Drawing on real life

Agnes Fletcher reviews this year's Mind book of the year winner

I was, in my view, distressed beyond anything I imagined it possible for a human being to be and remain alive.”

Artist Bobby Baker’s Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me is a journal of illness and recovery; a collection of pictures created over a decade; a visual documentary of experiences of mental, and later physical, ill-health as well as eventual recovery. Baker the diarist is not delving back into the underworld to depict a previous suffering self from a later point of safety but is immersed in the horror as day follows day.

Diary Drawings consists of 158 drawings from the 711 that Baker produced between 1997 and 2008. A brilliant introduction by writer and critic Marina Warner provides context for and commentary on the pictures and their captions. Diary Drawings also includes essays by Baker and her daughter clinical psychologist Dora Whittuck.

There is a long tradition of writers and artists portraying madness, mostly from the outside or in retrospect, occasionally from within. Warner traces Baker’s artistic influences, from Cubism to Schoenberg and Goya, but also places her in the company of writers such as Rimbaud, Dostoevsky and Sylvia Plath.

Baker’s evolving relationships with the professionals she encounters and the notion of treatment itself is fascinating.

She cautions against taking any one picture, prepared in extremis, as the summation of her views on the mental health “system”, which she describes as patchy and under-resourced but including some excellent services.

One of the most poignant moments is when Baker is diagnosed with cancer after months of doctors attributing symptoms to her mental illness. She feels relief to have something wrong with her that she isn’t judged for; that she and her family can be more open about; that friends feel better able to offer help and show their care for.

In her own essay, For the Record, Baker touches on an ambivalent aspect of the book: voyeurism. Rather like a horror movie, the reader/viewer has been on a white-knuckle ride on the madness rollercoaster. She explains that those attending previous exhibitions of some of the pictures have asked questions: Why did you get ill? Who or what made you ill? What helped you get better? Are you ill now? Will you get ill again? Is it therapy, your art? She rejects the idea of blame and the need for precise answers: “It is just lazy, sexist and cruel to blame the mother, or the father, or the patient with the ‘flawed personality’. It’s not my ‘fault’ that I got ill. It’s no one’s ‘fault’, and it’s not about being weak either.”

In response to enquiries about how she is now, Baker says: “Mentally I’ve never been better – and have been for some time. In fact, I’m as sane as a sandwich board.”

And she has some questions of her own: “Will people like me always be regarded with suspicion, our behaviour endlessly analysed and pathologized, because of unusual thoughts or behaviour, or a history of mental illness?

“Will it be possible for society to stop searching for scapegoats, someone other than all of us, to take responsibility when mental illness occurs?

“And when, oh when, will the prejudice end?”

• Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me, published by Profile Books in association with the Wellcome Collection, £15.