Free Digital Event
Available from
9am Wed 21 Sep to 11.59pm Sat 15 Oct.
Click ‘Book Now’ to register for a ticket and to receive the link to watch the conversation.
Siri Hustvedt with Jill Bennett
A conversation on art, mental health and the limits of the medical model.
In this conversation recorded for The Big Anxiety, acclaimed writer, Siri Hustvedt talks with festival director, Jill Bennett, extending on their chapter in the book, The Big Anxiety: Taking Care of Mental Health in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2022).
They discuss why and how creative practice is therapeutic, what the arts offer that medical interventions do not, and why we need to be wary of measuring the impact of art in medical terms. Rather than focusing on mechanistic measures that fail to capture the nuances of creative process, they argue that we need to attend to the messiness of lived experience and to the social and ecological factors that shape that experience.
Photo Herve Bruhat