"... a 14-year-old Midwestern boy who suddenly began experiencing psychosis-like symptoms after being scratched by his cat."

I'm reading "‘Cat-scratch’ bacteria linked to schizophrenia, study says." 

“Historically, prior to psychiatric symptom onset, the boy was socially, athletically, and academically active, as evidenced by participation in national geography and history competitions, and a lead actor in a school play, winning an award in fencing and achieving excellent course grades,” a 2019 study by [Edward] Breitschwerdt reported about the boy, who was initially diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was once placed on a psychiatric hold for a week after saying he was an “evil, damned son of the devil,” according to a report at the time.... After receiving antibiotics to treat the infection, the boy made a “full” recovery.

The pathogen, Bartonella, is more commonly known as the cause of "cat-scratch" disease. That disease has symptoms like swelling and malaise. This newly reported link to schizophrenia is something else. 

Here's the new study.

"Graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions..."

"1. An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities; 2. A high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; 3. The absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel)."

Wrote Milan Kundera in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" (1979), quoted at the Wikipedia entry "Graphomania." "Graphomania" is a word I looked up after writing the previous post, about Mr. Doodle.

What if anything distinguishes obsessive writing from obsessive drawing? I don't know, but back in 2005 there was a show called "Obsessive Drawing" at The American Folk Art Museum. Holland Cotter wrote about it in the NYT: 

The act of drawing and painting, [one artist said], helped to ease a debilitating anxiety that had dogged him all his life. Once he started a drawing, the anxiety lifted. Relief arrived as a state of entrancement. One minute he'd be sitting at his kitchen table with sheets of graph paper and a pen filled with ink. The next, he'd be aware that hours had passed, and he'd done a drawing. What was the mechanism responsible? He's not sure, but it worked for a creative half century....

Debates about the ethics and efficacy of Outsider Art as a category, with an aura of exceptionalism and exoticism, are old by now.

Yeah, who even hears about that anymore? On the internet, who's the outsider? Mr. Doodle didn't need the Folk Art Museum to embrace him. He just put himself out there on social media.

Archaic prose from Cotter's article:

This is art that can neither be expressively tempered, nor politically corrected, nor marketably slotted by that great vetting, veneering machine called the art industry. So it stays volatile, radioactive, problematically hot. Is this why our mainstream institutions are so reluctant to exhibit it? Because they're afraid of it, afraid of its unpredictablity, afraid of how its intense singularity will react with, clash with, even infect other art? 

"In March last year I was sectioned and went to a psychiatric ward for six weeks, I had been diagnosed with suffering from a Psychotic episode...."

"It’s basically like an overspill of your brain’s 'stress bucket,' when your mind can’t handle it any more. In my case I went through a wave of hallucinations and delusions from thinking that I was speaking to God to being hired to doodle all over Donald Trump’s wall to believing that I had become the video game character Crash Bandicoot. In the psychiatric ward I believed I had met and become friends with Banksy and Kanye West and that we were destined to doodle the world together, in reality these were nurses and patients. It was amazing how convinced I was that these things were all true, it was as if I was living in an alternate reality dream world and I just couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t.... I was under a lot of pressure mainly from the administrative side of my work, the contracts and legal stuff got on top of me and there were too many things to deal with at once. I am much better now... and I am able to doodle better than ever before!"

Writes Mr. Doodle on Facebook. You can see a lot of his work there too — here. Instagram — here. Sample:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mr Doodle (@mrdoodle)

Here's an Artnet article about him from 3 weeks ago: "How an Artist Named Mr. Doodle Became a Multimillion-Dollar Auction Sensation With a Bunch of Squiggles and ‘Like’-able Branding/Powered by towering sales results in Asia and millions of social followers, Mr. Doodle has quietly taken the auction market by storm." 

In his private moments, Mr. Doodle (AKA the Doodle Man) is a British-born 26-year-old named Sam Cox.... [A]ny public appearance by Mr. Doodle finds Cox draped in clothing covered in his own signature imagery—the intricately interwoven pandemonium of cartoon creatures the artist sometimes refers to as “graffiti spaghetti.” (Imagine if Keith Haring adapted the Where’s Waldo? books, and you’ll start to get the picture.)...

[I]n spring 2017, when Mr. Doodle became a social media sensation thanks to an enthusiastically shared Facebook video of the 60-plus hours he spent doodling the full interior of a vacant shop next to London’s Old Street Underground station.... By early March 2021, Mr. Doodle’s steady stream of videos and lighthearted meme fodder (such as a walk in the park with his paper mâché pet, Doodle Dog) has won him a jaw-dropping 2.7 million followers on Instagram, more than 736,000 Facebook friends, and about 82,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. For context, Damien Hirst currently has 739,000 followers on Instagram; Jeff Koons has even fewer....

Mr. Doodle has been deliberately diving into this broader commercial infinity pool for some time now. “Yes, I am aware of Mr. Doodle as a brand,” he said. “Being aware that each artist is actually a brand too is useful, because then you’re aware of your worth, your audience, your own branding, and how that needs attention when working with others.”