Comics and Women's Mental Health

This book discusses five recent, hand-drawn, comics memoirs of women's mental health experiences, not easily captured in words alone. It deals with a range of mental health experiences that are not simply diagnoseable mental disorders, and do not always stem from visible physical conditions (heavy feelings, loneliness, postpartum depression, grief, schizophrenia and suicide). Yet, by also considering the formal qualities of these stories, it is able to focus on embodied aspects of experience, inflecting these with perspectives from a range of women of various ages, sexualities, genders, races and cultures. This book demonstrates how comics are an effective, interdisciplinary means of communicating women's mental health and wellbeing.

Builds on the established knowledge of autobiographical and embodied comics Develops contemporary literary trauma theory in comics Exposes readers to a range of quality, contemporary women's voices in comics creation and comics scholarship

Autorentext

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen is a scholar of literary trauma studies at Adelaide University, Australia, where her focus is on contemporary literature and visual narratives in decolonial contexts of violence. Her international training and lived experience of contested places (Cyprus, South Africa and Australia) continue to drive her engagement with arts as an active means of working with marginalization and its effects on social cohesion and collective wellbeing.

Inhalt

Chapter 1: Introduction: why comics and health?.- Chapter 2: How 'graphic medicine' is suited to telling women's stories of mental health.- Chapter 3: Collaborative authorial perspectives and relational knowledge of depression in Chipkin & Tavassoli's 'Eyes too dry'.- Chapter 4: Nagata's 'My lesbian experience with loneliness' and the 'mentally involved' subject.- Chapter 5: The emotion of invisibility and time passing in Wong's experience of postpartum depression, in 'Dear Scarlet'.- Chapter 6: Objects of haptic memory and the embodied experience of grief in Feder's 'Dancing at the Pity Party'.- Chapter 7: Experiences of schizophrenia depicted through disruptions of form in Thornton's 'Hoax Psychosis Blues'.- Chapter 8: Conclusion and recommendations for practical use.