Helping Yourself 2020 is a resource of self-help materials by artists sharing personal tips, coping and healing strategies. (For context: this collection started before Covid)

The collection provides evidence for the mind-body at dis-ease and shares ideas on care for ourselves and our communities with a focus on chronic conditions.

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‘In the last few years, due to a health condition in my own body, I've been researching self-help methodologies and ways of coping with chronic pain in relation to stress. In the process, I found standard self-care practices to be merely aiding self-exploitative mechanisms in the guise of well-being, targeted at optimizing performance and productivity, whilst deliberately isolating personal issues. In the cult of 'self-improvement', the individual is held accountable to better themselves whilst covert suffering and being unwell are normalised. I believe that caring for ourselves needs to be learned. It is a practice of self-knowing that is not separate from the fluctuating and complex realities we live in. Being unwell requires us to re-think our assumptions about health. The desire to improve must be scrutinized.’

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