Heroes and Hostages: The Toll of the Bad Faith Narrative

Every man's memory is his private literature

—Aldous Huxley

Steeped as we are in a culture of therapy and emotionalism it may seem strange to us now to consider that until relatively recently, expressive writing was not encouraged among individuals who arguably are most in need of expressive outlet, those suffering from mental ill health. Indeed, there are examples of psychiatric patients instead being denied writing materials (Hornstein). Such denial however, apparently only succeeds in making the quest to produce "autopathography" (Couser 65) more forceful and illness and trauma more demanding of expression. A bibliography of first-person narratives of madness compiled by Hornstein has now more than 700 titles listed. The propagation of such narratives extends into mainstream publishing, with an entire genre being steadily built up. Mainstream literature has also embraced stories about such stories with the creation of characters who, locked in psychiatric institutions, write out their story on "unwanted paper—surplus to requirements" which is then imprisoned "under the floor-board" (Barry 6).

Much of this work has afforded unique insights into the experience of mental illness and is a testament to an indomitable human spirit, demonstrating the use of writing as part of "a re-negotiating of the spaces of the self in which suffering is, or was, experienced" (Stone 50). There is also a significant body of research into the effects of writing about emotional trauma and mental illness (Bolton; Graybeal, Sexton, and Pennebaker) and work on how to encourage self-writing among people experiencing mental illness (Hunt). This interest focuses, however, mainly on the writing and narrative of people who are literate—often highly fluent and articulate. Yet for many mentally ill adults, writing is a skill which has either been denied them through an erratic and problematic relationship with an inequitable formal education or one which has deteriorated as a result of an illness. Mental illness, almost by default, attacks coherence and chronology, two of the mainstays of narrative and its writing. With much research maintaining that narrating is a human urge and that "sickness calls forth stories" (Charon 23) it therefore stands as both frustrating and unjust to be denied the means to that expression. The research on which this paper is based set out to explore some of this terrain.

The Research

A group of fourteen mentally ill adults aged between twenty-four and sixty-five agreed to be part of this research, which took place at their local mental health drop-in center. With literacy levels below the national average, they were all eligible for a literacy course. Consent was obtained for each part of the research and implications were regularly discussed with individual participants. Data were gathered through a critical ethnographic approach (Tamboukou and Ball), involving observations, interviews both with participants and professionals in education and health, and the writing produced in the sessions. This juxtaposition of data enabled an exposure of the jarring discourses at work (Sagan, "Anxious"), revealing the different language being directed through the discourses of health and educational professionals, and the ways in which individuals absorb these, losing voice, "in the impersonal and sometimes dehumanizing medical discourse" (Adame and Hornstein 139).

A psychosocial framework (Holloway and Jefferson) allowed attention to be paid to experiences of anxiety and defending against it as well as perceived loss, both heavily implicated in a psychoanalytic understanding of learning. This framework allows the researcher to be alive to undercurrents in the data and to keep awareness of each individual being at once a construct of a particular constellation of psychological factors and of particular socio-political structures and discourses, whose cultural and historic creation of mental illness is contentious.

Case studies from the research (Sagan, "Interplay") have focused on the reparative (Klein) function of writing, auto/biographic narrative being particularly poignant in cases of mental illness. Individuals often had histories of abuse and neglect and deeply enigmatic relationships with both learning and writing. In some cases they managed to overcome these, albeit in small, incremental ways, and write about the arrival of their grandchild, for example (Sagan, "Loneliness"), and other events in...