An Active Mind's blog

Before starting Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, I was interested in memoir’s relation to mental illness. I wondered, are memoirs like Jamison’s successful? Are they able to capture the true nature of the illnesses they discuss? Do they work to change perceptions concerning mental illness?  What are the benefits and detriments of these types of personal narratives?  

I just finished reading Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, which describes her long journey with manic-depressive illness. It was a wonderful read and really depicted the roller coaster ride that comes with mental illness—its highs and lows, triumphs and defeats, beauty and despair. Anne and I are particularly interested in talking about An Unquiet Mind because it very much relates to Margaret Price’s Mad at School. Jamison, who works in psychiatry, reveals throughout her book the struggles of coping with her own illness in the academic setting, and more specifically the field of psychology.

I just finished reading Margaret Price's Mad at School. It gave me an entirely new lens with which to view the academy and very much centered itself around the questions I’ve been thinking about both in my advocacy work and also my independent study. I admire Price for having the courage to make the moves that she did throughout her book—to critique the academic structure, pull issues of mental disability out of silence and invisibility and into the foreground, and assess what intellect/intelligence and broad, liberal thinking really mean. I believe her book can do a lot to change the way we think about academy and who is allowed inside the ivory tower and who is left out. My wish is that all educ

...but what if someone’s experience with bi-polar disorder, depression, or anxiety, could illuminate academic conversations?   

"The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful" (5).

--Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

I just started reading Margaret Price’s Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life.   It came out a few weeks ago and I quickly ordered a copy on Amazon after a professor at Haverford who specializes in disability studies suggested that it would be an interesting read for my independent study.  Price is a professor of English at Spelman College and is interested in expanding disability studies to include those with mental disabilities or what she also calls “psychosocial disability” (a term she likes because "it bumps psych (soul) against social context", br

I recently attended "in/visible: Disability & The Arts”, a symposium that took place at Haverford College on Friday that explored the role of art in relation to disability studies. The event featured five speakers: Tobin Siebers (author of Disability Aesthetics (2010)), Georgina Kleege (author of Sight Unseen (1999)), Katherine Sherwood (artist and co-curator), and Ann Fox and Jessica Cooley (co-curators of Re/Formations: Disability, Women, Sculpture and Staring at Davidson College (2009)).

...Rather than striving for any sense of completion, it’s this act of becoming, this perpetual refashioning of ourselves, that seems to be both my own and Lady Gaga’s focus.         

....Gaga asks us to take our own depravations and turn them into over abundances—relishing our “lipstick” and “rolled…hair” and opting not to be a “drag”, but instead striving to be a “queen."       

Lady Gaga’s recently released single “Born This Way” relates to a lot of what I’ve been thinking about this semester in relation to issues of disability.  My opinions of the song waver.  As a big Lady Gaga fan, I have to admit that I love it (I love all of Gaga’s songs), but at the same time I feel like its sentiment comes off as being somewhat simplistic and cliché.  Luckily, Gaga—perhaps because she is so avant-garde—seems to get away with it, she appears to really mean what she says.  One of my friends (who’s probably a bigger Gaga fan than I am!) recently wrote an article for the College News about “Born This Way” and seemed to have similar reservations.  She wondered, do these sentiments of loving yourself and being proud of who yo