In their review of Motherless Brooklyn, The Guardian includes excerpts from interviews with Jonathan Lethem: “I came across Tourette’s the way anyone might,” says the 35-year-old Lethem, “by reading about it in Oliver Sacks. The germ of inspiration, that really…

Reading “Marbles” was a new experience for me. I hardly ever read comics or graphic novels. Every time I try I lose interest so quickly. Maybe it’s because I get so distracted by the pictures and I don’t know what…

Marbles by Ellen Forney has to be one of my favorites books that we’ve read so far. I felt like the images matched perfectly with the story/themes. One of the things that I want to talk about is how Forney uses…

Hacking’s article discusses the development of the DSM starting back in 1844 to produce a “statistical classification” of patients in mental asylums and later used to assess army recruits. He calls it a “statistical manual” because it is used to study…

In this story Casey begins by telling us that the reason for writing was because she wanted to seethe effect of her depression from the view of others. She states, I am doing research trying to find out what the…

Kay Jamison thought a great job but those around her seem to differ in the opinion. According to her psychiatrist, seems to believe she was in this manic state (he noted multiple actions), however she believes she wasn’t acting manically.…

Let me preface this post by saying that I usually hate graphic novels. I find there is too much going on with the text and the placement of words and the pictures that I get distracted and can’t really concentrate…

Imagine you’re writing about this passage in an essay about how various writers use literary techniques to portray mysterious about relations between mind and body. Write for five minutes, brainstorming about what details in the passage you might choose to…

Jamison found a way to deal with her manic-depressive illness. She states, “I had learned to accommodate quite well to them. I had developed mechanisms of self-control, to keep down the peals of singularly inappropriate laughter, and set rigid limits…

“My memories of the garden party were that I had a fabulous, bubbly, seductive, assured times. My psychiatrist, however, in talking with me about it much later, recollected it very differently. I was, he said, dressed in a remarkably provocative…