surface

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?  

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

--Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

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)).

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