Hannah Brookes
At the zoo

"My painting shows my own personal experience of my time spent in a psychiatric hospital earlier this year. I have called it "At the zoo", because it describes how I felt, the feeling of being constantly watched like an animal in a zoo, loss of freedom and a desperation to get out.

The colours in the two cages are significant, as they describe stages of depression, sadness and anger, switching from one to the other with little in between. The gorilla sits in sad resignation of his situation, acceptance, but the scratchy lines indicate anger underneath the sadness.

The man on the right expresses fury and anger about his situation. He is desperate to get out. He has thrown his banana out of the cage in an attempt to be uncooperative with the doctors and left them the skin to slip on.

The melting bars on the red side are metaphorical. To the person they feel very real, although they do not physically exit. The gorilla, however, remains captive and has no hope of freedom.

The lady doctor looks a little like myself, so it could indicate me wanting to be well like the so-called "normal" people on the outside."

Phil Webb
Another reality
 
"First sight of a car
parked black enigmatic
remember the first graffito
a "Ban the bomb sign". I didn't get it
I was only three for heaven sake.
Wore a uniform for school it was black
just to let you know we're all the same
remember my careers adviser telling me
the world is not a place
for artists.

So, remember pulling off my clothes
standing naked before God and the crowded
shopping centre.
The wind blowing all around me. That.
I did it, you just thought it
And that!
Remember the police vans. The crowded room. 
The academics the university laboratory
quiz. The man with the spoons, and that!

The psychiatrist's face looking up then down
the man who sells carpets and drives a
Ford something saying "Your God, you are
Mate", disappears down the corridor of voices.
Nurses like banished choristers, their hands
On their heads, waiting to be let in again.

The thin metal point digs in, filled with
poison from another planet.
Another reality
Where everything else is just a blank

Laura Wilson
Nightmares on Haloperidol

"This drawing is a collage of memories based on several hospitalisations in various North London psychiatric wards. It is formed from images and words in pen and black ink on watercolour paper. (A3 size).
 

Being an inpatient for me was a nightmare - locked up against my will in totally un-therapeutic environments and injected and forced to swallow medications that gave me psychological and physical side-effects I still suffer from today, decades later.

I've called the drawing "Nightmares in Haloperidol" because I vividly remember collapsing on a hospital bed one afternoon, drugged up on large doses of the tranquilliser, and having the most horrific nightmare, in which there were enormous beasts filling rooms and swimming pools, preventing me from escaping from my predicament.

The "Nightmare" also includes the reality of being on the wards, the names of people who self-harmed, who committed suicide on the wards and after, the prolific drug abuse, the violence, the police, the bizarre comments and attitudes of mental health professionals, the "treatments" of medications and ECT, the constant waiting for . . . tea, mealtimes, doctors, waiting to be released from sectioning, from the prison-like environment, waiting for time to pass, for the next cigarette, and the constant anxiety of wondering if I would ever be able to get a life again after such experiences."