Don't Paint Me Crazy - What Mental Health Awareness Week Gets Wrong

What HAA ™ Gets Right About Mental Health Awareness

Mental Health Awareness Week arrives every May, but real mental health awareness is harder to find. The green ribbons go up. The emails go out. Someone books a mindfulness session for the lunch hour and calls it culture.

And somewhere in the same building, someone is being asked to be less of themselves.

I painted Don’t Paint Me Crazy years before I had language for what it was holding. That’s how it usually works for me. The canvas arrives at the knowing first. The frameworks, the words — they come later. The studio is where my research and development happens. What I paint is what I’m processing before I can fully name it.

In that painting, a brush is being held to a woman’s lips. The words on the brush read: Paint Me Crazy. Around her — green mental health ribbons. Roses. Her natural hair full and present. Her eyes wide open.

The brush does not belong to her.

Someone is painting her as crazy. Naming her. Defining her. Using language as an instrument pressed directly to her mouth. To the place where her own words would come from.

This is what narrative misalignment does at its most harmful. It doesn’t begin inside you. It begins with a story someone else decides to tell about you. That story is often supported by structures, institutions, and systems. They have their own reasons for finding that story convenient. Too much. Difficult. Emotional. Unstable. The labels get repeated. They get formalised. They find their way into the language of the room.

And then something shifts. The gaslighting does its quiet work. You begin to question your own reality, your perception, your responses, your fullness. The story told about you starts to feel, in the most disorienting way, like it might be true. Until you can no longer tell whose hand is holding the brush.

That is the moment the harm completes itself. Not when someone first calls you crazy. But when you start to wonder if they’re right.

Here is what I have observed, across organisations and across lived experience.

When someone’s fullness, their expressiveness, joy, directness, and cultural way of being make a system uncomfortable, the system rarely examines itself. It examines the person. It reaches for language. Too much. Difficult. Emotional. Unprofessional.

The bubbly Black woman told to tone it down. The expressive leader whose passion reads as volatility. The person whose cultural communication style gets labelled as aggression. The one who laughs loudly, moves freely, takes up space unapologetically, and gets managed for it.

This is narrative misalignment as a mechanism of harm. The story the system tells about a person diverges completely. It diverges so much from who that person actually is. The person begins to question their own reality. They perform a smaller version of themselves. They pick up the brush.

And then Mental Health Awareness Week arrives.

And the ribbon goes up.

HAA™ — Hydrate. Affirm. Adorn.

HAA™ came to me as a framework after years of watching what people do to survive. It came from watching people navigate environments that don’t hold them.

Three interlocking practices, not luxuries, not wellness extras, not self-care in the commercial sense.

Hydrate is about genuine replenishment. What actually restores you. Not what you’re told should be enough.

Affirm is about the words that hold your reality in place — who you are, what you know, what you have lived. In organisations, affirmation is structural. It is whether your contribution is named, credited, and held. Or whether it is absorbed and attributed elsewhere.

Adorn is about showing up as yourself. Fully. Your hair, your voice, your register, your laugh, your cultural self. Not the managed version. Not the version that has learned to make others comfortable. You.

Most people practising HAA™ are doing it because their environment makes it necessary. They are replenishing privately what the system depletes publicly. That is not wellness. That is triage.

The question for any organisation this Mental Health Awareness Week is not whether you have a policy.

It is whether your culture requires people to un-adorn before they walk through the door.

Whether your affirmation is structural, or whether it lives only in the all-staff email.

Whether you hydrate people, genuinely replenish them, or whether you extract, and then offer a lunch-hour yoga session as restitution.

Cultural competency is not a training module you complete in February. It is the daily structural question. Does your organisation make room for the full humanity of the people inside it? Without that, mental health awareness is a ribbon. It is placed on a wound the organisation helped create.

Don’t Paint Me Crazy lives in the Becoming Collection now. It belongs there — because that is exactly what it is. A painting about the journey of becoming yourself in systems that would prefer you didn’t.

I wasn’t ready to show it fully when I first made it. I understand now what it was holding. I understand that I painted it before I had language for any of this. That was before HAA™ had a name. It was before I could articulate narrative misalignment as a structural mechanism. This is exactly what I mean. The studio is where my research and development happens.  Art arrives at the knowing first. The rest follows.

If this is landing, if you recognise something here, in yourself or in the organisation you lead, the thinking continues.

Because here, is where art becomes your strategy.