“The words crawled like spiders” : a cognitive approach to memoirs and graphic novels about psychosis
cIRcle (University of British Columbia) July 10, 2026 Joshua Levesque
People who experience psychosis communicate their altered worldview through memoirs and graphic novels using rhetorical language, not meaningless 'word salad.' Combining cognitive linguistics and phenomenology, the author analyzes three memoirs and three graphic novels to show how psychotic viewpoint construction blends literal and figurative elements into 'figurative scenes' that draw on all senses, including vestibular motion. Comics extend these strategies through medium-specific conventions like eye-replacements and page layout. The mental space approach characterizes alternativity relations between psychotic and sane viewpoints that are often represented simultaneously. This cognitive-phenomenological approach is argued to be the most effective way to analyze creative psychotic discourse in terms of inner experience.