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Rx

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‘You wont know the shape of your unravelling until it happens’ says Rachel Lindsay’s disheveled comic avatar, sitting on her bed in a breeze-block room of the mental hospital to which she has just been committed. ‘But you probably have some idea what it looks like’ adds her previous corporate self, from the advertising office where she was in charge of marketing antidepressants. Rachel’s fall has been sudden and dramatic: from well-paid, corporate ‘suit’ to ranting unemployed maniac, shouting obscenities at authority and at her concerned parents. It is not often, nowadays, that I find myself unable to put down… Read More

Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life

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Book Review by Kevin Wolf Ellen Forney’s newest book, Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life will  be a very helpful tool for many. Rock Steady covers bipolar mood disorder in particular, and mood disorders in general. The book provides coping tools and treatments. It’s not a graphic “novel,” because it’s a work of non-fiction that can be used as a teaching tool for the general public and health care providers interested in the topics. It has no continuing characters, except the author, who appears infrequently; and is mostly text though there are cartoon images throughout. I recommend this work for… Read More

Call for Contributors for “Missing Panels”

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Call for Contributors for “Missing Panels” Zine funded by the University of Leicester – Wellcome Trust ISSF. “Missing Panels” focuses on the impact a lack of representation has on the lives and mental health of members of BME communities, illustrating the need for more equal representation as one of the many strategies required to build a more equal society. Specifically, we are looking for contributors to create a 2 or 4-page full colour comic revolving around questions such as: i) is NHS outreach/campaign material inclusive to BME communities? ii) in what way has your personal experience of accessing health care… Read More

Comic and Mental Health: Jobs and PhDs at Liverpool

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We had an email from David Hering who is running a project at the University of Liverpool called Illustrating Futures, which looks at comics and young persons’ mental health, in association with the Lottery/Children in Need funded social enterprise Comics Youth and in a semi-partnership with Tate Liverpool, where they have held two residencies (and looking at a third in October). David tells us that some funded PhD posts and a post-doc fellowship have just been advertised at Liverpool and they would welcome applications from people who would like to research in the field of comics and mental health. The… Read More

CFP: Uniting Two Perspectives.

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Uniting Two Perspectives on Mental Illness: Philosophy and Linguistics University of Essex, 13-14 September 2018 Mental illness has long been of interest to researchers in the humanities, including philosophy, linguistics, sociology, history and politics. In a domain where psychologists and psychiatrists have focused on identifying interventions and developing explanatory models, scholars in the humanities have preferred to explore broad conceptual and cultural questions. For instance: Where do notions like “mental health” and “mental illness” come from? What can we learn from their history? How do specific diagnostic categories emerge? How does psychiatric language shape the way we think about ourselves… Read More

CFP: Madness and Literature: What Fiction Can Do for the Understanding of Mental Illness

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Philosophers have considered the relation between madness and literature since Plato’s Phaedrus. Mental illness has been a favorite topic for great authors throughout literary history just as psychologists and psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers have been interested in and influenced by literature. Pioneers within philosophy, psychiatry and the world of art share the endeavor to explore and explain the human mind and behavior, including what a society deems as being outside perceived normality. This conference seeks to explore intersections between literature and mental health issues. Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to, the following: Representations of… Read More

The Return of the Honey Buzzard by Aimée de Jongh

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By Kevin Wolf   This fictional graphic novel has the impact and realism of a non-fictional work about bullying, depression and suicide. The back cover indicates this work is Aimée de Jongh’s first graphic novel, though it’s a very mature work. The drawings are beautiful, showing scenes from nature, grade school, and adulthood. The story flows naturally with events surrounding Simon. He’s having trouble closing the multi-generational used bookstore he inherited from his father. The graphic work shows recent and past painful moments that he feels extreme guilt about observing but not preventing. Some scenes Simon lives and some are… Read More

New papers on Graphic Medicine.

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This week sees the publication of two new important papers on Graphic Medicine. Here are direct links to the online papers. The first is published with open access on the excellent Comics Grid website: ‘Graphic Medicine’ as a Mental Health Information Resource: Insights from Comics Producers Authors: Anthony Farthing ,Ernesto Priego Abstract 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… Read More

The Bad Doctor – The Troubled Life and Times of Dr Iwan James

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Review first published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2016 The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Dr. Iwan James is a riveting, debut graphic novel by Ian Williams, a celebrated medical humanist and founder of the Graphic Medicine website. He previously published using the nom de plume Thom Ferrier and contributed a series of comic strips for the Guardian. In The Bad Doctor, inspired by Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary and by his own experience of the continuing secondary effects of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), Ian Williams deftly evokes the world of country GP Dr Iwan James’s deep… Read More

When Anxiety Attacks

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In number XXV of his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Sigmund Freud described anxiety as ‘a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence’. While Terian Koscik’s new autobiographical comic, When Anxiety Attacks, has the more modest ambition of depicting her personal experiences of anxiety, she does succeed in giving an illuminating account of a condition for which she can testify there are no easy answers. The cover’s science-fiction scenario and punning title hint at the humour that underpins the storytelling, but belies the book’s concern with how small, everyday events can… Read More