why are people so afraid of mental illness?

Anthony Mannix

1953, Australia

Self-taught artist, born in 1953, Newton, Australia. Anthony has lived with a biochemical imbalance most of his life forcing him in and out of psychiatric institutions for many years. He is not afraid calling his illness, "madness".

However he decided not to fight against, but rather to live with, to adopt it. "There's nowhere else to go. Or you jump out a window. There are three choices: it destroys you, you destroy yourself to get away from it or you do something else. I'll do something else." Inspired by the surrealists, he began making outsider art in 1980 and for some years thought himself alone in this, as then he had no contact with people. His art has a fairly direct connection to unconscious, "to the source" as he says. He uses his self-taught art as a mean of bringing his unconscious to the conscious world through numerous journals, ink drawings, paintings…

In 1984, with his friend Philip Hammial, they found the "Australian collection of outsider art" promoting this marginal art by organising the first outsider art exhibitions in Australia, making videos…

www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/nightair/stories/s861423.htm