The Material, Didactic, and Intermedial Dimensions of Schizophrenia as ‘Lived Experience’ in Clem and Olivier Martini’s Bitter Medicine

Schizophrenia is arguably the most misused and contested psychological term in science and culture at large. The genre of the (graphic) memoir, for its part, has not only played a crucial role in shaping the development of diagnosis, treatment, and cultural theory of schizophrenia, but it might also challenge or enrich contemporary medico-cultural knowledge about this mental illness when considered from a health humanities perspective. While, for example, twentieth- century schizophrenia memoirs such as Daniel Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) and Louis Wolfson’s Le schizo et les langues (1970) have acquired the literary cult status thanks to studies by the likes of Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault and Paul Auster, the comics medium’s entangled visual-spatial, textual, and verbal dimensions “provide subjective insights into experiences of various forms of illness and disability” but has remained understudied when it comes to schizophrenia (La Cour and Poletti 2022, 1). Bearing in mind the institutional dimension of life writing (i.e., how publishers, literary agents, and editors influence narratives), this paper will analyze Olivier and Clem Martini’s graphic memoir Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness (2010), so as to evaluate the extent to which the lived experience of schizophrenia this medium evokes corroborate or complicate our medico-cultural understanding of this mental illness and/or the dominant narrative of linear recovery. Mainly armed with insights from rhetorical narrative medicine (Phelan 2022), new materialism (Alaimo 2010) and (queer) affect theory (Smilges 2022), it will examine the caregiver/author/patient’s lived experiences as constructed in a state of constant physical/affective interconnection with ‘material agencies’ such as diagnosis, treatment, and therapy in order to critically interrogate these agencies’ consequential link to social exclusion and/or hospitalization.