I found this summary of Gail Hornstein's work on collecting narratives of persons with mental illnesses.
Brian Koehler
Psychologist Hornstein Urges Therapists and Lay People to Listen to the Mentally Ill
Most of us think people with mental illnesses are too damaged by their affliction to know what might help them recover. Psychologist Gail Hornstein, however, believes patients can have great insight into what treatments will be most effective for their illness. It's not that the mentally ill have nothing useful to say, she explains--it's just that few listen. Hornstein will detail her ideas at 4:30 pm on March 6 in 101 Dwight Hall.
Hornstein notes that, in English alone, there are more than 300 accounts written by mental patients about their illnesses or treatment. Some date from the early 1400s; about half were published in the last fifty years. "Looking at the history of psychiatry from the patient's point of view," Hornstein says, "we get a whole different perspective on who invented particular methods of treatment." For example, Freud's and Breuer's famous patient "Anna O." discovered during hypnosis that if she traced a symptom to its root cause and re-experienced the traumatic event, the symptom often disappeared. It was she (not her therapist) who made the connection and named the treatment "the talking cure." Freud got the credit, Hornstein says, because "until the last decade or so, the idea that a presumably irrational patient could come up with a new technique would never have occurred to a doctor."
And she proposes another fascinating idea: "The extraordinary accomplishments mental patients have made to science, art, philosophy, and theorizing in many fields were done not in spite of their illnesses, but because of them." It's not that people with mental illnesses are "tragically creative visionaries," she emphasizes; that would deny the suffering and pain inherent to mental illness. But Hornstein believes patients who accomplish great things--like dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and composer Robert Schumann--do so because "the particular characteristics in their personalities that give rise to their extraordinary artistic gifts are the same characteristics that give rise to their mental illness."
"All of us need to have a more humble, appreciative, and respectful attitude toward the contributions patients can make in general and especially toward the accomplishments they've been able to make from the agony of their illness," Hornstein argues.
She's training students to take the mentally ill seriously by teaching--with University of Massachusetts English professor Lee Edwards--a seminar titled Patient Narratives of Mental Illness. It is, she believes, the first course anywhere whose texts consist entirely of the writings of mental patients. " Most people think of patients' ravings as the thing to be gotten rid of, not the thing to pay attention to," she explains. But someone is paying attention now, and it may influence the way therapists think about their patients.
