It’s a reassuring thought to consider artistic expression as a tool for healing. However, I have to object to the idea that I am considered sick and in need of healing. Yet I was told at a very early age that that is indeed what I am. I was given a diagnosis, medications, and sent away from my home and friends, never to return in a fully human form ― at least not without invasive medical and social intervention in punitive reformatory settings. Artistic expression is the part of me that has not been deconstructed, deprogrammed, or disabled by these attempts at healing me.

Art can be a powerful tool, and I have used it to carve out some shelter at the fringes of a world that has often been hostile and intolerant of me being here. Recently, it has served as a passport allowing me back into the country of Normality, if initially only as a kind of exotic curiosity.

Being labeled mentally ill as a kid had the effect of casting me onto the human scrap heap – the place where all are discarded who can’t or won’t fit the mould. I really don’t think being on the scrap heap is about being ill. But I see real disease in the minds of those that created it, and in the ones that keep on piling it higher every day. I think that artistic expression is the tool residents of the scrap heap can use to heal the disease that put them there.