Tag: depression

BDD, Fighting the Voice of Imposter Syndrome, and an Act of Power

This 47 minute podcast discusses how three generations of Koreans have experienced mental illness. Joanne details her elders’ PTSD and depression, then moves into her own story. Initially, she ignores the little voice in her head, comparing her struggles with her grandparents’. Later, on her honeymoon, she realizes that she is losing a fight with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). Joanne describes an up and down journey toward body acceptance. As media become saturated with unrealistic beauty standards, this podcast would fit well in an undergraduate class to discuss how students face body image issues.

Love Sorrow Self Portrait

“Love Sorrow Self Portrait” is a self-portrait series the photographer, Natalie Brescia, has created to reflect her experience of major depressive disorder. The pieces frequently show her in shadow, and use split bisected frames with stark black and white contrasts so experience the nature of her emotions and a fractured sense of self. There are also thread and scissor images that Brescia says evoke the Greek mythology of the Fates with the compromising position of the scissors representing the closeness of death.

The series of images does suggest a narrative thread, and could prompt discussion of how narrative can be conveyed in images. The images also prompt discussion about the experience of mental illness and the ways words may fall short of conveying it.

The Hidden Dying of Doctors: What the Humanities Can Teach Medicine and Why We All Need Medicine to Learn It

This review of Kalanithi’s “When breath becomes air” focuses most on the opening story of a young colleague who took his own life, the problem of medical student and physician suicide/ depression/burnout, and how humanities education could alleviate the suffering of doctors by connecting them with the human side of medicine, their own and that of patients. This is very useful as a first-week reading in a Foundations of Health Humanities course or as a reference for a talk to aspiring med students