How art gives mental health patients a sense of self-worth

"I’m not sure you can imagine what it’s like to be sectioned, until you’ve seen it with your own eyes," says Niamh White, the curator and co-founder (with the artist Tim A Shaw) of Hospital Rooms, a charity dedicated to creating art within psychiatric wards. The venture arose when their friend was admitted to one of these facilities. "The thing that got to me was that she didn’t want to open her eyes anymore, as what she saw was not just clinical and functional, but dilapidated," says White. "Everything in those rooms visually communicated that no one cared."

Since its inception in 2018, Hospital Rooms has worked to combat this sterility in over 17 units across the UK. Its purpose is not merely to hang art on walls, but to create works specifically catered to the needs of the patients. "White walls in a gallery are designed to be time- and space-erasing but that creates the wrong environment to heal in," White says. Each having operated within the art world for more than 10 years, the pair had a thriving network to call on. Their initial project saw artists including Nick Knight and Gavin Turk transform the Phoenix Unit, a residential ward in Tooting, south-west London, that specialises in treating schizophrenia. They have gone on to commission painted rainforests by Sutapa Biswas in a dementia facility in Highgate, murals by Sonia Boyce in the courtyard of a psychiatric care unit in Croydon, corridors alive with playful figures by Sara Berman in a London clinic, and the entire façade of Springfield University Hospital’s recovery unit, painted by Shaw himself. The artists work directly with the patients, running workshops and discussions with them and forming—and often installing—their pieces not just for them, but with them.

For the figurative painter Harold Offeh, this collaborative process was inspirational. His sessions with the women on one intensive-care ward produced vivid abstract images based on oil splatters found on the street. "I had never created that way before," he says, "but it wasn’t about me, it was all about what we could discover together." Fashion designer Giles Deacon recently threw himself into hours of drawing workshops with the men at a psychiatric unit in north-east London, where he has just installed his own contribution. "One guy sketched a very fabulous abstract number and then another gentleman drew a really brilliant dog," he says. "They all told me so many stories. One opened up about being a musician. I asked him to make me music for my installation." Deacon believes these moments are an integral part of the charity’s mission: "I’m no therapist, but I could see it helped."

Susie Hamilton’s paintings for a men’s psychiatric intensive-care unit recently became a case study for the World Health Organisation for this very reason. She also sees art as not just an enlivener of walls, but a curative tool. "As artists, we know quite a lot about mental difficulty and we know a bit about how to find a way out of it through creativity," she says. "Art will put you in touch with your inner world and a feeling of inexhaustible possibility. It’s a very healing thing."

"I walked into one of the workshops and told them I had trained to be an artist," says Katherine Lazenby, who was a patient at Springfield at the time of the first project. ‘They invited me in and asked if I would like to run a session. They gave me back my sense of self-worth." Since leaving hospital, Lazenby has continued to work with the charity, and now teaches photography and creative writing at a recovery college, where former service users can learn new skills in an understanding environment. Laura Cundall, a fellow former patient, was creating a ‘mental-health doodles’ Instagram account from her ward. Hospital Rooms commissioned her to create information packs for artists, and she is now making art based on interviews undertaken with patients across the country.

"Ultimately, the people in these facilities all just want to be seen," she says, "That is what Hospital Rooms does. It makes incredibly revered art figures answerable to people who have otherwise been forgotten. That is hugely empowering."

And it seems many of the artists working with Hospital Rooms often take as much out of the experience as the service users. Eileen Cooper has just completed a series of painted windows for a mother-and-baby unit specialising in post-partum psychosis, and the process proved personally affecting. "I felt I had dealt with my own births, but then meeting these women and their children… I discovered things about myself I thought I had coped with," she says, "This has been an incredibly emotional and humbling experience."

Phoebe Boswell, who created a silhouetted landscape of intricately drawn trees in pencil for an intensive-care unit this year, says the experience confirmed a long-held political zeal within her. "Obviously, drawing something on the wall is not going to achieve what needs to be done on a systemic level," she says. "But this has made me more resolute in my understanding of the systems required for ensuring people don’t get thrown away by society, but rather move towards repair."

This piece originally appeared in the November 2021 print issue of Harper's Bazaar UK