Statement?

When you wake up at three o'clock in the morning to a peremptory knock on your bedroom door and an unstoppable entry, it should be upsetting. When a woman in a black, smelly wool cloak sits down by your bed and begins to accuse you of conspiracy to kidnap her with the aid of an array of movie stars by your side, it should be ludicrous, offensive, frightening.

But the blue, stark eyes that hovered fiercely above wildly gesticulating hands were the eyes of my sister, the same with whom I had shared a room, a bed, countless hours of time. The experiences that I was enduring for me, had become normal. More than normal, these were now the good nights. I had not quite accepted, at that time, that my sister's world, my sister's life, had become closed to me. I only knew that she was far away and I didn't know how to reach her.

Like the other human sciences, the 20th century saw a period of blossoming for psychology and its various schools. The developments are clear in the great strides that scientists have made in analyzing physical factors, in the myriad therapies now available, in the many articles published everyday on methods from acupuncture to Freudian psychoanalysis. And yet, despite all of this, to a large degree, mental illness remains a mystery, one that touches on the very nature of what it means to be human. Mental illness, more than any other state, makes us question humanity with its otherness because it challenges the norms of behavior and the range of experiences that society understands to be those of human beings.

Many have tried - and not succeeded - to define what the quality is that 'makes' humans human. No doubt it is a mixture of the legion of cultural, biological and psychological factors that such great minds have proposed. But there is one thing that is very universal to the human experience: the presence of narrative. Saussure, Derrida, Foucault, Geertz, Levi-Strauss; all of these scholars claimed we live in a world delimited by social context and culture's historical webs of meaning, that is, grand and complex social narratives. More recently, theory has emerged strongly in favor of the narrative perspective as a guiding human cognitive trait (cite). In fact, in literature and psychology, narrative-centered practice has been explored by many in the last decades, including psychologists Bruner and White, and literary theorists Cohn and (cite). These developments point to an exciting research direction: narrative as a guiding psychological paradigm in human mentality, and as a route to deeper understanding of marginalized experiences, such as those of the mentally ill.

Through anthropology's focus on particular human experience as related to the universal understanding of people, I want to pursue the guiding theoretical thread of narrative in the fields of psychology and medicine. I hope to research the developmental power of narrative to create meaning and reality, and the ways in which not only individuals, but also societies, define their worlds through contextual histories which become fixed narratives of normative behavior and treatment. Applying evolving literary theory, cognitive research, neurological science, and understandings of perception, I hope to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to be sane and not sane in our modern world, not only through well-defined symptomatic definitions, but through the lived experience of these states. In future, such research could reshape our concepts of mental illness and ultimately, of what it means to be human.

Anthropology's ethnographic focus celebrates and explores the diverse characters of human experience. Now, more than ever, is the moment to explore the nature of humanity, of illness and wellness, of treatment, and of social contexts which shape our understandings of our society and ourselves. More than ever we can push the boundaries of thought about what it means to live on the 'other' side of these concepts.

Standing on the edge of what we call madness, what became most clear to me was the great distance between myself and my sister. It was not frightening to be near her or her psychoses - except in the cases where I feared for her life or mine - but rather it reinforced the very basic distinctions between us. I could never understand her way of being, and she could never understand mine. Our culture calls her illness paranoid schizophrenia, but for her it is simply daily life. Perhaps, someday, if I could hear her history from within, if I could parse her narrative of her life, it would shed light on this great rift between her and me, between what our culture knows as sanity and psychosis, between one entire human experience and another.