Photo project aims to break down mental health stigma
Article, Halifax Metro newspaper
HALIFAX – Six young faces stare openly out of black and white photos next to images of a sterile bathroom, a cord phone on a windowsill, a concrete bench.
Stella Ducklow has heard many say those experiencing mental illness should be “put somewhere,” and created The Somewhere Project to showcase current mental-health wards.
“It looks like a prison, and so we have people in there who are scared. They ask for help and they get put in a place that looks like an institution, like they’re being criminalized for having an illness,” said Ducklow as she walked along the photos in the Nova Scotia Community College’s Waterfront Campus Art Gallery.
“It’s terrifying.”
Ducklow, a Haligonian and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design student now based in Toronto, travelled across Nova Scotia for a year to capture these “somewhere” spaces and challenge the idea institutionalization is the best treatment.
“It perpetuates this idea that people are misbehaving, but it’s really because they’re in this awful environment that’s not conducive to recovery,” Ducklow said.
Although Ducklow planned to show only the hospital photos, she realized people might be intimidated and have nothing to relate to, so she included the portraits.
She said she is proud to represent her subjects as strong and resilient people who have been through the system and break the stereotype of what a “crazy person” looks like.
“It’s very, very different. These are all young people with bright futures,” she said.
Dr. Stan Kutcher, chair of the TeenMentalHealth.org program who hosted Ducklow as an artist in residence, said these images can “drive change.”
“Art really speaks in ways that words can’t,” Kutcher said. “The visual representation confronts us with a reality that we can avoid when we just hear the spoken word.”
From her personal experience and through this project, Ducklow said an ideal system would include a peer-support model like at Laing House in Halifax, and day programs not based on diagnosis or medication but coping with everyday problems.
One in five Canadians will be affected by mental-health issues in their lifetime, Ducklow said, so everyone needs to help break down stigma and change the system.
“It involves all of us, it’s just that we’re all not talking about it,” she said.
The exhibit will run until the end of May.