Additional information
by Sweetha Saji (Author), Sathyaraj Venkatesan (Author)
This book investigates how graphic medicine enables sufferers of mental illness to visualise the intricacies of their internal mindscape through visual metaphors and reclaim their voice amidst stereotyped and prejudiced assumptions of mental illness as a disease of deviance and violence.
In this context, by using Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), this study uncovers the broad spectrum of the mentally ills' experiences, a relatively undertheorised area in medical humanities. The aim is to demonstrate that mentally ill people are often represented as either grotesquely exaggerated or overly romanticised across diverse media and biomedical discourses. Further, they have been disparaged as emotionally drained and unreasonable individuals, incapable of active social engagements and against the healthy/sane society.
The study also aims to unsettle the sanity/insanity binary and its related patterns of fixed categories of normal/abnormal, which depersonalise the mentally ill by critically analysing seven graphic narratives on mental illness.
Author Biography
Sweetha Saji is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru. Her areas of research interest include Graphic Medicine and Medical Humanities. She has published over ten research articles in SCI and Scopus indexed journals. She is an ad-hoc reviewer for Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and BMJ Journal of Medical Humanities. She has presented over 12 research papers at International and National conferences organized by prestigious institutions including the University of Granada, Spain, JNU New Delhi, and IIT Madras.
Sathyaraj Venkatesan is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy (India). He is the author of 6 books and over 90 research publications that span African American literature, health humanities, graphic medicine, film studies, and other literary and culture studies disciplines. He is most recently the co-author of Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine (2021) and India Retold (2021).
