Reading Marbles: Mania, Depression, Muchelanngelo, and Me, I feel as if I understand a little bit more about mental health than if this novel would have been written in the form of your “traditional novel.” By that, I mean that by this novel being written in the form of a graphic novel, I was able to learn more about this particular mental illness (Bipolar Disease). This novel was drawn by Ellen Forney, which is who it is about. I think that by her drawing out all of the illustrations for her novel, she gave us readers more of a look into her life. Many of the drawings were drawn so that the readers could feel and understand what was going through her head. I have come to truly appreciate people like Ellen Forney, and Lori Schiller (author of The Quiet Room) because they have written out their life story for people they don’t even know all across America and even the world to read.
From this novel, I learned that mental illness can really affect how you feel about yourself on a day to day basis. There were many times throughout that we saw Ellen practically begging Karen to put her on a different medication, or take her off of them completely because she didn’t like how they made her feel. Lithium was the medication that Ellen had the hardest time taking because of the side effects and she was worried about how it would affect how she did her work and her daily life from day to day. She went from manic moods to depressed moods, so she was never really happy with who she was.
This novel absolutely ties in with the other novels we have read for this class. We saw Lori Schilling’s struggle with Schizophrenia through her story that she told. She told it from the points of view of different people in her life at that time, and she also added in some of her medical records. In this novel, we were able to go through Ellen’s story as she walked us through it and drew out what appointments with Karen looked like, what going out with friends, or her mom looked like, etc. Not only that, but we were able to just see how she was able to finally find the right combination of medications to help her overcome this mental illness so it wouldn’t determine her fate on a day to day basis. These two novels taught me a lot even though they were written in two totally different formats, but with how each of them was written, I don’t think they would have as much of an impact if they were written in any other format.
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