Altered Cognition and Affective Experience:

Biomedical models fail to capture the lived cognitive and affective experience of bipolar disorder. This paper analyzes Ellen Forney's graphic memoir "Marbles" as a cognitive-phenomenological archive that enacts and represents mania and depression through graphic form. Using Havi Carel's Phenomenology of Illness and Sara Ahmed's Cultural Politics of Emotion, the study conducts a qualitative phenomenological close reading of six thematic vectors: imaginative cognitive reconfiguration under medication; the 'crazy artist' identity and treatment resistance; costs of untreated illness and psychiatric ethics; mood-dependent memory and cognitive restructuring; graphic formal elements (panel composition, gutter, repetition, visual metaphor)...

Study at a glance

Abstract

Biomedical models have substantiated particularly the ineptness at communicating bipolar disorder as a lived cognitive and affective experience․ This research contemplates the graphic memoir Marbles: Mania‚ Depression‚ Michelangelo‚ and Me 24) by Ellen Forney to be a cognitive-phenomenological archive of bipolar disorder where the text not only enacts but represents mania and depression in graphic form․ Based on Havi Carel's Phenomenology of Illness 2) and Sara Ahmed's Cultural Politics of Emotion 19) , this study undertakes a qualitative phenomenological close reading of six thematic vectors: the sites of imaginative reconfiguration of cognition in a pharmacological regime; the affective economy of the 'crazy artist' in identity-formation and treatment resistance; the phenomenological costs of untreated illness and the ethics of psychiatric care; the mood-dependence of memory and cognitive restructuring; the epistemic function of graphic formal elements such as panel composition‚ gutter‚ repetition and visual metaphor‚ in the externalization of cognitive-affective schemata; and illness as an epistemological mode of being-in-the-world․ The analysis demonstrates Marbles exclusively projects a cognitive-affective map of manic hyper-presence and depressive temporal collapse that cannot be captured in prose‚ clinical notes‚ or standard illness narratives․ The paper argues graphic illness narrative is an emergent epistemic resource for phenomenological and cognitive approaches to mental illness 1) ․ This research pays attention to graphic medicine and recognizes its links to phenomenology‚ cognitive science‚ and affect theory․