Notes on Airless Spaces
p.4 “When critics dismiss these friendships as symptoms of illness rather than a legitimate attempt at community building, they deny the personhood of those who cannot “recover,” people who end up getting left behind has Esther moves toward normalization.”
This sounds like intentional dehumanization, potentially even rooted in misogyny. The dismissal and denial of community is also a method of control. Isolation can make and/or keep people “mad” and thus keep them in requirement of “care” (a case could be made for this scenario in “The Yellow Wallpaper”). Control under the guise of healing is also a plot point in many a modern horror story and psychological thriller – Grady Hendrix’s “IKEA” horror comedy Horrorstör comes to mind, since it plays with Foucault’s idea of discipline and punishment and the iconic panopticon.
p.8 “Graphic novels and comics, Gross argues, are important modes of communicating trauma: they can present experiences of disability in images when words fail. This is especially important when dealing with mental illnesses which have symptoms that may be impossible to express in words and are also often invisible to others.”
Visual media representation (that is accurate and empathic) is so important, especially nowadays when more people are reading comics and watching TV/movies rather than reading novels or short stories. I also admit there have been several instances in my own life when I wished I had the artistic skill to visually express what I was feeling with regard to my anxiety & depression, and my executive dysfunction because my words were failing me or generally getting jumbled up/not making any sense, and other people just weren’t understanding what I was trying to say. Visual art and media can be so incredibly powerful and sometimes people just have no idea just how much power a poster or a TV appearance can be.
Overall, this reading interested me because of the diversity involved with the project. It made me interested in writing the whole book to see a diverse set of writers talking about a diverse set of issues and topics within the larger discussion of disability studies.
Notes on The Snake Pit
p.113 “If people think you’re crazy, they don’t listen to you.”
Coupled with a line on p.109 about the importance of patient experience, it’s very hard to get successful treatment when your doctors don’t listen to you. I had a psychiatrist I had to quit seeing because he wasn’t listening to what I was really saying, and it was like all he heard was “insomnia” and “depression” so he essentially just threw Welbutrin and trazodone at me and called it a day. He barely even talked to me, and I was only ever in his office for like 15 minutes at a time. It was frustrating, and I hated going every month, since he wasn’t listening, and the medications weren’t working, and I told him they weren’t working. I finally found a therapist who, though she can’t prescribe medication, listens to me and talks to me. She’s been more help than any meds have ever been. It’s fortunate that I’ve been in a situation where I can choose to quit an unhelpful doctor and find another. Many people aren’t so lucky.
p.116 “Sometimes a sick animal knows more about how another sick animal should be treated.”
Sometimes the best help comes from someone who’s been where you are and understands. Sometimes doctors only have a theoretical, superficial understanding and not an experiential one, and therefore don’t know what it’s actually like being ill. That lack of understanding can lead to frustration on both ends at best and gross mistreatment (both medically and socially) at worst.
p.118 “They reached out to their patients. […] Some suggestions were as radical as simply calling the patients by their names.”
This really shouldn’t be so radical! The fact that people don’t seem to grasp basic human decency is appalling. Utterly astounding that basic courtesy can lead to vast improvements in interpersonal relationships does unrecognized. Talk to people. Use their names. Listen to what they’re saying – they typically know their own lives better than you do. They live them after all. They live with their minds/bodies every day. You don’t.
In general, I think it’s important that this chapter emphasizes in several places that recovery is rarely linear. Relapses happen. Something can trigger an anxiety attack or a nervous breakdown. The important fact is that we’re trying to recover and working toward recovery, and a little support from our supposed professionals and a sense of community can go a long way.
Notes on The Yellow Wallpaper
The whole “doctor knows best” trop really needs to be modified. The doctor may know how to treat maladies, but they don’t know what the patient actually lives through. They need to listen to their patients to have any hope of success. The patient knows their own body/mind. They live with it. Every day. The doctor doesn’t. Even in the case of The Yellow Wallpaper, the doctor husband and doctor brother don’t live with the patient day in and day out. The husband is away during the days and sometimes even away overnight. So he’s not there day in and day out.
There are several instances where it reads like the narrator’s husband is keeping her ill as a means to keep her close and controlled, since he’s often away from the house. He has her completely isolated, and even though this was supposedly a common treatment of “nervous disorders” back in the day, the fact that the narrator isn’t allowed to see any friends or family at all, and if she weren’t in a beautiful ancestral home (in need of renovations), she might as well just be locked up in an asylum. She, the narrator, is absolutely convinced that she would do better if she just got to see some friends and family, had a little bit of stimulation, but her husband, “the doctor” keeps her isolated and “controlled.” Keeps her insane. After all, I think we’ve established this semester that isolation can cause insanity. Human beings are social/pack animals.
The fact that the doctor-husband clearly “knows best” and won’t even listen to his wife is telling. The level of control there is alarming. A case can be argued that the doctor-husband fainted in the end of the story because either he realized he couldn’t control her anymore, as the narrator explicitly states, or he was utterly astonished to be incorrect in his treatment/diagnosis, because obviously he knows best, and she was improving physically (and wouldn’t even listen to the possibility that her mind was deteriorating).
It could even be said that it wasn’t the wallpaper itself that drove the narrator mad. It was the isolation, the lack of stimulation and any real companionship outside of her illness. The wallpaper was the only stimulating thing available to her that she could focus on, since she wasn’t allowed the creative outlet of writing – hiding her writing had exhausted her to the point where she couldn’t even do that anymore. She was essentially completely alone with no companionship, no stimulation, and a semi-checked out husband. That would drive anyone mad, even the healthiest person in the world.
Notes on Tulips
I’m not really sure what to say about this poem. Part of it reads like the poetic speaker is being treated without being listened to at all. Like the poetic speaker is just being loaded up on sedatives to keep her compliant and “happy.”
I’m not even sure what the tulips are supposed to mean, since traditionally red tulips are indicative of pure/true/eternal love, which seems incongruous with the rest of the narrative. Plath has always been difficult for me to parse out, but especially here, since I’m not sure what’s really going on outside of the sedatives and hospital bed.
