VOICES: Anna Quon, Low, and the ‘purpose’ of psychosis
The Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association’s 2023 VOICES campaign is focusing on mental health, and authors who write about it and/or who have lived with mental health challenges or illness.
The lead interviewer is Triny Finlay, a professor of English at the University of New Brunswick. Finlay is the author of several books, including Myself a Paperclip, which explores her experiences with mental illnesses, their treatments, and stigma.
Anna Quon is a Mad, mixed-race poet whose three novels explore mental health and sickness as it unfolds in her characters’ lives in Migration Songs, Low, and Where The Silver River Ends.
Low by Anna Quon delves into the intricacies of “Madness,” specifically focusing on the relationships, struggles, and life within a mental institution. This novel encapsulates a psychiatric experience, one that many people have endured, but that few talk about, due to the stigma around mental illness and mental institutionalism.
Anna Quon and Triny Finlay sat down to discuss the importance of including mental illness and psychiatric or institutionalized experiences or stories in both literature and conversation, in order to dissolve the stigma around them.
Quon herself has spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including in her twenties, thirties, and forties.
She was influenced by her personal experience in these environments to write about “the experience of being in there, what brings you in there, what you feel like in there, and what you feel like coming out of there.”
She added, “I wanted to portray this realistic experience to demystify it for people in some way, trying to somewhat make sense of psychosis.”
In Low, Adrianna Song’s life took a tragic turn when she lost her mother to brain cancer at the age of 11. Her younger sister, who was only a couple of months old at the time, was sent to live with their aunt in Toronto, leaving Adrianna and her father in Nova Scotia.
Now, at 19, this trauma still resides within her. On top of it, she’s heartbroken and in a deep clinical depression with psychotic features including her dead mother’s voice in her head, who is often hypercritical of Adrianna and her challenges.
As a result of these struggles, Adrianna ends up in and out of the Nova Scotia Psychiatric Hospital.
Quon uses Adrianna’s “madness” as an example of this logical unraveling. Adrianna’s psychosis and paranoia were related to her relationship with her mom when she was alive. Thus, they stemmed from an unconscious urge to sort it out.
Quon says she sees psychosis as having a purpose in a way; it has a reason for being there.
From her experience, she believes that the stigma associated with mental illness stems from fear. She observes that within the realm of mental health, hierarchies exist, with anxiety and depression often considered more “normal” mental health issues, while conditions involving psychosis, like those faced by Adrianna, are seen as “less normal.”
She advocates for a more compassionate and understanding society, emphasizing the need for open conversations about mental health. By including these narratives in literature, she says, we can work towards a world where mental illness is accepted, understood, and supported, rather than stigmatized.
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