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

Résumé

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.