Psychotic
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A moving autobiographical portrayal of psychosis and mental illness as shown through the experiences and writings of writer-poet Jacques Mathis.
1 VOLUME RELEASED - INDEPENDENT STORIES
Jacques Mathis tells his own story—of a megalomaniacal man stuck in a body too small for his ideas. His childhood, spent in a dreary little town in Lorraine, came to a brutal end at the age of fourteen after he suffered his first episode of psychosis. Since that day, between repeated visits to psychiatric wards, Mathis had to find some way to carve out as much of a normal life as possible.
With PSYCHOTIC, Jacques Mathis gives us a candid, inspirational account of his daily life, beginning with the day his disorder was first discovered and covering his many stays in psychiatric hospitals, his sessions with various doctors, his setbacks and his triumphs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Mathis and Dorange's poetic comics portrait of psychosis, scribbler Jacques offers up a meandering series of vignettes that reflect on the "episodes" his mental illness has given him. As a child in a "gloomy small town," Catholicism was "a poison" to his mind. From youth, he's fixated on strange notions such as that the dead live in objects, and has his first serious mental-break episode at 14, when he becomes convinced he and a school administrator are an alternate dimension's Adam and Eve. Drawing the reader into his various subsequent stints in and out of hospitals, he doesn't attempt to rationalize actions, such as why he stopped once in the middle of a one-way street and abandoned his car. Instead, the approach is introspective and philosophical, drawing out Jacques's feelings of euphoria, of grandeur, of emptiness. Dorange's layered, quietly surreal art sketches overlay scenes and shadows that follow the characters around, with echoing shapes and metaphorical leaps left open to interpretation. While Jacques's treatment in institutions is presented with distinct resentment, he does find a way through therapy and drugs to an orderly life. He queries, "How can you tell if a patient is cured?" There's no easy answers in this intimate, provocative trip into a disordered mind.
