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A groundbreaking examination of the entanglement between psychiatry, art, and art history.

Looking beyond the white walls of art galleries and museums, Kaira M. Cabañas explores art history through the psychiatric wards of the twentieth century, offering a reevaluation of the relationship between madness, making, and the art world and considering the deeply intertwined fields of psychiatry and art. 

Putting aside romanticized myths about “outsider art,” Cabañas argues for a radical revisioning that centers artists in psychiatric settings not as deviants and curiosities but rather as skilled, sophisticated innovators and active participants in shared culture. Beginning with the story of legendary art historian Aby Warburg, whose own psychiatric internment and subsequent recovery serve as a point of departure, the narrative then covers the globe, following visionary reformers such as Nise da Silveira in Brazil and Franco and Franca Basaglia in Italy. The book tracks how psychiatrists collaborated with professional artists and patients to turn clinical spaces into laboratories of liberation. By documenting how patient-artists moved from being subjects of clinical study to recognized cultural producers, Deviant Art Histories demonstrates how art was a primary vehicle for reclaiming their agency. Featuring a diverse cast of figures—including Lygia Clark, Ornette Coleman, and Antonin Artaud—the book offers a powerful testament to art’s ability to break the clinical frame and transform the definition of what it means to be a creative citizen in the modern world. 

In Learning from the High Priestess, Ann Cvetkovich integrates theory and somatic practice to assemble a survival guide for artists, academics, and activists in search of new strategies for social justice in times of trouble. Building on her previous work on why feelings matter to political action and intellectual inquiry, Cvetkovich shows how experiments in writing can be a form of affective and somatic practice. She uses four key themes—care, disability and madness, trauma and somatics, and breath—as launch points for reframing discourses of mental health in the direction of practices for decolonizing bodyminds and for the sensory experience of freedom. Engaging with writer-practitioners from Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Alison Bechdel to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Staci Haines, and Kai Cheng Thom, with particular emphasis on Black feminisms, Cvetkovich places femme care and embodied practice at the center of movements for social transformation.

How does a parent make sense of a child’s severe mental illness? How does a father meet the daily challenges of caring for his gifted but delusional son, while seeking to overcome the stigma of madness and the limits of psychiatry?  W. J. T. Mitchell’s memoir tells the story—at once representative and unique—of one family’s encounter with mental illness and bears witness to the life of the talented young man who was his son.

 Gabriel Mitchell was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age twenty-one and died by suicide eighteen years later. He left behind a remarkable archive of creative work and a father determined to honor his son’s attempts to conquer his own illness. Before his death, Gabe had been working on a film that would show madness from inside and out, as media stereotype and spectacle, symptom and stigma, malady and minority status, disability and gateway to insight. He was convinced that madness is an extreme form of subjective experience that we all endure at some point in our lives, whether in moments of ecstasy or melancholy, or in the enduring trauma of a broken heart. Gabe’s declared ambition was to transform schizophrenia from a death sentence to a learning experience, and madness from a curse to a critical perspective.    

Shot through with love and pain, Mental Traveler shows how Gabe drew his father into his quest for enlightenment within madness. It is a book that will touch anyone struggling to cope with mental illness, and especially for parents and caregivers of those caught in its grasp.