From Self-Help to Destigmatization: Aesthetics, Didacticism, and Intermediality in the Twenty-First-Century Schizophrenia Graphic Memoir

Since its first contested definitions as a mental illness, myths and stigmas about schizophrenia have proliferated (Granger and Naudin 2022). The memoir genre has played a crucial role in shaping and challenging the development of diagnosis, treatment, and cultural theory of schizophrenia. In the 1960s–80s, for example, antipsychiatrists such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault considered memoirs—e.g., Daniel Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) and Louis Wolfson’s Le schizo et les langues (1970)—to question normality and mobilize altered mental states as sources of creativity. Our twenty-first-century context, for its part, has been marked by social movements (Mad Pride and neurodiversity), but also by continued misunderstanding and stigmatization. In this context, a shift in focus in the schizophrenia memoir happened: from the aesthetic complexities of twentieth-century memoirs to the aim of raising mental health awareness and providing self-help guidance. Still, while scholars have highlighted the potential of schizophrenia memoirs for destigmatization (Woods 2011; Wood 2013), others have recommended contextualization and critical scrutiny when reading such a commercialized literary genre with problematic institutional dimensions and self-help rhetorics (Radden and Varga 2013; Van Goidsenhoven 2017; Franssen 2020). Against this backdrop of research, this paper will investigate Esmé Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) as well as two graphic memoirs: Fous alliés (2001) and Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales (2010). Inspired by insights from rhetorical narrative medicine (Phelan 2022) and graphic medicine (Squier and Krüger-Fürhoff 2020; La Cour and Poletti 2022), it will analyze the narrative features and rhetorical aims of these schizophrenia memoirs and graphic memoirs. Special attention will be given to experimentation and intermediality as means of avoiding the above-mentioned traps of the illness memoir and foregrounding ways in which this genre and its didactic, aesthetic, and intermedial dimensions can still contribute to destigmatization and social transformation.