‘Eye of the Beholder’: Psychiatric Medical Reasoning, Narrative Humility, and Graphic Medicine

Within health humanities, graphic medicine narrates individual stories of patient experience in its interaction with the system of healthcare and its professionals. These autopathographies give a new perspective to the medicalized accounts of diseases and assign subjectivity to the voice which narrates its sufferings. From a medical perspective, clinical reasoning is an important step in the treatment of any disease and a procedure that determines the course of the upcoming treatment. However, in psychiatry, clinical reasoning is a problematic terrain with its lack of external validating criteria and increased reliance on non-somatic symptoms of the disease. In many instances, the authority of biomedical knowledge takes over clinical reasoning and completely denies the individuality of a mental patient and his or her story. This research article attempts to investigate how individual stories and experiences are undermined in psychiatric clinical reasoning discourses and recognizes the importance of empathy and compassion in medical listening through a close reading of select graphic memoirs on bipolar disorder. Citing certain panels from Rachel Lindsay’s Rx (2018) and Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me (2012), this study analyses the pitfalls of clinical reasoning in psychiatry and the widening gap of doctor-patient communication in such facilities. Interweaving the theory of Sayantani Das Gupta’s Narrative humility with instances taken from the above mentioned texts this article discusses the imperative need to restore empathy in medical listening.

Caligula : malade mental ou fou de lucidité ? (Rostworowski et Camus)

Caligula: Mental illness or lucid madman? (Rostworowski and Camus) This article – focused on two plays about the Roman Emperor Caligula – has a double objective: firstly, it puts aside two dramatic versions of history of Caligula, and, secondly, it asks a question whether it is more legitimate to consider Caligula as a madman or as a mental patient. After introducing the playwrights Karol Hubert Rostworowski and Albert Camus, as well as the basic terminological concepts concerning the notion of madness and mental illness, the article analyses the symptoms of the illness and the madness included in the studied texts.

Serpiginous gangrene of the skin in a mental patient

In 1897, I had to observe a case of serpiginous gangrene of the skin in a mentally ill patient in the House of Appreciation of the mentally ill Emperor Alexander III. This case, it seems to me, is of sufficient interest both in the meaning of the vastness of the defeat and the nature of the course, as well as in the meaning of ethology, which is why I consider it unnecessary to describe it.

Rehabilitation Therapy For Mental Patients

Rehabilitation is a process that allows individuals to return to the highest possible level of function. Usually aims to restore the level of function that is the same or higher than the level of function before the illness. Nurses in implementing mental nursing care use scientific methods in the form of nursing processes, interacting with clients, both individuals, families, and communities to achieve client independence. One of the nursing services in independent clients is a rehabilitation program in accordance with the definition of mental patient rehabilitation formulated in the National Working Meeting of Mental Health

Changes in body perception caused by mental illness on the basis of Great Thoughts of Nervous Patient by Daniel Paul Schreber

The article presents a study on delusory changes in perceiving one’s own body in a patient with mental illness. The story of Daniel Paul Schreber is an example of strongly experienced delusions, which, in the described form are contemporarily attributed to schizophrenia. This story, coming from over one hundred years ago, is still vivid, and actualizes the image of mental illness and suffering connected with it in the thoughts of the reader. The author presents these characteristics focusing mainly on the symptoms of dysmorphognosia or dysmorphophobia, which became an important element of delusional constructs. He describes the nature of the experienced symptoms in detail, documenting them with extensive quotations from „Diary of a mental patient” written by such patient. The study of mental illness presented in the paper reveals the meanders of distorted psyche and some changes that are happening in it under the influence of delusions. It is a study undertaking the issue of describing and understanding the symptoms of mental disorders.