Psychiatric Tales, Darryl Cunningham
Sep. 1st, 2011 12:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jinianYou may know Cunningham as a web cartoonist. He did the excellent graphical exposé of the vaccine scare that made the rounds quite deservedly a while back.
Nonfiction in comic form was interesting enough to get a library checkout from me. Cunningham worked as a psychiatric nurse for some time and, as a cartoonist, chose to address the misconceptions and prejudices people have against mental illness by telling stories about how he found the inpatients he worked with. Each graphic story covers a particular diagnosis or theme, such as "People with mental illness enrich our lives" or "Bipolar disorder." One irritating note -- the "Schizophrenia" section begins by saying that it's not the same as "multiple personality disorder," so I waited the rest of the book to see what he had to say about multiples, but there was nothing.
His spare, slightly messy line-and-black-fill drawings look simpler than they actually are. The layouts don't add as much to the presentation as I would have liked, but overall I think the style is effective in conveying the idea that the events presented are (black-and-white) factual. Occasional reverses into white lines on black and heavily posterized photographs ranged from pointless to powerful.
Possible triggers are permanent awful self-harm, suicide, scat, vivid descriptions of mental illness.
The last story is not about other people. It tells about the author's battle with depression and how he dropped out of grad school/ stopped being a mental health nurse. I found it much more sympathetic than the dry and often too-short vignettes prior to it, partly I think because it reads like later work. There's more deliberate abstraction, like giant pound coins chasing him when he's in debt, and the techniques chosen for particular frames seem more appropriate.
If it's handy, this is worth reading, and I'm very much looking forward to Science Tales.
Nonfiction in comic form was interesting enough to get a library checkout from me. Cunningham worked as a psychiatric nurse for some time and, as a cartoonist, chose to address the misconceptions and prejudices people have against mental illness by telling stories about how he found the inpatients he worked with. Each graphic story covers a particular diagnosis or theme, such as "People with mental illness enrich our lives" or "Bipolar disorder." One irritating note -- the "Schizophrenia" section begins by saying that it's not the same as "multiple personality disorder," so I waited the rest of the book to see what he had to say about multiples, but there was nothing.
His spare, slightly messy line-and-black-fill drawings look simpler than they actually are. The layouts don't add as much to the presentation as I would have liked, but overall I think the style is effective in conveying the idea that the events presented are (black-and-white) factual. Occasional reverses into white lines on black and heavily posterized photographs ranged from pointless to powerful.
Possible triggers are permanent awful self-harm, suicide, scat, vivid descriptions of mental illness.
The last story is not about other people. It tells about the author's battle with depression and how he dropped out of grad school/ stopped being a mental health nurse. I found it much more sympathetic than the dry and often too-short vignettes prior to it, partly I think because it reads like later work. There's more deliberate abstraction, like giant pound coins chasing him when he's in debt, and the techniques chosen for particular frames seem more appropriate.
If it's handy, this is worth reading, and I'm very much looking forward to Science Tales.
