The Uncomfortable Journey Continues
摘要
This chapter claims that comics provide deep knowledge of mental health and advocates studying their differences in art style, cultural and narrative perspectives, production methods and the mental health issues they focus on. It confirms graphic medicineGraphic medicine as being productively linked to theories in drawingDrawing, literature, philosophy and aesthetics as well as to disability studies, social theory, neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry. However, it also concludes that graphic medicineGraphic medicine has even more potentail to deliver on, not simply being an academic discipline or research methodology but a powerful social movement, humanizing subjects suffering from mental health issues and championing their lived experiences, which are often from marginalized or provocative perspectives. It cautions that focusing on the margins requires constant reorientation in an ongoing and uncomfortable journey of radical inclusion and warns graphic medicineGraphic medicine not to merely focus on Western categories of disease, forms of art and lived experience. It suggests that, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, digital comicsDigital comics may assist with this reorientation.