Our latest Spotlight on projects and people within the Graphic Medicine international community focuses on Andrew Field, a poet, cartoonist, and librarian making comics about his experience with schizoaffective disorder.
About the Artist
I am a poet, cartoonist, and librarian, who finds joy and meaning in creating comics and cartoons about my experience living with schizoaffective disorder. I draw these comics and cartoons because I find it difficult to capture my experiences with psychosis in words alone. When I combine words with drawings in a comic, I feel that I am able to express better what the experience of living with schizoaffective disorder is like.
About Andrew’s Work
I started drawing comics and cartoons about my illness after a prolonged psychotic episode that lasted from about 2020-2022. During this time, I was hospitalized five times. When I returned from my last stay in the hospital, I was desperate to capture what my experiences had been like during my episode, and I felt a sense of purpose drawing the cartoons, which I had lacked in a very stark way during my hospitalizations and, in some sense, my illness.
I think it is important to tell stories about psychosis, to put a human face on the illness, and convey what it is like to live with it. This can raise awareness about the illness, make it less scary-seeming to the public, and in doing so, make unfamiliar people more familiar.
I currently post cartoons on Instagram, as well as on my website. I am working on a longer comic about my illness, which can be found on my website under the “Recent Work” tab. I hope to continue working on this comic. There aren’t a lot of comics and cartoons out there about schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses, and I want to help fill in this lacuna.
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