Laura's Response to Eisenhauer

Writing Dora: Creating Community Through Autobiographical Zines about Mental Illness
By Jennifer Eisenhauer, Ph.D.

In this paper, Dr. Eisenhauer speaks of how zine writing by people with mental illness can provide a sense of community and understanding among them and which by doing so causes a disruption between the relationship of the doctor/patient, consumer/producer, and reader/writer boundaries. Though zines, the legitimate voice of the author can guve insight into the life as a person with mental illness without anything being lost in translation by a doctor or a mass popular culture producer. The act of writing a zine keeps the information in its’ raw state from the author itself.

Dr. Eisenhauer was diagnosed with Bi-polar disorder and was hospitalized for it for 27 days in the spring of 2004. She questions why people have to whisper their stories about mental illness. She questions whether she should whisper her own. While hospitalized she came across a book by Kay Jamison, An Unquiet Mind and found she had many similarities to Kay. In the book, Kay writes about her experience with living with bipolar rather than a simple medical account of her condition or a reinforcement of stigmatizing representations. This was the beginning of Dr. Eisenhauers search for authentic stories. She found these stories within the zine community. She focused on perzines (personal zines). What she found useful in zines is that their purpose is not to make money, but to create a discussion that challenges dominant cultural narratives and in doing so forms new communities that connect people. The roles of the reader and the writer of a zine is blurred as the reader is suppose to respond to the zine and vice versa. Dr. Eisenhauer created her own zine with the adopted pen name, Dora. She needed a pen name because she felt that if she used her real name, her words would not be taken seriously, that they would be considered as words attached to her condition. As she wrote her zine, she tried to separate herself from it in her academic life. However in the end, the zine changed her academic life. She became interested in how people with mental illness are portrayed in popular culture and how it can be inaccurate and damaging to people who suffer with mental illness. She points out that when stories are told and retold many times; people tend to start believing them even if they are untrue. Stigma emerges from fear. When people are afraid of something, they condemn it and repudiate it. By rejecting something, it gives people a sense of safety because they can easily say I am not like that so I am ok. It is meant to confine the Other. When someone speaks up about their mental illness they have the courage to self stigmatize or to wound themselves because they are marking themselves as different with something that is not popularly accepted. However, these zinesters rather speak up than let is pass because they believe that once these things come out of the closet, in time they will become more acceptable and less shameful to talk about. They view their personal stories as a way to find healing through the community that they have built. Zines allow for stories that are not marked with stereotypes or medical translations Zines blur the boundaries of consumer and producer because those who read zines also write back to the zinester.

I was very intrigued with this paper by Dr. Eisenhauer. I think she has such courage to come out about her mental illness especially before she had tenure. I do believe there still is a stigma surrounding mental illness. I think many people go undiagnosed for the fear of being exiled or treated differently. When reading this paper, I kept thinking about my sister and how I think she would benefit from reading it. I think that perhaps if she were to write about her own experiences, she may be able to understand herself better and maybe find a community that would understand her better. I think she suffers from some kind of mental illness, but I am not sure which one. She has not been diagnosed with anything yet because of her fear of how it might affect the rest of her life. The world of zines is new to me. I find it fascinating that there is this underground culture surrounding me. I think it is very useful for people suffering with mental illness because it gives them an outlet to speak their voice without their words getting lost in translation or not being taken seriously. I think it may be somewhat healing for those with mental illness to feel that there are others like them in the world and that it may be more common than previously suspected.