Within the field of the health humanities, there has been a propensity to claim that medical expertise and lived experience equally contribute to our understanding of symptoms and the etiology of illness. Family memoirs, written by a parent or relative who is living with someone who has been diagnosed with an illness, offer a different…
Tag: illness memoir
Contextualizing Twenty-First Century Schizophrenia Memoirs and Graphic Memoirs: Between Self-Help Culture and (De)Stigmatization
Schizophrenia is one of the most misused and contested psychological terms in medicine and culture (Carlson). Consequently, myths have proliferated since Eugen Bleuler built on Emil Kraepelin’s concept of “dementia praecox” to define schizophrenia as the disentanglement of psychic functions resulting in ambivalent feelings, autism, and abnormal affectivity (Frith and Johnstone 28–30). For example, schizophrenia…