Tag: mental illness
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Sectioned
Shaili JainMenlo Park, California, United States Liverpool, Great Britain, 1999 In 1999, during my residency in Liverpool, England, I had the experience of observing a supervising psychiatrist make a home visit to a severely mentally ill patient and arrange for her involuntary hospitalization, a process referred to in England as sectioning.1 I was greatly impressed…
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The poetics of the body
Rachel BaerPennsylvania, United States Pathographies are narratives that describe the intimate emotional effects of illness and disability. Body Story, a creative work in which Julia K. De Pree shares her experience with anorexia, exemplifies this type of writing. According to the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Eating Disorders Association, anorexia is an…
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Creativity and psychopathology in literature
Montserrat KawasChicago, Illinois, United States “There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.” — Aristotle“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” — Edgar Allan Poe William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, among many others, all suffered from one of the most challenging psychiatric illnesses,…
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F. Scott Fitzgerald and mental illness in Tender is the Night
Jessica FrostBirmingham, United Kingdom In the 1930’s classic Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays Nicole Diver as “a schizoid – a permanent eccentric.”1 However, whether the diagnosis is clinically accurate is a question that arises as the novel explores issues of mental illness and the doctor-patient relationship. The evolution of psychiatry and the…
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Conquering the stigma of mental illness
Eric LevyNew York, New York, United States You have an illness, you let your boss know, and he fires you. There are many first-hand accounts of people who have had such an experience. Moreover, not only can mental illness be a cause for dismissal, it is also a taboo subject. Not just to your boss,…
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Mood and anxiety disorders or a return to “neurosis”?
Brian SharplessPullman, Washington, United States Since the publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)1, explicit recognition of the overlap between anxiety and depression markedly declined. However, a long historical tradition tracing its roots back to the ancient world (i.e. Greeks and Romans) viewed these two phenomena as…
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Portrayal of schizophrenia in movies
Akli HadidSouth Korea Schizophrenia is a mental disorder in which patients experience irrational paranoid thoughts or simply affective flattening. The onset of the disease is usually around the age of twenty-one. Some 42% of patients tend to have their symptoms progressively disappear, 35% have an intermediate outcome, and 27% do poorly. Those from wealthy families…
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Sunbathing the mind: faith healing in India
Karen De LoozeBelgium Understanding mental health care in an Indian context involves a long and adventurous exploration of faith healing. In India, people who suffer from mental illness frequently employ faith healing as an alternative to psychiatric treatment (Raguram et al. 2002). Faith healing often takes place in the temple of a Hindu deity and…
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Mentally ill and Jewish in World War II
Mary SeemanToronto, Canada Introduction In 1928, my grandfather was admitted to the Clinic for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases in Vienna for a recurrence of the manic-depressive illness he had suffered from since youth. The clinic director was Julius Wagner-Jauregg who one year earlier had been awarded the Nobel Prize for fever treatment of third stage…
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A battered soul rebels
Anonymous As a maturing poet I have recently noticed my work has themes of redemption. I surmise this stems from the fact that both my parents are mentally ill from the effects of war and I was an abused child. My mother suffers from PTSD/paranoia, my father suffers from PTSD/intermittent explosive disorder, and I was…