With the immediacy and authenticity of the first-person narrative, the mental illness memoir creates a graphic picture of human existence in the kingdom of the sick. Moreover, autobiographical narratives of mental illness have an established tradition of lending themselves to the psychiatric field. Jaspers, in his General Psychopathology, borrowed from Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Indeed, both Freud and Sass have based their own constructs of delusions and other mental illness phenomena on Schreber’s descriptions. The three vital signs of psychic life are ambivalence, introspection and turmoil. William Styron wrote candidly about his own turmoil of mind whilst in the throes of melancholia: ‘I was feeling in my mind a sensation close to, but indescribably different from actual pain’. Autobiographical narratives of mental illness provide a window into the nature of psychopathology in a way that is not possible from standard psychiatric texts. They allow psychiatrists, service users and the general public a rare qualitative insight into the richness of psychopathology as experienced first hand rather than as drawn out and described by psychiatrists. Indeed, in the preface of Oliver Sacks’s book The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat the author contends, ‘To restore the human subject at the centre - the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject - we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale...’. Perhaps it is for these reasons that the editors of Cutting Edge Psychiatry in Practice have decided to include autobiographical narrative in their journal. For the GP or psychiatrist reading them, it can be insightful and instructive. For family and friends of loved ones who suffer from psychopathology, it can be informative and illuminating. For those who actually compose the articles, it can be an effective and indeed cathartic form of therapy.
Keywords: autobiographical narrative, psychiatry, health humanities