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My life as a scholar and writer has been dedicated to unknotting the tangle of forces that created my mother’s mental illness, which became apparent to me in 1986, when I was fifteen. The biomedical paradigm of mental illness was dominant in the 1980s, and it said that her condition - a set of perceptions that Western psychiatry calls “schizophrenia” - was nothing more than genetic bad luck, her voices nothing more than symptoms of a broken brain. Her illness might have been cured, I was told, had we noticed it earlier. Schizophrenia was (mis)understood to be only a young person’s disease and not an ailment that could befall a middle-aged woman like my mother, and so the counselor at the community mental health center where I sought help for my mother said that it was “too late.” That year was when the seeds of my future work were planted.
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References
Notes
1 Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed, John Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 184.
2 Michael Rembis, “The New Asylums: Madness and Incarceration in the Neoliberal Era,” Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, eds. Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carrey. (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014), 139.
3 Jonathon M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), xiv.
4 Metzl,. Protest Psychosis, xiv
5 David A. Karp and Lara B. Birk, “Listening to Voices: Patient Experience and the Meanings of Mental Illness,” Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health, eds. Carol Aneshensel and Jo Phelan (New York: Springer), 28.
6 Choe Sang-Hun, “Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases,” New York Times, January 7, 2009.
7 Choe Sang-Hun, “South Korea Illegally Held Prostitutes Who Catered to GIs, Court Says,” New York Times, January 20, 2017.
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