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: psychiatry
What Happened to Mrs. Taguchi? Reading Medical Pluralism in Imperial Japan
Trigger Warning: This essay discusses attempted suicide. What Happened in the Hallway? The story of “Mrs. Taguchi” had a happy ending. Having attempted suicide by hanging for a third time while an inpatient at the Tokyo Matsuzawa Hospital, an elite psychiatric facility where she received treatment in 1930, the 42-year-old’s symptoms took a sudden turn…
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…
Ulysses Contracts and the “Authentic Self”
“‘In flowery meads the sportive Sirens play, Touch the soft lyre, and tune the vocal lay; Me, me alone, with fetters firmly bound, The gods allow to hear the dangerous sound. Hear and obey; if freedom I demand, Be every fetter strain’d, be added band to band.’” In the above, Odysseus addresses his crew as…
The Appeal of a Royal Procession, Diagnosed
What drove people to interrupt royal processions, could it be mental illness? What political purposes could a psychiatric diagnosis serve, could it be more than dismissing a petitioner?
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series (III)
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series tackling Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series (II)
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series tackling Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
His Wife (No. 8847)
Jonathan Chou // His Wife (No. 8847) History from wife. The water came in through painted rain pipes. It was not paint but a daub of lard on his wife’s dress. She didn’t remove it after all.1 Things didn’t go smoothly. Furniture had to be wiped off. Elix. Iron Phos. Quin. & Strych. Smash the…
Trump, Madness, Tricolon Crescendos
Pasquale S. Toscano // Madness is therefore defined to be a vehement dotage, or raving without a fever, far more violent than melancholy, full of anger and clamour, horrible looks, actions, gestures, troubling the patients with far greater vehemency both of body and mind, without all fear and sorrow, with such impetuous force and boldness…
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…