Click here to read my invited commentary as Editorial Board Member, ‘Art and psychiatry in the 21st century: here’s to more messy – and magical – entanglements’ on the British Journal of Psychiatry Bulletin (Cambridge University, open access), in its new the new culture section, Cultural Reflections. Between November 2021 (when the article was published) and mid-June 2022, the metrics recorded for this article are: Total number of HTML views: 1337. Total number of PDF views: 226. Total abstract views: 176).

CITATION

Tan, Kai Syng. 2021. ‘Art and Psychiatry in the 21st Century: Here’s to More Messy – and Magical – Entanglements’. BJPsych Bulletin, November, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjb.2021.93.

ABSTRACT + KEYWORDS

In a volatile world, during a time of multiple crises and amid a projected upsurge in mental illnesses as an aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, now is a critical time to consider how art and psychiatry can entangle with each other. Submissions like that of Lily Aston can create new spaces for conversation, reflection and constructive collisions. This can help disrupt and extend the state of psychiatry, management of psychiatric services, and education and training in mental healthcare, and advance how we understand other bodies and minds around us, and how knowledge can be created. Keywords: Art and psychiatry; medical humanities; creative health; neurodiversity in the arts; anorexia nervosa.

CONTEXT

My article was written in Spring 2021 and published in November 2021. It was through engagement with the process that I stepped forward to join the BJPsych Editorial Board in Summer 2021 and I am the first artist to do so. The Board consists of 13 Editors, 22 Board members and 2 staff, who are practitioners and researchers in Psychiatry in UK, Ireland, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand and Canada. I will help shape content, especially with and to help commission and identify reviewers and contributors. I want to create equitable ways to meaningfully include and collaborate with neurodivergent colleagues, and those who may not otherwise engage with Psychiatry, as well as to open up spaces to irritate the often binary set-ups of psychiatrist-patient, medical/deficit versus social models of disability, illness/health. Contact me to get involved.

Top and above: Screenshots of extract from commentary.