The 99^th page of my dissertation is nestled within Chapter 3: When Words Fail: Therapeutic Aspects of Visual Arts—my favorite chapter. Conveniently, by explaining this chapter, I also show what my dissertation is about overall. It is about the visual arts community in the Southern Tier of New York state, and the role of community spaces to do their thing, and the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos of a particular subculture within the broader art scene of a now rustbelt town. It is about how these folks, through their artistic practices and the process of creating, are coping with, among other things, life in a de-industrialized town with limited economic opportunities.

Chapter 3 is where I present my data about the act of creating art in the “narrating moment” when the performance of visual storytelling occurs. How does the act of making self-portraits, and crafting a visual story in that way facilitate the embodiment and enactment of an identity, of a persona that is broadly therapeutic and cathartic? I love this chapter because it highlights their creativity and thoughtfulness and presents very real ways that art make life better.

However…. the 99^th page is the 5^th page of this chapter, void of the beautiful words shared with me during interviews. Rather it contains hedging and caveats, explaining that while Western psychological terminology appears, it does makes up part of the broader frameworks my participants operate within, along with therapy speak and wellness discourses. “This “therapy culture” and the broader discourses of mental health are similar to what Marsilli-Vargas (2016) noticed in Buenos Aires. She examined the unique way that discourses found in psychotherapy had permeated the broader culture to the point where discussions of projection and the psycho-somatic came up in everyday conversations.” I also draw inspiration from Grinker (2021), and wanted to make it clear that the diagnoses that came up in my work are in fact culturally and temporally mediated “idioms of distress” (Nichter 1981).

What is funny to me about the content of page 99, is that it is where I most explicitly did what ended up being a subject of critique in my defense. In my revisions, I went through the document to ensure that I took care to not accidentally naturalize these diagnoses and to be clear that these are “idioms of distress” (Nichter 1981) based in a Western psychological framework.

Sebastian, Rachael. 2025. “Sevastra—Art Saves:” Narratives of Trauma and Transformations Through Visual Arts. Binghamton University Ph.D. http://proxy.binghamton.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/sevastra-art-saves-narratives-trauma/docview/3212460241/se-2?accountid=14168

Grinker, Roy Richard. 2021. Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness. New York, USA: W.W. Norton and Company.

Marsilli-Vargas, Xochitl. 2016. “The Offline and Online Mediatization of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires.” Signs and Society 4 (1): 135–53.

Nichter, Mark. 1981. “Idioms of distress: Alternatives in the expression of psychosocial distress: A case study from South India.” Culture, medicine and psychiatry 5(4): 379-408.