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Crafts CouncilStories

How crafting helps me manage my mental health


ByRuth Terry

10 December 2020

The writer Ruth Terry describes how the making process has helped her through difficult times – and speaks to others who have experienced its benefits


Ruth Terry

10 December 2020

  • Opinion
  • Textiles
  • Knitting
  • Craft and wellbeing
  • wellbeing

Photo: Pixabay

My brain does not work like other people’s brains. That’s because I have ADHD, bipolar depression, and generalised anxiety disorder. For the past few years, I’ve managed my symptoms fairly well through a combination of medication, diet, and exercise. Then came 2020. My symptoms stopped following a predictable pattern, and I started to experience new ones like non-restorative sleep that required different remedies.


  • Ruth Terry, wearing a scarf that she knitted herself

All my usual go-tos failed. Morning affirmations increasingly felt like self-delusion, while gratitude journaling provided only a fleeting respite. Roller skating helped—until I developed chronic knee pain.

Finally, I decided to lean into distraction in the form of crocheting a sweater, which required no psychological gymnastics or physical strain. I was surprised how much it helped — and how sweet and immediate the relief. I’ve always been intensely creative and loved working with my hands but, before now, I never realised the potential that crafts had to literally keep me sane. When I came across a Twitter thread where other makers revealed how they coped through craft, I reached out to them to find out more.


  • Work by Alison Mayne

First, I spoke to Alison Mayne, a knitter, pattern designer, and educator whose doctoral work explores how crafting actually makes people feel and why. Her research primarily took place in a private Facebook group with more than 500 members from all over the world, who associated positive feelings such as pride, agency and self-esteem with crafting.

‘There was also a lot of general well-being associated with having a creative outlet of some kind,’ says Mayne. ‘And then there was that calming, sort of slowing down and slowing of breath through the repeated actions of stitching.’

Crafting also gave participants a sense of connection, whether through in-person crafting groups, online groups such as the study itself, or ‘just being part of a big tradition of makers’, Mayne continues. This chimed with my experience: needlecrafts make me feel connected to my ancestors – enslaved Africans and their descendants who were America’s original craftivists – and my crafty friends and family in the US, who I can’t physically connect with because of the coronavirus pandemic.


  • Work by Lilith Green

For Lilith Green, a professional yarn dyer and knitter from West Kilbride, Scotland, who is autistic, pre-pandemic knitting circles made socialising possible. Normally, she contends with high anxiety in social situations but showing up to a group with a shared interest gave her ‘an immediate level of comfort’. And because everyone is already looking down at their knitting, ‘I’m not the kind of weird one because I’m not looking at people’, says Green.

Knitting has also helped her with stimming – ‘unconventional, intense, or repetitive’ movements that help people with autism self-stimulate, self-soothe, and communicate (as the writer Lauren Rowello puts it). Green says her own stimming has ‘gotten massively worse’ during the pandemic. 'Knitting, for me, fulfills the same kind of physical need, because it’s a repetitive movement that I’m doing with my hands,’ she says. ‘It’s incredibly helpful for me to be able to replace an anxiety-causing activity I can’t control with something creative.’

Joi Weaver, who lives in State of Washington in the US, also uses crafts like weaving, spinning, and nalbinding – a Viking method of knitting with a single needle – to manage her anxiety, bipolarity, and complex PTSD. 'Crafting makes me exist in my body,’ she says. ‘That grounding, that forcing me to be in my body right now in the moment – I find that really helpful.’


  • Work by Meep Matsushima

Over in Washington DC, Meep Matsushima, who has obsessive compulsive disorder, incorporates repetitions of her ‘safe’ numbers into her crochet designs. ‘Some numbers feel good, and I’ll do colour repetitions in multiples of those,’ says Matsushima, who has also been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and ADHD.

Crocheting also helps her cope with the realities of living with chronic pain associated with migraines and Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare group of conditions that affect connective tissue. ‘I have a lot of existential dread about "wasting my life" because I spend a lot of time unable to do anything at all,’ she says. ‘Crochet is a low-spoon hobby for me. I can usually crochet even when I can’t do anything else. Then when I’m done, I have a thing, and the thing is proof that I existed.’

Making and counting stitches works as an active meditation for me


Ruth Terry

Meditation is often recommended to assuage the kind of anxiety and depression that leads to negative thought patterns like this, but my ADHD makes it nearly impossible to sit still and empty my mind. I’ve discovered that making and counting stitches works as a kind of active meditation for me. In this meditative state, I arrive at joyful and unexpected solutions, like marling multiple yarns together to make new colourways or to improve fabric drape. I experiment with new techniques, like crocheting my ‘turning chain’ after I turn. It’s a rebellious thrill every time I start a new row.

Those little victories are important to me because I don’t get particular pleasure from completing things. Rather than revelling in the joy of the finished product, I mostly see the flaws – an anhedonia that I blame on my bipolarity. That means it is imperative that I enjoy the process of making.


  • Work by Alison Mayne

Mayne’s research corroborates my experience. She found that, for some people, crafting ‘would lead to negative self-talk and people being quite cruel to themselves about their skills’, she says. Other subjects found that crafting played into obsessive behaviours, with some crafting to the point of repetitive stress syndrome or physical pain. Meanwhile, the ever-memeable yarn stash can trigger hoarding tendencies.

These kinds of triggers are why Mayne is wary of over-prescribing crafting as a panacea for mental health. ‘You just have to tread really carefully with individuals and what they need, and what they need at different times,’ she says. ‘And it's not a replacement for proper medical care, counseling, care, talking therapies or medication.’


  • Holi Colour by Julie Taylor

Nonetheless, at a time when global events are taking a toll on everyone – whether they have prior clinical diagnoses or not – the benefits of crafts for mental health should not be ignored. ‘Crafting for me has been my lifeline through some very rocky parts of my life,’ says Julie Taylor, a veteran dyer, spinner, and tapestry weaver from Cambridge, who does not have a specific mental illness but still copes with difficult periods through craft. ‘I will try and take time each day to sit and engage in some form of craft and just concentrate on that and try to not think about anything else. I am totally entranced by the finished surface of tapestry.’


Harriet Tubman knitted $20 Bill by Lorna Hamilton-Brown

East Sussex-based knitter, designer, and educator, Lorna Hamilton-Brown echoes this. ‘I use my craft as a way of keeping sane and dealing with issues. During lockdown and after the death of George Floyd, I used knitting and crochet to help me heal,’ she says in a Twitter DM.

Back in the US, the election threw Joni Weaver into a crafting fervour. ‘I’ve been super, super stressed about it. And so I just channeled it into my loom and I’ve got about four scarves now.’

I’ve always had uncomfortably lurid, anxiety-provoking dreams even in the best of times. For months now, I have had nightmares multiple times per week. Every day, I awake unrested and then muddle through my day in a state of bone-deep exhaustion. Sometimes in the afternoon, I cry like a baby because I am just so tired.

Making something – anything – feels like a shaking of the fist at this destructive year and the body and mind that I feel are failing me


Ruth Terry

Crocheting is one of the few things I can do that doesn’t sap what little precious energy I have, and, compared with knitting, it offers nearly instant gratification. In a year of seemingly insurmountable global crises and personal health battles, crocheting presents me with problems I can solve relatively quickly and while I’m binge watching Netflix. Figuring out a better sleeve structure for the ribbed crochet sweater I’m making is one of the few things I enjoy right now because everything else leaves me so fatigued.

Weirdly, I’m finding that repeated failure – after four sleeve iterations, I decided to knit a cardigan instead – is actually helping me deal with everything. Every day is a fresh opportunity to try to fix my past mistakes and to make new, better choices – a tiny hit of optimism when things seem so grim. Making something – anything – feels like a shaking of the fist at this destructive year and the body and mind that I feel are failing me right now. Somehow Weaver knows my heart when she says: ‘It’s so helpful sometimes when my brain is really bad to just sit down and make a thing and remind myself that, you know what, I can still do things, I’m not entirely broken, I can still produce things that are cool or useful or sometimes even beautiful.’


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