Abstract
Content analysis of three chapters of Jamison’s memoir, An Unquiet Mind, shows that depression, mania, and Bipolar Disorder have a common metaphoric core as a sequential process of suffering and adversity that is a form of malevolence and destruction. Depression was down and in, while mania was up, in and distant, circular and zigzag, a powerful force of quickness and motion, fieriness, strangeness, seduction, expansive extravagance, and acuity. Bipolar Disorder is down and away and a sequential and cyclical process that partakes of the metaphors of its component moods. We conclude that metaphors of mood disorders share a number of structural features and are consistent across different authors.
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Notes
“Madness” and “mental illness” are contested terms because they carry a lot of ideological baggage: the use of these words can be seen as stigmatizing and insensitive to the experience of those who are so labeled. As a result, some authors reject the use of these descriptors in favor of others that are less laden with a history of negative meanings. Margaret Price reviews the terminology used to denote “impairments of the mind,” including “psychiatric disability, mental illness, cognitive disability, intellectual disability, mental health service user, (or consumer), neurodiversity, neuroatypical, psychiatric system survivor, crazy, and mad” and quotes Geoffrey Reaume’s contention that “no term in the history of madness is neutral, not mental illness, madness, or any other term” (Price 2010, 9; Reaume 2006, 170–182; italics in original).
For a particularly explicit statement of these goals, see Styron 1992, 32–35; Hawkins 1999, for a valuable discussion of the functions of illness memoirs, or “pathographies.”
See Endler 1982; Hodgkin 2007; Sommer, Clifford, and Norcross 1998; and Vonnegut 1975.
See DeCherney 1996, 407; O’Brien 1995, 16, 18.
For another illustration of the concepts of social representations theory, consider the emergence of acquired immune deficiency syndrome—AIDS—in the late 1970s and early 1980s. For reviews and descriptions of the anchoring and objectification of AIDS, see Gilman 1998 and Schoeneman, Henderson and Weathers 2005, 171–189.
For a history of theories of metaphor, see Leary 1990, 1–78.
In their more recent theoretical work (1999), Lakoff and Johnson emphasize bodily experience over social ideology as the basis of metaphor. For a critique, see Vidali 2010.
We would like to clarify two points about the selection of these three chapters for our analysis. first, these chapters are not intended to be a representative sample of the book as a whole. Rather, they were chosen because we judged them to be particularly dense in metaphors of mania, depression, and Bipolar Disorder. Second, we chose not to analyze An Unquiet Mind in its entirety, as we did for Darkness Visible. As it is, the three chapters of An Unquiet Mind are about 14,000 words in length, comparable to the 17,000 words in the whole of Darkness Visible.
This report does not deal with the remaining 262 metaphors for life, time, relationships, communication, and psychological phenomena (behaviors, cognitions, perceptions, emotions) not related to mental disorder or recovery. These excluded metaphors were often common, everyday metaphors of the kind described by Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By, e.g., container metaphors for mind, brain, concepts, body, words; mind as a machine; time as a valuable resource; thinking and imagining as seeing; and so on.
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Schoeneman, T.J., Putnam, J., Rasmussen, I. et al. “A Fire in the Blood”: Metaphors of Bipolar Disorder in Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind . J Med Humanit 33, 185–205 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-012-9177-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-012-9177-5