Welcome to our Research Spotlight series, where we invite postgraduate researchers and early career researchers to submit short-form articles that sheds light on their research to highlight fresh scholarship specifically on underrepresented research areas in an effort to stay abreast with new voices in the humanities. In this article, Arunima A V provides an overview of the narratives, interpretations, and ethics behind memoirs written by individuals with schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia acquired the status of a standalone term not earlier than the 20th century, serving its precarious purpose of diagnosing one of the debilitating human conditions. Irrespective of the medical significance of the term, it entails a historical baggage of myths and stereotypes marginalising the physical and subjective liberties of the afflicted individuals. With growing scholarship in the area and increased access to information, the lack of insight among patients is substantially addressed. Antipsychotics and therapeutic interventions have also brought drastic changes in the quality of life, subject to the individual’s social and financial status. The advent of narrative medicine marks a shift in the approach to patient narratives towards knowledge-making. However, schizophrenia is associated with irrationality, incoherence, and fragmented reality; hence, considered incompatible with narrative capacity and, consequently, knowledge-making. My research attempts to subvert this predominant perception about schizophrenia with respect to the conditions in contemporary society by studying memoirs written by individuals with schizophrenia.
Instead of conceptualising these memoirs as counternarratives that challenge or overturn the clinical narratives, I intend to juxtapose them with the dominant scholarly narratives, including scientific, cognitive, philosophical, literary, linguistic, sociological, etc. I examine the intersections and intermingling of the subjective perspectives with these academic narratives in the lives of the authors and subsequently their manifestations in the memoirs. I read into the memoirs’ negotiations with an outside world that deems a schizophrenic’s narrative nonsensical, to reclaim agency over their fair share in knowledge-making about schizophrenia.
First, dialogues between clinical texts, primarily diagnostic and statistical manuals (DSM), and the authors are thoroughly pondered upon, emphasizing the reconstitution of the concept of schizophrenia on the authors’ terms. I aim to demonstrate how the authors, through their memoirs, carve out a niche where they negotiate and largely coexist with the clinical narratives. Second, the cognitive underpinnings of the illness as deficits are scrutinised with their narratives as potential mitigations to them. I hope to illustrate how these deficits are navigated through narratives, exploiting the faculties intact, accentuating the trajectory of the idea of the self, memory, and affect in the memoirs in the context of their disruption by the illness.
Third, my research explores multifaceted linguistic aspects of schizophrenia and memoirs; their implications in power struggles and aesthetics within medical and literary discourses. Instances of interpretations in memoirs by family members, therapists, and friends, and a larger scope of interpretation by the readers are investigated through a critical study of the first-person narratives. Fourth, the memoirs are situated in the broader scheme of illness narratives, throwing light on the idiosyncrasies of narrative strategies employed. The social construction of illness, subsequently, mental illness, narrative competence, narrative ethics against the background of narrative medicine, are examined alongside the role of implied readers of the memoirs.
Finally, my research discusses the ethical and rhetorical significance of the memoirs in the context of mad studies and disability studies in relation to policy-making and legal questions of rights and freedom. The authors’ comments on these facets and their implications are studied with insights into the contemporary legal and ethical frameworks on schizophrenia or mental illness in general.
Thus, my research envisages a comprehensive examination of the epistemic ripples created by the memoirs in the dominant scholarship concerning schizophrenia. It hopes to accentuate the voices of the otherwise marginalised patients, effectively reclaiming their agency over the self, language, and knowledge.
Arunima A V is a PhD scholar in the department of English Literature at English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She is a Junior Research Fellowship awardee under the University Grants Commission, India. She is interested in the intersections of science and literature in general, and her current research project is in the medical humanities. She is seriously invested in the scholarship of mental illness, especially schizophrenia, and aims to contribute to the field as a literary scholar.
If you’d like to contribute to the Research Spotlight series, please write to Aanchal Vij (Aanchal.vij [at] bloomsbury [dot] com) or Paige Domantey (paige.domantey [at] bloomsbury [dot] com) with your idea.