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The human mind is very complex and can’t be fully understood through words alone. Adam MacKenzie, PhD, psychologist at Trinity Health Riverside, spends his days helping people navigate the complexities of behavioral health disorders. In his free time, he finds another way to explore the human mind more deeply: through ballpoint pen illustrations.

Although art and psychology are two different career paths, Dr. MacKenzie has seen many parallels between the two in his life, beginning with the closing of one door eventually leading to the opening of another.

“I got into psychology by way of career No. 1, which was art and graphic design. When I graduated from Minot State University in 2009, it was around the recession. Art was a difficult career then, so I had to figure out my next step,” said Dr. MacKenzie.

After pondering what to do next, Dr. MacKenzie returned to Minot State to study psychology. As he began this next chapter, it felt like the right decision as he fell in love with the field of psychology.

“I really fell in love with the whole field of psychology, as well as being a therapist and paying it forward, kind of that sense of knowing what it feels like when life falls apart and what the next step needs to look like,” said Dr. MacKenzie.

He added, “How I understood art, mythology, and even superheroes was part of why I loved psychology. Art and psychology just seemed to blend together. Now, I still draw on my own time, but I feel a sense of inspiration from what I get to do on a day-to-day basis.”

Although, admittedly, Dr. MacKenzie doesn’t have as much time for his drawing passion now as he did before, he still always keeps a sketchbook on hand, allowing him to utilize even the smallest windows to continue immersing himself in his passion. Even though drawing has taken a back seat lately, that passion will always be prevalent in his life.

Having been a psychologist at Trinity Health since 2022, he continues to find parallels between his two passions of psychology and illustrations. “Talking to people daily about their experience can be subjective. A client may ask themselves, ‘How do I convey to my therapist or anyone what I’m feeling and thinking?’ To take something so abstract and personal and to try to get someone else to see what they are seeing and understand where they are coming from can be a challenging experience.”

He added, “That’s a piece of what art can do on its best days; it can express something that maybe one can’t put into words, or something that one deeply feels is true or beautiful and convey it in a certain way that gives someone else a related experience. Art can be a form of emotional communication.”

As Dr. MacKenzie describes, art is about emotional communication and connecting with others on a deeper level. Encouragement from those around him played a significant role in his journey, motivating him to expand his reach and share his work with a broader audience.

This led to an opportunity for Dr. MacKenzie to display a show of illustrations at Atypical Brewery & Barrelworks in Minot. After a conversation with Atypical about displaying over 20 pieces of his artwork, Atypical was highly supportive in allowing him to put his heart out there for the Minot community to see.

According to Dr. MacKenzie, the illustrations displayed at Atypical represent our relationship with our own experience. “As a clinician, you see people who have very different relationships with what they’re going through. Some people see their anxiety as an element of their personality. Other people see anxiety as ‘This is what I’m going through. How do I combat this?’”

“The illustrations are about how I can take what is an incredibly varied experience and distill it down into a representation of what someone might be going through, how to take my own professional experience dealing with a variety of mental health conditions and give my perspective in terms of what somebody could view it as in a visual medium. With a pen, I can take what I learned through school and represent this in a way that maybe someone else hasn’t seen before and maybe change their relationship on how they feel about their own struggles.”

Dr. MacKenzie further stated that he hopes people will understand, from viewing his artwork, that mental health diagnoses don’t define someone. The artwork is a visual representation to help people understand what they are going through at that moment, and that the diagnoses should be useful, not life sentences.