LOCKDOWN DOODLES 2020

About the Book

One of the now-accepted methods of reducing stress, anxiety and other mental disorders is to doodle. This art therapy method requires no training or special skill. Everyone can do it; indeed, we all doodled as youngsters. It requires little more than drawing a bundle of lines on a piece of paper with a pencil and then developing it by making changes that start to give it an appearance that looks more artistic. One can start with a subject on the mind before trying to commit to paper. One becomes immersed in the process as it develops thereby taking the mind off a worrying mode. Many become very absorbed in this activity, and that’s when it really becomes strong therapy. The author has strong bipolar disorder; doodling has greatly helped in relieving the downs, and this is especially true when in 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic made the depressed state even worse. The production of doodles during the lockdown years was surprisingly high with an average of a new one every second or third day. The author hopes readers will like the doodles and attempt to draw some themselves when feeling down.

About the Author

Denys Wheatley is a retired academic, had a biomedical science editing company running for 23 years before its closure in 2022. He has published 6 books of his own and co-authored 4 more. Since a very young age he was always interested in art. At the age of sixteen he was diagnosed as bipolar (in those days more accurately described as manic-depression). One of his first doodles after childhood was called writer’s world as it had a quill pen in it. Throughout his busy research into cancer, doodling was not done that often, but he did a considerable amount of still-life, landscapes, portraits and abstract artwork. Doodling took off in 1998 when severe depression occurred. Since then, he has probably completed over 750 doodles, many of different sizes, but in more recent years with Covid around the doodles have been more uniformly on A4 paper in portrait orientation, which lends itself to presentation in a book such as this one. Almost all are done in pencil, but a few were coloured from the start. Their themes are highly varied. Denys has many qualifications in science and medicine, and his written hundreds of research papers. He has been helping mental health groups in the last decade mostly through art therapy. Several years ago, he completed the Scottish Mental Health First Aid (SMHFA) course. As mentioned in the Introduction to this book, one of his major publications in 2012 was “BipolArt – Art and Bipolar Disorder: A Personal Perspective”, published by Springer, Dordrecht, ISBN 978-007-4872-9, DOI 10.1007/978-007-4872-9