This month, I read Hallucinations by neurologist Oliver Sacks, in which he analyzes a variety of non-psychiatric medical conditions that cause hallucinations. Through a series of case studies Sacks illustrates that hallucinations can accompany conditions ranging from the strictly neurological, like ecstatic epilepsy, to physical conditions including amputated limbs and blindness. Sacks distances hallucinations from madness while criticizing the intense stigma around these sensory illusions. I really enjoyed Sacks’s straightforward writing style and his emphasis on patients’ long-term quality of life and emotional wellbeing, as opposed to sensationalizing the case studies. This text is extremely effective at normalizing experiences of hallucinations, and its tone and subject matter have become references for my own zine.
I also read Bitter Medicine by brothers Clem and Olivier Martini. The graphic memoir features side by side illustrations and text as Olivier draws his experiences of schizophrenia and treatment, and Clem narrates the impact the condition has had on their family system. I was intrigued by the multiplicity of perspectives communicated through this co-authored book. At the forefront of the book is the importance of family support in managing psychosis, alongside an ever-present tension between group reliance and ostracization from society. The text and illustrations do a phenomenal job of demonstrating the shortcomings of public health policy and faults in the healthcare system, as well as how the perspectives of patients and families are disregarded in the treatment process. I liked how the scope of the book incorporated family members’ perspectives and how schizophrenia has impacted the entire family system in addition to the perspective of the member struggling with psychosis.
I read a few other books, including Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched With Fire, and revisited some theory-focused texts, including works of Ian Hacking, Sara Ahmed, and Sianne Ngai.
As for my comic, I have been doing a lot of exploratory writing and planning in an effort to narrow the scope of the comic-zine. I am focusing on the boundary between reality and perception in group settings, and how a mix of assumptions are applied and misleading narratives constructed for youth with mental health issues. I’m interested in portraying the instant in which the biomedical model of mental health might first be internalized, and the external pressures which cause an adolescent to do so. The story is limited to one event with multiple witnesses and interpretations of it, resulting in a diagnostic intervention for the protagonist, and their immediate reaction to the diagnosis. I decided to incorporate dreams and parallel realities in the framing, inspired by the artworks of Oda Iselin Sønderland. Outer frames will capture daydreams and emotional states as events unfold, eventually swapping with the inner frames as the protagonist turns inward.
I have been playing around with sketching possible character designs. I’ve been making some digital manipulations as well, since I plan to use multiple mediums in the comic itself and as ephemeral inserts between pages. This digital work is a really fun way to play with layering and illusion. In order to visually explore ways I could represent amalgamations of experiences, I have been drawing surreal comics of my own daily life in which I draw compounding sensory inputs alongside thoughts, dreams, and internal experiences. I’m excited to get into the final drawings in the next few weeks.
