Dissociating the self: representations of mental illness in graphic memoir

Abstract

Although the field of graphic medicine is burgeoning, the rapid proliferation of mental illness graphic memoir over the past two decades has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention (Velentzas 2021). This dissertation aims to correct that oversight by examining how mental illness graphic memoir operates as an essential vehicle for engaging with verbal-visual representations of mental illness through pictorial embodiment, graphic style, verbal-visual tensions, factors of visual coherence, visual metaphor, multiple textual delivery systems, and self-reflexivity. This study relies on foundational scholarship in the fields of disability studies, life-writing, comics formalism, and graphic medicine to examine the underlying constructions of mental illness representations in graphic memoir through close reading analysis and “research creation” (Loveless 2019). The dissertation’s academic portion closely examines seven mental illness graphic memoirs – Becoming Unbecoming (2016), Depresso (2010), Hyperbole and a Half (2013), Inside Out (2007), Lighter than My Shadow (2013), Marbles (2012) Solutions and Other Problems (2020) – alongside seventeen additional texts to determine patterns of representation that address and challenge stigmatic mental illness language and constructions. Its creative component, the graphic memoir Undiagnosed (2025), further applies and extends the foundational theory and the dissertation’s academic findings. “Dissociating the Self: Visual and Verbal Representations of Mental Illness in Graphic Memoir” reveals the ubiquitous use of a representational strategy I term dissociation – a visual mode that communicates the separation of the narratorprotagonist’s understanding of self from stigmatic understandings of mental illness embodied by a double. Visual dissociation is shown to operate through different stylistic appearances of the self and the double (Chapter 1), which encodes the moral, medical, and social paradigms of disability (Chapter 2). The double dissociates from stigmatic understandings of mental illness through the use and conceptual alteration of common visual metaphors for encoding mental illness, such as monsters and darkness (Chapter 3 and 4). Following the introduction (Chapter 5) and examination of Undiagnosed (Chapter 6), several verbal dissociation strategies are noted operating in mental illness graphic memoir, including differentiated font styles for personal and medical narratives; purposeful silence; disembodied speech balloons; and the inclusion, ironizing, and overwriting of medical texts (Chapter 7). Ultimately, “Dissociating the Self: Visual and Verbal Representations of Mental Illness in Graphic Memoir” demonstrates and theorizes the unique multimodal affordances of mental illness graphic memoir that enable cartoonists to encode, challenge, and overturn stigmatic understandings of mental illness to construct new understandings founded on empathy.