It combines a variety of styles and forms to tell the story of how Forney discovered and came to terms with her mental illness. It is well summarized by a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Yale and a member of the APA’s Ethics Committee who said: “If you’re going to talk to the press and spread stuff on your opinions, it’s important to at least say very clearly, ‘I have not examined this individual and therefore much of what I’m saying is sort of mystical black magic.” Or, as I like to say, psycho-astrology.Ī page from “Marbles,” depicting mania and the patient/therapist situationĮllen Forney is a fantastic artist, and the book itself is extraordinarily well made. In American politics, there’s the Goldwater Rule, instituted by the American Psychiatric Association. Ellen Forney’s graphic memoir of bipolar illness, Marbles, is predicated on all these intuitions being perfectly valid and accurate – and applicable to people (like Michelangelo, Van Gogh or Randall Jarrell) who have been dead for decades or even centuries, because this flim-flam system of symptoms is impervious to questions of reasonable and evidence-based inquiry, of course. “Yes, yes, that applies to me! I am SUCH a taurus!” These self diagnoses of mental illness work, in my opinion, very much like that. I have seen people rationalize the vagueness of horoscope prose as fitting for their lives.

Now imagine if you were given the DSM manual and asked to self evaluate your mental state and were given a list of symptoms – what are the chances you’d behave exactly as you’d do when exposed to the unfiltered WebMD? I have always considered these self-diagnoses a form of psycho-astrology.

You know how when you feel a bit unwell and you go on WebMD and suddenly, you feel as though you were dying of a terminal illness because ALL THE SYMPTOMS FIT. Forney, Ellen (2012), Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo + Me, Robinson

Marbles mania depression