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Nightmare Scenarios

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Guest review by Eric Hoffman Matt Barrell is a London-based comic book artist with schizophrenia. In his short but powerful comic, Nightmare Scenarios, he provides twenty-four one panel-per-page depictions of the inner life of Londoners suffering from mental illness. There are no word balloons; the primitive yet effective illustrations, accompanied by first-person captions, provide a claustrophobic firsthand depiction of the disconnectedness of mental illness, of being trapped inside one’s own head, and the confusion and difficulty of interacting with a society which one is a part of, yet also apart from. Each page of Barrell’s comic presents a single frozen… Read More

The Road to God Knows

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awaiting GM review. Amazon blurb: ‘The road to god knows… is the story of Marie, a teenage girl coming to grips with her Mom’s schizophrenia. As a result, she’s struggling to grow up fast; wrestling with poverty, loneliness, and her Mom’s illness every step of the way. Betty, Marie’s Mom, can’t help; she’s living with an illness that’s slowly getting worse and increasingly frightening, and she just doesn’t have the resources left over at the end of the day to help Marie. With her Mom absorbed in her own problems, Marie is essentially alone while she learns to deal with… Read More

The Secret of the Brain Chip

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My registrar Paul Smith gave me this. He was given it during a psychiatry attachment, by a pharmaceuticals rep.  It was produced in 2003 by three belgian psychiatrists, one of whom, Erik Thys, did the illustration. It was produced with financial support from Janssen-Cilag, the pharmaceutical firm, and is dedicated to the founder: Dr Paul Janssen. I mention all this at the outset because I see it as very relevant. It does seem to me to be a book made with the best of intentions, using an easilly accessible medium (comics, although there is prose, poetry and medical text in… Read More

Swallow Me Whole

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Guest review by Penn State University graduate student in English, Derek Lee What would you do if you ever began hearing voices in your head? Would you try to eradicate them with antipsychotic drugs? Or would you accept them as an intrinsic part of your life, scarcely different from your own thoughts? These are some of the questions raised by Swallow Me Whole, a beautiful and complex graphic novel that challenges many of our assumptions about reality, perception, and the mentally ill. With this wonderful work, Nate Powell, the author of Please Release and Tiny Giants, has created a comic… Read More