What does it really take to improve mental health? In this powerful episode, visual artist and psychiatry professor Meghan Caughey shares her incredible journey from surviving schizophrenia to thriving as an educator and advocate.
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Show Notes | Transcript“Sometimes you just go through the fire, and then there you are, in the middle of the fire, and you deal with that. That might be your path.” Meghan Caughey
Meghan discusses the science behind art therapy, the concept of “making art from the edge of the bridge,” and how creative expression can transform trauma into healing. She offers a unique perspective on recovery that combines lived experience with scientific understanding.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
- How creative expression can serve as a powerful coping mechanism during times of emotional turmoil
- The surprising scientific evidence supporting art’s ability to rewire the brain and promote healing
- Why embracing your unique artistic voice is more important than technical perfection
- The potential of art as a complementary approach to traditional mental health treatments
Key insights include:
- The measurable impacts of various art forms on brain chemistry and stress reduction
- How Meghan’s Buddhist practice intertwined with her artistic journey to foster resilience
- The importance of challenging limiting beliefs about recovery and personal potential
- Why being present and supportive can be more powerful than having all the answers when helping someone in crisis
Meghan also introduces us to the concept of “free drawings” – a technique that allows the unconscious mind to express itself through art without judgment or planning. This approach offers a gateway to self-discovery and emotional processing, even for those who don’t consider themselves traditionally artistic.
Whether you’re navigating your own mental health journey, supporting a loved one through challenges, or simply curious about the healing power of creativity, this conversation offers valuable insights and practical strategies. Tune in to learn how tapping into your creative side might just be the key to unlocking greater mental wellness and personal growth.
As German artist Gerhard Richter said, “Art is the highest form of hope.” So why not pick up that paintbrush, pen, or instrument today? Your brain – and your spirit – might thank you for it.
Connect with Meghan
Art website: https://meghancaughey.com/
Memoir website: https://mudflowerbook.com/
Resources:
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TRANSCRIPT
Live Love Engage Podcast: Lotus Blooms from Darkness: Finding Hope in Mental Health Challenges
Guest: Meghan Caughey – Visual Artist, Cellist, and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University
Host: Gloria Grace, Founder of Align to Shine Academy
Episode Topic: Art as a Pathway to Mental Health Recovery and Brain Healing
Introduction
Gloria Grace: Namaste. Are you ready to discover how creativity can literally rewire your brain and become your secret weapon for mental wellness? Well, stick with us because we’re going to be exploring how making art from the edge of the bridge isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a powerful pathway to healing that can actually help entrepreneurs like you move from surviving to thriving.
But first, I do want to welcome you to Live Love Engage, especially if this is your first time joining us. I am Gloria Grace, founder of Align to Shine Academy, and I empower women over 50 to step into their highest potential with clarity and confidence.
And my guest today is an amazing woman. Her name is Meghan Caughey, and she was an artist and cellist from an early age. But then Meghan developed schizophrenia when she was a freshman in college. But she has recovered and now is a visual artist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University. And I really looking forward to having her join us and talk to us a little bit about her journey and about art and the brain. So welcome, Meghan, to Live Love Engage.
Meghan Caughey: Thank you so much, Gloria. I’m really happy to be with you today.
Early Discovery of Art as Healing
Gloria: I thought we’d actually start if you can maybe kind of take us back to when you first discovered this healing power of art, especially during your journey with schizophrenia.
Meghan: Okay, well, can I go back even before that? This will date me, but I just want to say I have made art all my life, and I come from a family of musicians, and I had a great uncle that was a painter.
But when President Kennedy was shot, I was in elementary school, and I think I was like 9 or 10 years old, and it was awful. And everyone was crying and it was tragic. And my response was to get a piece of paper and some pencils and draw a picture about it. So even then I knew that if there was something terrible and awful in our environment, something awful that happened to us that we didn’t know how to handle emotionally or psychologically, that by making a picture about it, that that was the way to deal with it.
And by the same token, when I was about the same age I had my Uncle Gene who worked in construction, and he had a terrible accident and had to be in the hospital and he died. And my response was to write a poem about it for him and that way helped me emotionally connect with him and it was healing for both me and my mother read it to him.
That’s just an example of before I even developed this hard to deal with psychiatric illness known as schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia. I was making art from early, early on because it works, because it’s powerful.
The Onset of Schizophrenia
Gloria: What happened when you were diagnosed then? Were you able to start kind of again going back to using art to be able to help?
Meghan: Well, I was 19. I was a freshman in college at a school in Colorado. I went to Colorado not because I thought the school was any good, but because I wanted to be able to go backpacking in the Rockies. So that was my priority. And I got to school, new freshman and immediately took off backpacking. And this was the 70s.
And then I was going to study art. I had gone back and forth between would my major be cello or visual art, and I decided on visual art. So I was taking an art history class. And one day early on I was in this big cathedral, big auditorium like classroom, and I had seats all the way back to the ceiling in the back. I was up by myself on the top row.
And during the lecture when the professor was lecturing about famous artists, I started hearing something very small in the back of my brain. I didn’t pay attention to it, but it got louder gradually during the course of the class. And I remember the teacher was showing work by Francesco Goya, if you all are familiar with his paintings. But I started listening more and more because I just couldn’t tune it out. And then suddenly I realized that it was telling me I was bad. It was talking to me and telling me I was bad. And I didn’t know what it was. It was awful.
And so soon the class was over and the lights came on and I went running out of the classroom. I went going across the main campus, and there was this woman, this other student, walking towards me. It was a woman with blonde hair, blonde ponytail and a red sweater. And when she got up close to me, I looked at her face, and her face looked like a giant insect.
Gloria: Oh, my goodness.
Meghan: I was terrified. So I went running to get to my dormitory, running up to my room. And then when I was in my room, I went to the mirror and I looked at the mirror at myself. And I wasn’t myself, was no longer a young woman. I was a beast with holes for nose and blood dripping down my mouth and awful eyes. It was the scariest. I can’t really say how awful it was. And I saw that, and I thought my life would never be the same. I knew on some level that I had changed in a way that I just couldn’t explain, couldn’t understand. It was terrible.
The Long Journey of Recovery
Meghan: So I went through that year. When the snows came, this was Colorado, when the early first snows came, I’d been having these hallucinations. That’s what they were, hallucinations. And I went out when the first snow came, and I was looking up at the snow, and it was such a relief to have the beautiful snow coming down. And some students came and said, you don’t have your coat on, you don’t have your shoes on. We’re taking you to the student health center. They knew I was not doing well.
And that was the beginning of being hospitalized many times through my life for the symptoms of schizophrenia and later schizoaffective disorder. I’ve been hospitalized over 100 times.
Gloria: Wow.
Meghan: But I’m over that now. But it’s not like everything is totally simple, but my life has—no one ever thought that I would be able to have a career and a life that has meaning and I’m respected in my work and I love my life. And yet sometimes things are just better than we could ever imagine.
The Lotus Revelation
Gloria: What helped you to finally start being able to be where you are today?
Meghan: Well, it’s not a simple path. But when I was in high school, before I was even ever diagnosed with schizophrenia, I started studying Buddhism and started meditating. And then later, after I became symptomatic of schizophrenia, I had this kind of real strange life because on one hand I was having these terrible hallucinations and mind states. And at the same time I still was interested in meditating.
There was a time in my life when I was very unhappy, in a lot of emotional pain. I was very suicidal. So I made a number of suicide attempts. And I realized at one point that it was just a matter of time until I was successful. But at the same time I was meditating every week nearly as I could with this group of Buddhists. And they were very much into non violence. And I was aware of the conflict that here I was doing these violent things to myself, yet I was practicing and I had the value of nonviolence.
So there was one night where I was awake during the night and I was walking through the house and I went to my studio and I had this contemporary Buddhist magazine just laid on the chair. I picked it up absentmindedly—I couldn’t sleep, and my mind was looking for something, obviously.
So there was an article in this magazine on lotuses, lotus flowers, which is a symbol in Buddhism and many cultures of beauty and reverence. And they’re very special flowers. So I read about mudflowers, which is my name for lotuses. And it said that a lotus is a beautiful flower, but it has to have its roots in the mud in order to bloom and be beautiful.
And I read that, and suddenly I just had this realization: oh, my goodness, my life has so much mud. I have all this mud, this pain and suffering, all these years of pain and suffering, and that’s a lot of mud. And I can be a lotus. And that mud will help me have a really beautiful life, because I have a lot of it.
So I was in my studio, and I picked up a brush, I started painting a lotus painting. And I paid special attention to the mud around the flower. And that was the beginning of a change in my life because I started painting lotus after lotus, all different kinds, different sizes, different colors. Each time I painted one, I was reinforcing this belief that I could use the pain and suffering of my life to create really beautiful. And see, that’s what I’ve done. That’s what I’m doing with my life.
Making Art from the Edge of the Bridge
Gloria: I mentioned in the intro that you say something about making art from the edge of the bridge. So what does that mean to you exactly?
Meghan: Well, in my first memoir, my first book, which is called “Mudflower: Surviving Schizophrenia and Suicide Through Art,” at the end of the book, I am forced with needing to support someone that I know who is totally filled with grief and unhappiness and wants to end her life. I lived in Portland, Oregon, and Portland has all these big river and lots of bridges through the city to get from one side of the city to the other.
And it was in the middle of the night, and my friend that I was trying to support—her boyfriend had died from a fentanyl overdose. And so she had texted me in the middle of the night, said, “I have to go be with him.” And then I realized I put some facts together. I realized that she was talking about ending her life. And see, she was someone I love. So I figured out she was on the edge of this bridge in Portland, where it’s known to be a place where people have sometimes completed suicide.
So in the middle of the night, I rushed to her to be with her. And there at that time, I just had to make the decision, was I going to live? I mean, I needed to live to help support her and support people I love and have a life that I love. But I was conflicted.
But my belief is that oftentimes the big decisions that we make with our life are like on the edge of the bridge, where it’s like, if you jump into the bridge, into the river, you’re going to die. Or you can stay on the edge, which is not easy, but it can help save someone. It might save you.
And I used to tell people I was working in mental health in Portland. I would say to people, “You can go through the fire and come out on the other side, because I’ve done it—you can do it, too.” When I was on the edge of the bridge, I realized sometimes the point is not to go through the fire and then come out on the other side. Sometimes you just go through the fire, and then there you are in the middle of the fire, and you deal with that—that might be your path. And you can do great good and do service for people and help yourself even from the middle of the fire.
So the book I’m working on now is called “Making Art from the Edge of the Bridge.” And it takes off from that.
The Science Behind Art and Brain Healing
Gloria: I’m curious to know what you know about current research that talks about this connection between creativity and brain healing.
Meghan: There is a ton of research and data right now. I would recommend there’s a wonderful book called “Your Brain on Art” by Susan Magnuson and Ivy Ross. Susan Magnuson is a director at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. And this book has all the data that you need if you want to find research and just get an overview of what’s been done.
What a lot of people don’t realize—I live in Oregon, and Oregon is behind the time when it comes to art and medicine. But there are places in the United States and also in the world where art and medicine just go together. I mean, especially Great Britain and places like Johns Hopkins where Susan Magnuson is. They have all kinds of research.
So making art, whether it’s visual art or music or dance or storytelling or going to a symphony, dancing, all of this makes changes in the brain. And they are measurable. They are being measured. And so art is now—this is not every place, but some places people will use art to help treat Parkinson’s disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s, all kinds of diseases.
There’s some specific research about how making art causes changes with neurotransmitters. Did you know that if you are nervous, if you are having anxiety and you scribble or make art for about 20 minutes, that the stress hormone in your brain, the cortisol, will come down in about 75% of people? Oxytocin, the love hormone, will go up if you make art. And there’s a center in our brain called the amygdala—it’s our fight or flight center. If we get stressed and we’re scared, we’re panicking, the amygdala will activate and get all busy. But if you make art, the amygdala calms down.
Teaching and Lived Experience
Gloria: How has your own personal experience with mental illness shaped your approach to teaching and research?
Meghan: I love being a psychiatry professor. I love working with medical students and psych residents. And I just finished an eight week class where I was part of a group working with primary care physicians that are rural. And we would do zoom at like 7:15 in the morning. And these doctors were all over the Pacific Northwest and they were getting ready to go meet with patients all day. But the topic was suicide prevention.
Part of what I want to say is we are seeing in medicine that there is a greater appreciation of what’s called lived experience. So I have lived experience because I had a diagnosis and many years of hospitalizations and treatments and all these things. I can call on my experiences when I give a talk to the public Psychiatry training program which is the program I teach the most at the school where I work.
People have not talked to someone who has the experiences that I have. I mean when you have over 100 hospitalizations, that’s a lot even now. I’m able to tell people from my lived experience what it’s like to have side effects to the medication or to totally—whatever, you know, I can tell people from a perspective that is very vulnerable and very real. And I tell you they—people respond. And I use, when I do seminars and presentations, I use my art to illustrate what I’m talking about.
Free Drawing and Unconscious Expression
Meghan: When I graduated from college, I changed my major from art to psychology because I was trying to figure out what was going on with my brain with schizophrenia. And then when I graduated, finally, I was going to become an art therapist. So I went to graduate school briefly in Vermont. And I didn’t last very long because I got very symptomatic. But the thing I learned was that there’s this thing called free drawings.
And free drawings is you just—you don’t plan what you’re going to draw or paint. You just let your hand move across the crayon or the paintbrush or whatever, and your unconscious pulls out the image. And learning to do that changed my art because my art became focused on whatever was coming up in my unconscious, which is a pretty interesting place at times.
A lot of people think, “Oh, I’m not an artist. I can’t draw a horse that looks like a horse.” A lot of people will tell me, “I can’t draw. I can’t make art. I’m not an artist.” Because when they were in kindergarten, someone named Johnny could draw a horse that looked just like a horse. And the teacher said, “Oh, look at Johnny’s horse. Johnny is an artist.” And everyone whose horse doesn’t look like a horse, whose horse looks like a slug or a snail or snake, they think, “Oh, mine doesn’t look right, so I’m not an artist.” And they go through their lives with that.
Making art doesn’t have to look a certain way. It’s really a process thing.
Misconceptions About Mental Health Recovery
Gloria: What other misconceptions about mental illness and recovery are there that you wish more people understood?
Meghan: Mental health issues, psychiatric illness is not an end point. I mean, there is recovery possible and recovery can look many different ways. My recovery doesn’t look like someone else’s recovery necessarily, but people can recover and contribute.
And so if someone has something that’s going on with them that seems psychiatric or mental, and maybe they make art, maybe they don’t, but maybe they discover art, some form of art that they love, that can be a pathway to some, to the next thing.
People used to think I would never recover. I would never be able to probably be out of the back ward of a hospital. And yet I’m a psychiatry professor and I have a wonderful life. It wasn’t supposed to happen. When I first decided that I wanted to try working, I was getting treatment at a county mental health program. And I told my doctor I wanted to work. I hadn’t worked in many years. He said, “Oh, you’re too sick to work. You’re too sick to work.” I thought, “I wonder if I can challenge that.”
Individual Paths to Recovery
Meghan: I get the greatest pushback and I get a real hard time from people who are my peers because they’re angry at psychiatry and they don’t want to consider medication because for them that hasn’t been helpful. And I’ve taken a route where I was able to find something that was helpful for me for many years. But everyone is different.
We certainly shouldn’t judge other people for what path they find for themselves, whether it’s with medication or with bowling or dancing or—I don’t know. People are amazing. People can find all kinds of things. I think the main thing is that we have faith that recovery is possible and we respect each other because we’re all different. We’re all individuals. And so what works for me, I’m not going to say it’s going to work for the next person, but I will do my best to support you and encourage you and love you.
Advice for Those at the Edge
Gloria: If someone feels like they’re standing at the edge of their own bridge right now, what would you recommend that they should do?
Meghan: If you’re standing at the edge of your bridge—that’s not an easy question, because what we know about people when they’re suicidal is that if they’re seriously very suicidal, their brains are not working in a normal way or regular way. They’re feeling like a level of pressure and things seem so much worse than they would normally seem. So I can’t say that there’s just a simple “do this or do that.”
But there’s a condition called suicidal crisis syndrome. And when people are in that state they really need to have medical help. And I don’t say that lightly, but they need medical help because they’re in a physical state that’s out of balance and out of whack.
But sometimes just really—we think we have to do something with someone. But just being present for someone—and people have a right to decide what to do with their lives. Not everyone understands this. But if someone is convinced that they do not belong on this planet, I’m going to have a certain amount of respect for them and that belief. But I will try to get help for them to change their mind because I want to change their mind.
And reaching out doesn’t mean having all the answers. It just sometimes might mean sitting with someone, letting them either talk or be quiet. Sometimes being silent with someone, being present is the main thing.
The Oldest Art in the World
Meghan: One fun thing. I just have to tell you this because I just discovered this yesterday. Do you know what the oldest piece of art in the world is? So it was found in Tibet. High Tibet. And it’s 225,000 years old. I mean that’s really before there are a lot of Homo sapiens. But it was fingerprint and footprints in a real playful way. So that’s so old. That’s much older than what I would have guessed. But with our culture and with our problems in our world today, let’s go for longevity.
And make art in whatever way works for you.
My favorite saying that I say all the time is a quote from the German artist Gerhard Richter: “Art is the highest form of hope.”
Connect with Meghan Caughey
- Website: meghancaughey.com
- Book: “Mudflower: Surviving Schizophrenia and Suicide Through Art”
- Upcoming Book: “Making Art from the Edge of the Bridge”
Resources Mentioned
- “Your Brain on Art” by Susan Magnuson and Ivy Ross
- Oregon Health and Science University
- Johns Hopkins School of Medicine research on art and medicine
This episode explores the powerful intersection of creativity, mental health, and recovery. Meghan Caughey’s journey from surviving schizophrenia to becoming a respected psychiatry professor demonstrates that recovery is possible and can take many beautiful forms. Her philosophy of transforming life’s “mud” into lotus flowers offers hope and practical wisdom for anyone facing mental health challenges.
