The Picture of Health: Seeing the Health of the Chronically Challenged Through Van Gogh's Sunflowers as a Needed Revision of the Clinical Perspective

Abstract

This article identifies and offers a response to several problems that affect the quality of both clinical education and health care services. These matters are: that in clinical training and practice, health, as lived by patients (persons), is not properly considered, and is equated reductively with treating diseases/disorders; that health is seen through disease, and as restricted to a single model defined by an organism's meeting (or being returned to) biochemical or functional standards; that intellectual assumptions instilled in schools of Medicine and Psychology about realities pertaining to healthcare determine an understanding of chronic illness or life with chronic challenges focused on impairment and suffering, and not on the fuller experience of living with illness, disability or neuropsychological challenges that patients have as persons; that arts-based education reflects the same focus in understanding ‘illness’, and thus neglects giving attention to the creation of personal health states of those living with challenging or debilitating long-term conditions; that, consequently, the arts are instrumentalized to serve these predefined educational purposes, rather than allowed to inform clinical training through that which is intrinsic or more specific to them. As a way out of these limitations and as an illustration of how things could be done differently, Vincent Van Gogh's paintings of the Sunflowers are used as visual inspiration for how we could change the way we see, and construct new mental representations of ‘health’, ‘chronic illness’ or 'chronic challenges', ‘patient as person’ or even 'person as non-patient', ‘the clinician's role’ and ‘the identity of clinical practice’. Relying on Van Gogh's depictions of the sunflowers as an example and a visual basis, the article shows how characteristics typical to art (transformation, alternative generation, etc.) can be transferred into the perception and conceptualisation of clinically relevant realities, and discusses the benefits of these changes for clinical practice.