Over the Borderline

I generally refrain from posting on work that I don't have at least some expertise in, but I've been reading Greg Duhl's courageous (that's one of the words for it, and I might add powerful and haunting) essay, "Over the Borderline — A Review of Margaret Price’s Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability in Academic Life."  It's partly a memoir and I think you may also want to read it.  Here is Duhl's abstract:

This essay is about “madness” in higher education. In Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability in Academic Life, Professor Price analyzes the rhetoric and discourse surrounding mental disabilities in academia. In this essay, I place Price’s work in a legal context, suggesting why the Americans with Disabilities Act fails those with mental illness and why reform is needed to protect them. My own narrative as a law professor with Borderline Personality Disorder frames my critique. Narratives of mental illness are important because they help connect those who are often stigmatized and isolated due to mental illness and provide a framework for them to overcome barriers limiting their equal participation in academic life. 

You can download the paper from ssrn.  Close followers of the blogosphere will recall that I wrote some about Greg's paper on food trucks in Philadelphia back in 2006.

Comments

[Tamar Birckhead]

Thanks for posting this, Al. I have read the memoirs of two other law professors who have written about their mental illness -- Elyn Saks and Jim T.R. Jones -- and they are also powerful and compelling accounts (and, yes, also "brave").

[Tamar Birckhead]

Also, for those who are interested in this topic Professor Saks gave a wonderful TED talk earlier this summer: http://blog.ted.com/2012/06/27/seeing-mental-illness-elyn-saks-at-tedglobal2012/