Art as a Psychopathology

The life of an artist is much maligned. Despite my dreams of becoming a rich and famous writer with a tenured position at a modest university, I pay the bills by working as a community interpreter, dealing primarily with medical and social service encounters. (Thanks to the current Republican regime, part-time teaching jobs are scarce, which works out since student fees are high and enrolment is low—no connections to be made, of course.)

Anyway, last week, I was interpreting for a parent. The assignment was a monthly follow-up with a child psychiatrist treating a sixteen-year-old male who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I’ve worked with the family off and on for about a year and have observed that the young man seems to be doing very well on his current medication regimen, responding intelligently and sensibly to the doctor’s questions.

At the latest appointment, the psychiatrist asked the young man what he wanted to do when he finished high school. The youth said he wanted to go to college to become a photojournalist.

The doctor put on his thoughtful face and asked the young man how he would “pay the bills.” The young man shrugged, so the doctor went on to explain to him that this sort of irrational thinking was exactly what characterized the manic depression.

I kept my mouth shut because interpreters aren’t paid to think, remember, or have opinions, but it was incredibly difficult for me not to point out that the mass communications department at the local university is full of aspiring photojournalists and that many of them, especially at the beginning of their careers, pay their bills by working for police departments, local advertisers, and photo studios or by providing other services to people who are not at all interested in their photographic genius.

While my general mental health is something I choose not to dwell on very often, preferring to focus on others who have little in common with myself, I’m pretty sure that my writer and artist friends are not manic depressives (well, not most of them) or even particularly irrational (well, not most of the time), and I’m bothered by the fact that careers in the arts are considered so far outside the norm that they can be symptoms of mental health pathologies.

Dovetailing with that, a few days after the encounter, I read an article about the need for a sense of tradition among contemporary African-American writers. The piece pointed out that, while there is a body of African-American literature, the current generation of writers doesn’t really come from families that value writing or the arts as a career.

My own feeling is that the lack of a tradition has more to do with socioeconomic factors than cultural ones. Writers who come from a tradition of writing also come from environments where job security, money, and time are in abundance. For The vast majority of people who have to worry about the roof, the cupboard, and the closet, art is done in small ways, a good joke or a fine piece of mending or repair. In my own case, I’ve been willing to hang on to a job I’m dissatisfied with because it gives me both enough money to pay the bills (though that amount is shrinking) and enough time to read and write.

That the arts rarely provide financial stability (except in indirect ways, like the tenure that results from publication) is not to be argued, and that parents and other more sensible people would want to steer their charges toward safer careers is understandable, but symptomatic of irrational thinking …, really?

As an aside, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which is used to identify personality structure and psychopathology, asks individuals to assign a number to a series of statements in order to indicate how well those statements describe them. One of the statements is “I want to be a poet”—no doubt indicative of some dreamy, irresponsible tendency. The statements before and after it are something like, “Sometimes I torture pets” and “Rules only get in the way.”

Puntitas reads _Ice Blue_ by A. Stuart and _The Late Roman Empire_ by G. Downey. She has decided not to read Harlequin romances for a while since this last was annoying in lots and lots of ways.