Keep Your Head in the Gutter: Engendering Empathy Through Participatory Delusion in Christian de Metter’s Graphic Adaptation of Shutter Island (original) (raw)
Related papers
2024
[NOTE: You will have to download the thesis to see any of the FIGURES, as the preview cannot show them!] This doctoral project, Re-worlding the Self in Graphic Narratives—A Case Study of Sense, Affect, and Mad-Centered Knowledges of Psychosis, collaboratively explores and addresses experiences of psychosis (sensory breaks from reality) with Mad-identifying participants who describe their earliest memories of these interior events from a sensorial and visual perspective. Co-creating an arts-based ethnography of psychosis through the ongoing production of artworks and media, I survey the ways that participants’ narratives of psychosis materialize through visual and poetic representations of their lived experiences of madness. I examine how individuals distressed by psychosis move beyond their symptomatic illnesses and narrowly prescribed identities and find new ground to (re)make themselves through expressive processes. Within a synergetic inter-arts research setting, I led a series of five online workshops with two unique groups of participants, each of whom had prior past episodes of psychosis and were immersed in outpatient mental health services. Participants drew from and upon their interior, emotionally charged experiences during the workshops to develop multisensory and narrative drawings that became both prompt and foundation for subsequent individual interviews. We then collaborated on participant-led comics that became the foundational impetus for re-imagining the ethnographic text. Through this novel approach to arts-based research, I aimed to understand psychosis from empathic, sensorial, and visual perspectives. This project documents, engages, and theorizes the role of “psychosic” imagination and creativity in the lives of ten participants who have experienced psychosis as a life event and were involved in comics-making activities. Here, I track how participants, as cherished Mad interlocutors and co-collaborators, sought to resolve communication and subject-positioning issues that arose from the equally ineffable and challenging dynamics of psychosis and madness. These conflicts were internally registered and spurred a vital set of self-fashioning, polyphonic dialogics that primed my interlocutors for self-transformation and psychosic re-worldings. These collective efforts not only de-center ethnographic practice through research-creation strategies, but they succinctly clarify aspects of how madness and pressured, non-normative consciousness are experienced, generating a set of symbolic, poetic, and visual languages to capture expressions of psychosis. Moreover, as a collaborative research-creation practice, our extensive, year-long work aided in destigmatizing and reframing mental duress. Participants simultaneously developed ways to navigate emotional tensions, challenge points, and affective accruals wrought by psychosis through graphic narrative modalities, offering this practice as one that sees Mad-inclusive systems of living myth intertwined with post-traumatic growth.
[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.
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] 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.
Seeing feeling, feeling seen: a reparative poetics of youth mental health in graphic medicine
2020
This creative writing thesis explores the theory and practice of developing a reparative poetics of youth mental health in graphic medicine. It pertains to the design and development of a series of comics for use in a suite of online youth mental health websites, developed in collaboration with an interdisciplinary research team at Orygen Youth Health. The structure of the thesis moves iteratively between critical readings of published comics that present lived experience of youth mental illness and wellbeing, and chapters that tell a narrative of the comics we produced and the stylistic choices we made in terms of representation, characterisation, setting, story and metaphor. Despite the highly collaborative, interdisciplinary context of the research, the thesis situates itself firmly within the discipline of creative writing.
Introduction: Graphic Narratives and the Precarious Condition
Precarious Youth in Contemporary Graphic Narratives: Young Lives in Crisis, 2022
This introduction presents precariousness and precarity as recurrent motifs in contemporary culture in general and graphic narratives in particular. It explores different critical approaches to precarity, precariousness, and other related terms—vulnerability, precariat, cognitariat, good life—building up the theoretical background of the volume. The introduction argues that precarity and precariousness are related to graphic narratives through a triple dimension: formal, authorial, and thematic. It includes a historical overview of the thematic presence of precarity and precariousness in comics including young characters, whether fictional—comic strips, superhero comic books, sci-fi, etc.—or non-fictional, directly influenced by underground comix—autobiography, autofiction, biography, memoir, etc. Finally, it justifies the structure of the volume and summarizes its chapters, in which an international team of authors explore graphic narratives from different comics traditions as examples of moral outrage in the face of a reality in which precariousness has become an inherent part of young lives.
[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.
Rhetorics of the Visual: Graphic Medicine, Comics and its Affordances
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2016
Affordances, in the context of comics, connote to the general attributes of the medium such as temporality, spatiality, gestures, tone/handwriting and economy. Although comics evinces a dynamic relationship among these elements, it is possible to delineate functional and rhetorical role of these affordances on a conceptual and technical level. Taking these cues, the paper after briefly reviewing the definition and scope of graphic medicine aims to demonstrate the functional and rhetorical role of the aforementioned affordances in communicating illness and illness related experiences. Among other issues this article also seeks to address the following: how do comics engage in the visual and verbal translation of the experiences of chronic illness? how do affordances of comics facilitate the readers' haptic experience of an author's subjective trauma? Despite its juvenile legacy, comics capacitates graphic medicine to represent physical and emotional aspects of narrating subjective illness experiences within the medium. The paper concludes that comics is a uniquely suited communicative medium as it diagrams the interiority of illness experience, and, in the process, evolves itself as a locus of tacit knowledge through its translation and mediation of emotional truths and affective states altered by illness.