Library
APS Bulletin • Volume 8, Number 1, 1998
Pain In Art
A Cry for Help
John Heil, PhD
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Figure 1. Commercial Illustration. Williams & Wilkins has granted permission to reprint this image. |
This commercial illustration (see Figure 1) offers a message in picture and in words. The words “Pain is no one's gain” convey a clear and straightforward meaning, personalized and illuminated by the image.
The image tells the story with depth and feeling. A disembodied head is stretched backward, eyes squinting, mouth grimacing in a universally recognized display of pain. It is as if the person who has been rendered anonymous by the indistinct, distorted face is trying to speak. Is the facial expression a gasp or a groan of severe acute pain, or is it a sigh of the blending of pain and frustration that characterizes the chronic pain sufferer? The image conveys a sense of helplessness and is thus implicitly a cry for help.
Stylistically, the artist chose to represent the face as a series of dots, which for the scientific observer loosely evoke the concept of receptor fields. The image scintillates with color--black and blue, white and purple, strong reddish accents in the face. The colors lend a vibrant intensity, as if the pain has a life of its own. The distinct, disconnected dots convey a sense of entropy--a breakdown in the functional integrity of the organism and a disintegration of the sense of self that comes with unrelenting, intractable pain.
John Heil is a psychologist at the Lewis-Gale Clinic in Roanoke, VA, and is coordinator of psychological services at the Columbia Lewis-Gale Pain Management Center in Roanoke, VA.
