Health Story Hub
This podcast called “En la Sala” is hosted by singer Becky G. There is also a guest on this episode, Latino rapper J Balvin. Both people speak about their struggles with mental health in their industry and in their culture as well. Their discussion reveals that that mental health is a taboo topic in Latin American culture.
Barbara Stepko details the experience of five people with depression. One of these is Nita Sweeney. As a child, Nita felt that she lived with an immense melancholy that prevented her from functioning. These feelings stayed with Nita throughout her professional years. Her grave feelings weighed on her until she made a plan to take her life. She was stopped by a call from her therapist. Because of this professional, Nita spent time in the hospital and used writing, running, and medications to stabilize herself. Useful for community groups to discuss stigma of seeking help for mental illness.
David Martinez tells of his experience with bipolar disorder through childhood flashbacks that detail his family’s desire to deny that anything was “wrong,” their wariness of therapy, his placement in a classroom for “troubled” youth, his dropping out and his drug use. He describes the relief it was to receive, at age 32, a diagnosis and prescription medication for his condition and his subsequent work to integrate “the boy” he was and the college professor he is now. His story provides insight into how he experiences the “highs” and “lows” of his bipolar condition. He includes self-portraiture to tell his story. A recurring theme is uncertainty about what is “real”–his euphoric and dysphoric experiences, his diagnosis–and the distinction between internal experience and how one appears to others.
The essay could prompt discussion about the role of family in encouraging or discouraging treatment for mental health issues, the reasons why people may not take medications, the ways people mask or express mental health experiences.
This essay appeared in Please See Me, an online literary journal that features health-related stories by members of vulnerable populations, and those who care for them.
This 7-minute music video tells Rene’s (Residente) story of growing up “lower middle class” but secure in Puerto Rico. Describes happiness, sadness and the fragility of being a famous rapper and how he uses alcohol to deal with powerful feelings: loneliness, fear, grief – but music and baseball are more stable healing forces. The video has accurate subtitles in both Spanish and English and moves quite slowly (and can be slowed even further). Many scenes and details of Puerto Rican culture, excellent illustration of dialect features. Could be used to discuss alcoholism, addiction, grief in an upper intermediate or higher Spanish course.
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.
Michelle Friedman describes providing home care for her estranged younger brother as he dies from advanced pancreatic cancer. She touches on difficult topics of conversation, her brother’s depression, and grappling with death and religion.
An English language translation of this essay is available under the title, “A last act of intimate kindness.”
“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.
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
A rare Stephen King short story that’s both publicly available in a literature magazine and on point for a health narratives course. It has the SK mark of supernatural weirdness/ unexplainability and also nicely profound messages about why human beings turn down unlimited good things – like fresh baked cookies – in favor of something horrible, like war. Mental health struggles become a superpower and there’s symbolism to keep a literature class well engaged for a class period.