When the System Offered No Answers, Ashley Showalter Drew Her Own

Images provided by Ashley Showalter

By the time anyone realized the severity of what was happening to her, Ashley Showalter had gone several days without sleep. 

She was a senior at the University of Oklahoma, busy with the ordinary pressures of finishing a degree, when her thoughts began accelerating beyond her control. 

A supervisor noticed it first. Showalter was glassy-eyed, and she wasn’t acting like herself. A campus counselor suspected mania. The ER didn’t disagree. By evening, she had been transferred to a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of town.

What she found there was not treatment in any meaningful sense. The ward was bright, loud and airless. Staff hovered at a distance. “Therapy,” in the ward, consisted of DVDs and popcorn. It was the sort of environment that gives the appearance of care without offering much of it.

“I saw a doctor once and not again,” Showalter told HYVEMIND. “It felt like babysitting.”

Showalter remembers being unable to complete a single action. Instructions formed and dissolved before she could act on them. Lie down, she thought—then stopped. Shower, she thought—then froze. Eat something—no. Everything collided. She was no longer sure what she wanted, let alone what she needed.

It wasn’t a doctor, but another patient who intervened, recognizing the agitation that staff seemed to miss. She handed Showalter a box of crayons and said: try drawing. Showalter resisted.

“I hated drawing,” Showalter revealed. “Nothing ever came out the way it should.” 

But she tried anyway, sketching what was meant to be a giraffe and ended up as a series of shapes, yellow and orange with black pen binding the chaos into something recognizable. 

When they examined the completed drawing together, both were surprised. The picture worked. More importantly, the drawing steadied Ashley.

Through the rest of her stay, she drew for others—patients, nurses, the janitor and whoever asked. It was the only form of regulation the hospital inadvertently offered.

In the months following her Bipolar I diagnosis, Showalter realised that if she wanted better outcomes, she would have to secure them herself—an arrangement that, in the United States, is less an exception than a norm. 

People in psychiatric crisis are routinely asked to navigate systems designed around liability rather than long-term care. Appointments are scarce, diagnoses often rushed and the burden of management frequently shifts back onto patients who are least equipped at that moment to do so. 

Although the system had offered almost nothing, what Showalter did have was her art, which, unintentionally, had become a kind of diagnostic record. 

When she was stable, her lines were controlled and deliberate. When she was slipping, the drawings grew darker, restless, scattered. 

“You can see fear in them,” she said. Anyone paying attention could chart the state of her mind by the shifting geometry of her pen.

This was how she learned to read herself: through the images that surfaced when language couldn’t. 

And it was this early, improvised system of observation—part coping mechanism, part forensic record—that made something clear: if she didn’t study her own mind carefully, no one else would.

So she did. She learned her patterns the way others learn a language. She learned the earliest signs of mania and psychosis: the sudden, deceptive burst of energy; the nights swallowed by restlessness; and the shift in her eyes. 

“They turn bright lime-green when I’m manic,” she stated as plainly as someone describing a change in the weather. 

It was this catalogue of intimate, granular knowledge that allowed her to intervene before episodes worsened, knowledge she gathered not because someone taught her but because our system expected her to teach herself.

Her friends also became a makeshift safety net. She texted them a list of behaviors to watch for and instructions on how to intervene. Once, catching the changes early prevented a full episode.

As she gained more strength in her mental health recovery, her art evolved. She moved from simple shapes to fine-line penwork, then to fields of micro-lines that required sustained focus.

More recently, she has drawn clusters of faces, florals and patterned designs. She does not plan the pieces. 

“I draw one line and then the next,” she said. “It’s the only thing that quiets my brain.”

Text began appearing in her work as well—phrases she couldn’t speak out loud at the time. 

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” and “Don’t believe everything you think.” The latter came from a friend who told her, during a difficult period, that her mind was misreporting the facts. The phrase stayed with her.

People often approach her at art fairs and share their own stories about bipolar disorder, sometimes their own and sometimes someone close to them. Showalter says they identify something in her work before she explains it.

“They can see the mental health in the art without me saying anything,” she said.

Showalter does not describe her recovery as linear. It resembles her drawings: pattern-based, shifting and reflective of the conditions around it.

“It has ebbs and flows,” she said. “You just have to be patient with yourself.”

The first drawing—the improvised giraffe made with hospital crayons—remains significant not for its appearance but for what it signaled: that in the absence of a functional system, she had begun creating her own map.

Line by line, she learned to understand the disorder the healthcare system had named but never explained.

For more of Ashley’s art, check out her website and follow her on Instagram.