"Wouldn't It Be Easier to Be Burned at the Stake?": Schizophrenia and Deinstitutionalization in Bitter Medicine

abstract: This article examines the lived reality of schizophrenia and its treatment as portrayed in Clem and Olivier (Liv) Martini's Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness (2010), with a focus on how graphic medicine can represent the complexities of subjective experience in the psychiatric health-care system. Drawing on Foucault's critique of disciplinary power in psychiatric institutions, the article explores how the memoir reveals tensions between therapeutic care and systemic control, even after deinstitutionalization. Through El Refaie's idea of visual metaphor and embodiment in comics, Liv's illustrations about his psychiatric suffering are read as more than expressive art that challenges dominant clinical narratives. The article investigates the shift in psychiatric health care in Canada from institutional care to community-based care and the impact of psychopharmaceutical drugs, highlighting the embodied cost of psychiatric treatment. By revealing the social exclusion and economic vulnerability produced by gaps in the implementation of health-care policies, Bitter Medicine critiques the promises of deinstitutionalization. The article illustrates how visual narrative forms can foreground subjective experiences of schizophrenia, while interrogating broader systemic failures in mental health care.