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Tastes Like War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

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My life as a scholar and writer has been dedicated to unknotting the tangle of forces that created my mother’s mental illness, which became apparent to me in 1986, when I was fifteen. The biomedical paradigm of mental illness was dominant in the 1980s, and it said that her condition - a set of perceptions that Western psychiatry calls “schizophrenia” - was nothing more than genetic bad luck, her voices nothing more than symptoms of a broken brain. Her illness might have been cured, I was told, had we noticed it earlier. Schizophrenia was (mis)understood to be only a young person’s disease and not an ailment that could befall a middle-aged woman like my mother, and so the counselor at the community mental health center where I sought help for my mother said that it was “too late.” That year was when the seeds of my future work were planted.

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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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