Mannon Bethany Ober
Department of English, Department of Women's Studies, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA.
J Med Humanit. 2019 Jun;40(2):141-154. doi: 10.1007/s10912-018-9508-2.
The field of narrative medicine holds that personal narratives about illness have the potential to give illness meaning and to create order out of disparate facets of experience, thereby aiding a patient's treatment and resisting universalizing medical discourse. Two narratives of bipolar disorder, Kay Redfield Jamison's prose memoir An Unquiet Mind (1995) and Ellen Forney's graphic memoir Marbles (2012) challenge these ideas. These writers demonstrate that one result of bipolar disorder is a rupture to their sense of identity, making straightforward and verbal forms of narrative impossible. During periods of relative mood stability, reliable memories of mania or depression are equally impossible. As a result, these memoirists seek to develop sources of self-knowledge other than memory and introspection, long the foundations of personal narrative. Finally, An Unquiet Mind and Marbles return attention to questions of selfhood at a time when scholarship on memoir rejects interpretations of life stories as clear and reliable expressions of identity.
叙事医学领域认为，关于疾病的个人叙事有潜力赋予疾病意义，并从不同的经历层面中创造秩序，从而有助于患者的治疗，并抵制医学话语的普遍化。两部关于双相情感障碍的叙事作品，凯·雷德菲尔德·贾米森的散文回忆录《躁郁之心》（1995年）和艾伦·福尼的图像回忆录《弹珠》（2012年）对这些观点提出了挑战。这些作家表明，双相情感障碍的一个后果是他们的身份认同感破裂，使得直接的文字形式叙事变得不可能。在相对情绪稳定的时期，对躁狂或抑郁的可靠记忆同样不可能。因此，这些回忆录作者试图开发除记忆和内省之外的自我认知来源，而记忆和内省长期以来一直是个人叙事的基础。最后，在回忆录学术研究拒绝将生活故事解读为身份的清晰可靠表达之际，《躁郁之心》和《弹珠》重新将注意力转向自我问题。
