This book discusses five recent, hand-drawn, comics memoirs of womens mental health experiences, not easily captured in words alone. It deals with a range of mental health experiences that are not simply diagnoseable mental disorders, and do not always stem from visible physical conditions (heavy feelings, loneliness, postpartum depression, grief, schizophrenia and suicide). Yet, by also considering the formal qualities of these stories, it is able to focus on embodied aspects of experience, inflecting these with perspectives from a range of women of various ages, sexualities, genders, races and cultures. This book demonstrates how comics are an effective, interdisciplinary means of communicating womens mental health and wellbeing.
Chapter 1: Introduction: why comics and health?.
Chapter 2: How
graphic medicine is suited to telling womens stories of mental health.-
Chapter 3: Collaborative authorial perspectives and relational knowledge of
depression in Chipkin & Tavassolis Eyes too dry.- Chapter 4: Nagatas My
lesbian experience with loneliness and the mentally involved subject.-
Chapter 5: The emotion of invisibility and time passing in Wongs experience
of postpartum depression, in Dear Scarlet.- Chapter 6: Objects of haptic
memory and the embodied experience of grief in Feders Dancing at the Pity
Party.
Chapter 7: Experiences of schizophrenia depicted through disruptions
of form in Thorntons Hoax Psychosis Blues.
Chapter 8: Conclusion and
recommendations for practical use.
Jeanne-Marie Viljoen is a scholar of literary trauma studies at Adelaide University, Australia, where her focus is on contemporary literature and visual narratives in decolonial contexts of violence. Her international training and lived experience of contested places (Cyprus, South Africa and Australia) continue to drive her engagement with arts as an active means of working with marginalization and its effects on social cohesion and collective wellbeing.
