'Eye of the beholder': Psychiatric medical reasoning, narrative humility, and graphic medicine

Abstract

Within health humanities, graphic medicine narrates individual stories of patient experience in its interaction with the system of healthcare and its professionals. These autopathographies give a new perspective to the medicalized accounts of diseases and assign subjectivity to the voice which narrates its sufferings. From a medical perspective, clinical reasoning is an important step in the treatment of any disease and a procedure that determines the course of the upcoming treatment. However, in psychiatry, clinical reasoning is a problematic terrain with its lack of external validating criteria and increased reliance on non-somatic symptoms of the disease. In many instances, the authority of biomedical knowledge takes over clinical reasoning and completely denies the individuality of a mental patient and his or her story. This research article attempts to investigate how individual stories and experiences are undermined in psychiatric clinical reasoning discourses and recognizes the importance of empathy and compassion in medical listening through a close reading of select graphic memoirs on bipolar disorder. Citing certain panels from Rachel Lindsay's Rx (2018) and Ellen Forney's Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me (2012), this study analyses the pitfalls of clinical reasoning in psychiatry and the widening gap of doctor-patient communication in such facilities. Interweaving the theory of Sayantani Das Gupta's Narrative humility with instances taken from the above mentioned texts this article discusses the imperative need to restore empathy in medical listening.