[en] This talk examines how twenty-first-century
schizophrenia memoirs negotiate and complicate psychiatric understandings of schizophrenia through representations of lived experience.
Focusing on Clem and Olivier Martini’s Bitter Medicine (2010), Polo Tonka’s Dialogue avec moi-même (2013), and Josie Méndez-Negrete’s A Life on Hold (2015), it
explores how forms of memoir—graphic, testimonial, parental, and autoethnographic—from different contexts—Canadian, U.S., and French—foreground diverse experiential, affective, and embodied epistemologies that challenge or complement clinical knowledge.
Bringing narrative psychiatry into dialogue with
Mad Studies, the talk considers how culturally situated memoirs both unsettle psychiatric descriptions and expand our understanding of schizophrenia.
Research Center/Unit :
Leuven Centre for Health Humanities Leuven English Literature Research Group Leuven Cultural Studies Research Group
Disciplines :
Literature Arts & humanities: Multidisciplinary, general & others
Author, co-author :
Lombard, David ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de langues modernes : linguistique, littérature et traduction > Littérature anglaise moderne et littérature américaine
Language :
English
Title :
Narrative Psychiatry in Tension: Reading Twenty-First-Century Schizophrenia Memoirs Across Cultures
Original title :
[en] Narrative Psychiatry in Tension: Reading Twenty-First-Century Schizophrenia Memoirs Across Cultures
Publication date :
01 October 2026
Event name :
Guest lecture by David Lombard, Leuven Universitet
Event organizer :
Centre for Uses of Literature / University of Southern Denmark (SDU)
Event place :
Odense, Denmark
Event date :
Du 1er octobre 2026 au 1er octobre 2026
Audience :
International
Development Goals :
3. Good health and well-being
Name of the research project :
The Twenty-First-Century Schizophrenia (Graphic) Memoir: A Rhetorical-Narratological and Multi-Actor Materialist Approach
