Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com
Psychiatric Tales draws on Darryl Cunningham’s time working in a psychiatric ward to give a reasoned and sympathetic look into the world of mental illness. In each chapter, Cunningham explores a different mental health problem, using evocative imagery to describe the experience of mental illness, both from the point of view of those beset by illness and their friends and relatives.
As Cunningham reveals this human experience, he also shows how society’s perceptions of and reactions to mental illness perpetuate needless stigma, for example, the myth that schizophrenic people are more likely to commit crimes than non-schizophrenic people. Psychiatric Tales is a groundbreaking graphic work; it deftly demythologizes and destigmatizes the disorders that 26.2 percent of American adults live with every day.
Concluding with a reflection on how mental illness has affected his own life, Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales is a moving, engaging examination of what is, at its root, the human condition.
About the Author
Darryl Cunningham is the creator of the Web comics Super-Sam and John-of-the-Night and The Streets of San Diablo. He is a prolific cartoonist, sculptor, and photographer, and lives in Leeds, England. This is his first book.
Telling ‘Psychiatric Tales’ To Destigmatize Disease
NPR Book Review – February 8, 2011 (Excerpt)
As readers of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’sPersepolis, David Small’s Stitches and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home are well aware, the graphic format of inked drawings augmented by tightly written captions and dialogue balloons — a medium long associated with comic strips and satirical political cartoons — adds a powerful dimension to memoirs.
Darryl Cunningham joins these illustrious illustrators with his heartfelt first book, Psychiatric Tales. Drawing from his years spent working as a health care assistant on an acute psychiatric ward in his native England, as well as his own experience with acute depression, Cunningham has produced 11 graphic vignettes about mental illness — and graphic they are.
Cunningham does not try to sugarcoat brain diseases. He employs bold, often stark, heavily inked, black-and-white illustrations and unadorned prose to convey the alienation and misery behind self-mutilation, suicide, anti-social personality disorder, bipolarity, schizophrenia and clinical depression. Depicting self-cutters, he captures the pervasive bleakness with drawings splotched with rain and blood: “Pain provides temporary relief against unbearable emotional distress,” he explains. [Read the full article...]
Advertisement
Queen of Misfortune
A Novel by Peter Carroll – Available at all good book stores by February 7, 2011
Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]
Sign up for the FrogenYozurt.Com Newsletter to receive information on new releases.
