Resisting triumph and embracing uncertainty in narratives of mental health
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Elena Christine Makarion (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Abstract: A mental health diagnosis can impact one’s ethos, self-understanding, and whether or not one is listened to and believed by others. This is especially true of uncertain and ongoing mental health conditions that are difficult to diagnose or cure. In this dissertation, I take an interdisciplinary approach, using rhetorical, disability, and literary theory to consider practical implications for a wide array of audiences, including the narrative medicine and mental health rhetoric fields. Through an analysis of case studies, patient stories, and patient handbooks, I establish the pervasive impact of the cultural story of triumph. Within this dominant cultural story, I decode expectations in triumph scripts, focusing on cause-and-effect plots and metaphors of brokenness that can be dismissive of painful experiences or make the person who doesn’t “overcome” culpable for their illness/disability. By bringing attention to the foreclosing power of triumph scripts and medical identifications, I call for an expansion of narrative forms that allow for ambiguity, agency, and singularities in narrating experiences. These divergent narratives can be found in the formal structures of literature. In subsequent chapters, I cluster novels—defined as Gothic and Transient narratives—that offer rhetorical strategies, like fresh plots and metaphors, which allow for accepting instead of overcoming embodied differences. Through literature, I describe the affordances of narratives to create inroads to a fuller engagement with the severities of suffering while also inviting identification with difference for both the listeners and tellers of experiences of illness/disabilities.
Resisting triumph and embracing uncertainty in narratives of mental health
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Created on 8/1/2024
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Language: English
- Date: 2024
- Keywords
- Cultural Narratives of Triumph, Ethos and Rhetoricity, Mental Health, Narrative Medicine, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, Storytelling and Healing
- Subjects
- Mental illness in literature
- Triumph in literature
- Narrative medicine