An Active Mind's blog

When Anne and I met a few days ago she asked me to describe my brain.  Her question surprised me.  I’ve never really thought about my brain as something tangible; I haven’t thought about its tactility or what it might look like.  So just now I closed my eyes and took a few minutes to envision my brain, to think about metaphors.  I see it as being covered in Chri

One of the main questions we have to ask when thinking about mental disability in relation to “physical” disability is the dichotomy of invisibility and visibility.  I use the term “physical” loosely because more and more studies are finding that mental illness is a result of physical abnormalities in the brain and that it, too, is bodily.  Nonetheless, mental illness is often something we can’t see.  It can alter one’s behavior and mood, but these things aren’t quite as tangible as an actual disfiguration of the body’s surface

Below are a list of questions I hope to explore throughout the semester that concern the relations among disability studies, mental illness, and literature:

What brings me to studying disability studies and mental illness in relation to literature?  The summer after my freshman year I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD.  My journey with OCD has been a long one.  There was a time when my obsessions and rituals took up nearly every hour of the day, when I could barely leave my house, and when my parents thought they had lost their daughter forever.  When my ability to function was quickly declining, I decided to take a medical leave of absence from Bryn Mawr my sophomore year.  I enrolled in an intensive OCD treatment program, which gave me back the life I had lost and I was able to return to Bryn Mawr the following year.