How mental illness really feels, expressed in images
Made by patients from a top Massachusetts mental health community.
What does mental illness feel like?
To Kyle, it felt like this image of a man standing on a stage alone. He’s shrouded in shadow, the image blurring at the edges; he felt isolated.
Sarah’s bipolar disorder felt like this chaotic picture of chords.
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Being diagnosed with a mental illness made Margaret feel confused, which she portrayed by transforming a photograph of strawberries into an unrecognizable burst. With this abstraction, others in her same therapy group were able to connect to her emotions.
These are just a few of the ways people can translate their feelings into tangible images with Expressive Digital Imagery (EDI), a mobile technology tool developed by Steven Koppel after his family’s own navigation of mental illness’s murky waters.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness of Massachusetts (NAMI) has partnered with the EDI Institute to bring these images into mental illness education programs. This is the first experiment with mental health out in the community for EDI, Koppel said. Previously, he’s used his technology to comfort cancer patients and the homeless.
“The idea with NAMI is to take what we learned in clinical settings and apply it to community settings,’’ Koppel said. “NAMI already has wonderful programs, but part of it is people talking about their experiences. What we said was, ‘Instead of just talking, what if people were able to create digital images to reflect that?’’’
Koppel worked in the business world for years, but changed paths when he took up photography as a hobby and realized how therapeutic those images were to him. He developed this tool so that others could implement this practice.
“I can’t say how many people say to me that they didn’t think they could ever do anything creative but with this, it was easy,’’ Koppel said. “There’s all kinds of research on why art and imagery is often so much more powerful of a mode of expression that the spoken word…If I create an image that reflects what isolation feels like, there’s a whole different level of engagement.’’
At the Alliance, these expressive images have been used in conjunction with therapy sessions. The app allows a group therapy leader to share the images with the rest of the group’s devices or even print them into books. Patients can get a laminated card of their image as a physical reminder of all the work they did.
Koppel hopes to expand the program to work with autistic children, for whom self-expression is often frustrating. To Koppel, there are unlimited opportunities for his technology to help someone.
And it is helping, it seems. Koppel said that both clinicians and patients have told him that the use of this imagery enables a level of expression that “never would have been possible’’ otherwise. There hasn’t yet been an official study on the effects of this tool, but Koppel said they do want to have that concrete proof and are designing that study, which could take two or three years to complete, at this moment.
“No one is saying ‘Where’s the evidence?’ because they can feel and see it in the reactions of the patients,’’ he said. Like one patient who made an image to express her improvement. For her, the act of getting better was like seeing color again, after everything seeming so dark.
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