I’m not sure I know what belonging is. There are moments I can glimpse it—my mother tucking curly fly-aways behind my ear, wafts of samosa hovering above the chatter of Aunties huddled around the stove, the borrowed humming of a sitar in the background of my favorite television show—the actors’ skin paler than my own. …
Category: Mind, Brain and Behavior
A Reimagined Healing: A Reflection on “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace
Nitya Rajeshuni // I don’t understand why wrinkles are blasphemous. I examined her face framed by wisps of smoky hair, captivated by the zigzagging marks traversing her forehead and chin, parables of her youth tucked neatly in their crevices. I imagined these lines etched into place by a magnificent painter, some with delicacy and precision,…
Against the Return to Normal: Trauma and Human Sociality
Bojan Srbinovski // The past three months have given people in the United States good reasons for cautious optimism. After a disastrous winter season that saw the number of recorded cases of COVID-19 rise over 300,000 per day and the total number of deaths exceed half a million people, the pandemic and the country seem…
Emotions as Ethnography: The Story Doctor’s Toolbox
Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo// I am always “in my feelings.” I say this unapologetically, and knowing that some Latina women are rendered in popular culture as lacking control of their emotions and impulses. The overlap between these representations and my ethnographic life does not escape me. Empathy, “my gut,” memories, and emotions are all my critical tools…
Double Bind. A Collaborative Piece on Care and Its Mixed Perceptions
Pauline Picot // Being taken care of is serious. Being taken care of is the first thing you experience when you come to life. You surrender to another human being and in doing so, you establish your first human relationship. Being taken care of is belonging to someone; being the object of their care. Being…
Brave New World: Cyberpunk 2077’s novel depiction of mental illness
Steve Server // By now, many have heard of Cyberpunk 2077, even those not normally within the gamer-orbit. The early rollout of the game has been plagued by game-breaking glitches and unexpectedly poor graphics and performance. Beyond the controversial rollout—and underneath the typical blood and guts associated with violent role-playing games—Cyberpunk 2077 has something unique to say about mental…
From Rumi to Herman Hesse, A Contemplation on Optimism: Why Uncertainty is When Hope is Needed Most
Nitya Rajeshuni // I was followed only by the clouds, drifting across glass windowpanes, as I passed my regular landmarks—the coffee shop with live music, the endless roadblocks of construction, the redbrick campus then pink with cherry blossoms. While life is now beginning anew, there were many months in the dark slumber of the pandemic…
You Will Hear. On the Shareability of Physical and Psychological Suffering in Academia
As a French PhD candidate, I would like to question the shareability of pain in the particular context of academia. Indeed, physical and mental suffering among PhD students is a widely but unofficially admitted fact in the French academic milieu. Consequently, I decided to find out how things stood for my fellow PhD candidates.
“That Most Dreadful of All Human Calamities”: Bipolar Bodyminds in the Early United States
Timothy Kent Holliday // In the scant historiography of bipolar disorder, David Healy’s Mania stands out almost by default. The central premise of Healy’s book is one that most historians and medical humanities scholars would probably agree with: that disease is made, and that disease-making is a historical process. Healy explains in his conclusion: “Whatever view we…
The Beast Within: Mental Illness in Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Miller
Avril Tynan // Throughout the nineteenth century, degeneration theory associated certain behaviours and physical and psychological pathologies with a pseudo-Darwinian atavism of primitive traits and characteristics. One need only think of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, and particularly his 1890 novel La bête humaine (The Beast in Man or The Beast Within), to note the parallels…
