Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness addresses the cross-cutting theological implications of mental illness. The artwork in this series expresses some of the experiential quality of mania. As the colors darken, I hope to illuminate the darkness of depression as well as some of the implications for social justice presented by American society’s mistreatment of those with mental illnesses. The narrative shape of the series comes from Kay Redfied Jamison’s book Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. This book shepherded me through the first year after my diagnosis and helped me to understand the central point of this series of work: people with mental illness experience the world in ways that illuminate great truths about the very nature of human existence.

The stations illustrate the words of artists profiled in Jamison’s study of creativity and bipolarity, as well as some mentioned in another of her excellent books, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, August Strindberg, and Virginia Woolf are just a few of the artists included in this series.

From the artist Rev. Mary Button