For my response I used a bunch of my hospital medical records from a car accident and a prescription drug overdose (oops, personal). Some of the words I used were actually written by doctors/nurses on my records and some were just next to empty check boxes. I thought that using check boxes and questions would highlight the absurdity of trying to make mental health and emotional/physical pain fit into some sort of box or formula. It is certainly difficult to quantify.
When reading Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip I was struck by the use of erasure and structure she used. It seemed like as a whole, the author was trying to make some sort of comment about the disjointedness of seeing humans as objects in the slave trade and how it inevitably causes a breakdown of empathy and morality. I was interested in seeing how this applied to the commodification of the body in the "illness industry" - how some psychiatrists spend 20 minutes with a patient before prescribing extremely intense medications with serious side-effects and potential for abuse and tolerance and suicide. Sometimes filling out this kind of paperwork in a hospital waiting room is extremely impersonal. The body is seen in a sort of isolationist way in Western medicine, with separate symptoms being treated with separate drugs. In my response I was trying make a statement about the disjointed commodification of the human body and how seeing our body parts, illnesses and symptoms as separate not only separates ourselves from understanding our health, but it separates us from our humanity and each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment