Mental Illness A Deception of Reality is an exhibit I created that is meant to expose the errors of AI and prove that there is no one true face of mental illness Mental illness affects about 20 of the population and affects both men and women In my exhibit I used an AI image generator alongside ChatGPT and other photographers mainly those who work in capturing celebrities As a psychology major breaking down the stigma is a major passion of mine I plan to pursue a career in adolescent psychology and my goal is to normalize mental illness and spread awareness of how common it is With this goal more teens will reach out for help and the suicide rates will lower Before I get into my final reflection I want to highlight my slide on depression The image I used was of the director of my volleyball club from ages 13 17 Rich Walton Rich was a very successful man who led teams that were top in the state and took his own life in 2020 About a year before Rich committed suicide the director of my first volleyball club ages 10 13 also killed himself Both men were highly successful and always had a smile on their faces They were the last two people I would have ever imagined to take their own lives The purpose of this exhibit is to expose and prove the stereotypes of mental illness wrong As I mentioned in the introduction my exhibit highlights mental illness It first shows you images of what AI thinks mental illness looks like and then transitions into images of real people living with the disease At first I planned on using pictures of people in my life but that felt a little too personal so I resorted to using famous people like actors singers and athletes For a few of the illnesses I used everyday people to spread awareness of their stories as well I felt like using celebrities helps humanize them and proves that we don t always know the full story or every detail about someone s life I was somewhat disappointed in what the AI and ChatGPT provided me with I was expecting dramatic images of people with mental illnesses It was also very interesting to me that most of the images provided to me were of women A huge stereotype of women is that they are emotional and irrational It s interesting that even a computer has these biases Therefore my exhibit can also expose the bias in AI while still communicating to the audience that there is no one true definition of mental illness as one may think Because AI takes information from websites and search history hopefully in a few years they will be able to generate more realistic images if more people can understand what mental illness truly looks like The images developed by AI each represent a different mental illness My favorite images that were created are the images representing bipolar disorder and schizophrenia In the bipolar image a woman sits on the ground upset with herself and surrounded by broken objects on her floor In the image generated to represent schizophrenia another woman sits in the middle of an empty room with an eerie looking figure hidden behind her I feel like these two images are the most stereotypical out of all of them The AI generations create a sad dark tone for the exhibit After transitioning into the photographs of real people in the exhibit the tone shifts to a much more upbeat mood I like to compare this to a sad movie having a happy ending To help create this tone switch even more I would have the lighting in the first half of the exhibit be very dim and the second half be bright or maybe even colorful I appreciated that AI kept the same style in each image it generated It helped keep all of the photos related to one another and keep the same theme throughout While I wish AI exaggerated a little bit more in the images it produced I still think they met my expectations of what I had in mind for this project I wanted to show that AI only saw the stereotypical signs of mental illness and that s just what it did As for the images of real people those are less related to one another This helps prove that there is no one true face of mental illness Each disease looks different and a lot of times even the same disease looks different for different people I hope that after walking through my exhibit a person has a new perspective on mental illness I hope they don t overlook some who are struggling or see them as weak or incompetent I hope that they don t run from a person with schizophrenia or judge a person with bipolar disorder and call them irrational I hope the stereotypes of mental illness are lessened I hope that AI creates more realistic images and provides more proper information on mental illness But most importantly I hope we start accepting one another for how they are and stop making assumptions about one another I enjoyed creating this exhibit After hearing my classmates present their exhibit ideas in class I realized that everyone chose to highlight something they were passionate about This project was flexible and gave us the freedom to create an exhibit we would enjoy going to When I first wrote my proposal I was very nervous about how I was going to create the exhibit I was describing I first mentioned that I wanted to take an approach like Diane Arbus and Sally Mann did and catch my subjects in everyday life and not in traditional ways I m not quite sure I accomplished this While some of the images I included were candid most of them were staged I feel like this would have been easier to do if I used photos of people I know In my image selection I describe in detail what I wanted my images to look like and represent I said that I wanted my exhibit to help others become socially aware of mental illness and have a better understanding of what it is and what it looks like I feel like I did an excellent job of accomplishing this My project turned out to be just what I imagined and am pretty happy with it During class presentations my slide was put into the Layers of Reality section Each slide in this section worked to prove that there was more to their topic I specifically like Elyse s presentation titled Unveiling Beauty in the Unconventional I like how she clearly stated that her audience would be people with a closed mindset to the topic While my audience is anyone interested in mental illness I hope that those who come with a closed mindset leave with a more open and accepting mentality The whole point of my project is to prove the stereotypes wrong and hopefully I can change the minds of some with it