The Summer Holidays will be upon us before we can even think what the children should be up to, there's nothing to do is there? The 'feral' kids from the streets should slip on their trainers, a clean pair of underpants and cynch their baggy tracksuit bottoms that they don't have to do the Fetham shuffle, and walk about all these free events in London. If you are living elsewhere I am sure there is something similar. And those of you who live in stunning rural landscapes just be thankful how lucky you are so close to the natural wilderness! We only get a glimpse of that at Tate Modern.

Is there really nothing to do! I was minded to see the new fossil at the Natural History Museum (free) but before I could pack my bag they had whisked the original off back to Norway and put a replica on display. David Attenborough enthused about the research on television tonight joking that Darwin would have taken ten years to comment about it! That programme will probably be on i-Player. The immediacy of my journey today fell away and caused me to drop into the British Library for starters. Henry VIII: Man and Monarch is on until 6 September and free to under 18s. That would go well with Dressed to Kill at the Tower of London, though that isn't free.

If you happen to be in Portsmouth in December the touring exhibition will visit The Mary Rose Museum. It's a 75 mile cycle ride and used to be quite enjoyable. On yer bikes! And not on the pavement, get a helmet and some lights and read the Highway Code.

The free access to a room in the entrance hall of the British Library provides 'The Sound and the Fury: The Power of Public Speaking' right up to December. Sound Archive and newspaper collection extracts of famous speeches in world history. Three out of ten screens were working today, let's hope they get them all up and running smoothly!

Nearly closing there is 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat!' presenting four hundred years of poetry for children, Family Events and Workshops. Just this week, 26-29 May.

Now I'm heading for the Wellcome Collection on the Euston Road, but I drop in to Friends House bookshop to see what they have to say about Peace. I'm searching for an NGO ­ Non Governmental Organisation ­ that will take up the cause of Design for Need, or Designing out Crime. More of that another day.

What's to see at the Wellcome Collection. Right now two brilliant exhibitions; Madness & Modernity: Mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna 1900. This is open until 28 June. Just next door the second current exhibition is Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings: Mental illness and me, 1997-2008. They complement each other well!

So we are transported to Vienna about a century ago, Madness and Modernity. They didn't teach art history like this at Hornsey, just with a middle European accent. The notes are brief, the effect of the exhibition is much longer lasting!

Franz-Xaver Messerchmidt, 1736-83, Viennese portrait sculptor of the nobility who turned to produce sixty grimacing heads, or busts. Produced in 1907, Hagenbund. "Dreadful lunacy of a realist genius." Four of these character heads are displayed: The ultimate simpleton, chin jutting out. An arch rascal, chin down on the chest. A lecherous and careworn fop, pursed lips. A hypochondriac, grimace, pouting lower lip.

In 1784 The Tower of Fools, Narrenturn, was commissioned by Emperor Joseph II. A cylindrical multistory asylum. Shockingly impressive, it reminded me of the Spithead Forts built for military purposes a century later. They were built to fight the enemy outside. Narrenturn was built to imprison the violently insane.

Otto Wagner designed a more humane establishment at Amsteinhof.

Then at Purkersdorf Sanatorium all sorts of exercise equipment in the Mechanotherapy room. This was in complete contrast with Sigmund Freud's methods of revealing dreams, drives and impulses. Yet a century on the addiction to gyms and exercise machines has been popularised outside the sanatoriums. What's that about Care in the Community! What's so normal about sanity anyway?

Product or Industrial Design of these times bridged the gap to Modernism with silver-plated brass matchstick-holders and ashtrays by Kolomon Moser in 1904. And now cigarette packets carry explicit and terrifying pictures of chronic illnesses caused by cigarette smoking. They must be mad to smoke?

The white painted softwood chair designed by Joseph Hoffman in 1904 looks curiously like its modern-day Ikea counterparts, but with a diamond pattern in the back, probably for extra strength when abused by violent patients.

This is contrasted peculiarly by his dining room chair made of bent beechwood with red leather upholstery and odd pairs of spherical balls at the angles of the leg joints! See Freud about that one?

The third chair, for the entrance hall designed by Koloman Moser in 1903 is of interwoven black and white checked seat and white vertical slatted sides and back.

Max Oppenheimer's portrait of Sigmund Freud in 1909 is unimpressive. He didn't even accent the detail of a Freudian lip! (Sorry Sigi, I couldn't resist that one.)

In contrast Egon Schiele's several self-portraits show a progression of emaciated and disturbing compositions. 1910 is a bit early for heroin chic and size zero male models so there must have been something else quite as disturbing going on. There is some variation, here grimacing, there with hand to cheek, in a white garment, in profile, and clutching his genitals, a caption suggested this was masturbating. They concluded the pathological artist was born. Compare these with Hockney's portraits of family, friends and matelots? Apparently Egon Schiele, 1890-1918, had a traumatic early life where he witnessed the mental decline and death of his father from syphilis.

There are more portraits by other artists of their exotic clients; a portrait of Peter Altenberg by Gustav Jagespacher, about 1909. Franz Biel in 1911 by Max Oppenheimer. It's all about the arthritic looking contorted hands? Also Heinrich Mann by Oppenheimer rivalling Kokoschka. Then a quite unimpressive portrait of Lotte Franzos by Kokoschka in 1910, she an art historian and an artist. She didn't like it and I'm not surprised!

Quoting Josef Karl Rädler, "Idlers, do nothings and eccentrics are all mixed together here, hanging around in the fruit trees." In other works from this time, Rädler comments in his inscriptions on the folly of the war and refers to himself as a pacifist.

Karl Otto Rädler, 1902, twelve years in a psychiatric institution at Mauer-Öhling to the west of Vienna.

'Mauer-Öhling lump of earth ­ world university! Poor ­ mentally stunted ­ Half ­ or wholly Imbecilic people are what I see here. But all in all good sorts, they stand around me as I paint I myself see this home as a church ­ these poor souls as living saints!!! J K Rädler senior, court painter to six states, to many farmsteads, now painter of fools! Price 300 crowns ­ true art and useful art should, must, be worth it!'

A very powerful exhibition. Did a certain gene pool settle into some ice-bound valley multiplying Ötzi the Iceman's characteristics? Oh that we were all analysed genealogically and genetically, what do you think about that Herr Freud. What was your Y chromosome haplogroup and your mitochondrial DNA haplogroup? No, it's our turn to ask the questions. Don't hesitate, don't purse your Freudian lips. (Again!) The patterns on your couch are enough to drive anybody mad. Lighten up my friend, de-clutter. Draw more, let it out. Don't scramble your mind thinking, dreaming, driven with impulses. Start afresh with a plain sheet of paper, no lines, no words . . . Look at all that plain white Modernist design around you. A hundred years on and still we haven't tackled the fundamentals of Design for Need.

And so to the other exhibition. Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings: Mental illness and me, 1997-2008. Until 2 August 2009, but go today or tomorrow and again and again and get everyone you know to go. Yes, it's that important. Bring David Hockney along, and Tracey Emin, but not together please. Sandrine, tell Stuart to go.

The exhibition panels before the calm and quiet television image describe her college studies and her extraordinary performance art, dressed in all the ingredients of a Sunday dinner. You are looking and reading when the quiet woman, on screen, sitting at her drawing board looks up and speaks to you and tells that the exhibition starts in the room next door.

Having been stunned by her doctor's diagnosis of 'personality disorder' she set about what becomes 15 years of treatments.

On day one she determined to make a drawing each day and the exhibition is arranged in a cack-handed way with a number of works selected from important stages in her progress. Eventually the drawings are limited to one a week but still the last caption is for Day 711. In China they say that women hold up half the sky but Bobby Baker seems to have held up a much larger piece than the rest of us, men or women. Thankfully not all the sketchbook pages are annotated in detail and it is possible to absorb the essential works with just the occasional notes. Everyone I spoke with was as absorbed and shocked and amused and admiring as I was, and still am. We agreed that certain images were specially excruciating, the naked sketch of self-harming near the beginning. Some concerned with drinking and drug taking to near oblivion. And so many about the conflicts of the treatment, the therapy, the people she liked and those she didn't think helped her. The pages and pages of observations and complaints to the health authorities about her treatment all distilled into a collage of essential quotations pasted into the cross-section of her head.

How did I resist writing until her Day 418

"In the session with my psychoanalyst I finally told the whole story of what had really happened when my father died on a family holiday when I was 15." It seems he drowned at the seaside.

Day 444

"Running away from depression." Multiple legs like Balla's futurist dachshund.

Day 480

"Attacked by sharp thoughts."

The displays introduce various treatments and therapies such as DBT ­ Dialectic Behaviour Therapy.

Day 540. Go see, again.

Stage 12, days 555 to 575

"My planned major skills for recovery were to be: exercise, a healthy diet and writing, writing, writing."

Day 620

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away . . . Lake of tears, 'I'm ok', blue mug. Mugs of tea everyday keep psychiatrists away."

Day 701

"The last week of my radiotherapy ­ elation!" (For breast cancer.)

Day 711

"The Daily Stream of Consciousness."

Back to Day 10

The self harming. "This is a tragic drawing, but I love its simple beauty and it stopped me self harming for a while."

The next panel declares "In the Day Centre it became a running joke how much red watercolour paint I got through."

If you are feeling a bit out of sorts, go see this. If you are feeling on top of the world still go see this. Bobby Baker has shared a stunning array of intimate insights into her state of mind with a strength, simplicity and persistence of style and technique. If Edvard Munch explored 'The Scream' Bobby Baker has nuanced every atom of her kaleidoscopically fragmented experiences with seemingly effortless mastery of technique and candid honesty. Oh Bobby, I hope you are well.

© Brian Marsh, 26 May 2009 email initiative.cafe@btinternet.com