Jackson turns to art to express his triumph over child abuse and schizophrenia

One of the first things you notice about Robert Kwami Jackson is his hands.

It was his mother’s boyfriend, in a fit of rage, who burned Jackson’s hands in water hot enough to turn tiny fingers into stubs, hot enough to fuse them into clumps of blackened flesh.

The crime was severe enough to send the man to prison. Mercifully, Jackson was not old enough to remember it.

But he later learned that the man had become furious when Jackson had an accident like any young child undergoing toilet training can have.

As punishment, the man pushed the boy’s hands into the scalding water.

Jackson’s hands will forever serve as a reminder of the mindless cruelty he suffered that day.

But he has turned those hands into the finely tuned instrument of his art. He uses them to paint, allowing him to speak from a deep inner place, expressing his thoughts and feelings in ways words cannot.

Jackson credits what he has been able to do with his hands to the loving parents who adopted him when he was 5.

“They raised me to believe I could do just about anything I set my mind to do,” Jackson said.

He grew up believing them – and still does.

The couple had an older daughter who became the big sister he tried to emulate. When they went to their grandmother’s house after school, she would sit at the kitchen table and copy pictures out of magazines. Jackson would climb up on a chair beside her and draw with her.

Unlike most children, though, Jackson never stopped drawing. When he was 7 or 8, he saw a picture by Pablo Picasso called “Guernica.”

He remembers telling himself, “I can do that.” And from that moment on, he has considered himself an artist.

Even through high school, he said, he did nothing but sketches. Art without color, not even shading with a pencil. He did not begin to paint until 1995 when he was in community college studying commercial art.

That December, his life took another jolt-ing turn.

“I started hallucinating and began hearing voices and having these visions,” Jackson said. “I began thinking there were demons out to hurt me.”

Neighbors called police after they saw the 19-year-old acting strangely in his parents’ yard. He ended up spending weeks in the hospital where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Jackson is 36 now. He has a job in Chapel Hill as a supervisor at Caramore, a structured support program for adults with mental illness.

He has a wife, a friend from his teen years who decided a couple of years ago to look him up. In a few months, they will celebrate their first anniversary.

Today, he continues to take medicine to keep his illness at bay.

But his art still offers him a healing power all its own.

“I do it because I love it,” Jackson said. “It is the only thing that listens to me. It is the only thing that can describe who I am and what I am feeling.”

And for the past few years, he has been able to display his work at “Brushes with Life,” the gallery started by Carolina’s Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health in 2000 to support recovery from mental illness.

Some of Jackson’s paintings – in ways he cannot even explain – capture the mood he was in when he painted them. Some hint at the trauma of the sudden storm that raged inside his head when he was 19.

All have become a way of seeking a stronger connection to the outside world, a way to get people to see past his hands, to look beyond his mental illness and glimpse the person inside.

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Patients are not defined by their disease

No one knows what causes schizophrenia.

Too few people understand what it is – or the people who have it, said John Gilmore, professor and vice chair for research and scientific affairs in the School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and director of the Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health.

“When most people think of schizophrenia, they think about what they have seen on television or on the news,” Gilmore said. “They think of someone out of control and out of touch with reality. They think of someone who is violent and unpredictable.

“And the vast majority of people with schizophrenia are not like that at all. And they are more likely to be the victims of violence rather than perpetrators of it.”

It is a disorder where, for periods of time, people become out of touch with reality. They hear voices, have hallucinations or experience paranoid delusions about someone or something wanting to hurt them.

It is also more common than people think: One out of every 100 people has it. Typically, the first episode occurs in a person’s late teens to early twenties.

Although no one knows for sure what causes schizophrenia, scientists have some ideas, Gilmore said. “It may be a subtle miswiring of all the billions of connections in the brain,” he explained.

The good news: Most of the people diagnosed with schizophrenia lead relatively normal lives.

At one end of the spectrum are people who experience a psychotic episode and never recover. Many have persistent symptoms that do not completely go away, but that can be controlled over time through a combination of therapy and medical treatment.

“That is one of the things we do when we work with people who have schizophrenia,” Gilmore said. “We treat the psychotic episode, and then try to educate people about what the illness is and isn’t so they have the tools to cope and to get on with the rest of their lives.”

Gilmore said the Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health uses a comprehensive team approach that includes psychiatrists, social workers and other mental health professionals to meet the particular set of needs each patient has.

“As with any chronic medical illness, we emphasize to our patients that they are not their disease,” Gilmore said.

Art therapy is one way patients can see that for themselves, he said.

Eleven years ago, the staff at the center started the “Brushes with Life: Art, Artists and Mental Illness” art gallery for patients who had been in the inpatient psychotic unit as part of an overall recovery program. It has expanded to include patients who receive outpatient care as well.

This year, “Brushes with Life” is showcasing around 150 pieces of art from some 35 people in Outreach And Support Intervention Services (OASIS) and the Schizophrenia Treatment and Evaluation Program (STEP), as well as members of Club Nova, a local clubhouse for people with mental illness.

“It is a way for people who have an artistic bent to see that, ‘Yes, I can do something artistic, I can be successful at it, I can express the pain I am having, or the uncertainty I am having, or the joy I am having,” Gilmore said.

“The exhibit, in a way, validates them as a member of the community who can create something of value for others to see.”

For information about “Brushes with Life,” see go.unc.edu/Tx72S.