“Addiction issues, mental illness, attempts at recovery, progress, setbacks: a mother tries to make sense of her son’s troubled life journey in light of her own history. Without sentimentality and from an unvarnished self-oriented perspective, Judy Sandler allows herself to explore how her son’s type II bipolar disorder has affected not only his life, but hers as well.”
Author: Pauline Picot
Dr. Pauline Picot is a fresh PhD graduate in Theater Studies. Her research lies at the crossroads of theatrical aesthetics and medical epistemology. She explores the interactions between medical discourse and artistic representations, both in the 19th century and today. She is also a published playwright and poet, and a performance artist.
“Into Their Home”: Thoughts on “Total Institutions” From the Perspective of a Visiting Artist
“In this article, I would like to propose a format that is halfway between a reflective essay on “total institutions” (E. Goffman) from the perspective of a visiting artist, and a practical guide for future guest artists in those institutions.”
“If Nothing” by Matthew Nienow – An Alphabetical Review
An Alphabetical Review of “If Nothing” by poet Matthew Nienow (Alice James Books, 2025)
Reducing Creativity to a Psychiatric Syndrome: On the Pathologization of Female Poets
October 17th, 2024. Public reading of my latest collection of poems, Permettez-moi de palpiter [Allow Me to Pulsate][3]. Open discussion with the audience. […] Suddenly, in a eureka moment, an elderly man speaks up: “You have Cotard’s syndrome. You must have. All the symptoms you describe match up.” This anecdote – whose significance is, in fact, more than anecdotal – gives me the opportunity to revisit a centuries-old tradition in patriarchal discourse of pathologizing female poets.
Sensitive Immersions in Medical Institutions: The French Contemporary Playwright as a Witness to Care, Vulnerability and Precariousness
There is something theatrical about medicine. And there is something medical about theater. It should come as no surprise, then, to observe a very strong trend in the French theatrical landscape, that consists in linking playwrights with medical institutions through what is called immersions programs. But this trend is too significant not to question it.
Bits, Fragments, and Splinters: On the Difficulty of Writing an Article About Mental Health in Wartime Ukraine
This is the account of an attempt to write an article on the management of psychological disorders in wartime Ukraine. The attempt looks like a failure. But isn’t it fair to account for one’s failures, especially in academia ? Isn’t that the only way to understand them, in order to turn them into something else ?
You Threw This at Us. Now We’re Throwing It Back at You.
What is the most violent thing a member of the medical community ever told you ? “You Threw This at Us. Now We’re Throwing It Back at You.” is a collaborative and performative piece about medical abuse.
A Few Pages for a Life: Self-Portrait Through A Health Record Booklet
“It overflows with loose pages: medical prescriptions all mixed up, from my teenage to my adult years, from benign afflictions to serious troubles. All of those scattered fragments compose an anxious being. Rashes, panic attacks, chronic diarrhea. Nothing really changes, nothing really ever gets better. With slight variations, the same medication names come up again and again. 2005, 2013, 2021.”
Stunning and Stirring: A Theory on the Symbolic of Spirit Ectoplasm in the Early 20th Century
The purpose of this article is to interweave the history of spiritualist phenomena and that of sexuality in the 19th century, in order to demonstrate that a mixture of fascination and desire may have played a significant role in the observations made by the esteemed scientists who studied the case of “ectoplasmic mediums”.
Meeting on a Bridge of Silence: A Talk With Géraldine Berger, Bilingual Performer in French and Sign Language
“Géraldine Berger has no hearing disability. And yet, she has been speaking sign language for almost twenty years. This French “bilingual performer” – she makes a statement of being identified as such – has worked on more than thirty artistic productions involving deaf artists.”