||Abigail Jane Mack|| I was diagnosed with Papillary Thyroid Cancer, Stage Two, on my 25th birthday. The news was not shocking, though I felt the ground beneath me shift profoundly. After an ultrasound and biopsy, I had a sense the diagnosis was coming. It was not a scary diagnosis. “It’s the second-best cancer you could…
Author: abigailjanemack
What’s Culture Got To Do With It? Reading Jason Schnittker’s “The Diagnostic System”
Abigail Jane Mack // In the past year, the diagnosis of mental illness has loomed large in US political debates about gun control and healthcare. We’ve seen the continued growth of individuals with mental disorders identified in the US prison and jail system. We’ve seen public commenters diagnose the president and celebrities from afar. At…
Screen Play: Writing Ethnography of Mental Healthcare in Los Angeles
Abigail Jane Mack “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside of me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” – Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis “The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in…
The “Criminal Mind:” Discourses of Mental Health and Crime, Part 3
Abigail Jane Mack “UNLOCK THE POWER OF THE WELLNESS EFFECT.” In white lettering across a cool blue background photograph of happy workers, Prudential Financial touts the employer benefits of financial well-being for employees. The Wellness Effect™ will not only create confident, mentally healthy workers but improve the lives of workers’ families and communities. Following a growing…
Teaching Invisibilia: Culture and Conceptions of Mind, Mental Illness and Sanity in the United States
Abigail Jane Mack In “The Power of Categories,” an early episode of NPR’s popular podcast, Invisibilia, Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel spin a web of scientific inquiry and human interest stories to interrogate the role—the power—categories have in shaping our lives. They tell us how early infants learn to discriminate between cat and dog before…
The Criminal Mind: Discourses of Mental Health and Crime, Part 2.
Enlarged Photograph from “Brains of Feebleminded and Criminalist Persons,” a display at the 1921 Second International Congress of Eugenics. Part of Myrtelle M. Canavan Papers, 1898-1945, GA 10.20 “Myrtell Used with permission from the Harvard Medical Library. Abigail Jane Mack I began Part 1 of this series with the image I reproduce here. Item number 1552…
The “Criminal Mind”: Discourses of Mental Health and Crime Part 1
Abigail Jane Mack Everything happens for the first time, but in a way that is eternal. -Jorge Luis Borges “We are as we think,” Stanton Samenow writes, concluding Inside the Criminal Mind.[1] The text, now in its third edition, outlines a theory of criminality, which has had enormous though often overlooked impact on psychiatric and…