Unmooring
Those who write about their mental illnesses—Jane Kenyon, Susanna Kaysen, Andrew Solomon, Kay Redfield Jamison, and Elizabeth Wurtzel to name a very small few—often struggle to reconcile their character with the disease that riddles them.
Kay Redfield Jamison
The Poetics of Madness: Reading and Writing Mental Illness
In a sense, madness (to use an archaic but attractive term) is a problem of narrative. To put it plainly: mental illness makes it difficult to know just what the heck is going on, or to what extent one’s perceptions of events can be trusted.
Round-Down: The Role of Writers in a STEM Obsessed Society
The recent appointment of Dr. Suzanne Koven to the first-ever writer-in-residence program at Massachusetts General Hospital has me asking: is the U.S. as a nation starting to re-value creativity after years of putting math and science first? An assistant professor of medicine at Harvard and renowned writer, Koven, in addition to her MD, holds an MFA in…