How do you write your life story when readers expect you not to make sense? How do you write a case history that makes sense when, face to face with schizophrenia, your ability to tell a diagnostic story begins to fall apart? This book examines work in several genres of life writing-autobiography, memoir, case history, autobiographical fiction-focused either on what it means to live with schizophrenia or what it means to understand and 'treat' people who have received that diagnosis. Challenging the romanticized connection between literature and madness, Life Writing and Schizophrenia explores
Cover; Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 'Time Turned Solid, Like a Wall':Four Mental Hospital Memoirs; 2 'Will They Hear and Be Convinced by my Story?'First Person Accounts from Schizophrenia Bulletin; 3 'A Striking Similarity with our Theory':Freud and Bateson Read Memoirs of Schizophrenia; 4 'The Speech Which Arranges the Dance':The Undoing of Schizophrenia in Janet Frame'sAutobiography and Fiction; 5 Diagnostic Narrative in the DSM-IV Casebook; 6 'That Damn Schizophrenia':Evolving Identity in Eunice Wood's Unwritten Story; Bibliography; Index
