To Tell or Not to Tell: Nature and Objectives of Mental Illness Narratives/Autopathographies
Naveen John Panicker | University of Delhi
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 4
Abstract | The act of writing about oneself has almost always been seen as an inherently truthful act, and the ensuing narrative as authentic; memoirs, autobiographies, and life narratives in general have often been regarded as truthful accounts of an individual or a collective experience. But any act of narrativizing—regardless of whether it borrows its source material primarily from one’s imagination or from one’s lived experiences—cannot be entirely truthful, since it is not merely subject to the choices and deliberations of the author in deciding how the story would be told, but also owing to the inadequacies of memory and the flawed process of remembrance itself. This is further complicated in the instance of illness narratives, particularly concerning narratives of mental illnesses, since they also encounter the difficulty of language, of finding suitable vocabulary to express the seemingly inexpressible, represent the seemingly irrepresentable, to capture in words experiences that defy conventional understanding. The paper will attempt to examine the objectives and concerns of such narratives through a study of two mental illness memoirs/suicide narratives, namely, Katherine Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness and William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.
Key words | Mental Illness Narratives, Memoirs, Autopathography, Depression, Suicide, Memory, Agency, Testimony, Language, Katherine Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind, William Styron, Darkness Visible
Naveen John Panicker (naveen@ststephens.edu) is Assistant Professor at Department of English, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, India. His research interests fall broadly under the rubric of Medical Humanities. He did his M.Phil. from Department of English, University of Delhi, wherein he explored questions about the self, agency, and how experiences of illnesses and suicidality are articulated and made intelligible through memoirs.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Panicker, Naveen John. “To Tell or Not to Tell: Nature and Objectives of Mental Illness Narratives/Autopathographies.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 5, no. 4, 21 Nov. 2023, pp. 2.76–2.88, http://ellids.com/archives/2023/12/5.4-Panicker.pdf.