someone who is suffering from one. Sherri facilitates writing groups locally and nationally for DBSA (Depression & Bipolar Support Alliance). Sherri also offers workshops in person and virtually on how writing is an important tool for mental health. She believes writing saves lives, as it has continued to save hers. She teaches creative writing and poetry classes at an arts center. She has a new anthology forthcoming by Fernwood Press: Waking in the Blue: Poetry & Essays on Mental Health. Please visit her at sherrilevine.com
Other: sherrilevine.com
Aubé-Nicolas
Age: 47
Canada, Québec
Title of Artwork: Laurence Desjardins
Year Created: Décembre 2025
Medium of Artwork: Illustration with m’y Apple Pencil and graphism
Statement: I am “Le Foulosophe Nic,” a multi-indisciplinary artivist—an engaged thinker-artist. Art is the best fuel I know for navigating my personal rollercoasters, growing through my dreams, and journeying toward recovery. My art revolves around mental health.
I focusing largely on mental health. I wants to emphasize that art saved his life. Through the process of art therapy, he forged the backbone needed to overcome 17 years of drug and alcohol addiction. By July 2026, it will have been 17 years since he completely transformed my life.
As a peer trainer since 2016, I put my lived experience to work on projects bridging art and social and social intervention I train future social workers at the University of Sherbrooke and at the Cegep. I also act for role-playing scenarios that simulate the challenges future social workers will face in their careers I am involved in différent mental health alternative-care organization.” Art therapy and my work involving lived experience across various roles help me navigate these different levels effectively. Peer trainer projects have been the ultimate springboard and catalyst for leveraging my strengths through empowerment. They help me transform my difficult past into a force for influence and awareness-raising through my talks, and help me become the best version of myself.
I wear many hats, but they all point in the same direction: transforming lived experience into a lever for change, for myself and for the world.
If Dalí said, “I am the drug,” then I am its side effects.
Instagram: @LE_FOULOSOPHE_NIC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FoulosopheNic
Lauren Wellman
Age: 57
United States
Title of Artwork: Warm, Organic Trellis
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Crayon on Copy Paper
Statement: Lauren Wellman is a writer, tutor, and Zen practitioner based in Tempe, Arizona. She is at work on an essay collection exploring the lived experience of spiritual emergency and the gap between clinical and spiritual framings of altered states of consciousness. Her practice draws on Zen communities in the U.S. and Mexico, Jungian and depth psychology, and years spent living across Latin America. She is developing a parallel body of poetry alongside her prose.
I made this drawing by feel — not looking at the page while my hand moved, and choosing each color by touch instead of sight, reaching into the crayon box and letting my fingers decide. I developed this method during a psychiatric hospitalization, where I first used it to draw a lattice of neural-like forms as a way of showing a doctor something I couldn’t yet say in words: that everything is interdependent, arising in relation to everything else, and that the drawing itself — made without a single controlling hand — was proof of that as much as its subject. I’ve continued the practice since. Taking the deciding, evaluating mind out of the process lets something through that isn’t available when I’m composing on purpose. What’s left on the page feels less like something I made than something I was part of making — which is, I think, close to what art can do for a mind that has been over-surveilled, including by itself.
Peter Schachter
Age: 71
United States
Title of Artwork: A Moment’s Notice
Year Created: 2016
Medium of Artwork: Digital drawing, stylus on touchscreen
Statement: Digital artist using modern medium to create traditional art. Art has been a cathartic experience as it sparks emotions, memories, imagination and the search for something “other/new.”
Nisey Garcia
Age: 47
Las Vegas
Title of Artwork: Blooming from Within
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Acrylic and Oil
Statement: I am a mixed media artist who found refuge in art.
My work explores resilience, hope, and the quiet inner strength that helps us navigate life’s emotional challenges.
Creating art has helped quiet my negative inner voice and soften periods of sadness. When I paint, I feel present and at peace. Time seems to disappear, allowing me to focus only on the creative process.
My hope is that each painting invites viewers to pause, look inward, and reconnect with the hope and strength that already exist within them.
Instagram: nissysshop
Facebook: Nisey Garcia Quintero
Other: www.nissysshop.com
Kristina Gosh
Age: 54
Brookfield, Vermont USA
Title of Artwork: moon garden: angel’s trumpets
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: de/reconstructed mixed-media painting collage on computer generated background {acrylic, upcycled painting remnants coated with acrylic & gesso on watercolor paper, Sharpie on canvas}
Statement: Kristina Gosh is an interdisciplinary artist/educator based in Vermont, USA. Her practice combines yogic principles with installation, sculptural painting, social performance, writing and collage techniques to ponder the organic dichotomies of life . . .
The natural and the synthetic ~ the urban and the rural ~ the modern and the antiquated ~ the balanced and the unstable.
Kristina is deeply inspired by the Fluxus art movement. Slowness, Experimentation and Chance are at the crux of her process.
Kristina has 25+ years of diverse experience as an educator. She has been a college faculty member, instructional designer, arts integration specialist, art camp instructor and an Arts & SEL consultant for public schools. She currently facilitates embodied SEL experiences through art and trauma-informed yoga resources.
Kristina has exhibited and performed her work in Edinburgh, Hamburg, Shanghai, Toronto, Brooklyn, Chicago and across Vermont. She performed Alison Knowles’ Fluxus scores in a concert led by Knowles in Chicago.
Kristina holds a double BA in Studio Art & French from the University of Vermont and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts & Media from Columbia College Chicago. She is certified in youth mental health first aid, trauma-informed yoga education for children and is currently working on her RCYT certification through Yoga Alliance.
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My art practice is a sacred space of pause and slowness.
It nourishes my spirit by activating the creative process through chance and experimentation.
The bipolar disorder I endure demands consistent pause to heal from the toxic speed at which modern society moves . . . I resist it in my sacred space.
Other: kristinagosh.com
Natalie Jukes
Age: 44
Australia
Title of Artwork: Akathisia
Year Created: 2025
Medium of Artwork: Watercolour
Statement: I live in Australia and I am married. I previously worked as a Early childhood teacher for fifteen years but developed akathisia from a pill that was prescribed to me fior situational anxiety.
This watercolour painting is dedicated to the lives that have been lost and the individuals who have experienced the inhumane condition of medication-induced akathisia. As Joseph Glenmullen, M.D. noted, there is an outer restlessness, but the much more important element is an ‘extraordinary state of terror inside a person.’ Physically executing this split-portrait captures that hidden, internal battle.
For me, the practice of watercolor painting acts as a literal sanctuary, a profound release, and a vital distraction required for surviving my days while living with neurological damage. When my nervous system is stuck in severe chemical terror, focusing entirely on mixing pigment, controlling water, and rendering fine details forces my brain to anchor itself in the present moment. It offers a powerful cognitive diversion that interrupts the physical trauma of my symptoms. While this piece reflects a specific injury, it remains open to interpretation, representing the complexities of life we encounter as a human.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natalie_jukes_?igsh=em9qcHo5NGd1ZnFx&utm_source=qr
Emanuela Nelli
Age: 51
Title of Artwork: Pas-Sage au Non-Faire
Year Created: 2005
Medium of Artwork: https://www.swisstransfer.com/d/ec659a95-0bc3-4ba6-b173-669d8829aaca
Statement: She is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker.
She has worked with artists such as Carlotta Ikeda, Ko Murobushi, Josef Nadj, Thierry Bae, Cécile Borne, and Pierre Meunier. In 2000, she created choreography for fashion designer Issey Miyake. Since 2004, she has developed her own creative projects (including *Siyala*, *Ultimo Round*, *Banshees*, *Scorcio*, *Lazo*, and *Hent …par les racines*) under the auspices of the Méharées association. From 2025 she’s co-directing a place in west of France “La Baraque-Méharées”: A space of interculturality, a potential space for encounters that transcend the boundaries of solitude—social, economic, and cultural.
For some twenty-five years, she has collaborated with a wide range of artists and craftspeople (dancers, musicians, poets, visual artists, illustrators, filmmakers, weavers, carpenters, fabricators, etc.). A state-certified professional, she has taught both in France and abroad.
She creates documentary films, including *Pas-sage au Non-Faire*, *Entre-vues*, *Las piedras no se mueven solas*, *mirada Quebrada*, and *Film Ultimo Round*.
https://meharees.wordpress.com/
Other: https://somoscaos.fr/
Jessica Hirst
Age: 55
Dominican Republic
Title of Artwork: Drink, pray, or medicate?
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Performance art
Statement: I am a multidisciplinary artist, working in performance, video, and installation. I work on issues including neurodiversity, psychiatric medication, disability, migration, and climate change. I suffer from long-term adverse effects of psychotropic medications. I have been tapering medication for several years. My art installation “Withdrawal First Aid Kit” was awarded a prize in the 31st Dominican Republic Biennial for Visual Art.
This performance took place at the Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo. I played a psychiatrist handing out random diagnoses, prescriptions, and free pill samples to the public. It was the start of a conversation about what it means to import a manual of diagnoses that was created in a completely different cultural context from the Dominican Republic.
I became an artist as a way to survive catastrophic protracted withdrawal from an antidepressant. I have been a choreographer, teacher and performer. Even on my very worst days, when I was dancing, I wanted to stay alive. I evolved into a performance artist, still focused on processing and expressing through the body. When my ability to express myself in words became compromised, I learned to create visual images that could communicate for me.
I now have a large enough body of work related to medication, mental health, withdrawal, and adverse effects that I have been able to hold exhibitions and cohost workshops that allow me to share, educate, and support a wider community. I love using my work to start conversations with other people about their own experiences.
Instagram: @palmer_fishman_studios
Zarko (pseudonym)
Age: 58
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Title of Artwork: Zarko’s story
Year Created: 2023
Medium of Artwork: Illustration
Statement: From the study ‘Madness after the war’ by Halida Vejzagic and Reima Ana Maglajlic, exploring accounts of distress and support to alleviate it during and after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Because participants in the pilot study wanted their knowledge and experiences promoted, we worked with a Bosnian visual artist Zoran Herceg to help the stories come to life.
Zarko is in his late 50s and from a village in Eastern BiH.
After the Dayton Peace Accords were signed, I moved to the territory of Republic of Srpska [one of the two entities/ main governance levels in Bosnia and Herzegovina].
This illustration is accompanied by Zarko’s story. As there is no place to upload it, it is available here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C48k_W-p_SI/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stories_war_distress/
Tom Schneider
Age: 76
Brooklyn, NY United States
Title of Artwork: My Night Stand
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: oil in canvas/w beer can, small rug and photo
Statement: My paintings are oil on canvas that incorporate 3D objects and flow down, incorporating the floor space. Art is my life.
Other: www.tomschneiderartist.com
Eva Julietta Tortora
Age: 45
United States
Title of Artwork: Lost in Art…..
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Photo
Statement: I love People. I love laughing with people, crying with people. I love working with people. I love uniting with people. I love holding hands with people. I love creating art with people. I love cooking up ideas with people. I love passionately experiencing life with people. Ive been published in 100 newspapers and magazines. I modeled for Oprah Magazine and written music for off Broadway shows. Ive won grants and awards. Thank you to people around me for making this possible! Thank you and love you, Eva Julietta Tortora artist and published writer in NYC
Judith Berman
Age: 70
United States
Title of Artwork: Judy’s Audrey Hepburn Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Acrylic
Statement: Judith Berman
Born in New York City, Judith has lived in the Bronx, is a longtime resident of Queens, and has made art since the age of seven. Her artistic skill was recognized while she was a Brownie, and as a Girl Scout her creations such as yarn dolls earned merit badges. A self-taught artist who admires Andy Warhol, Peter Max, and Marc Chagall, she loves color, working primarily on canvas and sketch pads. She has utilized acrylic, pastel, markers, and pencil and now works exclusively in acrylic marker in vivid hues to create serene images of animals and flowers as well as abstract designs. Judith communicates and expresses her passion through artmaking, which has been instrumental in breaking barriers and in helping her to ease isolation. A daughter of Holocaust survivors, Judith has lived with trauma and depression. She is a homebound, disabled senior who finds peace and harmony through spreading joy through her art. She finds satisfaction in uploading her art images to t-shirts and totes as a means of sharing her work and creating gifts for loved ones.
Instagram: @jmischellberman
Other: Https://sites google.com/view/judyswimz912
Vibeke Heiberg Knagenhjelm
Age: 48
Norway
Title of Artwork: Nobody
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Still from film. Painting, text.
Statement: My artistry is inexorably about the path free from a stuck psychiatric system. I am conscious of composition, color, line and technique, yet I would say that expression is paramount to me. I am an expressive painter who works from emotions such as rage, horror, ultimate hope, desperation, and euphoria.
I am an activist and anti-fascist, and will always fight for human rights, freedom in art and thought, and a strengthened community across groups.
TikTok:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vibeke_knagenhjelm?igsh=ZmY5MWZsNDkza2Zp, https://www.instagram.com/vibekeheibergknagenhjelm?igsh=c2RleXFzNmY4dm40
Other: https://youtube.com/shorts/M5T_Y1xD0E0?is=9KC6CURxqGfo0Aei
Sarah England
Age: 61
France
Title of Artwork: Resonnance
Year Created: 2023
Medium of Artwork: Clay
Statement: I am a former international public health professional who has spent much of my life working in science, medicine, and global health. In recent years, I have faced significant challenges with chronic health issues. While many traditional treatments have provided only limited benefit, I have found that creative expression offers a different way of engaging with difficult experiences.
The sculpture I am submitting was created during an art therapy program at a mental health clinic. It depicts two human figures whose heads and arms are partially fused together. The piece can be interpreted in different ways: as mutual support between two people, as one person carrying another through a difficult time, or as the deep interconnection that exists between human beings.
Creating this sculpture allowed me to express ideas and emotions that are often difficult to put into words. Art provides a space where ambiguity is possible and where complex experiences can be explored without the need for explanations or solutions. For me, the value of art therapy was not in producing a finished object, but in the process of creation itself: slowing down, focusing attention, and giving form to feelings and relationships that might otherwise remain unspoken.
This sculpture is a reflection of that experience.
Cornelia Selover
Age: 66
Australia
Title of Artwork: Artist before the work 37c
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Ink on archival paper
Statement: Forged by fire.
I survived the Black Saturday bushfires. Just.
The flames receded but the PTSD and Survivor Guilt stayed for years.
My art saved my sanity. Truly.
Even though I had made art for my entire life, the fires stopped me in my tracks.
I kept going. I knew I had to. One line at a time, one mark on a piece of paper was another moment I didn’t have to process the trauma.
The marks began to form a story. I pursued it doggedly until I came out the other side.
The result was over 600 pieces of inter-related works on paper, canvas and sculpture.
INFERNUS was my first solo show and it re-established my internal strength and drive to make art.
I learned that life and art are brought into meaningful being one line at a time, building a recognisable entity: a work and a life. Both. Intertwined.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cornelia_selover_art/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CorneliaSeloverArt
Marcos Klein
Age: 30
Brazil, Rio de Janeiro
Title of Artwork: OCULTO
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Video
Statement: Brazilian artist-researcher with expertise in Contemporary Dance, aiming to discuss modern knowledge construction paradigms through embodied performance and videodance. I have a long-standing relationship of art within academia, having Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Dance from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and pursuing at the moment a doctoral degree in Performing Arts.
My research is based on how we are constantly pressed to produce more and more, leading to an unbalanced conflict between what we are and what we do. I have questionned modern overproductivity since I was a teen, having been submitted to a military-model school. It was during the pandemic, when online hyperactivity was the norm and productivity was at the center of our lives, that I started to develop artistic outputs to reflect on how we could produce art in a way that respects our bodily limits.
From that moment, I began to perceive how our daily grind pushes us to the machinery of the pain-based success and, exponentially, I have suffered intense mental distress culminating in a mental breakdown due to burnout in 2024. When I realized that, at 30, I had been part of hundreds of spectacles, produced dozens of artworks and taught inumerous classes, I got scared and got motivated to focus my body research on this issue.
I have discovered that nature and the body itself can act as great philosophers and that they have a lot to say about what they need. Pause, tranquility and balance. Or better, moderation.
Instagram: marcosklein.art
Other: www.marcos-klein.com
Elisabeth Andersen
Age: 60
Norge
Title of Artwork: Akatesi
Year Created: År 2014
Medium of Artwork: Akryl på lerret
Statement: Mine malerier beskriver ikke soldagene.
De beskriver det som faktisk skjedde.
Jeg malte ikke for å dekorere virkeligheten eller gjøre den lettere å se på. Jeg malte for å forstå, overleve og dokumentere erfaringer som var vanskelige å sette ord på.
Dette bildet ble til i en periode preget av sterk uro og lidelse, et resultat av alvorlige bivirkninger. Mens andre lette etter måter å døyve smerten på, malte jeg.
Kunsten ble min måte å fortelle historien på.
Ikke slik den burde vært.
Men slik den var.
Jennifer Siciliano
Age: 54
United States
Title of Artwork: Paint Medicine
Year Created: 2022
Medium of Artwork: Acrylic on Sign Board
Statement: My painting provided my healing path toward true deep recovery–not restraints, not meds, but creativity. As the creator of Not As Crazy As You Think Podcast, sharing the perspective of the often ignored voices of psychiatric survivors, I offer an alternative view on mental illness and challenge today’s definitions of normal and abnormal by highlighting creativity and nonconventional healing. I share the message that states of mental distress are not the result of individual pathology but manifest as a sign of guidance to redirect our lives. Art and creative expression are fabulous ways to set this path of discovery in motion, and they should be front and center in a treatment plan. I have discovered this to be true for many people with lived experience of mental distress.
In my artistic career, I found professional acclaim as a New York City-based bodypainter for over a decade, winning awards nationally and working with top artists. Since Covid, I began painting canvases again and exhibiting my work regularly in New York City. I now teach high school art in the urban setting of Yonkers, New York. I stress the value of learning creative expression to maintain a strong foundation of mental health throughout one’s life.
Other: https://bsky.app/profile/jengaita.bsky.social
Ildikó Kalapeacs
Age: 61
USA, WA State
Title of Artwork: Magna Carta and Pennicillin
Year Created: 2023
Medium of Artwork: acrylics, mixed
Statement: Ildikó grew up in the socialist Hungary in the 70s under Soviet occupation. She studied visual art and folk dance over there. She came to the US in 1987 and she has lived in the Northwest since then. She continued her visual art studies at Eastern Washington University and has worked in the folk dance/research field in the US and Hungary.
Her work is greatly influenced by both cultures, and she expands her understanding of more cultures in the era of globalization in order to understand cultural flux. Diversity is the basis of her art. That led her to exhibit not just in the US, but in Europe and Japan over the years.
She also creates public art works for institutions which have a philosophy similar to hers, namely compassion and respecting cultures, individuals, and nature. One recent example is Refuge created for the YWCA of Spokane WA.
Being a folk dancer gave her an insight into non-mainstream cultures (“low art”) and doing village research exposed her different ways of self-expression. Thus she moves comfortably back and forth between the continents and between city and rural cultures.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ildikokalapacs/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kalapacsildiko
Other: www.ildiart.com
Tara Lee
Age: 61
United States
Title of Artwork: Screaming Into the Void
Year Created: 2024
Medium of Artwork: Pencil and paper
Statement: My name is Tara. I am 61 and have been battling my demons since 2020 after being dragged into the mental health care system as an “Identified Patient” during a rational but scary mental health crisis where nobody would come to my defense.
The journey of the past six years has been harrowing. I’ve been subjected to coerced treatment including forced medication and two involuntary inpatient commitments – locked up by my own family.
I am a shell of the person I once was – punished by a system that I trusted to help me.
At age 55 I was a well-respected nurse and mother. Today I am a pariah with no family, no career, few supports, and no hope for the future. Writing and drawing are creative outlets that help to keep me grounded. This drawing is from 2024 – the year where I almost lost it all. I attempted suicide four days before my 60th birthday – ironically, the day I’d returned to the United States after a very brief failed visit to see my big sister in Bergen, Norway. This drawing was inspired by Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
I continue screaming into a void as I pray every day for salvation. I need one person on my side. One person to see my true goodness. One person to help me with my burdens as I claw by way out of despair yet again.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wanderlust2222/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tara.unfiltered
Twitter: https://x.com/feet_earth
Other: https://medium.com/@tarasierralee_57910
Cassandra Langer
Age: 84
East ElmhurstNY
Title of Artwork: CAGE
Year Created: 2017
Medium of Artwork: Watercolor
Statement: Author, poet, artist, free spirit and animal lover.
Art and creativity are the seedbed of humanism and the barrier to hate and path to not only surviviving but thriving and creating a better world. Healing through trauma can be listening to the small still voice in you and finding spiritual enlightenment through it. It has been mine
Instagram: sandra.langer.790
Facebook: Cassandralanger
Other: HTTPS://www.theothersideoftherainbow.org
Terese Strømeng
Age: 38
Norway
Title of Artwork: The Sailor
Year Created: 2025
Medium of Artwork: Watercolor and marker on paper.
Statement: Norwegian Sámi outsider artist and poet Terese Årnes Strømeng has struggled with psychosis and depression for over 20 years. Since childhood she has used drawing as a way to express, process and explore her own mind. It has been profoundly important for her during the toughest periods of her life. She is now recovering from her illness and the result is on her watercolor paper as it is in her mind: more color, light and freedom.
Instagram: hemmeligdetektiv
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/oobalouTV
Other: https://oobalou.blogspot.com
Alice Glasser
Age: 35
United States, California
Title of Artwork: Herekawe Walkway
Year Created: 2021
Medium of Artwork: Digital Illustration
Statement: Alice Glasser studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and subsequently started her own Brand and Web Design contracting business for the past decade.
Art has helped grow in her the discipline to observe objectively, to love learning, and to keep persisting until the product is exceptional.
Other: https://www.aplusdesign.us/
Edward Corscaden
Age: 45
Merseyside
Title of Artwork: The Other Side
Year Created:
Medium of Artwork: Photo
Statement: Six inpatient stays on a psychiatric ward
Trying to give up my meds hence the hospital stays
Drifting a bit
Friends all been through psychosis
Currently a bit scrambled
Trying supplements
I like reading plus photography, cooking, history, music, etc.
I’m very sensitive.
I live alone.
I’m reasonably apathetic now.
I lack a bit of guidance and direction but that’s how I’ve learned.
As for art I’m always looking for something lasting. I’ve tried writing. I’ve tried writing a play, comedy, a diary and poems.
I always abandon it because I don’t know what to do with it.
I’ve some literary heroes. With the writing I just need to know it’s there when I have to turn to it. The main thing I practice art wise is photography which is easier once you have printed off a picture and framed it to have created something permanent. So my flat has several of my photos framed on the walls and I’d like to put more up and maybe print some more too with a view to selling them.
So my art is a hobby even if it’s a dead end that’s a hobby for the saner times.
In terms of madness I do and have written and drawn even when mad. Again this largely has been thrown away or collected in dormant folders but nowadays I keep a pen and a foolscap pad in my room if I’m ever unlucky enough to be back on a section.
Lorna Collins
Age: 44
Amersham, United Kingdom
Title of Artwork: Trapped
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Pencil
Statement: I had a severe traumatic brain injury when I was 18. After that I lost everything, including all memory of my life before it. I developed severe mental illness, which has plagued my life ever since. My painting, writing and poetry have been my lifeline and means of coping with all the torment I have experienced. The piece I include in this submission was done whilst I was detained on an acute psychiatric ward. I felt so trapped in this admission, in response to the coercive control policy of ‘treatment’. During the admission, I spent the days and nights drawing and writing in my room. Nobody could take this away from me. Ultimately, being creative allowed me to express and break free from the constraints posed upon me and make something positive and affirmative. The arts brought form and substance to my violent hallucinations, changing them and allowing me to cope. This enabled me to stabilise myself, cope with the symptoms of the illness, and start rebuilding my life. This is an ongoing journey, in which the arts provide both an escape route and a daily routine, which I utilise and rely upon in times of acute stress and to build ‘recovery’, my new normal.
TikTok: @sensinglorna
Instagram: @sensinglorna
Facebook: @sensinglorna
Twitter: @sensinglorna
Elizabeth Tritthart
Age: 68
Montana, USA
Title of Artwork: Winter of the Heart – Trauma Tree
Year Created: 2025
Medium of Artwork: Mixed Media
Statement: Elizabeth Tritthart is a designer of contemporary textiles informed by historical research as well as being a weaving educator. She weaves Fine Art using modern handlooms. She holds degrees in both Electronics Engineering and Fine Art – Studio Arts. She began weaving after a major car accident in 1990 as part of her recovery.
Born on the East Coast, Elizabeth moved to Montana in 1991. She acquired her Fine Art degree from Montana State University – Bozeman in 2006. Her vocation as an engineer lasted for more than 40 years, while living an extraordinary private life as an artist.
Elizabeth Tritthart is the founder of Art as Support for Recovery. She has established a creative vocational opportunity studio for artists in recovery in Butte, MT. As of 2026, she is a CBHPSS – Certified Behavioral Health Peer Support Specialist as well as being the lead textile artist in the Art as Support for Recovery studio.
Art as Support for Recovery in Butte, MT. which believes; Recovery is possible. Support is essential. Our chosen path is Art.
Art as Support for Recovery works to strengthen community ties through the use of studio access, peer support and creative vocational opportunity.
Websites:
Historicweaving.com
ArtSupportRecovery.com
Facebook: Facebook.com/artsupportrecovery
Other: Facebook.com/historicweaving
Dan Armstrong
Age: 40
Gwa’dzi on Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw Territories, colonially known as Port Hardy, British Columbia, Canada
Title of Artwork: Quake the caves of our oppressors
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Drawing
Statement: Dan is a Mad Artist and expresses himself by coalescing his experiences of madness with many aesthetics. Such as: experimental filmmaking, creative non-fiction writing, drawing and painting. He is a psychiatric survivor and loves being in, on, and around the water. Spending time with the ocean and his loved ones.
“Quake the caves of our oppressors” is a series of graphite drawings on mylar. This particular piece is 2ft x 3ft. The series of drawings is inspired by the essay I wrote in my sketchbook “So Long august”, which was written when I legally changed my last name from Smeby to Armstrong.
The essays I wrote in my sketchbook were inspired by the self published diaries of Mary Huestis Pengilly. She wrote hers in the “Provincial Lunatic Asylum” in 1885.
Unfortunately, not much has changed.
For me, writing the essay and physically drawing Quake by hand grounded me in my activism towards abolition, and comforted me with repetition and discipline.
The drawings have now inspired a collaboration with other Mad Artists to create an exhibition installation filling in an entire gallery room. Composing a soundscape and an augmented reality using VR, for the installation.
The title “Quake the caves of our oppressors” is a call to action. It is a polyphonic lens of abolition. It is, for me, the literal translations of my days into vibrations. Each day is a call to action against our oppressors.
Asking each and every one of us to “Quake the caves of our oppressors”.
Instagram: @palmfoot
Facebook: Dan Elwood Armstrong
Danielle Zyp
Age: 63
Canada
Title of Artwork: Well well well
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Photography
Statement: I am a mature experienced artist who moves between mediums of music writing and visual art. My journey started when I was young became a mental health nightmare in 1994 and an excruciating healing journey thru the arts for 32 years. I am educated and high functioning and getting better every day! Thank you.
Instagram: Danidelectable
Facebook: Ladi harp
Other: DANIZYP.CA
Meghan Caughey
Age: 70
USA, Eugene, Oregon
Title of Artwork: Animal Dance
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Oil on Canvas
Statement: I was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was a freshman in college. I have been hopsitalized over one hundred times and have had ECT and insulin coma shock treatment. I recovered when I was 50 years old and am now assistant professor of Psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University. My memoir, published in 2021, is “Mud Flower: Surviving Schizophrenia and Suicide Through Art.”
Instagram: meghan caughey
Jennifer Waters
Age: 55
Canada
Title of Artwork: Big horned sheep
Year Created: 2025
Medium of Artwork: Acrylic
Statement: Scitzophenic women, animals portrait, featured artist at potential place clubhouse . Have had many art shows now and published in magazines and newsletters. I’d be interested in participating in zoom events?
Facebook: Jennie’s home art show
Carlos Spoerer
Age: 44.
Chile, Santiago.
Title of Artwork: Escafandra (Diving Helmet)
Year Created: 2019.
Medium of Artwork: Cypress wood and combarbalita stone (Chile)
Statement: Carlos Spoerer is a Chilean psychologist, writer, and sculptor based in Santiago. He carves stone and wood as a way of descending into what resists language. Each work becomes an apparatus for that descent — and for the way back.
Other: www.carlosspoerer.cl
Mary OMalley
Age: 69
Chicago
Title of Artwork: Clockwise
Year Created: 3026
Medium of Artwork: Collage mixed media on cardboard
Statement: Retired MSW mother of two sets of twins. Also MFA. Have been in back of tgecdesk in front of the desk, below the desk , and all around the desk of emotional support. Seen it all tried to do Nelly Bly when I experienced the straw that broke the camel’s back. Visual art much safer than using words for me.
Susan Spangenberg
Age: 52
NYC, USA
Title of Artwork: Oppenheimer Asylum Doll
Year Created: 2024
Medium of Artwork: charcoal, acrylic on fabric (hand-sewn) with polyester stuffing and pencil armature
Statement: Susan began making art at the age of three and hasn’t lost her childlike enthusiasm for creativity. She uses art to cope with the symptoms of her trauma and mental illness.
Susan has created several categories of hand-sewn dolls. Asylum Dolls consists of icons and the average person; the common thread is mental illness. The icons represented are women and men in history whom Susan identifies with due to similarities in trauma, mental illness, and confinement to psychiatric hospitals. Healing Pillows and Healing Dolls celebrate irreplaceable icons in history and everyday dolls with inspirational messages of hope and healing that are meant to comfort. The Out of My Head series consists of self-portraits featuring open zipper heads with handwritten inner dialogues pouring out like strands of hair –tangled, messy, chaotic and intricate, as thoughts are. Susan also performs as an actor under the stage name Shyla Idris. She has a doll series comprising characters from Shakespeare’s world. She was featured in Raw Vision Magazine UK, Issue 118, Spring 2024.
Instagram: @straitjacketsusan
Other: @shylaidris on YouTube
Caroline Atwood
Age: 31
Massachusetts, USA
Title of Artwork: Akathesia
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Watercolor Ink
Statement: I am an artist healing from a very early “Bipolar 1” diagnosis and subsequent side effects of long term treatment with anti-psychotic and mood stabilizing drugs. In my early twenties, when the number of prescriptions were at their highest, I rarely wanted to paint. But since slowly and tapering from Ativan, seroquel, fluoxetine and now lithium, my voice has come back and I love being in the studio. Painting helps to give me purpose, ground my energy and help me feel alive, confident, and most importantly, helps to release the past pain and trauma I experienced from over prescription of medication. I painted “Akathesia” to give life to the feeling of overcoming the agitation and the unnerving energy that anti-psychotics sometimes produce. By giving the feeling energy, color and form, the feeling gets transmuted to calmness, clarity and confidence to overcome. This is sort of like when my spiritual teacher tells me to name my fear to give it less power. Because painting is spiritual for me, wanting to be a good painter means I try to keep my creative channel clear so it also encourages me to avoid alcohol and get sleep which is a big win for my mental health (and everyone’s frankly.) If my art speaks to you, let’s please connect. You are never alone. I am not on social media but find me on my website: carolineatwood.com
Other: wwww.carolineatwood.com
Ioana-Noemy Toma
Age: 53
Romania
Title of Artwork: Evolution leads the King!
Year Created: 2026
Medium of Artwork: Photography
Statement: Retiree with a mild neuropsychical disability. I do superbe art as a hobby. I try to solve logical problems and cultural corrections with a bright, perfect.able look. It supports me to be fittest.
Instagram: @sitiarpitipi
Twitter: @siarpi
Ishaa Vinod Chopra
Age: 35
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Title of Artwork: Tango with an Odissi Bindi
Year Created: 2021
Medium of Artwork: Oil on Canvas
Statement: “I identify as a Mad, Registered Early Childhood Educator- RECE , Artist, and Female Queer South Asian Disability Justice Advocate, Author & founder of non-profit and arts collective Finding Order in Disorder.
I have been featured on Panels at Mad Studies Hub – York University, UVic – Mad Pasts, Mad Presence Conference, twice at the Rendezvous with Madness panel(s), and others. You may follow my porfolio as an Artist – I call myself ‘Ishaa Improv’ ”
Youtube: Ishaa Improv @findingorderindisorder
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Ishaa is an Award Winning Author, RECE and Guelph University MSc. Thesis Candidate in Critical Family and Kinship Studies with a Collaborative Specialization in Gender, Sexualities and Bodies at the University of Guelph, Canada.
She founded Finding Order in Disorder Foundation – a Non-Profit & Arts Collective- named after her memoir – seeking to explore projects such as hybrid podcasts, therapeutic dance and community engagement for mental wellness.
An immense source of inspiration has been her Indian Classical Dance Kathak teacher Guru Maneesha Tai Sathe ji, and her current research supervisor and mentor, Dr. Adam W.J. Davies.
Find out more at www.findingorderindisorder.com
Maria Salazar
Age: 46
New Jersey, USA
Title of Artwork: Wounded Healer Warrior
Year Created: 2019
Medium of Artwork: Ceramics and Mixed media
Statement: Maria Mia Salazar is a Peruvian-born sculptor, muralist, visual artist and poet. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, she served from 2002 to 2011 and deployed to Iraq in 2003. Drawing on her diverse experiences, Maria channels her creative energy into powerful and evocative works across multiple disciplines, her work explores the emotional alchemy of the human experience—the transformation of pain into healing, and power into love. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Art Therapy, with a focus in Ceramics and Art History.
Artist Statement: “My work explores the emotional alchemy of the human experience—the transformation of pain into power, and power into love. Through ceramics, murals, sculpture, mixed media, and painting, I create surreal, figurative worlds that invite viewers to dive inward, confront their own depths, and reimagine their wounds as portals to joy and self-realization.
Influenced by the symbolic intensity of Frida Kahlo, the dreamscapes of Salvador Dalí, and the mysticism of Remedios Varo, I build narratives that blend the intimate with the mythical. Each piece reflects my curiosity for materials: I sculpt with raw mud, resurrect discarded objects through thrifting, and allow the process of making to be as fluid and layered as the emotions I aim to evoke.
My practice is rooted in a belief that art is a space for emotional healing and radical self-reflection. It is a ceremony—sometimes messy, sometimes magical—where we remember that we are the alchemists of our own stories.”
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/of_artandsoul/
Other: https://www.of-artandsoul.com/