While mental health has always been a focus in my work, I had previously focused specifically on ADHD and communicating my personal experience with it. With this new body of work, I’m continuing my focus on mental health, but also collaborating with my peers and other people with various mental health disorders. How can individuals with mental health disorders share their feelings and emotions about their disorders through photography, so they feel heard and understood? I am interviewing subjects and asking them to be vulnerable with me while they sit for my camera so I can capture a side of them the world might not know or understand. The images are presented with handwritten text beneath each set. To show the mark of the individual, making it more personal, I decided to have subjects write down how their mental disorder makes them feel in words because it can be cathartic as well. Collaboratively, I photographed each person in three different personal settings to effectively communicate how their mental health makes them feel. Mental health awareness is very important to me, as I myself have ADHD, anxiety, and depression. My hope is that these images serve to bring more awareness to mental health and how important it is for people with mental health disorders to feel seen, heard, and understood.
