The art of medicine: Outsider Art

摘要

Neil Gaiman's essay about the Richard Dadd painting The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke (1855-64) encapsulates many of the popular myths both about Dadd and the association between art and mental health disorders. Admission to a psychiatric hospital is equated with imprisonment: patients become "prisoners" and "inmates". Dadd's psychotic illness, which led to the fatal stabbing of his father, is directly linked by Gaiman to a form of art that is intense, frightening, and largely disconnected from the real world.It says something for the potency of these notions that an intelligent writer like Gaiman is drawn into repeating them. Art and psychiatric illness are both hard to understand, but that does not mean that one explains the other.