Dis/Assembling Schizophrenia on YouTube: Theorizing an Analog Body in a Virtual Sphere

Abstract

As visual technologies become increasingly networked online, websites like YouTube provide a space to share vlogs (video blogs) online, suggest related content for viewers, and help in/form virtual communities, including those of mental illness. Within this space, vlogs of schizophrenia and comments generated about them by other users can represent transitional, dialogical states of illness that speak back to the analog body and affect a body’s way of being in the world. Moreover, as vlogs create resistance against static definitions of schizophrenia, they may foster a creativity, experimentation, and inventiveness that transforms understandings of schizophrenia within the sciences and humanities.

Appendices

Endnotes

¹ Other popular video-hosting websites that may provide fertile ground for sharing vlogs of mental illness include Vimeo, Dailymotion, Veoh, Metacafe, and Flickr.

² The medical humanities—particularly social medicine under its umbrella—places special emphasis on the cultural and historical construction of the body and the ways in which systems of power affect the body. This perspective can illuminate some digital humanities’ questions on the extension of the body through digital networks, novel means to survey and discipline the body, commodification of the self online, creation of neoliberal subjectivities, and the performance of health and illness in virtual spheres.

³As social historian Jonathan Metzl (2009) details in The Protest Psychosis, modulations of schizophrenia over time illustrate the socially constructed nature of mental illness taxonomies and the ways in which psychiatry has reified oppressive attitudes based on gender and race. He notes that schizophrenia in the 1940s and 1950s was an affliction psychiatrists mostly diagnosed in white, middle class women who were thought to have experienced a “splitting” of their personalities (37). Many of these women were sent to psychiatric institutions and stayed for a short term before being discharged. And instead of looking at the very limited options for women at the time, psychiatrists focused on individual women’s concerns with their inability to cope with the rigid demands of motherhood and the potential for the poor parenting of schizophrenogenic mothers to cause mental illness within their offspring (Neil 1990, 499–505). However, just a couple decades later, schizophrenia had taken on a different meaning for an entirely different population. As the civil rights movement gained traction in the United States and riots and protests broke out across the nation, psychiatrists increasingly diagnosed young black men with this disorder (Metzl 2009, 8). Moreover, the term itself changed during this time and became associated with paranoia and violent, aggressive behavior (96–108). Rather than taking a broader perspective to recognize the historic oppression of African Americans, psychiatrists—knowingly or not—pathologized the anger and outrage felt against racist policies and committed large numbers of black men to psychiatric hospitals, just as judges increasingly interred them in the prison system (178–185). By tracing the ways definitions of schizophrenia have changed historically, Metzl makes the case that psychiatrists are influenced by the needs of the time to scapegoat and control the behavior of those thought to be potentially dangerous to society.

⁴ Zeros and ones form a binary code that creates computer bytes. In relation to the analog body, zeros and ones could be considered the borders and boundaries that delineate a biological body, with separate organs, separate, veins, and separate arteries that work together mechanically.

⁵ Computational codification is not the only way that the body can be digitalized; rather, digitization can occur whenever expression is translated into codes of cognition, language, or other forms of signification.

⁶ For example, she may begin taking a new medication that gives her incredibly vivid nightmares; instead of solely feeling frustrated, tired, and agitated by the side effects of the medication, she may also feel some excitement or pleasure that she has another story to share with her vlog viewers that day. Her awareness of an audience, therefore, may thus affect her onto-epistemology through which she continues to “self” herself.

⁷ Scientific, cultural, and personal onto-epistemologies help shape the way we think and feel about our bodies, and as bodies respond to illness. Describing this interaction, Ian Hacking writes, “…scientific knowledge about ourselves—the mere belief system—changes how we think of ourselves, the possibilities that are open to us, the kinds of people that we take ourselves and our fellows to be. Knowledge interacts with us and with a larger body of practice and ordinary life. This generates socially permissible combinations of symptoms and disease entities” (2002, 10). Similarly, Anne Harrington describes the conflation of ontology and epistemology in the embodiment of mental illness when she writes, “…its [the body’s] experiences are likely to change over time when the ‘rules’ of what counts as acceptable or possible experience change. Since, in modern times, such rules are increasingly set by medical and scientific proclamations, we should expect bodies today to be ‘listening’ above all to scientists (or people they believe to speak with the authority of science) or to their doctors” (2009, 24). Mental illness thus takes on multiple realities and meanings in different times and places and adapts to the ecological niche it inhabits (Hacking 2002, 13). What is more, the expectations of those in authority (the psychiatrists, scientists, psychopharmaceutical marketers, and perhaps now consumers or potential consumers of psychopharmaceuticals) often project the symptoms of the illnesses they expect to find upon the general public and help to shape the very kinds of mental illness that they diagnose or experience themselves.

⁸ The Internet, often heralded as a democratic space for all, thus may not be what it seems; and as people assert themselves digitally through the accumulation of capital—monetary, social, etc., they may perpetuate neoliberal views of the self as a commoditized and objectified and further entrap themselves within an entrepreneurial ethos. Describing the rise of the homo economicus, Foucault notes, “American neo-liberalism seeks… to extend the rationality of the market, the schemas of analysis it offers and the decision-making criteria it suggests, to domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic” (1979, 323. Similarly, the Internet may be—to use Foucault’s term—“liberogenic,” a “device to produce freedom which potentially risks producing exactly the opposite” (1979, 69). For instance, Ken Hillis asserts that, in some ways, technology has reified perceptions of Neoplatonic, Cartesian views that reinscribe the body as text, mind as separate from the body, and individual autonomy as a click away (2009, 20–21). Within this worldview, YouTube and other websites become spaces in which content-producers are able receive some monetary compensation from advertising revenue based on the traffic they generate, and people—even in feeling a perceived freedom to generate new revenue for themselves online—may come to see of their lives as products that have particular economic values and may become further caught up in neoliberal ontologies.

⁹ Dimensions of class, age, gender, race, and geography may undoubtedly affect the styles, types, and structuring arcs of narratives told online, but such considerations remain beyond the scope of this paper.

¹⁰ Vlogs of mental illness on YouTube are not the only outlet to trouble psychiatric classification of mental conditions. Arguably, the most widely established group to chart out new model(s) and language(s) for mental illness since the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s is The Icarus Project. Explaining the principles upon which their network was established, this organization’s founders—Jacks McNamara and Sascha Dubrul—created the following mission statement:

The Icarus Project is a radical mental health support network, online community, and alternative media project by and for people struggling with extreme emotional distress that often gets labeled as mental illness. We envision a new culture and language that resonates with our actual experiences rather than trying to fit our lives into a conventional framework. We believe these experiences are dangerous gifts needing cultivation and care, rather than diseases or disorders. By joining together as individuals and as a community, the intertwined threads of madness, creativity, and collaboration can inspire hope and transformation in an oppressive and damaged world. Participation in the Icarus Project helps us overcome alienation and tap into the true potential that lies between brilliance and madness (2006).

Established in the early 2000s as a support network for people diagnosed with bipolar disorder, this group has become inclusive of all people who choose to define their troubled mental states through biomedical discourses or in other terms; and over the last several years The Icarus Project has established a strong Internet presence on their website and Facebook groups and through meet-up groups both within the United States and internationally. Placing a strong emphasis on the celebration of artistic expressions of mental states, this group has done much to foster alternative languages for discussing mental health and wellbeing.

Appendix 1

Table 1 Schizophrenia in DSM-5. Changes in diagnostic criteria from DSM-IV

Appendix 2