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, and he has run a biomedical editing and publishing company ever since retirement. He has published five books of his own and been involved as a co-author in four more. Denys has a range of qualifications in science and medicine and has written hundreds of research papers. As a youngster he was always interested in art. At the age of sixteen he confirmed as having genetically inherited bipolar disorder (at that time known as manic depression). Throughout his busy research into cancer, he doodled very infrequently, although he did a considerable amount of still-life, landscapes, portraits, and abstract artwork. Doodling took off in 1998 when severe depression occurred. He has completed well over 750 doodles, many of varied sizes, the largest being 105 x 87 cm, but in more recent years with Covid around the doodles were drawn on A4 paper and in portrait orientation, most in pencil but a few are coloured. Their themes are highly varied. Over the last decade he has been helping mental health groups mostly through art therapy and has since 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.