This article explores archival accounts of the experimental community, Kingsley Hall, established by R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist. The paper contributes to renewed interest in Kingsley Hall, R. D. Laing's radical psychiatry and UK counterculture. Archival sources enable not only the further exploration of already known figures but also let us hear previously unheard voices. Following a discussion of archival materials, the Hall is analyzed thematically and historically as an inner spaceship; an embattled middle-class countercultural plantation; a site (...) of spiritual renewal and development; a single-building arts colony; and a countercultural experiment. Finally, it is argued that with re-evaluation of 1960s and 1970s counterculture now underway on the Left, the Hall’s experiment in Laingian countercultural psychiatry—as we may fittingly call it—may yet inform future radical projects. (shrink)

Medicine and the humanities have been exploring new ways to improve the quality of healthcare. One such collaboration is the practice of narrative medicine which uses literature to teach physicians to better meet their patients’ needs. Narrative medicine, however, draws primarily from Anglophone literature, yet post-war French literature, philosophy and criticism have much to add to the theoretical and practical underpinnings of narrative medicine. As well, such scholarship provokes a number of questions that expose certain weaknesses in narrative medicine as (...) it is practiced currently. As this paper demonstrates, drawing post-war French literature into narrative medicine opens new ways to think about life, narrative and the place of the patient in the modern healthcare system. (shrink)

Jay Asher’s novel Thirteen Reasons Why and its Netflix adaptation have enjoyed widespread popularity. While they draw needed attention to issues like bullying and teen estrangement, they may have an unintended effect: they mislead about the etiology of suicide and even glamorize it to a degree. The medical literature has shown that suicide is almost always the result of psychiatric disorder, not provocative stress, in much the same way an asthmatic crisis is primarily the result of an underlying medical condition, (...) not an allergic stimulus. Both the novel and Netflix series ignore this premise and even belittle the idea. Thus, while the story has artistic merits, it also has the potential to be destructive if accessed by young readers and viewers seeking guidance. Approximately ten percent of teens suffer from depression, and suicide recently surpassed homicide as the second-leading cause of death among persons ages ten to twenty-four in the United States. A more balanced view addressing these misconceptions is provided for teens, parents, and mental health professionals. (shrink)

Researchers have increasingly been creating chimeras – combinations of cells from two species – raising profound ethical, social and scientific controversies. Such research could lead to the creation of animals such as pigs that contain human organs for transplantation, yet public fears have emerged. Scientists have thus called for enhanced public education and discussion, but these efforts require comprehension of the nature of public concerns. While arguments have viewed chimeras as either “good” or “bad,” artists have long depicted chimeras in (...) ways that can inform these discussions. Chimeras have a long history – the term itself is from Greek mythology – and have generated complex and ambivalent responses, reflecting deep questions regarding who we are as humans. Images across disparate cultures suggest how humans have long seen species boundaries as fluid but in differing ways. These images suggest that emotional, not just rational, utilitarian perspectives need to be addressed and that challenges may arise in altering views of all individuals. Nonetheless, public messages could draw on historic examples of positive such combinations. Thus, artistic representations can aid scientists, policymakers, educators and members of the public-at-large recognize and better comprehend and address the discomforts chimeras can foster. (shrink)

Liquor stores have been repeatedly shown to be disproportionately prevalent in Black neighborhoods and therefore constitute a disproportionate health risk. This paper examines the ways in which liquor stores jeopardize Black lives through social and material conditions that are broader than health risk. Embodying and perpetuating dysfunctional markets, liquor stores relegate Black consumers to an overabundance of inexpensive and potent alcoholic beverages sold from heavily securitized storefronts and provoke conflicted and oppositional relationships. Liquor stores exist in a state of antibiosis (...) with Black communities, an antagonistic relationship in which liquor stores gain but communities are adversely affected. (shrink)

Diagnostic terms in psychiatry like ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘bipolar disorder’ are deeply contested in the professional community, by mental health activists and the public. In this paper, we provide a theoretical framework for considering diagnostic terms as ordinary linguistic expressions and illustrate this approach by a corpus linguistic analysis of ‘schizophrenia.’ Our aim is to show how a focus on language itself can inform current and future debates about psychiatric terminology and provide new insights on relevant processes concerning their actual usage (...) and change over time. We hope that this contributes to enhancing mutual understanding between different discourse spheres and stakeholders. (shrink)

This article focuses on medical trials performed by Dr. Albert Kligman on the inmates of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974, which have been widely criticized as exploitative. I seek to investigate the mechanics behind the “ethical blind spot” that enabled the American medical community to laud Kligman for his efforts while simultaneously condemning the medical atrocities of the Holocaust and supporting the development of the Nuremberg Code. I argue that this nonrecognition hinges on a colonial logic by which (...) certain populations are produced as waste, both rhetorically and materially. Drawing on the incarcerated men’s accounts included in Allen Hornblum’s books on the subject, I trace the process by which human beings come to be reclassified as natural resources and their exploitation recast as industrious cultivation. (shrink)

This paper traces the emergence of a new figure of the desiring subject in contemporary addiction science and in three other recent cultural developments: the rise of cognitive-behavior therapy, the self-tracking movement, and the dissemination of ratings. In each, the subject’s desire becomes newly figured as a response to objects rather than a manifestation of the soul, measured numerically rather than expressed in language and rendered impersonal rather than individualizing. Together, these developments suggest a shift in the dominant form of (...) the desiring subject in contemporary U.S. culture, one that breaks with the subject-form that Foucault theorized five decades ago. (shrink)

This study explored representations of self-injury in Japanese manga. A content analysis of fifteen slice-of-life manga published between 2000-2017 was conducted, focusing on forty scenes that depict eighteen characters engaging in self-injury. Most depictions of self-injury reflect a stereotypical perception of “self-injurer,” a young girl cutting herself to cope with negative emotion. Characters receive informal support from friends and partners, while parents are portrayed as unsupportive and even triggering. An emergent trend was observed among manga targeting male readers to label (...) self-injuring women as “menhera” - mentally vulnerable damsels in distress - inviting a fetishistic gaze on the self-injuring female bodies. (shrink)

Françoise Dolto was a prominent French cultural figure thanks to her practice of dispensing psychoanalytically-informed child-rearing advice via the radio. From 1976 to 1978, on her show Lorsque l’enfant paraît, she responded to thousands of letters sent in by listeners requesting help with parenting problems and personal questions of a psychological nature. The article explores Dolto’s cultural position as a child psychoanalyst – understood in the 1960s and 1970s as a radical profession – but from a conservative, Catholic background. It (...) then examines a sample of the letters sent in to her show, analysing the demographics of the correspondents and highlighting their most common concerns. Finally the article studies the relationship between psychoanalysis and trauma. It indicates the anxiety that a psychoanalytic understanding can cause, by reinforcing parents’ fears that childhood traumas are common, can be created unwittingly by parents, and lead to major psychological consequences in later life. (shrink)

The impact of domestic violence and abuse is far reaching not least in terms of both the immediate and longer term physical and mental wellbeing of those who have experienced abuse. DVA also exerts a considerable detrimental impact on the wider family including children. While professional perspectives of working with DVA survivors is increasingly well documented, there remains a paucity of accounts of encounters with healthcare services and/or healthcare professionals from survivors of DVA themselves. A central aim of this study (...) was the exploration of women’s experiences of healthcare encounters told purely as personal narrative rather than framed in more traditional research terms. The focus of this paper therefore is unedited personal stories of encounters with healthcare professionals. The position of narrative as research method and the presentation of narratives in this particular instance are also considered. (shrink)

The Anger of Achilles, Robert Graves’ 1959 translation of Homer’s Iliad, has been variously dismissed by classical scholars as an ‘outrageous sortie into the field of translation’ and a work of ‘sheer egotism’, marred by its author’s ‘scattered yapping’. And yet, it can be read with greater understanding if we approach it not merely as a literary anomaly, but as a refraction of Graves’ experience of ‘Shell Shock,’ or PTSD, following his front line service during the First World War. This (...) paper proposes that the act of translation can itself be cathartic, creating a formalized textual space in which the translation of traumatic memory into narrative memory becomes viable, and that Graves used Homer’s epic as a tool to access his own occluded, traumatic past. By comparing The Anger of Achilles to R. Lattimore’s relatively literal translation of the Iliad, it will illuminate the ways in which the former is deeply rooted in Graves’s experience of combat, his ensuing neurasthenia, and the personal Myth by which he made sense of both – the matriarchal mythopoetics of The White Goddess. (shrink)

Nature has been widely represented in literature and culture as healing, redemptive, unspoilt, and restorative. In the aftermath of the First World War, writers grappled with long cultural associations between nature and healing. Having survived a conflict in which relations between people, and the living environment had been catastrophically ruptured, writers asked: could rural and wild places offer meaningful sites of solace and recovery for traumatised soldiers? In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Nan Shepherd’s (...) The Weatherhouse and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, trauma severs emotional, social, and cultural relationships with the natural world. These interwar literatures offer counter-narratives to simplistic depictions of nature as a healing space and highlight the difficulties of returning to rural environments and ‘reconnecting’ with known and natural places. (shrink)

Incorporating a discussion of physical and emotional trauma in medical education can help prepare students for their encounters with trauma survivors in clinical practice. A pedagogical approach begins with an inquiry into the purpose of historical or current representations of torture. Justifications include rationalizing state-sponsored torture, providing an outlet for critique and protest, and organizing representations of the enemy. Discussions of torture must further address the emotional and symbolic effects of clinical work with torture survivors on the caregiver. Introductory workshops (...) using visual representations can trigger pain, fear and anger in the viewer. Images of torture, war, and genocide may also invoke ethical concerns relating to the impact of visual images, where viewing can elicit an ambiguous response, casting the viewer into the role of voyeur. At the same time, learners should recognize that indifference or inattention to the provocations mediated through images has its own liabilities, signaling defensiveness. Discussions about the respective roles of perpetrators, victims and observers offer opportunities for the viewer to engage in self-reflection. Artistic representations also offer opportunities for advocacy on the survivor’s behalf, sometimes facilitated by dissemination of visual representations, but also by involving the survivors themselves in activities that exploit the healing power of art. (shrink)

This article makes the case for the largely unacknowledged relevance of the thought of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, for the emerging field of the medical and/or health humanities. From the 1930s all the way through to the late 1970s, Lacan was deeply concerned with the ethical and political consequences of then-dominant conceptions of the human in the ‘psy’ disciplines. His attempt to ‘humanise’ these disciplines involved an emphasis on humans as symbolic beings, inevitably entangled in the structures of speech (...) and the ‘logic of the signifier.’ This article explores the implications of Lacan’s linguistic framework for his understanding of trauma. It argues that the Lacanian concept of trauma offers a timely antidote to dominant psychiatric notions of trauma today, linked as they are to the questionable politics of ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ and, more recently, of ‘Post-Traumatic Growth.’. (shrink)

Fiction television series are one of the few cultural expressions in which men’s infertility experiences are represented. Through a content analysis of twenty fiction series, this article describes and analyzes such representations. By drawing on Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity and Ricoeur’s understanding of paradoxical power structuring, four character types of infertile men are identified: the virile in/fertile man, the secretly non-/vasectomized man, the intellectual eunuch, the enslaving post-apocalyptic man. While these various dramatis persona outline different ways of how infertile (...) men relate to normative hegemonic masculinity, they all represent infertile men as diverging from shared masculine norms. This non-normativity initially excludes many represented men from hegemonic positions. Eventually, however, these men generally aspire to and succeed in reaffirming their hegemonic masculinity through coercive force towards women and other men, through instigating the precondition for any power structure – the shared will to live together as a community –, and/or by seeking and finding explicit recognition for their normativity and dominance. At the end of this paper, I will reflect on the potential harmful effect of these outlined representations of infertile men and make a plea for diversifying representations of infertile men in our culture. (shrink)

The ongoing trauma of COVID-19 will no doubt mark entire generations in ways inherent in an unmanaged global pandemic. The question that I ask is why this ongoing trauma seems so particularly profound and so uniquely shattering, and whether there is anything that we could do now, while still in the midst of disaster, to begin the process of social and moral repair? I will begin by considering the trauma of isolation with unknown time-horizons, and argue that it not only (...) damages our experiences as social selves, but its languages of overwhelming grief rob us of hope of self-restoration. Second, I will examine some reasons for the “why us”-type of trauma experienced by so many in the Global North, and suggest that such laments are predicated on the misalignment among our socio-historical awareness, disaster-imagination, and our sense of ourselves as uniquely unfortunate. Finally, relying in part on Viktor Frankl’s notion of “tragic optimism,” I conclude by considering how we may begin to reconsider our traumas as not just endings of what is, but beginnings of what still might be —as repair without a master plan. (shrink)

We have never been so aware of masks. They were in short supply in the early days of COVID-19, resulting in significant risk to health care workers. Now they are highly politicized with battles about mask-wearing protocols breaking out in public. Although masks have obtained a new urgency and ubiquity in the context of COVID-19, people have thought about both the literal and metaphorical role of masks in medicine for generations. In this paper, we discuss three such metaphors—the masks of (...) objectivity, of infallibility, and of benevolence—and their powerful role in medicine. These masks can be viewed as inflexible barriers to communication, contributing to the traditional authoritarian relationship between doctor and patient and concealing the authenticity and vulnerability of physicians. COVID masks, by contrast, offer a more nuanced and morally complex metaphor for thinking about protecting people from harm, authentic and trustworthy communication, and attention to potential inequities both in and beyond medical settings. We highlight the morally relevant challenges and opportunities that masks evoke and suggest that there is much to be gained from rethinking the mask metaphor in medicine. (shrink)

Whereas evidence-based medicine encourages the translation of medical research into decision-making through clinical practice guidelines, patient-centred care aims to integrate patient values through shared decision-making. In order to successfully integrate EBM and PCC, I propose a method of orienting physician decision-making to overcome the different obligations set out by a formally-rational EBM and substantively-rational ethics of care. I engage with Weber’s concepts “the ethic of responsibility” and verstehen as a new model of clinical reasoning that reformulates the relationship between medical (...) knowledge and social values, while demonstrating the relevance of the classical sociological cannon to contemporary medical humanities. (shrink)

People narrating the experience of dysregulated anger after a brain injury call upon metaphor in patterned ways to help them make sense of their situation. Here, I analyze the use of the metaphor of the doubled self in a personal narrative of brain injury, and I situate this metaphor in its cultural history by analyzing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Incredible Hulk as landmark moments in its development. A pattern of thought reflecting Seneca’s philosophy on the incompatibility of (...) anger with rational selfhood emerges. I discuss implications for the way we care for people struggling with post-brain-injury anger. (shrink)

Two pediatric accidents in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and one in Margaret Oliphant’s The Doctor’s Family are examined from the point of view of trauma management with analysis of contributing risk factors, medical management, concerns of parents and bystanders, and course of recovery. Risk factors for injury are impulsivity, poor supervision, and parents who are unable to set limits. Medical attention is swift and competent, but no heroic measures are used; the management of the injuries, concussion with loss of consciousness and (...) dislocation of the collar bone, is consistent with the way these conditions are, for the most part, still managed today, and successful recovery depends on careful nursing and rest. Louisa Musgrove, who suffers a severe head injury, requires ten weeks of convalescence and undergoes a marked personality change, which we might today attribute in part to post-concussion syndrome but which may reflect contemporary debate about the biological basis of personality and behavior. A sudden traumatic injury to a child or adolescent changes the narrative abruptly, in fiction or in life, dividing a story into before and after, introducing grief and anxiety, and requiring that plans be rethought and personal relationships reshuffled with decisions about caretaking and nursing. (shrink)

The coronavirus pandemic has shattered our world with increased morbidity, mortality, and personal/social sufferings. At the time of this writing, we are in a biomedical race for protective equipment, viral testing, and vaccine creation in an effort to respond to COVID threats. But what is the role of health humanities in these viral times? This article works though interdisciplinary connections between health humanities, the planetary health movement, and environmental humanities to conceptualize the emergence of “planetary health humanities.” The goal of (...) this affinity linkage is to re-story health humanities toward promotion of planetary health and community well-being. Wellbeing is critical because the main driver of environmental destruction and decreasing planetary health is coming from non-sustainable definitions of wellbeing. We need the arts and humanities to help reimagine the possibility of a sustainable community wellbeing. For health humanities, a basic role and narrative identity starts to emerge—we should become a planetary health humanities. (shrink)

Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion positions the vaccine as the end point of the arc of ​pandemic, marking both the containment of an elusive virus and ​the resumption of a life not fundamentally different from ​before the disease outbreak. ​The film reinforces the ​assumption that a pandemic will awaken ​all of us to the urgency of vaccination​, persuading us to put aside our reservations and anxieties ​and the idea that compliance is the inevitable outcome of quarantine. This article explores how pro-vaccination cultural (...) products ​such as Contagion might in fact undermine public health efforts by promoting a false narrative, which simplifies the kind of vaccination campaign necessary for herd immunity to develop. An ethic of sacrifice and selflessness drives the public health messaging of the film but leaves intact certain individualistic tropes and plague narrative scapegoating tendencies, while the framing of the vaccine as “gift” takes it out of the realm of medical science altogether. (shrink)

The embodied creative practice of dance facilitates a particular kind of awareness or attunement which can inform both the therapeutic and the intellectual work of the Health Humanities. This paper therefore considers dance as a way of ‘doing’ Health Humanities in two interlinked ways: dance as a way of healing and dance as a way of knowing. In bringing together carnal and the creative dimensions of human experience, dance offers us a way of making sense of our place in the (...) world that provides us both with much needed existential security and much needed epistemological freedom. (shrink)

The new coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19, has resurrected a number of historical and sociological problems associated with naming and blaming collectives for the origin or transmission of infectious disease. The default example of the false accusation in 2020 has been the case of the charge of well poisoning against the Jews of Western Europe causing the pandemic of the Black Death during the fourteenth century. Equally apparent is the wide-spread accusation that Asians are collectively responsible for the spread of the present (...) pandemic. Yet querying group actions in times of pandemics is not solely one of rebutting false attributions. What happens when a collective is at fault, and how does the collective respond to the simultaneous burden of both false, stereotypical accusations and appropriate charges of culpability? The case studies here are of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and the PRC during the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19. (shrink)

Modern scholarship has drawn hasty and numerous parallels between the Yellow Peril discourses of the 19th- and 20th-century plagues and the recent racialization of infectious disease in the 21st-century. While highlighting these similarities is politically useful against Sinophobic epidemic narratives, Michel Foucault argues that truly understanding the past’s continuity in the present requires a more rigorous genealogical approach. Employing this premise in a comparative analysis, this work demonstrates a critical discontinuity in the epidemic imaginary that framed the Chinese as pathogenic. (...) Consequently, those seeking to prevent future disease racialization must understand modern Sinophobia as fundamentally distinct from that of the past. (shrink)