Posts tagged “books”
It’s all in my head
People with migraine have a degraded “objective self” – that is, their “taken-for-granted notions, theories and tendencies regarding [their] human bodies, brains, and kinds” have been damaged. Sometimes people with migraine don’t even believe their own pain. – Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight. I remember crawling across a bathroom floor, vomiting, wondering what was wrong […]
Headache medicine’s problems with legitimacy persist despite the “discovery” of a neurobiological mechanism underlying migraine. For while the emphasis on the brain does somewhat mitigate migraine’s association with psychosomatic, feminized personalities, locating migraine in the brain also managed to inscribe gendered cultural assumptions about the personalities of headache patients into the physical structure of their […]
[I]n 1973, Seymour Diamond and Donald Dalessio, then codirectors of the famous Diamond Headache Clinic in Chicago, wrote that the inability of people with migraine to adapt represents the repressed hostility of the migraine patient. Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight I am actually pretty angry about having a painful and debilitating disease that most people […]
The migraine interactive kind
How did psychological theories come this far in migraine medicine? Judy Segal has argued that the explanatory power and popularity of the migraine personality could be attributed to its expansiveness — the migraine personality could describe almost anyone. The migraine personality became what Ian Hacking refers to as an “interactive kind.” Interactive kinds are categories […]
Migraine complicates the relationship between specific disease and legitimation. Migraine has a well-established diagnosis, a subspecialty in medicine that is devoted to its treatment, brain imaging that illustrates a migraine in process, pharmacological interventions, research that links certain forms of migraine to genetic mutations, insurance companies and policy makers that recognize its existence (albeit to […]
Not Tonight
Not Tonight My library finally got Not Tonight for me yesterday. 15 pages in and have 5 post-its sticking out of the pages already! I’ve been making notes in pencil since it’s a library book – I think I’m going to have to do a lot of erasing before I turn it back in!!! What’s […]