Abstract
This article argues humans should not be defined strictly at their physical boundaries with clear distinctions between anatomical bodies, mental states, and the rest of the world. Rather, diverse mental states, which are often diagnosed as “mental illness,” take shape within greater environmental forces and flows, including those that are constructed online. Drawing from a multi-sited ethnography of The Icarus Project, a radical mental health community, the author situates online narratives written by two of its members within posthuman emotional ecologies in which the exchange of ideas online affects mental states in a profound way. These narratives can be seen as a new type of psychiatric resistance based in new technologies, one that “uncivilizes” mental illness by searching for alternative frameworks and metaphors to understand lived experiences with mental distress. This ethnographic perspective differs significantly from traditional bio-psychiatric models and interventions and can offer both patients and mental healthcare providers with an alternative language to frame mental health.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank FarAway, Faith, and other friends from The Icarus Project for their willingness to share stories and contribute to my dissertation research. I would also like to express my gratitude to Nicole Piemonte, Rebecca Hester, Jerome Crowder, Bradley Lewis, Sara Balabanlilar, S. Rodriguez, Austin Eldridge, and Dan Price for their thoughtful recommendations and advice regarding this paper. The Jeane B. Kempner Predoctoral Fellowship (2014-2015) provided financial support for this study. As always, this work would not be possible without Jung Hua Fletcher.
Endnotes
1 The Dark Mountain Project, which could be considered as a sister movement to The Icarus Project, fosters alternative ways of approaching ecological activism in a manner that does not deny the anthropomorphic destruction that has already been incurred upon the planet.
2 Here we can think of Jonathan Metzl’s use of the term “protest psychosis,” referring to schizophrenia’s shift from being seen as an affliction common to white, upper-middle class women in the 1940s and 1950s towards a much more negative, chronic disease state that young Black men were deemed to have during the Civil Rights movement and beyond. The caricature of the schizophrenia became one of violence, disruption, and subversion, as Blacks in the U.S. fought for social equality. I suggest that we can think of a protest psychosis in relation FarAway’s experience as a way of to explore how those deemed “mad” may—at times—become fixated by the deep wrongs of the world, yet whose behavior in protest of such wrongs becomes read as pathological by medicine and the state. See Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009).
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Fletcher, E. Uncivilizing “Mental Illness”: Contextualizing Diverse Mental States and Posthuman Emotional Ecologies within The Icarus Project. J Med Humanit 39, 29–43 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-017-9476-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-017-9476-y