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‘My camera is my real medication’ – Metro US

‘My camera is my real medication’

Annette Seip is a photographer. But she used to be a scientist. With a master’s in medical science, she was a senior clinical research manager for a large pharmaceutical company and studied things like endothelium dependent relaxation in the rat superior mesenteric artery. Whatever that means.

Then one day, she snapped. She wasn’t able to get out of bed in the morning and didn’t even call in sick.

“I was numb,” she says. She stayed in bed for three days, until her estranged husband found her and brought her to a psychiatric hospital.

It had been a tough year. She had just started a stressful new job and moved to a new city – from Toronto to Vancouver. On top of that, her father died and her husband had an affair.

She spent the next six months in hospital, on a cocktail of medications – anti-psychotic drugs, lithium, anti-depressants. She also learned to paint. The hospital had classes in the day, and at night a guard let her into the art room where she’d paint away sleepless hours.

“I’m a terrible painter,” she admits. The petite, middle-aged woman with short blond hair in a stylish do has just participated in a panel discussion at the Rendezvous With Madness film festival. The event is put on by Workman Arts, a non-profit arts group that supports artists with mental health or addiction issues.

After returning to Toronto, Seip spent long stints in psychiatric institutions, and survived several suicide attempts. She still painted, but it wasn’t until she got her dog – an English Setter cross from the Mississauga pound – that her life took a turn for the better.

She couldn’t mope around in bed, because she needed to take the dog outside for walks. She also had to talk to other dog owners. On one of her walks near her apartment in Port Credit, she saw a photographer at the end of a pier taking a picture of a misty landscape.

“It was so beautiful.” She felt she had to capture the image, but figured she could never paint it. She bought a one-megapixel camera and started taking photos. She says the camera was able to get her out of her head and into the natural beauty around her. “Nature’s powerful, peaceful. Not like the chatter in your head,” she explains.

She won a 12-megapixel camera in a contest with a picture of her dog, started entering her photos in art shows and winning prizes. Now she’s studying professional photography at Sheridan College and experimenting with Photoshop.

“The camera rescued me.” She still takes prescription drugs for a chronic mood disorder. But, she says, “for me, my camera is my real medication.”

– Read more of Carolyn Morris’ columns at www.metronews.ca/carolynmorris