Amala Poli // A noticeable discursive turn in attitudes toward the medical enterprise has captured different television and talk shows. A recent Netflix show Diagnosis, already reviewed in Synapsis, is a documentary take on medical mysteries that are crowd-sourced for various diagnoses, inviting the participation of experts and patients alike in solving what appear to…
Author: Amala Poli
I am a doctoral student at Western University, Ontario. My research in health humanities is currently focused on examining how sleep paralysis can realign the dialogue between disciplines invested in understanding why we sleep. I published my research in life writing and the relevance of the memoir to expanding the horizons of knowledge through illness narratives with Manipal Universal Press in a book titled Writing the Self in Illness: Reading the Experiential Through the Medical Memoir in 2019.
Compelling Associations: Kay Redfield Jamison on the Artistic Temperament in Manic-Depressive Illness
Amala Poli // One of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive illness in the world [1], Kay Redfield Jamison in Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, attempts to address a compelling association between artistic and manic-depressive temperaments through a literary, biographical, and scientific argument (5). Since the late eighteenth century, the glamorization of certain types…
Inhabiting Inner Worlds: Narrative Threads in ‘Mrs Dalloway’
Amala Poli // Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is a modernist text that captures the preoccupations of Woolf’s time. It also draws a timeless mindscape of an individual suffering from mental illness: the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Warren Smith. This article explores some strands specific to the character and the texts that discuss Woolf’s work on…
Common, yet Unfamiliar: Exploring Sleep Paralysis
Amala Poli // Stillness. A dark room that looks exactly like the one in which you fell asleep. Every detail captured in the first few moments of comprehension. You are awake, or so you think in a minute. Your surroundings begin to dawn on you. But there is this overwhelming sensation of being crushed, of being…
The Indian Mental Healthcare Act 2017: A Challenging Horizon
Amala Poli // In 2017, India’s Parliament passed a new Mental Healthcare Act that sought to address several gaps and problems in the previous act of 1987. While marking a significant moment in Indian history by attempting to prioritize patients’ rights and consent, the new act raises new concerns. Can the status quo be transformed through…
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…
The Insightful in the Personal Narrative: Reading Jerry Pinto’s ‘Em and the Big Hoom’
Amala Poli // Is happiness always conditional to good health? Or does it redefine itself in the presence of chronic illnesses? Author Jerry Pinto’s work of autobiographical fiction, Em and the Big Hoom (2012), set in India in the 90s and narrated from the perspective of a teenage boy, explores the strong ties in a…