Subtitling her book DSM 69 as ‘taking a subversive look at psychiatry through art and mischief’, Dolly Sen firmly separates herself from the tradition of the ‘outsider’ artist, often associated with those who are socially marginalised or experience mental distress, or in the case of those such as Agnes Richter, who created a now iconic embroidered straitjacket in the early twentieth century, lived in asylums for large parts of their adult lives. Instead, Sen’s work most readily locates itself within the activist art genre, and is particularly reminiscent of 1980’s feminist, punk and post-punk styles. In her wider work, Sen embraces all creative media to express herself, describes herself as an activist ‘writer, director, artist, filmmaker, poet, performer, playwright’ and is a regular contributor to Disability Arts Online. In this, her 10th published book, she uses humour (sometimes scatological), satire and ‘mischief’ to express her anger, sorrow and, at times, amusement at the absurdity of the psychiatric treatment she has experienced. Is the title DSM 69 a witty nod towards the punk band Sham 69? Or perhaps the reference is even more suggestive?
As with the feminist tradition, Sen’s artwork forms a dialogue between the viewer and the lived experience or standpoint of the political activist. In this way, she anticipates and resists any attempt to subject her work to therapeutic analysis, and neither can her work be classified as ‘art therapy’, unless we think we can put punk on the couch. In one piece (which featured on the autumn 2016 cover of Asylum Magazine, and was recently produced as a limited edition badge for their 30th anniversary), Sen presents us with two hearts crookedly superimposed on each other, upon which are stamped ‘pathologise this’. This is an arresting visual summing up the central challenge of the book: ‘The DSM is a diagnostic tool that aims to pathologise all things human’ (3). The book’s message is actually deadly serious, but Sen’s approach is an antidote to some of the more earnest and bloodless challenges to the mental health system favoured by those who do not want too much of a fuss. Her biting and moving poem and striking photographic mock up of a medication box, ‘Dignity Cannot be Taken Four Times a Day’, cuts to the quick; it is uncomfortable. Sen is fiercely critical not only of the psychiatric system, medication and the oppressive nature of the recovery approach as delivered by that system, but of the very project of psychiatry itself – to make people ‘normal’ and to impose and define ‘normality’, as well as render ‘mad’ people as objects of fear or pity. In ‘Help the Normals’, she takes a pop at the ‘charity model of disability, by switching the position of object of pity and giver of pity’ (53).
DSM 69 is published by the independent radical Eleusinian Press (‘where music, madness and politics meet’), and seems to belong in the tradition of radical political art, rather than in conventional academic or health-sector publishing. It includes poems, writing, illustrations, mock-ups and cartoons. The work is economical and sharp. Her arresting piece, ‘Shame of the NHS’, a perfect replica of a prescription with the word ‘Shame’ repeated on it, is reminiscent of the subversive work of Adbusters. At other times, the work has shades of the American feminist activist artists The Guerrilla Girls, in particular their 1986 ‘Dearest Art Collector’ or their 2016 film The Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Behaving Badly (Which You Have to do Most of the Time in the World as we Know It); their resistance is characterised by subversive humour. Sen is a psychiatric culture jammer.
Like her fellow artist activists from other movements, Sen laughs in the face of oppression and injustice, and in doing so strips the oppressor of their power over her. Her book is a very concise and important distillation of ideas and values of the psychiatric survivor movement. It is a visual and poetic absurdist primer for all those who want and need to understand what drives survivor activists, and the fundamental importance of humour to us – a must, then, for all students of psychiatry as well as their critics.
Mental Health Research, Middlesex University London, UK
[email protected]
© 2018 Sarah Carr
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2018.1457493