What If You Looked At Mental Illness As A House?

If mental illness were house, depression would be the loneliest house. Anxiety would be a suffocating prison. Insomnia would be a home inhabited by clocks without any hands for minutes and seconds, because time would stand still. Here we will consider what it would be like to consider many common mental disorders as houses.

At least Frederico Babina thought so. Babina is an Italian architect who wanted to show the world what it would look like if our minds suddenly became prisons.

Anyone who has ever suffered from any of these mental illnesses will undoubtedly identify with these interesting and impressive works of art. But you don’t actually have to experience it yourself to understand it. Because everyone will understand it if they have ever had interactions with people suffering from Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, a phobia, chronic insomnia, etc.

It is not uncommon to draw the metaphor of mental illness as places where people are trapped, isolated or lost. But no matter how obvious it may seem to most people, there are those who cannot see it or understand it. Mental illness is still a taboo in our society, whether we like it or not.

That said, everyone’s mind has thick walls that separate it from the world. That’s what Frederico Babina thinks. He wanted to use his art to represent the difficulty of these mental disorders and diseases. The project shows mental disorders as a house and is called “Archiatric”. It is definitely worth a look.

Mental disorders that house the project

1 – Depression

First of all, we have depression, one of the most common mental disorders. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) considers it an epidemic. Over the next few years, it may become one of the most common forms of disability.

Many people do not know that depression increases a person’s chance of heart disease, diabetes or even substance abuse. It is a serious condition and greatly affects a person’s quality of life. In practice, it takes over a lifetime…

2 – Anxiety

For Frederico Babina, anxiety is like a house in chains and the fence inside with barbed wire. It captivates and suffocates the people who live in it. As you can see, the artist represents anxiety as a house without windows or doors. Anxiety closes around you and gives you no escape routes…

3 – Schizophrenia

Next on the list of mental disorders such as house is schizophrenia. It is a serious illness that involves a worsening psychological condition, in which the skills associated with reasoning, information processing, perception, willpower and emotions are reduced.

The mind becomes fragmented, disorganized, and begins to fall apart in an irreparable and horrible way. Frederico Babina represents the good with this picture. You can see how the homeowner hangs from a house that is falling apart.

Nor can we forget that schizophrenia is also an early form of dementia. What many also do not know is that people with this disorder usually die earlier than normal.

4 – Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s is one of the saddest mental illnesses. It has a great impact on the patient’s family and as of today there is still no way to reverse the disorder. If Alzheimer’s was a house, it would be a collapsing house. A house that was once beautiful, but now has cracks, and which slowly but surely rots and disintegrates…

5 – Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Finally, on this list of mental disorders such as house, we have autism spectrum disorders. It is a neurobiological developmental disorder. Just as medical terminology indicates, each patient is at a certain point on a wide range. There are no two children or two adults with the same characteristics. Each individual will have a somewhat repetitive behavior, but very varying intellectual potential and use of language.

Still, one thing many people with autism spectrum disorders have in common is social isolation. Therefore, if this condition were a house, it would actually be a house inside another house. In other words, it would be like a psychological maze.

As you can see with Frederico Babina’s work, we can conclude that a person can represent mental illness in many different ways, but that they all still have one thing in common: suffering and isolation. People with these diseases, individuals with names and personalities, sometimes experience that the walls of their houses close around them.

Finally, if any of our readers would like to check out more of the architect’s work and his project “Archiatric”, watch the video below. There you can see several mental disorders like house.