This paper uses Kai Erikson's (Everything in its path: the disaster at Buffalo Creek. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1978) definition of collective trauma to interrogate the symptom reports and narrative accounts of six Guinean communities attacked by Sierra Leonean and Liberian RUF forces in 2000-2001. These data, collected in 2003, found high rates of fear, physical anxiety, emotional anxiety, d...

The dominance of technological paradigms within psychiatry creates moral and ethical tensions over how to engage with the interpersonal narratives of those experiencing mental distress. This paper argues that such paradigms are poorly suited for fostering principled responses to human suffering, and proposes an alternative approach that considers a view of relationships based in feminist theori...

Psychotherapists who work with survivors' of psychologic trauma recognize the almost inevitable clinical complexity of trauma-related disorders. Traumatized individuals do not just suffer memories of tragic and horrifying experiences-they demonstrate a number of complicated and debilitating signs, symptoms, and difficulties consisting primarily of bodily responses to dysregulated affects. These...

Comics has a complex relationship to trauma. Earle argues that comics offers unique representational strategies for narratives of trauma and distress (See). Trauma (specifically the individual experience) is often characterised by symptoms relating temporality *flashbacks catatonia), compulsion repeat acts. pivots on an ability make time visible keep it moving through narrative using sequential...

Amma Darko follows in the tracks of the two leading Ghanaian women writers, Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo. However, as a writer, Darko differs in her approach to social, political and cultural issues. Her first three novels, Beyond the Horizon (1995), The Housemaid (1998) and Faceless (2003), all present and contest the culture of patriarchy. In her works, women are victims of rape, battery...

How can writing about the collective cultural trauma of Covid-19 pandemic help in an autobiographical illness narrative coming to terms with pre-existing Dissociative Identity Disorder? This disorder is characterised by inner plurality, amnesia, and difficulties discerning past from present times. Thinking how recall let alone organise such a life story might appear, at first, be impossible cha...