Silenced Realities Crafting a Critique of Psychiatry in Graphic Medicine

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the unique ways in which graphic medicine enables individuals to visually articulate their experiences with mental distress and psychiatric treatment. Through close readings of graphic memoirs on mental illness and psychiatric treatments from the West (USA/UK/Canada), the dissertation foregrounds the unique ways in which the memoirists critique the psychiatric treatment system. While some criticism of psychiatry exists, the dissertation emphasizes the grave consequence of the structural violence inflicted by psychiatry on those undergoing treatment, which has not been adequately addressed. Such a critique is made possible by scrutinizing psychiatry s impact on selfhood, the medicalization of mental disorders via the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders (DSM) and the restrictive space in psychiatric care institutions. Drawing on the significant tenets of Mad Studies, the dissertation analyzes how psychiatric medications alter the ontological notions of selfhood and agency and how pharmaceuticalization paves way for the formation of neurochemical selves. While the DSM is scrutinized as a site of biomedicalization and pathologization, the study ultimately seeks to offer an alternative to psychiatric incarceration and promote a more humanitarian spatial perspective for treating individuals suffering from mental distress. This dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary approach to identify how the Mad identity is embodied in graphic narratives and to investigate how non-medical conceptualizations and alternative social responses to madness upends the extant hierarchic models and stereotypes in psychiatry. The following graphic memoirs, among other single-panel cartoons, zines and webcomics are critically analyzed: Head Meds and Other Stories (2021) by Tatiana Gill, The Third Population (2020) by Aurélien Ducoudray and Jeff Pourquié (translated by Kendra Boileau), Rx (2018) by Rachel Lindsay, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo andamp; Me (2012) by Ellen Forney