Dear Readers, Thank you! Editing, producing, designing (and reading!) this journal has been exceptionally gratifying. We are thankful for the bright and bold writers who each week step out of the confines of their traditional disciplines. We are thankful for being introduced to new ideas, artistic works and academic texts. And we are thankful for…
‘Your Body Is a Temple’: A Social Justice Take on an Old Health Paradigm
Marcus Mosley // At the last session of the Tuskegee Negro Conference in 1914, Booker T. Washington spoke out about distressing recent statistics that said “45 percent of all deaths among Negroes were preventable; there are 450,000 Negroes seriously ill all the time; the annual cost of the illness is 75 million dollars; that sickness…
Three ‘Cs’ of Global Health’s Avalanche of Numbers
David Robertson // ‘Suicide rate up 33%’ reads a recent news headline; ‘dementia skyrocketed by 117% over just 26 years’, reads another.[1] Internationally, health media today indicates a growing reliance on the quantitative representation of health findings, outcomes, and interventions in a display of what philosopher of science Ian Hacking once described, referring to the…
Is Homebirth Safe? Problems of Classification
Liora O’Donnell Goldensher// The first thing I heard when I clicked on the link to Gatehouse Media’s recent story was a siren[1]. While I’d known a new long-form investigative project about out-of-hospital birth was underway, I wasn’t familiar with the publication or its goals, and neither were most of the midwives I know from my…
Painful Memories and Memorable Pain
Gabi Schaffzin // The following contains spoilers for Amazon’s Homecoming series. Proceed with caution. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory. This started after I recently finished bingeing on the Amazon series, Homecoming, a quick but worthwhile watch for the psychological-thriller fan in all of us. Briefly, the show, directed by Mr. Robot’s Sam Esmail,…
“Let’s Play!”: The Use of Play Therapy in Child Healthcare
James Belarde// “To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.” -Charlie Chaplin Children are the definition of potential. While having dinner with a friend at a vegetarian restaurant, the conversation turned to my gross undereducation in the field of vegetables and an abhorrent overeducation in the field of…
Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation”: Uncanny Neuroscience and the Radical Self-Exam
Lauren Mitchell // Ted Chiang’s short story “Exhalation,” which you can read online here, evokes pleasure alongside mourning. Written from the perspective of a nameless anatomist in a mechanized future, Chiang re-casts the body as an “extraordinary machine,” where air, flesh and blood is replaced by argon, metal and gold.
Cuento Therapy, Storytelling, and Men Who Abuse Women
Chuka Nestor Emezue // In 1985, Dr. Giuseppe Costantino and his colleagues, Drs. Robert G. Malgady, and Lloyd Henry Rogler, drafted their foremost paperback: “Cuento Therapy: folktales as a culturally sensitive psychotherapy for Puerto Rican children.” Their work provided instruction in Cuento Therapy, as well as its hopeful application to the field of child psychotherapy…
Reconciling Grief and Unfinished Conversations: A Reflection on ‘If I Had to Tell it Again’
Amala Poli // First published in 1990, William Styron’s Darkness Visible lays bare the nature of unipolar depression in his wrenching account of what he calls an “indescribable” illness (16). In the decades since Styron’s pivotal text on depression, memoirists have continued to write about illnesses of the mind, grappling with questions similar to the…
Demons, Diseases, and Definitions: Historicizing Mental Illness and Neurological Disorders
Claire Litt // “I brought You my son, who has a mute spirit. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down; he foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth, and becomes rigid.” (Mark 9:17-16:20, NKJV) Following the publication of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual…
Twilight Sleep to Push Playlists: (Re)Sounding U.S. Childbirth 1840-Present
Bennett Kuhn // A certain origin myth at the intersection of music and care is celebrated by ambient music composers and their critics. In 1975, Brian Eno slipped while crossing a London road and was struck by a car. Immobilized and on the mend in a hospital room, Eno was visited by a friend, who set…
