Graphic Medicine
Home / psychotherapy

Call for participants – using sequential art in professional psychological practice.

by

Call for participants. For those of you in the Graphic Medicine community that I have not had the opportunity to meet or correspond with, my name is John Pollard and I am a psychotherapist based in London in the final stages of a doctoral qualification in counseling psychology. My doctoral thesis is a piece of qualitative research exploring how psychologists and psychotherapists use sequential art in their work. This research aims to create a representation of how sequential art is used in contemporary psychological practice. Rather than attempt to make a case for the potential of sequential art and how it could… Read More

Rx

by

‘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

Couch Fiction: A Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy

by

According to Augusten Burroughs (2009), there are two types of therapists: ‘those who are truly gifted with perspective and empathy, and those who are profoundly confused and possibly sick, and must feed off others’.  After reading Couch Fiction (twice) I am reasonably confident in the feeling that Philippa Perry must fall firmly into the former category. In an interesting departure from the usual graphic novel format, Couch Fiction both tells and analyses the theraputic relationship between Pat Phillips, an experienced psychotherapist, and James Clarkson Smith, her client. James is a successful barrister from a priveliged background who has developed a… Read More