“Medicine must no longer be confined to a body of techniques for curing ills and the knowledge that they require; it will also embrace a knowledge of healthy man, that is, a study of non-sick man and a definition of the model man. In the ordering of the human existence it assumes a normative posture, which authorises it not only to distribute advice as to healthy life, but also to dictate the standards for physical and moral relations of the individual and of the society for which he lives.”

Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973, translated 1975), p. 34.

I burnt a hole in my pocket to fix myself explores intersections between the upkeep of one’s mental health and the monetisation of the intangible concept of ‘wellness’. The exhibition interrogates how and why mental health is commodified for profit-making initiatives, exploring the forced exertion of neurotypical behaviour as a method of ‘control’ for those who are mentally ill through the prescription of psychotropic drugs, and acts of self-care in political and economic states of precarity. Today, a state of ‘wellness’, or the presentation of stable physical and mental health is now achievable by exchanging money and products for goods and services that intend to grant the consumer feelings of mental stability and a ‘lifted’ physical aura. The works question why neurotypical behaviour is subjected as a method of control for subjects existing within neoliberal capitalism.

Luigi Esposito and Fernando Perez write that neoliberalism sees neurotypical behaviours as commodities that can be purchased and sold for profit. Individuals are encouraged to acquire products and services that modify one’s action and behaviours to adhere to a pattern of social normativity. To properly integrate into a market society, substances such as prescription drugs for mental health disorders like depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia are designed and marketed to users to assist them in achieving successful lives through accruing financial wealth and social prestige by ‘overcoming’ the stigma and burden of mental illness (1). By viewing mental health as an investable form of capital through commodifying improvements to one’s mental wellbeing, the political, social and economic factors that greatly contribute to the formation of mental illnesses in some individuals are obscured. 

The works exhibited by Jesse Bowling, Jack Caddy, Grace Connors, Anita Cummins and Brooke Hyrons illuminate differing perspectives ranging from light-hearted and satirical, to sombre and contemplative, about the stigmatisation of mental health disorders. The works collectively interrogate about how states of ‘wellness’ are equipped by individuals through the production and ownership of goods and investing into services to mask experiences of being pejoratively treated within social and administrative realms as neurodivergent individuals.

They question the transformation of the ambiguity of mental health into what Francis Russell calls “mental wealth” – where one’s mental health is viewed as a form of investment. By investing into one’s mental health, the individual becomes beneficial to the state as they will become less financially burdened and self-fulfilled and is therefore more productive. This is due to the prevailing attitude that mental health issues are a threat to productivity and that sufferers are viewed as financial burdens (2).

The use of humour and satire employed in the absurd nature of some of the artworks, such as Jesse Bowling’s ‘Crystallised Effort’ (2020-2022), Jack Caddy’s ‘New Purity’ (2016-2018) and Grace Connors’s ‘I went to a Bikram yoga class and all I got was a pat on the back and a grande caramel soy latte’ (2017-2022) work to indirectly criticise how wellness is commodified into the marketisation of advertised services and products. In some cases, this can be dangerous and misleading for vulnerable people with mental health conditions who would otherwise benefit from seeking a mental health professional (3). 

The present iteration of Jesse Bowling’s ‘Crystallised Effort’ (2020-2022) presents a short video, imagery, and 3D printed rocks to comment on the ‘healing’ properties of crystal energy as a criticism on the commercialisation of mental ‘dis/ease’ (dis/ease as in using the prefix ‘dis’ to signify a state of unease, instead of labelling mental health conditions as a ‘disease’, or problem) and SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) medication. ‘Crystallised Effort’ is a continuation of Bowling’s interest in mysticism and pseudoscience, where the work refers to the science of crystal healing through the platform of a medication advertisement as an allusion to the false plausibility of disputed medicinal practices. The soothing advertisement we watch coupled with the calming voice of the female voice actor reifies the fact that the product exists, yet the fictional veneer of the video through its existence as a 3D render conflates with the advertised product’s illusion of believability and promise of healing. In contrast with crystals used in crystal therapy practices, these crystals contain fragments of escitalopram, the chemical term for a SSRI antidepressant known as the commonly prescribed antidepressant named Lexapro.

Crystal therapy commonly consists of treatment where different types of crystals are strategically placed around the body to correspond with bodily chakras. This can be an expensive process, yet its popularity is signified through looking at a Google search on ‘crystal healing’: yielding over 81000 results. The crystals advertised offer to help the beholder through their own personal sacrifices, where the artist hopes that the energy radiating from these crystals can help other individuals with anxiety – a reminder that people living from anxiety are not alone and there is always help close by.

Jack Caddy’s ‘New Purity’ (2016-2018) responds to the rise of ‘new age’ ideologies and the promotion of spiritual enlightenment in online circles by devotees to the wellness industry. The video installation explores the disparate tension between false promises of progress and online wellness networking initiatives. The installation promotes an undetermined product through buzzword-fuelled platitudes that glorifies ideas of enlightenment and interconnectedness. 

This version of ‘New Purity’ consists of a video, wall, decal and banners displaying content that simulates the philosophy of multi-level-marketing (MLM) schemes through the imitation of a digital brand launch, deceitfully promoting the benefits of a product that offers uncertain possibilities. To consume the product is to revel in the cultivation of one’s online persona, as the marketisation of the product encourages the immersion of the physical and virtual self. This journey towards inhabiting an optimised ‘self’ is fuelled though the normalisation of fitspo culture and the ingestion of supplements to interrupt bodily processes. 

The dark underbelly of the global wellness industry is touched upon, where corporate bureaucracy and sleek advertising preys on individual weaknesses; alluding to the omniscience of futures where one’s physical self is never as enhanced as their online self. Regurgitated content from multiple existing MLM schemes are transplanted and re-edited into one re-embodying these same values of wellness that are simultaneously broadcasted back into the online void.

Grace Connors’s ‘I went to a Bikram yoga class and all I got was a pat on the back and a grande caramel soy latte’ (2017-2022) uses the ritual of a yoga class as a medium to unpack the emotional weight of unbelonging. ‘I went to a Bikram yoga…’ alludes to Connors’s personal experiences with feeling alienated from contemporary wellness initiatives by appropriating found film footage taken from a how-to yoga instruction video. The practice of yoga is commonly used – and appropriated – by advocates of wellness to achieve states of enlightenment and inner peace. The promotion of a sense of ‘community’ through yoga classes within the context of white, Westernised yoga culture can make invisible the existence of not just non-normative bodies, but also traits of neurodiversity.

The video’s long title derives from her experience of inadequacy when attending a Bikram yoga session, as a conduit to unearth embarrassing memories to exorcise feelings of rejection and to promote the beauty of togetherness through sharing experiences of vulnerability by revisiting moments of shame. Connors thus uses found footage of a yoga instructor to create an atmosphere of vulnerability, where shame is subverted and yoga is used as a meditative portal to encourage the ritual of sharing stories to dispel the pejorative elements of unbelonging, feelings of being an outsider, and the pressure to perform in unsettling situations.

Anita Cummins’s Cortisol (2022), Share the Softness (2022), Someone Needs One (2022), and Brooke Hyrons’s Growing Pains (2020) offer more tender and emotional perspectives on how forced façades of neurotypical behaviours propelled by the speed of existing within late capitalism as an indication of normativity can be deconstructed and thus subverted to both champion and foster the importance of vulnerability through acts of care, connection, and collection. 

Anita Cummins’ ‘Share the Softness’ (2022) and ‘Someone Needs One’ (2022) are exhibited as partnering tissue boxes, where the titles have been appropriated from Kleenex marketing campaigns. In ‘Share the Softness’, Cummins has pasted images of themself crying, taken with their iPhone to replace images of ‘cutesy’ puppies and kittens. Kleenex’s ‘Share the Softness’ campaign was released in 2013. Kleenex tissues were marketed to remind consumers about two things, reminding customers of the softness of tissues, one’s emotional connection with tissues, and reinvigorating softness into one’s life. It is argued by the artist that these marketing tactics disguise the profit motive from selling tissues towards empty platitudes that monetises care and emotional connection. The artist has pasted images of themself in a direct outpouring of vulnerability and distress to refer to what they consider to be a ‘real’ experience of softness. The offering of a tissue from human to human also transcends profit motives as a universally recognised sympathetic gesture.

Cummins’ ‘Someone Needs One’ is a comment on systemic issues that can hinder people from achieving a state of ‘wellness’, by referencing the bureaucratic procedures of their mental health treatment journey. This tissue box hangs lower than ‘Share the Softness’, a reference to the two tissue boxes in the waiting room and consultation office of their psychiatrist. Printed on the tissue box are consultation dates from the beginning to completion of their master’s candidature, from 2019 to 2021, with the price, the Medicare benefit and the personal financial cost burdened onto the artist, row by row. This indirect comment on the Australian public mental health system facilitated by successive Commonwealth governments brings forward the argument that while psychiatric consultations are one stop to achieving a sense of peace, systemic change for marginalised people is another necessity for stable mental health that is so often ignored. Kleenex markets their tissues as not just a tangible product, but as a physical representation of the intangibility of care. While individual acts of care between loved ones are well-intentioned, mental stability can also be achieved through community care and togetherness.

Cummins’ ‘Cortisol’ (2022) is a collage made of white, brown, and blonde coloured packaging from Kleenex tissue boxes. The collage is 349 centimetres long. The discombobulated nature of the collage owes itself to the literal disfigurement of the original image, where ‘cute’ Labrador puppies sleep side-by-side alongside an adorable orange kitten. This image of softness, and more importantly, cleanliness, disguises the ‘messiness’ of emotions and the human body, which is another use for tissues – to wipe up faeces, urine, ejaculate, saliva, vomit, blood – and tears. Apart from this, the tissue box presents an images of baby animals – beings that cannot control their bodily impulses. Babies are messy, and so are the realities of mental distress. Traditional methods of advertising and pop culture present perfectly manicured and ‘clean’ bodies, where the abjection of the human body is discarded. The disfigurement of ‘cute’ imagery is a direct confrontation of the invisibilities of not just bodily excretions, but to mask the harsh realities of distress for which crying is used as a biological tool to relieve. Crying, an often-argued sign of weakness that is commonly hidden and made private, is celebrated as a necessary outpouring of vulnerability against the weaponisation of happiness in popular and corporate cultures for disguising the sometimes-brutal truths of why humans process feelings of sadness, anger, and anguish from experiencing complications of mental health disorders.

‘Growing Pains’ was created during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, where feelings of anxiety, disillusion and disassociation were rampant for youth in Naarm/Melbourne and internationally owing from sudden and radical changes in people’s working and social lives. A study by Juliana de Oliviera Costa, M. Gillies, A. L. Schaffer, D. Peiris, H. Zoega and S. Pearson published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (1-9, 2022) found that due to these immense material and existential shifts, higher numbers of antidepressants were prescribed for all age groups in 2020 and 2021 compared to the previous four years from 2015 to 2019. Antidepressants were prescribed for Australian women in 2020 and 2021 at a rate of 1.7 times higher than men. The rise in antidepressant prescriptions in Australia represents changes in our collective metal health, where for women aged 18-24, prevalent use rose by 7.5% and new prescriptions rose by 12.1%. This indicates that adolescents and young adults lived through higher amounts of distress due to ruptures and disturbances in social interactions, daily routines, and higher job insecurities (4).

For Hyrons, creating Growing Pains was a coping mechanism and an act of self-care during the onslaught of the first year of the pandemic. To cope with these anxieties, Hyrons’s methods of attaching the found items to chiffon and linen were cathartic, while these processes allude to the wider narrative of growing pains: a story of her personal growth, development and honouring the memories of the individuals that once owned or held connections to these items.

I burnt a hole in my pocket to fix myself applies a critical lens towards the treatment of mental illness through criticising the commodification of products and services; producing resilient subjects that can demonstrate mental and behavioural resistance to stress and change (5). These products and services, some directly advertised, some offered as part of the nation’s public health system, and some collected, unpack prevailing attitudes that for one’s state of mental health is an individual responsibility that is ultimately up to the individual to ‘fix’ regardless of race, gender, sexuality and socioeconomic status. The Western and neoliberal hyper-fixation on individualism within the context of stereotyping mental illness continues to evade the identification of systemic failures that can exist as the root cause of mental health issues, which are not yet held accountable in today’s collective mainstream consciousness (6).

References:

1) Luigi Esposito and Fernando Perez, “Neoliberalism and the Commodification of Mental Health,” Humanity and Society, 38, no. 4 (2014), pp. 417-425.

2) Francis Russell, “Wages for Self-Care: Mental Illness and Reproductive Labour,” Cultural Studies Review, 24, no. 2 (2018), p. 31.

3) Esposito and Perez, p. 424.

4) De Oliveira Costa, Juliana, Malcolm B. Gillies, Andrea L. Schaffer, David Peiris, Helga Zoega, and Sallie-Anne Pearson. 2022. “Changes in Antidepressant Use in Australia: A Nationwide Analysis (2015–2021)”. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 000486742210797, pp. 3-7. doi:10.1177/00048674221079740.