What comes to your mind when you think of mental illness? Among other things, we’ve always seen any kind of out-of-the-ordinary behaviour as inherently abnormal. Something that shouldn’t be the way it is. However, in today’s social media woke world, things are rapidly changing. Especially when it comes to speaking about one problem which affects millions of people around the world. Kate Fenner is a young artist who was diagnosed with Schizophrenia at 17. She then took to Instagram to openly talk about what it feels like to be schizophrenic. Her thoughts, dreams, and apprehensions were all taken and turned into sketches by Fenner. And to be honest, they aren’t very different from my thoughts, dreams, and apprehensions. Her sketches are beautiful and depict emotions of schizophrenia in the rawest form.
Fenner has always identified herself more as an artist than anything else. She wrote in an article, “I have always been an ‘artist’, I just didn’t realize what that meant until my mental illness appeared. I despise the term ‘mentally ill’; it implies that who I am as a person is fundamentally corrupted and broken.” Awkward Apostrophe, her handle on Instagram has found more love over time with different people coming together under one umbrella of emotions.