‘A Creative Transformation’: creativity, the brain and mental health

Academic discussion workshops in University College London (January 2024), Stanford University in Oxford (June 18, 2024) and University of Birmingham (July 1, 2024).

Led by Dr. Lorna Collins, these workshops consider lived experience narratives of mental health, sensory disturbances, trauma and the use of art as a recovery tool. We examine ideas and notions of madness, stigma, discrimination, subjectivity, ‘reality’, knowledge, control, health/illness, creativity and recovery. These discussion events are for educators, students and academics with an interest in the treatment and rehabilitation of people impacted by brain injury, neurological conditions, trauma, hallucinations and/or mental illness. Each event begins with the screening of film scenes that explore the creative process and hallucinatory world of Lorna Collins, who lives with the medical condition organic psychosis (caused by a traumatic brain injury). The screening is followed by a panel discussion about how art and creativity can express and make something tangible and illuminative from ‘madness’. We then open a wider conversation about art, mental health, sensory disturbances or non-consensus realities, and the effects of brain injury with participants in the audience.