Illustrating neurological disabilities: temporal fictions in public health infographics

Amid the rise of image-based social media, digitally circulated visual artefacts now dominate contemporary public health conversations. However, infographics and similar materials are more than just channels for clinical discussions; they <i>perform</i> healthcare roles, embodying the clinician's function to promote certain behaviours, prevent others and shape the material reality of a 'healthy' subject. The infographic as a material-discursive agent is especially clear in neurology, where instances of altered neuro-states (injuries, diseases) are transformed into shapes, colours, illustrations and affects that inform preventative and rehabilitative practices as well as subjectivities. Features of visual artefacts also change over a person's lifetime, reflecting real or perceived shifts in risk (eg, from infancy to old age: fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, shaken baby syndrome, intimate partner violence, dementia) for various types of altered neuro-states, and differ across different contexts (COVID-19, Zika, 9/11 or cerebral malaria). In this way, visual public health messaging directs a specific trajectory of brain health over time, which in turn constructs a particular notion of a 'healthy brain'.Drawing on a subset of representative visual artefacts (such as posters, pamphlets, social media campaigns and infographics) from a substantive collection of more than 1000, we examine the various ways that neurological health is represented and structured by public health infographics. The infographics are sampled and examined for several key elements including aesthetics (use of colour, font, text, shape and imagery), temporality (when, either implicitly or explicitly, they are intended to be most relevant in a lifespan), gender (ways in which gender is denoted, reified, challenged or enacted) and difference (ethnicity, race and Indigeneity). Specifically, we explore the ways in which public health infographics frame concepts of time in their messaging about preventing and treating brain injuries.