In this project we learned about mental health. Everyone got a mental illness to research, and we presented information about the illness in the form of a case report and an art therapy lesson at exhibition. We also wrote creative stories involving our mental illness. My illness was Fatal Familial Insomnia, which isn't actually a mental illness. It's a neurodegenerative prion disease, which means that misfolded proteins (prions) created by the body attack and destroy neurons in the brain. Physically, this can make the brain develop sizable holes. In the case of Fatal Familial Insomnia, the prions target the Thalamus, the part of the brain in charge of regulating your sleep. As the Thalamus gets destroyed the patient looses the ability to sleep and can develop various other symptoms because the Thalamus also normally connects other parts of the brain to each other. I decided to model my art therapy lesson after those given to people with terminal cancer, o I focused on making the patient feel fulfilled and tried to not have them focus on making things look realistic. My example art project is shown above. For my creative story I decided to write a detective story set during the cold war, before FFI was identified. My case report and story are featured below.
Before this problem I didn't know anything about neither Fatal Familial Insomnia or Art Therapy; I didn't even know they existed so this project provided a ton of new information. I learned that art therapy is a form of therapy that, while not always effective, can often help patients conquer negative parts of their illness and feel empowered. Art therapy is not a regular art lesson, the goal isn't to make the patient get better at art, but rather use their art as a sort of window into their psyche. For FFI I learned along with the information provided in the first paragraph that FFI is actually closely related to things like Mad-Cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakobs disease, as they are all Neurodegenerative Prion Diseases. FFI differs from the other two in that it is inherited genetically and other than that can't be transferred from one person to another.
Exhibition Reflection
I realized shortly after exhibition started that I had unintentionally made it almost impossible for anyone to visit my booth. FFI is a pretty uncommon disease so when other people were recommending places to go to to the visitors they would almost never think of FFI. On top of that, when people walk through an exhibition I've found they usually gravitate towards presentations on things they already know a bit about. Even worse, there was another group from another class presenting about FFI, but they were close to the start of the room where as I was near the end, so anyone who was pointed towards FFI would undoubtedly find them first. With all these things combined I realized that basically no one would show up to my booth, which was a shame because I actually liked my lesson plan quite a bit, and I had prepared enough paint and canvases to be visited by about a dozen people looking to do my art project. I voiced my concerns to one of my teachers who pointed one of the guests to my booth, they didn't have my disease but they did the project anyway. At first I was really excited because they listened intently and where making a really pretty blue and purple thing, but then they started mixing in red and green which turned the whole canvas an unsightly brown. I could tell this was going to happen before it did because I had made the same mistake earlier in the year, but I decided to stay silent because art therapy shouldn't be about making something pretty. They ended up covering the canvas in polka-dots, which I guess was okay. That was the only person who visited my booth. If I could do the whole thing over, I would tell my classmates to perhaps include me as a potential disease on their ID cards, so that more people would stop by my booth.