The Psychiatric Survivors Art Clinic is a 6-week cohort program that gives psychiatric survivors the space to explore their experiences of survivorship through artistic mediums of their choosing - without having to color inside the lines psychiatry draws for us
Weekly gatherings for themed discussion & art-making
Art supplies provided (kits mailed to youth participating in virtual cohort)
Small cohorts capped at 15 participants
For who?
Those who identify as having survived harm, coercion, and/or detention inside of psychiatric facilities
Those who are interested in exploring their survivorship through any artistic medium (you don’t have to identify as an ‘artist’!)
Those who are not licensed clinicians or mental health providers
AND who fit into either of the following cohorts:
Virtual: ages 16-25
Providence, RI: all ages 16+ (in-person, mask-required at a wheelchair accessible venue)
Schedule
September 13th - October 20th
Virtual Cohort: Tuesdays 6-7:30pm ET
Rhode Island Cohort: Sundays 2-3:30pm ET
Week 1: Not Art Therapy
This week we’ll create art that doesn’t color inside the lines of what recreational art therapists were asking you to create.
Week 2: In Our Own Words
How can we reclaim linguistic agency as survivors? We’ll explore the pathologizing labels we were given, finding new words and expressions of experiences that were flattened to fit onto the page of a DSM.
Week 3: What is Mad Love?
What does Mad Love look or feel like? This week we’ll explore how care within Mad communities resists carcerality and coercion, creating room for mutuality and self-determination. We will create artistic representations of Mad Love that can shape the world we’re moving towards.
Week 4: "Paranoid” as F*ck
“I said I felt surveilled so they locked me up in here with a bunch of cameras”. This week we’ll explore narratives of being labeled as “paranoid” while being actively surveilled by the state and corporations. More broadly, we will examine how psychiatry pathologizes us for having “unreasonable” or “extreme” reactions to the world around us, placing illness upon the individual rather than the environment and social structures.
Week 5: Exploring psychiatric resistance
Resistance is often reduced to symptoms - a hunger strike is evidence of an eating disorder, refusal to take medication is labeled as ‘lack of insight’. This week we’ll explore our own stories of resistance - communally or individually, however big or small - through artistic representations that reclaim lost narratives.
Week 6: Gallery/Open Mic
To close out the clinic, we’ll gather to spend time with the work we’ve created over the past 6 weeks.
Want to join?
Each cohort will be capped at 15 registrants! Apply below: