Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

SSRIs: the battle of the narratives

7 May 2018 2 Comments

Heather Bauchop

British documentary film maker Katinka Blackford Newman’s 2016 book, The Pill That Steals Lives, opens with a nauseating story: a mother kills her eleven year old daughter and ten year old son, and then turns the carving knife on herself. She wakes in the secure unit of a private psychiatric unit convinced that there are cameras trained on her every movement. She’s on suicide watch and diagnosed with psychotic depression.

The mother in the story is Katinka Blackford Newman. But it turns out she didn’t kill her kids – she hallucinated killing her kids. Newman had had a toxic reaction to a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant.

Who is telling the story here?

30 April 2018 1 Comment

Liz Breslin

In 2016, Liz Breslin was concussed. This is the third part of her ‘Diary of a Concussion’, an occasional series that documents this experience. See below for where to read parts 1 and 2.

I nearly give up. Twice. The first time I am sitting by the window at home, hand over my ear which still has a strange thudding lack of unlocated feeling that the doctor couldn’t find with her little hammer light thing and I can’t find the words for. Dull? Numb? Dumb. I feel so dumb. Stupid, stupid me.

The second time, I’ve driven to the city for the day because of the little white envelope of hope that said the neurologist would see me. A long time coming and a long time driving but that’s OK because, answers. Because, something. Because, someone.

The hauntological nature of tears

30 April 2018 Leave a Comment

Shanee Barraclough

Hauntology is a concept coined by philospher Jacques Derrida, in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, to describe the way that we all construct the world differently, out of what most haunts each of us from the past.

I became aware of this concept of hauntings, or the ‘hauntological’ nature of things, while immersed in my PhD and teaching counsellors-in-training. I became particularly interested in the emergence of tears in the counselling encounter and started looking at feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad’s descriptions of the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements. My hauntological inquiry into tears took me beyond their visible presence to tracking the ghostly traces of tears and the ghostly entanglements that make such traces visible.

Atlas – a literary medical journal

30 April 2018 2 Comments

Helen Ker

Atlas is a literary medical journal, published in print and sold in bookstores around New Zealand, that offers an alternative to the usual scientific discourse that surrounds our bodies. It hopes to shift medical conversations away from the rigid and prescriptive to a literary form that accommodates our human complexities.

I started Atlas in my third year of medical school because I was beginning to see that certain parts of the illness experience are missed through our predominantly scientific ways of theorising illness and treating people. I realised that this had the potential to undermine the quality of patient care because illness is far more than just a pathological process.

War injuries – they ripple on

23 April 2018 5 Comments

Sue Walthert

Physician, poet and soldier John McCrae (1872-1918)

The moving poem “In Flanders Fields” was written in 1915 by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae for the men he buried in Ypres, Belgium, during World War 1. Recently our Flagstaff Community Choir has been singing the lyrics. In the second verse, a drum takes up the beat and the words connect with me.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

My Grandfather Pops, an ANZAC soldier, marched in Flanders fields and in Gallipoli. He was decorated twice for bravery, imprisoned once for forgery and twice badly wounded. He returned home, his life muddied by war. He tried to wash that mud away – unfortunately, with alcohol. His life was one of suffering and sadness. That suffering is still felt through the generations.

Diagnosis: papyrophile.

23 April 2018 2 Comments

Dad was a papyrophile; he loved paper. Not necessarily what was written on it, but the feel of it, the size, length and shape of it. He viewed paper in its various forms in a way that most people don’t: as the end-point of a long, careful process of ruling, sizing, cutting, fitting into a desired product.

He began his working life as an apprentice ‘ruler’ for Coulls Somerville Wilkie in Dunedin, New Zealand (known in the trade as ‘Coulls’) at the age of 14 years old. His is not a unique story: with three brothers at the war and an invalided father, his mother accompanied him to his first and only ever interview and an apprentice he became, staying on with the same firm for forty-five years.