After talking about A.I. and art, I’ve come to an interesting segue.  May is Mental Health Awareness Month.  This is very important to me because I feel people ignore mental health all the time.  Not only that of other people, but their own.  We come up with excuses on why it’s okay to push ourselves towards panic attacks and depression.  Medications become the only thing that some people bother to use to gain any sense of normalcy, which isn’t how it should be.  There are other things that can be used alongside medications, therapy, and meditation.  One of those is:

Art

You can release so much by creating art.  It can be a book, poem, painting, photography, video, or anything.  By putting your emotions into it, you can come to an understanding of yourself.  One of the biggest dangers of mental illness, in my mind, is keeping the darkness pent up.  You know it’s there and ignore it.  You hide it.  This allows it to fester and wait for your guard to slip.  Maybe it’s when you’re distracted or as you fall asleep, but you will give it an opening.  Then, it will explode out of you.  So, it makes more sense to have period releases of the pain, anxiety, etc. into art.

Keep in mind that this isn’t always art that you share.  Yes, I write books and poems that I share, but that is my choice.  I slip parts of myself into it because I don’t fully reveal what parts are therapeutic to me.  Then again, I don’t hide that I have an anxiety disorder and suffer from constant doubts.  There are some traumas that I don’t openly put out in the open, but I’ve slipped them into my art a bit.  You would never know it though.  All of that is my choice, so a person who uses art to maintain and improve their mental health don’t have to do the same.

I feel like a benefit of using art to help with mental health is that you don’t even have to be trained in it.  Just let the words, paint, motions, or anything flow.  This is art that a person is doing to heal and release any negativity they have.  The only audience one has when doing art for this reason is themselves.  Nobody else should matter, which is why it isn’t a requirement to share.  If it turns into something that you can publish, sell, or hold up to help others then that’s great.  Yet, it isn’t the reason why art can be an essential tool for mental health stability and recovery.

Now, I’m talking about this from my own perspective.  I know there are studies out there about this.  I know there’s art therapy as well, which I’m going to get into next Friday.  In fact, I’m going to make a post about mental health and art every Friday for the entire month of May.  The rest of the month I’ll be reposting stuff on writing about or dealing with mental health because I apparently did a lot of those.  I hope all are informative and can make others both understand the importance of art for mental health and that they aren’t the only ones who may use it as an outlet.