Art-making and lived experience of schizophrenia: a vitalist materialist analysis.

BACKGROUND

This paper responds to calls for more lived experience research with a vitalist-materialist style of analysis inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. It challenges traditional understandings of art as a therapy associated with medical and psychological perceptions of schizophrenia, which have been found to be reductive.

METHODS

Using Deleuze and Guattari's relational assemblages, the flows of affect are mapped as bodies and things, ideas and sensations connect and disconnect through the community arts sense-event "Schizy Jam".

RESULTS

Opening a much broader territory for understanding the many ways that art can express, affirm and communicate difference, enables exploration of new ways in which art-makers are activating changes in feeling and thinking about schizophrenia.

CONCLUSIONS

Art-makers can be supported to connect with others with shared experience to find expression for things that have previously been inexpressible and create a world that is more inclusive of them.