Bengaluru: At NIMHANS, an art workshop provides a creative outlet

Arpan Kumar with his younger brother and mother (Express)

Kumar, who is from Mumbai, has been selected for an undergraduate course at NIFT Bangalore. “I always had the inclination towards painting but after I quit engineering and was not doing well due to health issues, I pursued this interest. My mother has been my greatest support,” Kumar said.

The second batch of the workshop will start in October.

“We thought of this idea of an art exhibition so that it could be an expression ground for them. We also thought that we could sell their works in the exhibition and the proceeds will go back to them,” Dr Aarti Jagannathan, additional professor at the Department of Psychiatric Social Work, NIMHANS, said.

“The second workshop will be on Mental Health Day in October and the culmination of all these paintings will be exhibited on disabled day (International Day of Disabled Persons), which is in December. We have a huge support from the Union ministry which gave us immense freedom to conduct the workshop. We started the process in April. So this is a nine-month programme,” she added.

Elaborating on the selection criteria, she said, “The first condition was that the participants should either have a mental health or a neurological disorder. So either they have a valid unique disability ID card or if they have not applied for it or in the process of applying for it, they get a letter from their psychiatrist or their neurologist stating that he/she is disabled and that they will be in the process of getting the ID card so that we know that they are authorised persons with a disability.”

The department then asked those who were interested to upload some of their works in the registration form. “We were very keen that it should be on a professional level where it is like a canvas painting. So the mental health education department at NIMHANS and two professionals from Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath (KCP) helped in the screening of the applications. We got 51 entries and we selected only 26,” she said.

“The ideas that these participants brought to the fore are marvellous. This is for the first time something of this sort has happened. Some of the participants had the experience of drawing on A4 paper but not on canvas. Here, they did that. We did not keep any age restriction,” said Rajeev V from the Department of Mental Health Education at NIMHANS.