Today, we are seeing a rise in the use of photography to provide benefits to mental health. These range from photo therapies and participatory projects within mental health settings to wellbeing practices such as mindful photo walks and photographic journaling.
To mark World Mental Health Week in May, we hear from photographers who use the camera to help make sense of trauma, understand difficult experiences, raise awareness and break taboos.
Ruth Emily Hanson ARPS and Simon Hill CPHOT HonFRPS
Memory has never been something Ruth Hanson ARPS can take for granted as reliable or even available. As a result of childhood trauma, Hanson lives with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD) and dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder. One effect of this was dissociative fugue states – from one moment to the next she had no recollection of what was happening.
"It was really disorientating and sometimes scary, like waking up and not knowing where I was… relying on other people to tell me"
Carolyn Mendelsohn and Catherine Cho
Carolyn Mendelsohn was invited by the Maternal Mental Health Alliance to make This is Also Motherhood, a commission about perinatal mental health that resonated because she herself had struggled as a new mother. Ten women feature in the series. Among them is Catherine Cho, an author, literary agent and ambassador for UK charity Action on Postpartum Psychosis who wrote an acclaimed account of her experiences, Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness.
"To see your own experience reflected back to you, to see it created in a way, in an artistic way, is incredibly healing"
Olga Stefatou and Yousef Shurrab
Teenage years are difficult for everyone. But teens growing up in a war zone like Gaza have to contend with things no young person should. Loved ones killed. Neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Yousef Shurrab, 19, now lives in Cairo after fleeing there with his family in 2024. Born in Gaza, co-authored with Greek photographer Olga Stefatou, considers how he navigates this new life through the trauma of grief and displacement.
"It’s difficult because Cairo is a big city. In Gaza, I knew everyone. I miss Gaza. I need to return"
