Bio:

Dr. Lorna Collins, FHEA, FRSPH, FRSA is an artist, writer, filmmaker, arts educator and researcher in Creative Health. She is project manager of “A Creative Transformation“, an Arts-Council funded project led by and for people with lived experience of acquired brain injury. Amongst other books, Lorna is the author of Making Sense: Art Practice and Transformative Therapeutics (Bloomsbury) and a series of children’s fiction, beginning with Squawk: A Book of Bird Adventures (Pegasus). She has written articles about mental health, the NHS, creativity and art in The Independent, The Guardian and The British Medical Journal. Lorna’s artistic, literary and research outputs respond to her lived experience of traumatic brain injury, total amnesia and decades of being detained in psychiatric hospitals.

@sensinglorna

My story: 

When I was 18 I had a severe traumatic brain injury and fell into a coma. When I awoke, I had total amnesia and did not know who I was, who anyone was. I developed a number of psychiatric illnesses, and was locked away for nearly 2 decades. During this time, art was my saviour. I would paint to express the inexpressible, my sheer misery. I would paint, write, express what I could not say. Eventually the doctors would look at my paintings (etc.), diagnose, medicate and treat my illnesses. Art became my medicine (on the list of the drugs I had to take). My creativity nourished me, drove my eventual recovery, feeds my life. In March 2020 I did a TED talk, ‘How Creativity Revived Me’, about this theme.