Create Me Free
by Kathryn Vercillo
Exploring the complex relationship between art and mental health
Honoring art as therapy and catharsis while exploring the shadow side of how mental health challenges impact creative process, medium, content, productivity, identity and business and exploring how this intersects with social and cultural issues.
Breaking down the binary stereotype of the “tortured genius” vs. “art is always therapeutic” and helping artists understand the shades of gray.
What is Create Me Free?
A woman-owned, disability-owned writing and research business committed to holistic success for all creatives.
Substack Archive of Resources
The primary way to both explore this work and support it is through the Create Me Free Substack, an online archive of continually updated resources.
Books
Kathryn has authored / contributed to a variety of print publications on this topic.
Art
Explore the solo and collaborative crochet art projects that Create Me Free has been a part of.
Services
How can Create Me Free help you?
Who is Kathryn Vercillo?
Learn more about the woman behind Create Me Free.
From Kathryn …
I explore and celebrate art as therapy but also want us all to talk about the shadow side – how mental health symptoms impact creative process, content, medium, productivity, self-perception/identity and how art and mental health both get complicated by stigma, money/business, and more.
I believe that this is an important conversation that we aren’t having enough and that by devoting my time to developing a library here, we can all better understand it.
And I believe that increased understanding leads to a world where writers, artists, and creatives of all kinds can achieve holistic wellness – financial, creative, physical, mental, social …
Art does heal individuals and communities. Shining a light on the shadow side helps us find solutions so that we can further magnify the beautiful parts of creating art.
Create Me Free Beliefs
- We are all artists with mental health experiences.
- We all deserve holistic wellness including creative, mental, financial, and community wellness.
- Artistic tithing is critical to creating a world that supports creatives. We give a minimum of ten percent earned income directly back to other artists, writers, performers and makers.
Support Create Me Free
When you invest in Create Me Free, you invest in a value system, a community, the creation of a library of online resources about the complex relationship between art and mental health. This supports a societal shift away from a productivity-driven consumer market where your money buys x product that you can use for y amount of time on your own towards a model that supports holistic wellness, deep creative process, and meaningful social contributions.
If you believe in the power of creating an online library of resources related to the complex relationship between art and mental health including essays and interviews written from lived experience as well as historic and contemporary research, please subscribe. Only through your support can this work continue.
“When I use the term “mental health” I sometimes mean things with a diagnosis and symptoms but just as often I mean something akin to “how the challenges of life are affecting our thoughts and experiences. This in turn affects our creativity, which is also a term I apply broadly to human activity”
Watch, Read, Listen
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Create Me Free is a living project.
It requires support. By donation subscriptions are offered on a sliding scale starting as low as $10 per year.