What is it about?
Personal stories of mental illness help our society understand what it is like to experience mental health problems, and also help some people come to terms with their illness as they tell their stories. Particular themes and patterns emerge in narratives of mental illness, and the details writers provide lead to greater empathy and compassion for people who have illnesses including bipolar disorder, OCD, and schizophrenia.
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Why is it important?
Increasing awareness of the lived experience of mental illness helps the general public respond to mental illness with compassion rather than fear, and helps people who have mental illness feel less alone. Stigma and isolation are central issues in the treatment of mental illness, and this article strives to address those social issues with engaging examples from personal narratives.
Perspectives
I learned a great deal reading the narratives in this article, and discovered a topic of literature that enriches my life as a human being as well as a researcher/writer. People's very act of writing a narrative about their experience of severe mental illness is inspiring, and the implications for improvements in professional and social treatment have changed my behavior in meaningful ways. I hope readers of the article will have similar emotional and intellectual responses to the narratives discussed here.
Elizabeth Young
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Memoirs, Narrative Inquiry, September 2009, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/ni.19.1.04you.
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