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Lights, Planets, People!

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by Melanie Anspacher Lights, Planets, People! is a graphic novel based on the author Molly Naylor’s stage play of the same name and illustrated by Lizzy Stewart.  The story follows an astronomer named Maggie Hill who suffers from bipolar disorder and is experiencing severe anxiety.  Maggie reluctantly seeks counseling from a therapist as she prepares to deliver a guest lecture that is intended to inspire young women, a task she finds quite daunting.  Weaving through the present and past as the conversation with her therapist unfolds, she recalls navigating a romantic relationship while pursuing her life’s work to discover exoplanets,… Read More

Dr. Werthless

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by Matt Peters   Content Advisory: Details of violence, violent psychosis, torture, homicide, cannibalism, and war crimes   In Dr. Werthless, writer Harold Schechter and writer/artist Eric Powell examine the life and legacy of the controversial psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham (1895-1981). Wertham’s long career as a psychiatrist included a broad range of accomplishments, but many of those accomplishments were overshadowed by his fervent accusations against the comic book industry. He was convinced that the content being produced by its various publishers was causing a crisis of juvenile delinquency. Dr. Werthless is a work of graphic nonfiction, so it’s naturally sympathetic… Read More

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

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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

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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

Couch Fiction: A Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy

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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