I have always believed that there is nothing worse than having a brain disorder as it is “unseen” -- I “look so normal” and “present well.” If one’s mind is not functioning properly, every inevitable challenge life throws at us (including death) becomes that much more difficult to endure and rise above.

I have been attacked for this point of view over the years. But now I have joined the ranks of millions of breast cancer survivors -- and no, breast cancer isn’t a “great way to get a free boob job.” I am a 16 month survivor of breast cancer, and a 53 year survivor of mental illness. As far as I’m concerned, and I speak solely for myself here, my mental illness is the greater challenge despite having a double mastectomy which is a terrible blow to any woman. I also have a number of other medical problems which pale in comparison to the limitations of Depersonalization Disorder, clinical depression and severe anxiety.

A friend recently brought this amazing woman to my attention -- artist Bobby Baker. I hope she has made her struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder “more real” to the general public. Mental illnesses seriously disrupt social and occupational functioning; they are medical/neurological disorders. Brain disorders can completely destroy one’s ability to cope with the most basic activities that mentally healthy people take for granted.

“Despite our proudest cultural and medical advances, mental illness remains largely taboo, partly because the experience of it can be so challenging to articulate. But when performance artist Bobby Baker was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in 1996, followed by a breast cancer diagnosis, she set out to capture her experience and her journey to recovery in 711 drawings that would serve as her private catharsis over the course of more than a decade. In Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me, Baker makes, at long last, this private experience public through 158 drawings and watercolors — poignant, honest, funny, moving, shocking — spanning 11 years of mental, physical, and emotional healing, a journey Marina Warner aptly calls in the preface a “chronicle of a life repaired.” The book is at once a personal journal and a tenacious thesaurus that helps translate the misunderstood realities of mental illness into an expressive and intuitive visual language the rest of the world can understand, reminiscent of the wonderful
Drawing Autism.”

Maria Popova
Brain Pickings
January 4, 2012

Visit Bobby's wonderful personal website Bobby Baker's Daily Life.

Here is a link to her 2010 book Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me