The Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF) will take place across Scotland this October for its 18th year, led by the theme ‘In/Visible’. 

From Thursday 10–Sunday 27 October the festival will play host to 220 events, including Now You See Us, a special two-day showcase of artist commissions, creative workshops, vital discussions, film screenings and more, including self-defined schizospectrum playwright Jen McGregor (pictured above) and her work-in-progress play Hallucinogen; Men Don’t Talk, a new play on male mental health by writer Claire Prenton; an International Film Award ceremony, which will celebrate categories like personal narrative, human rights and experimental, selected from 400 submissions; and new exhibition Our Power, created by people with lived experience of racist microaggressions to explore the impacts it has on their mental health.

The festival has also commissioned five artists to tackle its core theme: Deborah Shaw (aka Aurora Engine) will create an electronic-infused choral suite inspired by her experiences with Tourette's syndrome; Meray Diner will screen a moving image film drawing on interviews with people from migrant backgrounds and conflict zones, exploring how news events can trigger them in a way that is unspoken and invisible; Ritu Arya will exhibit a sculptural installation consisting of 'inside-like’ bodily shapes to visualise the impact of trauma; Rebecca Livesey-Wright and Indra Wilson will collaborate on a process of polyvocal writing, drawing on their experiences of pregnancy; and Sarah Forrest will create a short film in collaboration with her 15-year-old nephew about his experience of ADHD, asking the question: ‘how can we be sure if we’re seeing or not seeing the same things as each other?’

Gail Aldam, Arts and Events Manager Scotland for the Mental Health Foundation said, ‘Every year our group of festival coordinators from across Scotland choose a theme together, and we’re especially excited about this one. Invisibility is such a rich theme to explore in relation to mental health. It’s an opportunity to talk about all the ways that people can be made to feel invisible and how isolating this can be, it’s an opportunity to talk about stigma, about the things we keep hidden, and about inequality. 

‘But we also want to explore visibility – what are the things we choose to reveal about ourselves and our mental health and what are the things we don’t? How do we make the invisible visible? Through our artist commissions, and proposals for our showcase in Glasgow and other events across Scotland, we’ve already received so many powerful and provocative responses to this theme and we can’t wait to see what the SMHAF community across Scotland comes up with in October.’

Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, various venues, Thursday 10–Sunday 27 October.