“It Never Hurts to Keep Looking for Sunshine”: The Motif of Depression in Works for Children and Youth Inspired by Classical Antiquity (original) (raw)
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Classical Antiquity is a particularly important field in terms of “Hope studies” […]. For centuries, the ancient tradition, and classical mythology in particular, has been a common reference point for whole hosts of creators of culture, across many parts of the world, and with the new media and globalization only increasing its impact. Thus, in our research at this stage, we have decided to study how the authors of literary and audiovisual texts for youth make use of the ancient myths to support their young protagonists (and readers or viewers) in crucial moments of their existence, on their road into adulthood, and in those dark hours when it seems that life is about to shatter and fade away. However, if Hope is summoned in time, the crisis can be overcome and the protagonist grows stronger, with a powerful uplifting message for the public. […] Owing to this, we get a chance to remain true to our ideas, to keep faith in our dreams, and, when the decisive moment comes, to choose not...
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To Build a Bridge: Myth and Legend to Reframe Mental Health in Young Adult Readers
Youth Voice Journal, 2016
Carl Jung’s (1947) ‘collective unconscious’ and Joseph Campbell’s (1963) ‘mythographic discoveries’ examined the role of myth in our everyday lives. Additionally, Dr. Viktor Frankl (1984) identified that the ability to make meaning out of suffering can assist a person, including young adults, with mental health concerns. In this discussion paper it is argued that myth-based fantasy stories that describe the legendary ‘hero’s quest’ can play an important role in helping a young person to comprehend mental health suffering. Through the literary trope of Young Adult (YA) fantasy fiction, mythical fantasy stories can aid in understanding during a process of inner reflection and cognitive reframing. As part of an emerging methodology entitled Story Image Therapy (SIT)®, narratives such as the katabatic tale of the hero’s sojourn journey (to the ‘underworld’ and return) provide a viable method for a young person to make meaning out of mental health distress. The proposed method can also be used to deliver mental health information and strategies in a way that is fun, ever-expanding and open to individual, cultural and other interpretations. Evidence to support the YA fiction method includes archetypal literary criticism and bibliotherapy models, as well as the youth’s ‘literary voices’ revealed through the popular mythical YA fantasy fictions: Tolkien’s (1954-1955) The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Lewis’ (1950-1956) Narnia Chronicles, Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) and Pullman’s (1995-2000) His Dark Materials trilogy.
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Marciniak K. (ed.), Our Mythical Hope: The Ancient Myths as a Medicine for the Hardships of Life in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture, series “Our Mythical Childhood”, Warsaw, Warsaw University Press, 2021
In Classical Greek vase-painting, young individuals of both sexes play several skill and chance games at a prenuptial age, a risky time, especially for girls. The aim of the painters is not to represent a real game, allowing the reconstruction of rules. Ludic activities transpose in a virtual world the critical phase of courtship and the hope for its successful result: marriage. Play and games create a metaphorical space where maidens display their agency over life uncertainties under the patronage of Eros and Aphrodite.
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Ever since its origins, children’s literature has dealt with frightening subject matter. Retellings of classical mythology neatly illustrate the shifting shapes of such frightening fiction for children as the myths contain subjects that might be considered as a treath to the romantic notion of the innocent child. As such, a focus upon the way authors deal with sex, death and violence in retellings of classical mythology reveals how the paradoxical impulses and concerns that govern the act of retelling – i.e. a desire for preserving and challenging cultural tradition – alter under the influence of society’s changing ideas about children and their literature. This paper concentrates upon the rich and vivid tradition of retelling classical myths in the Low Countries. Shifts in the choice of pretext and age of the intended audience reveal a change of attitude towards frightening subjects in classical myths during the last decennia. A closer look at retellings of the creation myths, dealing with sexual and lethal violence between parents and children, and the subject of death in the myth of Orpheus, shows how the retellings of frightening myths range from unequivocal presentations as cautionary tales to demanding narratives generating unfixed meanings.
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[Graphic medicine] Sequential Sadness Metaphors of Depression in Clay Jonathan's 'Depression Comix'
Media Watch, 2021
Graphic medicine embodies a nuanced understanding of illness about the undercurrents in the systems of healthcare and society. Depression narratives in graphic medicine, a conspicuous subset of mental illness narratives, work in tandem with the existing oeuvre of verbal narratives and move beyond them to deliver and map the disordered mind’s complexities. These graphic expositions inculcate an ethos often glossed over by biomedicine and, in so doing, validate the patient experience either for its universality or singularity. Reflective of the widespread attitudes towards the illness, Clay Jonathan’s Depression Comix (2011), a webcomic on depression, deals with the intricate inner lives of subjects belonging to a heterogeneous society. Depression Comix is a saga of telltale clues of depression covering the sufferers’ intrapersonal and interpersonal lives in elaborate ways. From an impersonal point of view, the author deftly employs conventional and innovative metaphors to concretize the mental conditions and emphasize the diversity of illness experience and its challenges as perceived by the general population. The use of metaphor, the article argues, accentuates, and facilitates the visual narration of illness as it concretizes the phenomenologically intense experience of depression. The present article revisits the theoretical postulates of George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson theorizes verbo-visual metaphors as deployed in Jonathan’s Depression Comix to delineate the representational, aesthetic, and figural aspects of depression.
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](Discovering the Bifrost - Mental Health Messages in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction
Doctoral Thesis, 2019
Toula's doctoral thesis on how Young Adult mythic heroic fantasy fiction can be used to reframe and illuminate positive health messages to young readers. The thesis provides the theoretical foundation of Toula's Universal transpersonal teaching and counselling method: Story Image Therapy (SIT)®. Her doctoral artefact is now published as Shadows of Sylvaheim - available on Amazon and Feather Knight Books.
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Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2019
In this paper, I explore how Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, in This One Summer, employ a variety of images and visualmetaphors to address theemotional situations of traumatic loss. In this graphic novel,we encounter a character named Alice,who is often distracted andwithdrawn, and appears to suffer from a prolonged, inescapable period of depression and sadness. By the graphic novel’s end, however, she begins to learn how to live with the effects of a loss that won’t let her go, as her depressive period becomes reframed as a state of productive impasse. Inmydiscussion, Imove through three major types of images that help to illuminate the inner transformations of Alice’s psychic condition: Shattering, Shifting Temporalities, and Diving. Throughout this paper, I use the conceptual touchstones of psychoanalytic theory to describe the interrelation of mourning andmelancholia, and suggest that focusing closely on the visual elements of emotional events in comics might allow for an interpretation of those ephemeral aspects of human experience – including moods and feelings – whose expression inevitably requires more than words alone.
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