DMS 69: Art Activism as Rebellion Against Psychiatric Authority

Dolly Sen dismantles psychiatric authority through art activism, exposing the politics of diagnosis and reclaiming the narrative of madness.

After a childhood of abuse, neglect, poverty and being the “wrong” colour, my mind lost the ground beneath it, overwhelmed by a quicksand to constantly fight against: I became psychotic at 14 years old. I heard voices, saw demons and thought I was the cause of all the pain and evil in the world. My first contact with mental health services was seeing a child psychiatrist, who told me to “pull up my socks and not to be a silly girl.” I wanted to offload my pain, but she just added to it with her coldness and dismissiveness.  

I spent the next 15 years sitting in my room, terrified of the world outside of me and terrified of the world inside of me. I was trapped in the mental health system during all this time, including hospital stays, and it was an utterly devastating and traumatising experience. How can anything beautiful come out of a system that sees your mind as ugly? As I later wrote in DSM 69: If I went to Argos for a kettle and somebody pumped me full of drugs I didn’t want, pushed me on the floor because I complained the kettle was faulty, or electrocuted me by said kettle, you know, I wouldn’t want to go back. This ‘service’ affects more than your statutory rights. No refunds or exchanges for a damaged or missed life.

Dehumanisation, neglect, violence, invalidation, shaming – I saw very quickly that psychiatric diagnosis and treatment were not a medical issue, but intersected with identity, power, and socially constructed “normal.” Its response to trauma was to add even more trauma. I do not deny there is madness, but the greater insanity and harm belong to psychiatry itself.  

I had no strength in my teens and twenties to fight it. In my late twenties, I began writing, small pieces at first, writing about loneliness to feel less lonely, creating art on scraps of paper. By the time I was in my early 30s, I had a few published books to my name, including The World is Full of Laughter, published by Chipmunka Publishing.  

Around this time, I also became an activist, fighting for better mental health services and exposing the cruelty of the system. During a protest outside the Maudsley Hospital in South London, holding a placard, a realisation struck me. Holding a placard was not going to change anything. It wouldn’t touch the powers that be inside, and passerby just looked at me as a “loony.” I needed other ways to protest. I knew I could be funny, and I had the beginnings of an art career. 

Instead of picketing, I used humour and art to subvert and parody the mental health system. My process is not rigid or pre-planned. I work with intuition and intent, waiting for the ideas to come. Sometimes I may be given a brief, and I let that sit in my mind until it wants to throw the fireworks into the dreaming mind. Other times, I might instantly respond to events or institutions with a flash of subversive creativity.  

After a demeaning and frightening stay at the Maudsley Hospital, instead of picking up a placard, I subverted TripAdvisor by writing with dark humour about a stay on a psychiatric ward there. People loved it! You couldn’t call it ‘art therapy’. What would Freud or Jung do with a politicised punk artist like me? Probably hid behind their couch! Art activism has given me: power, armour, a shield, and fearlessness. The more I created art in response to the mental health system, the more it gave others strength, too. One survivor reviewer said, “Sen is a fresh and invigorating voice for those who are feeling exhausted by the systemic repression of the healthcare system. Their voice is empowering and reassuring to people like me who feel so deeply disempowered and in need of reassurance.”  

Artists have different motivations. Many want to be heralded in the art world. Personally, I would need a sick bag to do that. My motivation is defiant truth-telling, courage-teaching, evidence of crimes committed, providing alternative narratives, rejecting anything that suggests we are less than, disrupting, reclaiming identity and dignity, nourishing starved souls, and being a culture jammer. At the end of the day, I want people to look compassionately and critically at this experience we call “madness,” and see that it is more about a broken heart than a broken brain. And that the “mad” have their culture too.  

My work first appeared in local mental health newsletters and on my social media. Disability Arts Online asked me to blog for them, which gave me an international platform for my art and writing. Survivors kept telling me how much they loved my work and how it helped them. One person said she wished it were a small book you could dip into when needed. I thought that was a good idea and asked around for a publisher. The independent radical Eleusinian Press reached out, a press ‘where music, madness and politics meet’. They were the perfect publisher. I put together the book and called it DSM 69 to make fun of the psychiatric bible.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, claims to clarify mental disorders. My experience is that the DSM is, at best, scientifically unreliable, and, at worst, a label-maker that promises impersonal hell on top of personal, unbearable hell. The latest version is DSM-5. I called mine DSM 69 because the DSM will fuck you over. Those who have not gone through the mental health system have little idea of its abusive nature. I wanted DSM 69 to expose that, but also subvert and satirise the system.  

The little book begins: “If you want a shortcut to madness, then become involved with the mental health system.” I show how this is true with subverted items, forms, essays, posters, manifestos, art, recipes (in case you want to offer your psychiatrist a milkshake when they insist meds don’t make you lactate), and cartoons to make visible the hidden power structures that shape people’s lives. 

One example of this is the TIARA form I created. In psychiatry, you won’t be promised care or compassion, but you will get a demeaning and hostile risk assessment. Therefore, I crafted T.I.A.R.A. or The Institution Attendance Risk Assessment, or what can happen to you if you comply. This leaflet has little practical application. Its purpose is to show people enduring this humiliation that they are not alone, and to ensure that those who humiliate them are made a laughingstock. It is irreverently sticking two fingers up at them, reminding us that the power is in us, not them. 

The last image in the book is me performing some live art at Bonkersfest in 2006. I am up a ladder screwing a lightbulb into the sky, proclaiming the world needs more light. All my work is a tender rebellion to darkness, a demand for more light.   

About the author

Dolly Sen (she/they): My unique and provocative arts practices crosses writing, performance, film and visual art. My work is seen as subversive, humorous and radical. I am interested in debate and social experiment around themes of madness, sanity, the other, and acceptable behaviours, from an unusual and unconventional position of power. I am interested in this because I have been labelled mad, although I think my challenging of inequality and vicious systems of the ‘normal’ world makes perfect sense.   Reach out at dollysen70@hotmail.com; www.dollysen.com.

References

Sen, Dolly. 2002. The World is Full of Laughter. Chipmunka Publishing. 

Sen, Dolly. 2017. DSM 69: Dolly Sen’s Manual of Psychiatric Disorder. Eleusinian Press.