Communities hold the key

Mental illness treatment as addressed by state-level facilities and federal funding suffers unspeakably. The System suffocates with refractory cases and remedial pathways that can be extraordinarily difficult to navigate; frustration and burnout among patients, clients, inmates, treatment providers, and the service programs that oversee them - presenting a sociocultural and economic problem of utmost importance to address.

I have not been alone in spending so much of my life feeling alone. The irony of this experience has been robustly demonstrated to generate connection and proactivity for social change in diverse communities around the world. Nonprofit organizations and grassroots community foundations dedicated to the power of survivorship and stories, condition awareness and education accessibility, and progressive treatment modalities set precedents for effective action that cannot be summoned by the individual in isolation.

The institutional environments I’ve spent considerable time in have been divided, under-funded, and painfully stark. This never made sense to me. Locations structured for extended mental health, substance use, and trauma treatment, penalty, and shelter are integral community environments for the management of hardship management and therefore bear invaluable potential for relief. Visual art is one very powerful venue of environmental modification and therapy in every stage of its development and installation.

We learn through adversity. Few conditions in the breadth of human experience carry its gravity and energy to change the world.