Totem Walk at Sitka (1917)

"How I loathed London."

- Emily Carr who studied there and was broken there

"There's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert; such men would live in lunatic asylums."
- Carl Jung

landscapes of an embattled mind

"Living with lunatics, he wrote, paradoxically took his mind off of his own state and the frightening unpredictability of [epileptic] fits. 'For although there are some who rave and howl a great deal, there is much true friendship here. They say that we must tolerate each other so others may tolerate us ... and we understand each other very well.' In between attacks then, van Gogh seemed possessed by clarity and strength. So the phenomenal sequence of paintings achieved at the Arles hospital, and especially at St Rémy, with their convulsive bucklings and writhings, the cartwheeling stars, rocks heaving in sinuous arabesques, the cyclonic rush of brushstrokes through the quaking cypresses, should not read as documents of descent into lunacy."

- Simon Schama, Power of Art, p. 334

asylum

Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
Photographs by Christopher Payne, Essay by Oliver Sacks

This coffee-table collection of industrial-therapeutic dishabille—70 abandoned asylums in 30 states, photographed over six years—is as gorgeous and meditative as it is harrowing. Between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, nearly 300 palatial mental-health institutions—the result of Dorothea Dix’s humanitarian pleas and Thomas Story Kirkbride’s enlightened plans—dotted the U.S. countryside, bucolically housing half a million souls. By the 1950s, however, psychotropic drugs, court decisions, and policy-based deinstitutionalization had begun to radically reshape the mental-health landscape. Today, all but a handful of these “monuments to civic pride, built with noble intentions by leading architects and physicians who envisioned the asylums as places of refuge, therapy, and healing,” have been abandoned or repurposed. What remains, writes Sacks in the book’s introduction, are “ruins” that “offer a mute and heartbreaking testimony both to the pain of those with severe mental illness and to the once-heroic structures we built to try to assuage that pain.” Each of Payne’s elegiac prints—whether of magisterial facades or peeling interiors, in muted color or matter-of-fact black and white—captures the sense of loss that lingers.

From The Atlantic

Corridor in the Asylum

"It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy."

- Vincent van Gogh [1853 - 1890]

Regarding Bipolar Disorder:

Throughout his life, Van Gogh gave evidence of mental instability having a difficult and moody personality. Various biographies - all from the perspective of history - describe him as suffering with epilepsy, depression, psychotic attacks, delusions, and bipolar disorder. In December 1888, Van Gogh experienced a psychotic episode in which he threatened the life of Paul Gauguin, a personal friend and fellow artist. This episode also brought about the notorious incident in which Van Gogh cut off a piece of his own left ear offering it as a gift to a prostitute. Subsequently, he consigned himself to a mental asylum for more than a year, but left in frustration because his condition was not improving.

“On July 27, 1890, Vincent walks to a wheat field and shoots himself in the chest. He stumbles back to his lodging, where he dies two days later, on July 29, with Theo at his side. He is buried in Auvers on July 30. Among the mourners are Lucien Pissarro, Emile Bernard, and Père Tanguy. Bernard describes how Vincent's coffin is covered with yellow flowers, ‘his favorite color ... Close by, too, his easel, his camp stool, and his brushes had been placed on the ground beside the coffin' " [Van Gogh Museum].