Abstract
This study explores how schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder are represented through metaphor in literary works. More specifically, the objective is to show how comics dealing with mental illnesses might be serve both as didactic and medical resources, given their unique characteristics as literary genre. In that sense, my work aims at highlighting how traditional (mis)representations of mental illness might be challenged and reconfigured, and how these may provide invaluable insight into the lived experience of the patient. With this investigation, I seek to contribute to the growing fields of Medical Humanities and Graphic Medicine. In fact, these two areas of knowledge have already established enough background so as to structure my analysis upon them, as well as on other disciplines such as Narrative Medicine. Under the auspices of these disciplines, my work consists of an in-depth analysis of representations of mental illness through visual metaphor in a series of comic stripes, taken from Marvel’s “Legion”. In so doing, I demonstrate how novel literary genres can help reconfigure the misunderstood (and often stigmatized) concepts of mental illness, and how these new approaches may serve a pragmatic role in therapeutic processes. In sum, this project presents a blend of medicine, language, and literature that can bridge the gap between these three fields in an unprecedented way.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Medical Humanities; Graphic Medicine; Narrative Medicine; Metaphor; Comic Studies
