Comics and Women's Mental Health

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen is a scholar of literary trauma studies at Adelaide University, Australia, where her focus is on contemporary literature and visual narratives in decolonial contexts of violence. Her international training and lived experience of contested places (Cyprus, South Africa and Australia) continue to drive her engagement with arts as an active means of working with marginalization and its effects on social cohesion and collective wellbeing.

• Chapter 1: Introduction: why comics and health?.- Chapter 2: How ‘graphic medicine’ is suited to telling women’s stories of mental health.- Chapter 3: Collaborative authorial perspectives and relational knowledge of depression in Chipkin & Tavassoli’s ‘Eyes too dry’.- Chapter 4: Nagata’s ‘My lesbian experience with loneliness’ and the ‘mentally involved’ subject.- Chapter 5: The emotion of invisibility and time passing in Wong’s experience of postpartum depression, in ‘Dear Scarlet’.- Chapter 6: Objects of haptic memory and the embodied experience of grief in Feder’s ‘Dancing at the Pity Party’.- Chapter 7: Experiences of schizophrenia depicted through disruptions of form in Thornton’s ‘Hoax Psychosis Blues’.- Chapter 8: Conclusion and recommendations for practical use.