Clinical Fellow wins essay prize
March 10, 2011 at 3:58 PM
Jessica Eccles, BSMS Academic Clinical Fellow in Psychiatry, has won the 2011 Core Trainee essay prize from The School of Psychiatry at the Kent, Surrey, and Sussex Deanery.
The essay competition was open to all Psychiatric trainees in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex.
Jessica's submission explores the relationship between mental illness and the media.
She writes:
"We cannot escape the conclusion that the relationship between media and mental illness is fiercely complex, illustrating an enmeshed culture between minds and the societies they inhabit. It provides and creates representations of reality, each with their own truth and each with it's own struggle for authority and meaning. Marvin noted, 'The inscription of cultural codes upon the body is perhaps the principal means of detaching it from nature and transforming it into culture. The body and its actions, therefore, have a richly ambiguous social meaning. They can be made to emphasize perceived distinctions between nature or culture as the need arises, or to reconcile them.' (Marvin 1990) Indeed as the mind can become the media, and the media the mind, we must therefore not underestimate the importance of what Ian Barns describes as 'the cultural meanings of technology: a recognition that technology should be interpreted in symbolic as well as instrumentalist terms as an expression or projection of the self, and indeed as constitutive of the self.' (Barns, 1990).
I hope to have shown that a history of the media and mental illness could be read as a deeply contested history of misery and society, raising questions about how we know and interpret what we think we know and whether we can really now it."