Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Developing the lifelong reader

7 May 2018 1 Comment

Charlotte Molloy

Children's Room UBS — The Children’s Room, University Book Shop, Dunedin.

How can we help emerging readers progress successfully, intermediate children connect with reading and secondary students maintain that love of reading? How can we help people see reading as meaningful in their lives?

We have not yet answered all the questions about the best approaches to literacy learning, as demonstrated by the current critique of the value of New Zealand’s Reading Recovery Programme and the ‘phonics versus whole language’ debate. But CHILDREN CAN’T WAIT for these debates to be settled, so while we continue learning about what is most effective in literacy development we need to apply what we know about achieving better outcomes for our children now.

We need to develop lifelong readers, thirsty for books, with a habit and love of reading.

Living in the A zone

7 May 2018 2 Comments

Kaitrin McMullan

When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I had the good fortune, as a storyteller and dabbler in the arts, to be able to give up poorly-paid work and move into a kind of early retirement … albeit with an elderly dependent. Swapping poverty for poverty, not too hard! The rational was that we (my partner and I) would move in and care for Mum while her brain still lived at the same address as her body, in order to make the most of these precious years, much as some people decide to devote time to their children’s early years, only in reverse. Luckily Mum’s disease has progressed very slowly and in a benign way, and we now find ourselves in a four-generation “compound” with family living next door and a rainbow gate connecting the two houses.

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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.