Artist Feature

Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.

»There’s only a thin line between the sane and the mad« Old Middlewestern Saying When you feel hopelessly lost is there a point when there is no other possibility than to commit yourself to psychiatric care? Could this happen to anyone and could it happen to me? I spent time with patients, attendants and therapists. Many people I met seemed to be just like me. They had the same taste in music, the same pressure to perform, and the same anxieties. Suddenly their life went out of balance. Drug abuse or just one bad pill - excessive demands at work - love sickness, one thing leads to another. How do people deal with these situations? Where do they ask for help? What made them fail in their working life? Is the psychiatric system able to help and will their patients find new stability? From the beginning I collected letters, emails and texts. These were from patients who had received them from or wrote them to; friends, acquaintances or administrative bodies. One patient told me: »Within such a letter there contains the lifeblood of a desperate person. I don`t think you can make this up. I couldn`t re-write such a letter. A presentation of these texts can be useful to help healthy people in order to help them understand the feeling of being godforsaken and abandoned by bureaucracy.«