Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998) is inspired by Stesichoros’s epic poem Geryoneis, which describes the killing of the monster Geryon by the mythical hero Herakles. Carson’s take on the story reframes the violence between Herakles and Geryon through metaphors. The bodily injury in the ancient narrative is reworked into emotional harm and mental trauma…
Category: Mind, Brain and Behavior
“The Truth is That ‘Agreed Upon’ Part”: Community Building, Collective Knowledge, and the Medico-Cultural Power of Graphic Medicine
In a panel on ‘Altered Realities’ at SPX 2024 that included comic book artists Christie Furnas, Peter Kuper, Laura Pérez, and Nate Powell, Furnas claimed that “the concept of truth” always depends on one’s perception (SPX 2024). In a graphic work conveying multiple realities, Furnas explains, “the truth comes from how people receive” what is…
Psychiatry’s Political Responsibility
I. A psychiatrist from NewYork–Presbyterian visited my seminar on depression and shared a case study. His subject: a politically astute college student, recently undone by the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The student, anxious but articulate, declined a formal diagnosis. If you knew as much as I do, he told the psychiatrist, you’d be depressed too….
“She was evidently insane”: Gender and Madness in Victorian Britain
How did Victorians understand and diagnose mental illness? If a person on trial in a nineteenth-century British courtroom was thought to be suffering from “madness,” the court did not necessarily ask a physician to provide an expert opinion or to diagnose the individual. As Joel Peter Eigen explains, doctors were not respected as expert witnesses…
Writing and Reading Mental Illness Narratives with Lucid Hope
Hope has been widely recognized as playing a crucial role in the recovery process of people living with mental illness. When the possibility of recovery in the future becomes imaginable, patients can also (re)experience pleasure and satisfaction in the present (Schrank et al. 230–34). Yet the universal potential of hope for recovery remains difficult to…
Severing the Academic Mind
Dichen Lachman and Adam Scott in Severance, Season 2, Episode 7 (“Chikhai Bardo”), Streaming on AppleTV+. In the top image, the pre-severed Scouts talk shop while grading papers; in the lower image, Gemma writes thank-you notes in an eternal Christmas scenario. The AppleTV+ show Severance, which explores the lived reality of people who work…
Accounts of Estrangement: About Filaments and other Metaphors
In her book, Doctors’ Stories, Montgomery Hunter discusses the pervasiveness of narratives (e.g., diagnosis, cases study, rounds) in informing not only the medical encounter, but also medicine as an institution: “Patients’ stories within medicine are more or less pared-down autobiographical accounts that chronicle the events of illness and sketch out a commonsense etiology. . ….
Reinventing Purpose: Meaning-Making in the Face of Pain and Illness
Image Credit: Photo by Sameer Srivastava on Unsplash For many of us, a sense of purpose is a fundamental psychological and existential need. Indeed, decades of health psychology research link a strong sense of purpose in life with less illness and a lower mortality risk (Alimujiang et al.; Shiba et al.; Boyle et al.)….
Take a Hike, or Better Yet, a Walk: A Guidebook for Getting in and out of the Head
Image Credit: “person-talking-a-walk-in-nature-carrying-a-typewriter-overcoming-writers-block_ai,” generated by the Author with Davinci AI. In the writer’s guidebook for getting in and out of the head—for overcoming writer’s block— there is a paradoxical complement between the oft proffered advice to “go for a walk” and the instruction to create your “personal writing space.” Walking as a meditative and philosophical…
It was there in front of me: Trauma Art in Don DeLillo’s “Zero K”
What art works would adorn the place where the ultra-rich go to die? Zero K (2016), a more recent work by the American writer Don DeLillo, perhaps best known for his novels White Noise (1985) or Underworld (1997), offers a sardonic answer: art that represents the traumatic conditions of how we live now. The novel…