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I Explored My Own Mental Illnesses Through Collage In Order To Help Others.

For years I have remained quite about my battle with mental illness; five to be exact. Depression, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, Insomnia, and Bipolar II Disorder. As a means of self therapy, I decided to create a body of work portraying them to help myself better understand what it is I live with. After four years of nonstop research and ideations made this idea a reality.

I knew that with my knowledge and first-hand experience that it would benefit not only myself, but others as well – to educate and bring awareness to a misunderstood issue.

Encouraging others to seek help and to know they are not alone in their struggles with mental health is what I have striven to achieve with my work over the years. This project portrayed these indefinable experiences into visual form, and allow a better understanding of mental illness. Education leads to an improved attitude about persons with these problems. It also helps the public when they meet persons with mental illness who are able to hold down jobs or live as good neighbors in a community to discount stigma by regularly interacting with them. In general there is a lot more awareness about mental illness, but people still don’t feel safe talking about their personal experiences. I think the more people come out, the more the stigma will lift.

The work is designed to touch others’ lives in a different way. Though the symptoms of each illness can vary from one person to another, there is still overlap. It’s the same illness, only experienced differently. Each person is more than their diagnosis, and it’s a label brought on by symptoms one experiences. The work has allowed me to open up to a very private part of my life that has been long-hidden. But I have now brought my story to light to raise awareness for mental health. I want people who endure a mental illness to know they are not alone. Other people are experiencing the same thing too. The portraits are meant to reflect the textbook definitions of the disorders they discover to show universality among each diagnosis, and by injecting a first person account into them it shows their unique characteristics.

More info: jordannebowen.weebly.com