Intellectualizing My Anorexia: My (Literal and Literary) Encounters With Madness

Abstract

I was fourteen the first time I was hospitalized for my mental illness. I would be hospitalized several more times in the following two years, in programs ranging from pediatric psych wards to residential treatment facilities, and even one stay in the ICU following a suicide attempt. Ten years later, my academic career is built on my research around how to create more authentic and ethical representations of mental illness, using my own experience as the case study around which I build my methodology. In essence, I have made my trauma the subject of my academic studies, and yet—as my therapist often says—I cannot see how it could have been any other way. Mentally ill memoirists and essayists possess unique authorial insight into their experiences but are often viewed as unreliable narrators due to the very conditions on which that experience is predicated. Therefore a creative work integrating lived experience of mental illness and critical knowledge of research in medical humanities and literary theory offers a unique perspective in that the author holds a dual position of authority over the reader while also garnering suspicion from them. In this hybrid creative nonfiction piece, I reflexively examine this unique position as I inhabit the dual roles of both patient and expert.