[Graphic Medicine] Critique of DSM, Medicalisation and Graphic Medicine (original) (raw)
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[Graphic Medicine] On Graphic Mental Illness Narratives
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics , 2021
Mental illness continues to be the most stigmatized medical condition across cultures. Autobiographical accounts on affective disorders/mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression among others not only foreground the distinctive circumstances of one’s suffering but also poignantly portray what it means to undergo the disquieting phases of treatment (such as drug therapy and institutionalisation). As such, these narratives open up dialogues about mental illness which otherwise remain stigmatised and thus contribute to overcome discrimination associated with mental illness. Of late, graphic medicine, one of the burgeoning genres of comics, have widened the scope of such first-person accounts of mental illness. Coined by a British physician and comics artist, Ian Williams in 2007, graphic medicine, typically narrated by patients, (professional) caregivers or physicians, refers to the intersection of comics and healthcare. Prominent graphic mental illness memoirs include Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales (2010), Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me (2012), and Rachel Lindsay’s Rx (2018). In their mission to counteract medicine’s dogmatic and reductionist approaches, these visual memoirs foreground a plethora of subjective experiences as they also expose and change the current mental health procedures for the better. Taking these cues and in the context of deteriorating global mental health prompted by COVID-19 pandemics, three authors, Clem Martini, Tyler Page and Tatiana Gill, in an email interview share their views on mental illness, graphic medicine, identity crisis, stigma, and, the larger systemic challenges of mental illness treatments and care-giving. The interview consists of two parts. In the first part Drawing Mental Illness the authors respond to questions common to all of them and in the second part Greater Choice, Better Care each of them answer specific questions pertaining to their respective memoir.
Health, 2019
Representation of psychological experiences necessitates a creative use of means of expression. In the field of graphic medicine, autobiographical narratives on mental illness find expression through the unique semiotic nature of comics, which facilitates the encapsulation of complex psychic-scapes and embodiment of the artist's experiences. In so doing, these verbal-visual techniques provide vividness and easily digested expression, translating the sufferer's altered mental perspective effectively for the reader. The deployment of such elements inherent in the medium facilitates multilayered connections to the patient narrative, which provide a depth beyond the raw medical discourse. The present essay, with reference to Ellen Forney's Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me: A Graphic Memoir and Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and other Things That Happened, investigates the mediative value of rhetorical devices unique to the medium of comics in actualizing the subjective experience of mental illness. The essay also seeks to delineate the cultural power of graphic memoirs by positioning them at the crossroads of sufferer's experiences and clinical description, drawing on theoretical insights from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and other graphic pathographers/theorists, such as Ian Williams and Elisabeth El Refaie.
[Graphic Medicine] Representations of Mental Illness in Medical and Popular Discourses
Media Watch, 2019
Representation, primarily understood as ‘presence’ or ‘appearance’ with an implied visual component, is a critical concept in the cultural milieu. Conceived as images, performances, and imitations, representations propagate through various media: films, television, photographs, advertisements, and other forms of popular culture. As such, representations of mental illness perform a pivotal role in framing perceptions about the mentally ill. These representations influence and shape public perceptions about the illness. This essay aims to analyze how mental illness is perceived, represented, and treated in popular culture and medical discourses. In so doing, the essay lays bare the ideologies and the symbolic codes that undergird these representations and the consequent stigma confronted by the mentally ill. Taking these cues, the essay close reads popular representations of mental illness in movies, newspapers, advertisements, comics, and paintings and the articulation of stereotyped images of the mentally ill in a medical discourse which externalize madness in distorted physiognomic features. In so doing, the essay exposes the negative implications of these representations on the personal and social lives of the mentally ill and negotiates the significance of personal accounts of mental illness experience as a means of reclaiming their identity.
[Graphic Medicine] Visual metaphors and Patient perspectives in Graphic narratives on Mental illness
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2020
The diverse affordances of the medium of comics like spatio-temporality and visual rhetorical devices enable artists/patients who suffer from mental illnesses to approximate their experiential reality via graphic narratives. The graphic narratives analysed in this essay are reflections of the authors’ experiences of dealing with friends and family members who suffer from mental conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia. Weaving together dreams, myths and reality, Nate Powell and Glyn Dillon create complex narratives that bring to life the patients’ subjective worlds through the medium of comics. In so doing, these narratives vindicate the significance of graphic medicine in negotiating an alternate reality which is not captured in reductive biomedical and popular accounts of the illness conditions. Spatial and stylistic visual metaphors are used in these narratives to depict specific psychological experiences in viscerally engaging ways. Drawing theoretical insights from Elisabeth El Refaie, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, this essay explores the middle ground between triumphalist and fatalist narratives through grey metaphors that stylistically encapsulate the patient’s lived experience. It also investigates how Powell’s Swallow Me Whole and Dillon’s The Nao of Brown use visual metaphors to intersperse multiple temporal and spatial dimensions that mimic patient’s altered inner world.
Picturing Illness: History, Poetics, and Graphic Medicine
Research and Humanities in Medical Education, 2015
Comics have often been treated as a juvenile and sub-literary art form; however, taking cues from the new-found cultural acceptance of comics, particularly with the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragedy (2006), there have emerged, over the past decade, a new breed of comics dealing with the patient/caregivers’ experiences, perspectives and identities. Christened as graphic medicine, these illness narratives use comics as a medium to address wide ranging disease/illness related issues. The present review examines the following issues: What is graphic medicine? Is there a tangible relationship between underground comics and graphic medicine? If so, can we regard underground comics as historical precedent to graphic medicine? What are the uses of comics in medicine? Broadly put, drawing examples from various graphic medical narratives, the paper seeks to trace the histo...
'Eye of the Beholder': Psychiatric Medical Reasoning, Narrative Humility, and Graphic Medicine
Rupkatha Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021
Within health humanities, graphic medicine narrates individual stories of patient experience in its interaction with the system of healthcare and its professionals. These autopathographies give a new perspective to the medicalized accounts of diseases and assign subjectivity to the voice which narrates its sufferings. From a medical perspective, clinical reasoning is an important step in the treatment of any disease and a procedure that determines the course of the upcoming treatment. However, in psychiatry, clinical reasoning is a problematic terrain with its lack of external validating criteria and increased reliance on non-somatic symptoms of the disease. In many instances, the authority of biomedical knowledge takes over clinical reasoning and completely denies the individuality of a mental patient and his or her story. This research article attempts to investigate how individual stories and experiences are undermined in psychiatric clinical reasoning discourses and recognizes the importance of empathy and compassion in medical listening through a close reading of select graphic memoirs on bipolar disorder. Citing certain panels from Rachel Lindsay's Rx (2018) and Ellen Forney's Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me (2012), this study analyses the pitfalls of clinical reasoning in psychiatry and the widening gap of doctor-patient communication in such facilities. Interweaving the theory of Sayantani Das Gupta's Narrative humility with instances taken from the above mentioned texts this article discusses the imperative need to restore empathy in medical listening.
Visual Pathologies: The Semiotics of the Patient and the Practitioner in Comics
Newspapers have been a stronghold news source for centuries covering a wide range of topics. Though reporting is meant to be unbiased and only fact, stories produced are inevitably entwined with the author's cultural values-news content ranging from sports to healthcare, including articles, advertisements, and editorial cartoons provide valuable insight into the lives of society. Voices, or narratives, are a huge part of how culture is created and maintained. In healthcare, patients can feel like their voices are not heard. In an attempt to bridge the gap between medical and humanities research and to gain insight into doctor-patient interactions, this analysis asks what ideologies and beliefs are present in medical contexts and how are they represented within the editorial cartoon. Recent studies suggest that mass media as societal discourse may frame or position participants within a society. In this theory of framing, culture is formed from discourse through a reflexive process. Using Kress and Van Leeuwen's research on meaning making, this study will perform a discursive analysis on medical-themed editorial cartoons from Carpe Diem, Rhymes with Orange, The Lockhorns, to Bizarro. Through this close reading, explicit and implicit cultural beliefs held about medicine, including practitioners and patients, have been revealed, including the portrayal of the doctor's power over the patient and patient distrust in doctors. Taking into consideration media theory and the analysis of the comics, medical associations and practices may find valuable insight from the opinions and beliefs of not just the authors of these comics but society as a whole, which may prove important as debates over healthcare are ongoing.
‘Graphic Medicine’ as a Mental Health Information Resource: Insights from Comics Producers
Recent literature suggests that a growing number of comics are being published on health-related topics, including aspects of mental health and social care (Williams 2012; Czerwiec et al 2015) and that comics are increasingly being used in higher education settings as information resources. This article offers insights from comics creators and disseminators and explores the wider context of comics production and distribution (with a focus on 'Graphic Medicine' or health-related comics) as part of a larger study examination of the interface between these documents and potential academic audiences. Original data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with 15 participants actively involved in comics creation and production. Elements of domain analysis (Hjørland 2002) were used to obtain insights into attitudes to the creation, dissemination and use of mental health-related comics. Though potentially useful comics material is being produced in the mental health domain, significant challenges remain for producers in enabling their work to be accessed within higher education settings. This paper suggests that comics producers need to make a concerted effort to reach academia, and academia – including information professionals – need to embrace new types of material to enhance teaching.
[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.