Exhibition navigates ‘Mindscapes’ using Yale’s collections
“Mindscapes” explores the topic of mental health from various angles. The materials displayed here examines the role of language used in describing mental conditions.
In an engraving dating to 1677, a broad, tree-lined path leads to the stately stone façade of the freshly reconstructed Bethlehem Royal Hospital in Moorfields, London. Statues crown the hospital’s entrance gate. An elaborate cupola stretches from its roof.
From its palatial exterior, the hospital, popularly known as Bedlam, appears to be the very picture of an orderly and organized medical institution. A series of prints surrounding the engraving on a wall in Yale’s Harvey Cushing/John Jay Whitney Medical Library, however, tells a different story.
A hand-colored etching from 1794 depicts visitors to Bedlam mocking and berating patients, who engage with the tourists from windows in their cell doors. One patient wears a chamber pot like a hat.
“Historically, Bedlam was open to the public and its inmates/inhabitants treated as a spectacle or attraction to behold,” said Melissa Grafe, the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History and head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale School of Medicine.
The images of Bedlam are displayed in “Mindscapes: Stories of Mental Health through Yale Collections,” an exhibition on view at the Medical Library through Aug. 16 that explores the topic of mental health — its visibility, classification, and treatment — through the library’s archival and visual art collections.
“The exhibition examines shifting cultural attitudes and scientific approaches to mental health through a series of stories drawn from our collections,” said Grafe, who co-curated the exhibition with Laura Phillips, the library’s newly appointed curator for the visual arts. “We also looked inward, examining contested topics in mental health that intersect with Yale Medicine’s history.”
“Mindscapes” is part of a multi-institutional effort at Yale to highlight mental health through collections and members of the campus community. It shares similar themes with “Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression,” an exhibition that recently closed at the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) community art exhibition, “Mindful: Exploring Mental Health Through Art,” which is located in the foyer of the Medical Library into January. The latter exhibition is sponsored by the YSM Program for Art in Public Spaces and features artworks by members of the YSM community, including students, faculty, and staff.
The show opens in the hallway between the library’s entrance and rotunda with a selection of artworks from the collection of Clements C. Fry, an influential professor of psychiatry and mental health at Yale School of Medicine. Fry’s mid-century donations form the core of the Medical Historical Library’s holdings in prints and drawings. The works, both fine art and visual culture artifacts, are arranged in five clusters (including the one spotlighting Bedlam) that offer insight into how imagery has been used to stigmatize mental illness.
A grouping of prints demonstrating the use of monstrous metaphors in depicting psychological distress is anchored by a set of “surrealist grotesques” by 20th century Russian American artist Boris Artzybasheff illustrating indecision, timidity, infantilism, anxiety, frustration, and repressed hostility.
Artzybasheff depicts “indecision” as a figure with three faces and three arms tied in knots. One hand holds a single key while keyholes surround the figure. “Infantilism” is a grown man curled like a fetus inside a clam shell. An umbilical cord connects him to the top-half of the shell. The six illustrations were featured in a 1947 issue of LIFE magazine — displayed elsewhere in the exhibition — accompanying an article on the post-war boom in psychoanalysis.
Objects presented in display cases in the library’s rotunda grapple with several themes, including depictions of mental illness in patient art, examples of psychological tests, language used to describe mental health, the visibility of mental illness, and Yale’s role in the development of treatments and care.
A pair of landscape paintings — one gloomy, the other pleasant — were used by pharmaceutical company Sandoz Group AG in 1969 to market a new antipsychotic medication. The scenes were painted by a 53-year-old housewife and long-term survivor of spousal abuse, who had no artistic training and suffered from depression.
“The Sandoz paintings leverage certain assumptions about images and image-making in order to sell drugs,” Phillips said. “The kernel of the advertisement lies in its strategic transition from dark to light. This curation exploits deep-seated associations between darkness and sadness, lightness and happiness, to sell a story about successful treatment and effective medication.”
The exhibition explores the work of the late Yale neurophysiologist John Fulton, Sterling Professor of Physiology from 1930 to 1960, whose experiments operating on the frontal lobes of Becky, a chimpanzee, helped inspire Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz to develop the now discredited lobotomy procedure to treat psychiatric disorders.
“The research is troubling now for various reasons,” Grafe said, “but it’s fair to say that some work done at Yale led to unexpected and even harmful application.”
A case focused on the limits of language in describing mental health features “The Crack-Up,” a 1946 painting by James Wayne Seese showing an enlisted serviceman in obvious emotional distress seated on a cot in a crowded medical tent as a doctor prepares a sedative. The curators traced the term “crack-up” to a 1936 essay that F. Scott Fitzgerald published in Esquire magazine titled, “The Crack-Up: a desolately frank document from one for whom the salt of life has lost its savor.”
A first edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” or DSM, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952, represents efforts to standardize language and criteria used to diagnose mental disorders.
Posters displayed in a case focused on the visibility of mental health in culture and society are examples of art merging with activism in campaigns to improve mental health care. “End The Abuse of Psychiatric Inmates” demands a 1975 poster opposing forced drugging, electroshock therapy, and psychosurgery. It depicts an individual with their hands clasping their head in anguish.
A 1946 issue of LIFE magazine is opened to an exposé headlined “Bedlam” that detailed horrific conditions and disturbing mistreatment patients suffered at psychiatric hospitals in the United States. A photograph of a patient lying untended on a stone floor in a psychiatric ward at Cleveland Hospital calls to mind the prints illustrating conditions inside the original Bedlam in the 18th century.
“The story made a big impact,” Grafe said. “It was a step toward deinstitutionalization.”
The last cases in this new exhibition chart the development of mental health research and services at Yale, including the 1925 establishment of a division of mental hygiene under the direction of Clements Fry, the founding of the Department of Psychiatry in 1930, and the full range of mental health services the university provides today.
