#LoveMW: I love museums because they help with my depression and anxiety

Today is the last day of Twitter’s Museum Week on the topic of Museum Love. Not really knowing whether it is a good idea to post something like this on the Ministry, I thought I would throw together something personal and a little bit difficult to write. Why I love museums is, at least at the moment, slightly more self-centred than their research potential, engagement with history, or inspiring stories. I love museums because they help me deal with my mental health issues.

Museum Week is a huge time for museum bloggers to be busy, and getting likes and retweets for their social media content. You might have noticed the Ministry has been a bit quiet this week, however, and it’s mostly me to blame. In addition to being overwhelmed with work, personal life etc, it has been a particularly rough period in my much longer struggle with anxiety and depression. We talk a lot about mental health in museums, but typically about how this issues are represented in museums. More frequently the industry is becoming interested in how to reach out to different health communities, and how museums might be therapeutic for the public. Well I have to say as a museum professional they are simultaneously therapeutic and incredibly stressful.

How do I always seem to miss all the exhibitions? The grueling cycle of headline grabbing, queue-inducing exhibitions that London museum’s jostle for make loving museums in the city a stressful affair. Personally I have some serious FOMO, and when I do miss exhibitions it can make me very anxious and down. Too much to see in too little time – unless you are doing it as a job it seems inevitable to only scratch the surface of what London’s museums are doing at any one time. Great for tourists with so many amazing opportunities to choose from, anxiety-inducing for those of us who are trying to keep up with the industry.

But on the other hand, I think it’s the slowness of museums, their permanency, which has helped me out in times of trouble. If you can manage to get into a museum on a relatively calm day, there is something incredibly soothing about performing the role of the museum visitor. You enter the hallowed halls, hang up your coat, select a gallery, and slowly wander round, casually pausing at interesting looking pieces of text. You read from start to finish, you follow the story, you listen to the interactives, maybe you take a picture of something you’d like to share. You sit for a while and think. While I most frequently go to museums as a social outing, they are also a place for me to be alone.

When you have depression, doing anything at all is a challenge. When you combine that with anxiety, at least in my case, it typically means that I continued to be busy doing things (hence the FOMO) just more like a zombie inside. Social interactions are particularly difficult, but my brain is not very keen on letting me rest. Museums are such a blissful oasis in this particular combination of issues. I can be alone, I can be quiet but also keep my brain focused on something that is not anxiety. But I think importantly I’m often looking at objects or paintings made decades or centuries ago, probably by people dealing with the exact same things as me. The world is big, time is long, this moment is short and things will, more or less, continue in the same way (with probably a newer more exiting version of a phone).

So I love museums because (and this is not a particularly trendy thing to say, quite unlike what we normally promote via the Ministry), they are sanctuaries – places where anyone can go to see art, history, or whatever they are interested, and take a little break from the world around them. As a museum person, I know how to ‘be’ in a museum, how to interact, how to get the most out of it. I know this is a privilege of the few, but speaking from a selfish place, the knowability of museum has helped me time and time again when I have felt isolated or too introspective. I’m sure there are many people out there similar stories, and personally I would love to hear if and how museums might have helped with your own struggles.

I’m sure we will be back to your regularly programmed Ministry cheerfulness shortly, but thank you for listening. – Kristin

#Museumtweetup and the Social Media Manifesto

Hey everyone- we are so incredibly excited to be heading out of our normal stomping grounds and out to visit the Essex County Museums this coming Monday for their Tweet-up event! As you well know, there's nothing the Ministry enjoys more than a cocktail and the chance to natter about everything museums. But we are doubly pumped because we are going to talk more about our Social Media Manifesto. Developed during our workshop session for the MA Conference in October, writing the Manifesto was a great collaborative experience in figuring out how to do social media better. We can't wait to hear what the Essex crowd thinks! (or have your say using #museumtweetup)

Prepping for the tweetup has got us thinking about the Manifesto, the workshop, and how we arrived at the actual finished product. There were so many more discussions we had over the day which we just didn't have space for or we felt hadn't been generally agreed upon by the group. In the run up to the event, we posted these controversial Ministry proclamations to try to challenge the way people thought about museum social media. Going into the session, we didn't really have any particular outcomes in mind. We hoped that maybe just by rejecting some of the more cliched aspects of social media practice we would be able to get at something fresh and different.

The results of these conversations are what ended up in the Manifesto, but now maybe before we head to Essex is a good time to reflect on what those starting points were that brought out the most debate amongst our participants. We think some of these things just have to be said in order to get to the bottom of what we think about them. Two of our favourite contentious issues were:

Do we by making social media fun and cheeky, trivialise our jobs and the value of heritage?

If only young people use social media, does it really matter if we tweet things that would offend older demographics?

To us, these are just really fantastic questions that are a bit offensive but maybe we need to think about. In the session we used a lot of images from flyartproductions and LACMA's snapchat account which showed them, hmmm, engaging with art in a different sort of way.

Are these funny? Engaging to a younger audience? Or do they degrade the works of art and really the reason why we pay so much every year to look after them?

Maybe this isn't the case because this is how young people use social media. But are they the only ones following our twitter, instagram and snapchat accounts? Again, its a tricky question that begs some genuine thought. We gear our exhibitions for specific audiences, so why would our social media streams be any different. In fact, this is what the Brooklyn Museum has done with its social media strategy. 

This is why events like tweet-ups are so crucial for the museum industry. Of course it would be difficult to bring up these difficult questions in a formal institutional meeting. But that doesn't mean they don't need to be spoken about, and actually that informal sharing process can be the most informative way of tackling the issues. As one of our participants wrote to us after the session:

I think the main thing that struck me about this process was actually that social media has a much bigger reach and potential than I initially anticipated. Furthermore, I think that museums’ use of social media in particular has shown that social media isn’t solely for ‘young people’ but that actually it has the potential to be interesting, inventive and self-reflective for all ages rather than a self-aggrandising promotional tool for teenagers which is, to some extent, how it is often seen. In a strange way I think that museum’s use of social media has given social media a good name by making it something that is both fun and educational, both powerful and subtle. 

Declaration of participation: #museumweek

Here at The Ministry of Curiosity we're really excited to be taking part in #museumsweek!

We will be joining museums and galleries from across the UK and Europe on Twitter later from tomorrow for the first ever #MuseumWeek, a project that will connect people to artwork, culture, history and science in new and interactive ways.

#MuseumWeek will take place from Monday 24th March - Sunday 30th March and will give Twitter users direct and unparalleled access to some of Europe’s leading museums and the people behind them in 140-characters bursts.

The Ministry will join others across the UK and Europe by including the hashtag #MuseumWeek in their Tweets for the week, meaning users can follow along on Twitter. In addition, every day there will be a different theme including #MuseumSelfies, #AskTheCurator, and #MuseumMemories.

A full list of participating UK organisations can be viewed here

“#MuseumWeek will shine a light on these activities, giving a real-time glimpse into the workings of museums across the UK and Europe, 140 characters at a time."

P.S Please tweet responsibly. Check out our guidelines on how to be a social media guru and not get fired