yes, we still need ‘painful’ migraine art!

Imah Widai

I’m Mad as Hell and What I’m Doing About It…

Yes, we still need painful and frightening migraine art

…and everything else possible to help the migraine awareness effort!

Well, National Headache Awareness Week (June 7-13) is reaching its end, but our efforts to promote awareness and understanding while advocating for more research and better treatments must go on!

Dedicated migraine professionals, advocates and overcomers are leading the charge online with excellent, informative migraine and headache sites, providing support and sharing knowledge and experiences. Some can be found on this blog under Resources and more will be added here soon.

We can stay informed, help ourselves, be advocates and help others in lots of ways! For National Headache Awareness Week, here are a few ideas:

• Read about the National Headache Foundation and National Headache Awareness Week 2009, as well as participate in this year’s ‘Headache U‘ education program and Health Talk webinars still offered several times next week.

• At Health Central’s My Migraine Connection, Teri Robert, forever a fearless advocate, has assembled a tremendous list of migraine articles for National Headache Awareness Week, and you can always find solid information and invaluable support there!

• Megan Oltman at Free My Brain from Migraine Pain offers a free six-part e-course on managing migraines and a wonderful Managing Life with Migraine teleconference series with experts on the last Sunday of each month. I’ve attended one live and to two via audio recordings, and they’re great.

And for next week, and the week after, and the week after that, do whatever you can to inform yourself and others about everything migraine disease. Take time to explore all the other great Web sites and blogs out there. Read about it. Write about it. Draw and paint about it. Shout about it! See if you can help organizations like the NHF, the Migraine Research Foundation, and the Alliance for Headache Disorders Advocacy raise funds or awareness; even if in some way that seems small to you, you can make a difference.

...Which brings me back to awareness and Megan Oltman’s teleconference on April 26 with Michael John Coleman, longtime migraine advocate, fine-art photographer extraordinaire and president and executive director of MAGNUM.

The conversation was interesting and informative and so many useful topics were discussed that I was extremely dismayed by comments from Coleman during a discussion of how migraine art can help people understand: “…we’d rather focus on regular art, look at people like Van Gogh…”  not so much “heads exploding or chain saws coming out of ears.” The gist was that beautiful, symbolic migraine art is preferable and it “doesn’t always have to be frightening stuff.”

Well, I agree that expressions of migraine don’t always have to be brutally honest and painful, but until we have some basic understanding of what migraine disease is and how it impacts more than 30 million people and their families, friends and co-workers in the U.S. as well as 12-15 percent of people in most other countries, we still need the “frightening stuff.” For people who don’t get what migraine is, they aren’t going to get it from a beautiful piece of symbolic artwork, although I believe we need that, too. We need all of it; all the attention we can get.

Until people stop seeing migraine as just a bad headache and not the disease it is where often-debilitating head pain is only one symptom, we need all the straightforward, insightful, beautiful, ugly, twisted, hopeful, and awesome artwork, poems, essays, photographs, songs, letters, books – anything and everything that can possibly help others see and feel what we do.

After 40 years of migraine, I so wish we didn’t need the frightening stuff, but as long as we have comments in the media like this in the LA Times, “…Obama’s plan to give his acceptance speech in an 80,000-seater stadium is turning into a logistical migraine,” or this in the Chicago Beacon News, “Milton Bradley has been added to a lineup that was already dangerous but the bullpen looks like a migraine waiting to percolate…,” we need way more than scary art!

“The bullpen looks like a migraine waiting to percolate…”?!? What is that?! Is that like an epileptic seizure waiting to simmer, a Parkinson’s disease tremor waiting to boil over?

It’s not only because I’ve spent the last two years of my life compiling, publishing and marketing Migraine Expressions that I feel so strongly about this; there are many reasons and foremost are all the comments I’ve received from people with and without migraine disease, who through the honestly stark illustrations of migraine in the book and elsewhere, finally “get it.”

Yes, we still need the brutal, painful and frightening art and writing, and we all need to keep working together for advocacy, we need walks/runs and fundraisers, we need to shout and stomp our feet, to continue legal efforts, support research efforts, and we will need all of this until everyone “gets it” and maybe, just maybe, we will have true understanding, more research, improved treatments, and wow, maybe someday even – dare I say it? – a cure!

Okay, so here’s your challenge:  If you’ve read this far and are the first or fifth person to comment on this post with what you do for migraine awareness,  I’ll send you a free copy of Migraine Expressions to keep, give as a gift, donate to a library, U.S. Senator or Representative, or for any advocacy purpose. (If you’re in Canada or overseas, sadly you will have to pay your own postage.)