“Poetry in Yarn”—Making Sense of Life Experiences in the Shadow of Schizophrenia

Abstract

The poem Personal Particulars by Annika Malmqvist, written in her late 30s, is a distilled narrative about how a life story influenced by a diagnosis of schizophrenia in early youth changes one’s expectations of a normal life course. For a person who suffers from mental illness, the concept of the imagined, perhaps, idealized picture of her/his life plan is disrupted. An important aspect of the poem is the notion of “a whole other life.” The author is telling us what life is not about. Clearly, “the other life” remains silent or not spoken of, a silence reflected in the knowledge field of mental illness. This phenomenon is also described by Foucault1 as the psychiatric monolog of reason. Once a person becomes a psychiatric patient, their identity from then on becomes either that of a mental patient, an ex-patient, or a survivor.2 Their life is interpreted by their interaction with psychiatry, and their mental illness influences all the other life events. Even the popular concept of recovery is a reference to the medical model.2 However, Adame and Knudson2 do stress the existence of an alternative narrative developed within the survivors’ movement. It actually seems to be a challenge to ex-patients to formulate a narrative that does not start with medical language or the discourse of the medical model. Adame and Knudson explain that the survivor movement has developed “an alternative discourse of the good life that exists outside of the dichotomies of illness and health and transcends the counter-narrative and the medical model” (p. 176). Annika Malmqvist (AM), one of the authors of this article, was diagnosed as schizophrenic in her early 20s and considers herself a voice hearer and an ex-mental patient. Now on her own, after being widowed, she lives in an apartment in Stockholm in Sweden, with her 4 cats. This text has a life course perspective in the sense that Annika can be viewed as the story’s vehicle, ie, she formulates a story of “the other life.” The story is about how AM was treated as a child and how she later on, during her adolescence, became mentally ill. The aim is to present a narrative about how she makes sense of her life experiences in relation to her creative embroidery work in the shadow of having been diagnosed as schizophrenic. We do not know enough about people who are diagnosed as schizophrenic in their youth in relation to how they perceive their life course related to creative art work, even though art scientists3,4 and others have focused on the issue.5