Applied Project Summary

I had a few ideas for my applied project (AP) in the beginning and the only thing I knew was that I wanted to link my PLN, website, YouTube channel and my applied project together to try to create more traffic. The goal for the AP I decided on was to combine the disciplines of art and psychology in someway to reach artists specifically. People assume artists are these sensitive beings that have an automatic understanding of mental health and mental illness. This is an incorrect assumption to make, artists are no more informed than the general public. This idea most likely stems from the stereotype that many artists are mentally ill.

I think artists have a unique and powerful position with their creative freedom. I think many artists underestimate their ability to create art that makes an impression on people. For an artist, presenting work with a message that matters to them can be valuable and persuasive. Although if an artist is not educated in the message being presenting, they are often doing far more damage than they realize. I’ve seen this happen far too many times when it comes to mental health (see example here). I don’t think we should be aggressively policing young artists who make mistakes like misrepresenting mental health. It’s more important to spread factual information about mental illness to prevent it from happening.

That was what my AP was aimed at doing. I decided to create blog posts about specific mental disorders. I chose mental illnesses that are most commonly discussed and stigmatized. A lot of people assume they understand what the characteristics of OCD look like, but they typically have a very stereotypical understanding of the disorder. I chose major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, PTSD, OCD, and Schizophrenia. In each post I maintained the same structure. I included an overview of statistics, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, what you can do, and removing stigma.

The most important thing to me, in my AP was creating artwork to represent each mental illness. I wanted to be able to link a visual element to draw people in and connect the arts. This way I could better pull people in from my Instagram. I created abstracted and representational art to reflect the feelings associated with specific hallmark symptoms of the given mental illness. It was important to me to not present these illnesses through a stereotypical lens. I wanted to allow viewers to empathize and understand rather than stigmatize.

Another smaller part of my AP was to dispel some of the fear surrounding “bad artwork”. I felt that if I was already trying to reach younger artists, they could benefit from that information as well. I wrote two posts which included three YouTube videos I made about the topic of “bad art”. My goal in this was to make people feel comfortable sharing ugly artwork on social media. Even if that isn’t something they wish to do, it’s vital as an artist to know that all of the work you create will not be beautiful in your eyes or “postable”. All the artists that post perfect artwork do not create work like that all the time and have worked very hard and made mistakes to get where they are. This is a topic that isn’t often discussed in art communities that I wanted to put out there.

My AP in the end went fairly well. I didn’t follow my timeline the way I expected because I set very high expectations for what I could accomplish. I didn’t get too many views on my blog posts, I think my website was kind of hard to navigate so that may have turned people away. However, now at the end I’m starting to get some more views, but very few. I have been getting exposure on my Instagram though, where I’ve been posting the artwork. I think it was smart to link multiple sources of social media together. There were things I learned from and could have improved on, like my website. However, I if I were to continue to grow on Instagram I would eventually have a larger interested audience for those posts.