I Think I've Been Here Before: A Memoir in Fragments and Footnotes

This PhD investigates the process of writing narratives of chronic mental illness through documentation of my lived experience. The creative practice is rendered as a hybrid memoir that straddles the borders between personal narrative and critical interrogation of the methodological, ethical, and literary responsibilities involved in crafting such a narrative. This is accomplished through embedded essayistic passages in which I connect critical theory and research to my lived experience. Through this interrogation, in both my memoir and the contextualizing critical inquiry, I expand on Angela Woods's work on Recovery Narratives by problematizing expectations of the genre as both a psychiatric survivor and researcher within the medical humanities (Woods et. al, 2019). I also employ Margaret Price's concept of Counter-Diagnosis, in which she combines disability studies with critical discourse analysis to examine how 'the autobiographical narrator[s] use language...to subvert the diagnostic urge to "explain" a disabled mind.' (Price, 2011: 17). Drawing upon my lifelong experience of chronic mental illness, this hybrid approach integrates recent research in the fields of medical humanities, literary criticism, and trauma theory into my creative practice to explore new ways of interacting with and narrativizing mental illness. Mentally ill memoirists possess unique authorial insight into their experiences but are often viewed as unreliable narrators due to the very conditions on which that experience is predicated. Therefore, a creative work integrating lived experience of mental illness and critical knowledge of research in medical humanities and literary theory offers a unique perspective in that the author holds a dual position of authority over the reader while also garnering suspicion from them. My creative practice is inspired by mentally ill female writers who used their position of marginalization and the anti-coherence of their experience to construct rich, unsettled textual representations of their experiences. Building on their work, my project employs postmodern narrative techniques such as non-sequential ordering and utilization of multiple tenses and voices as a means of representing the disparate selves involved in rendering such a narrative. These voices come from different phases and experiences of my illness and create a sense of movement and change-in both my circumstances and my relationship to my illness-throughout the piece. I use the technique of I then and I now created by Virginia Woolf in her essay 'A Sketch of the Past' to create space within the narrative, allowing the reader a chance to process traumatic material while also unsettling them through temporal dislocation. This kind of writing is a performance of the instability of the self and the self's relationship to narrative that is interrupted and unsettled by the experience of mental illness and trauma. By letting go of narrative coherence and making use of fragments and episodes outside of time, I create a more authentic experience within my own work of living with psychosocial disabilities. Through experimenting with temporality and perspective within my creative practice, I approach a more accurate rendering of my experience of chronic mental illness.