Bioconcerns, OCD Fears, and Other Worrisome Things: Healing through Narrative

Abstract

This chapter deals with what a reading of linguistic expressions and literary and historical sources tells us about the relationship between OCD, mental illness, narrative ethics and bioethics, power, the politics of disability, and disability studies as a disciplinary orientation and, even more importantly, a way of seeing the world. I argue that research into medical phenomena, if medicine is to have a healing power, needs to take into consideration the social forces of the environments where these disorders, diseases, and disease entities are situated and the narrative accounts of the different parties involved. At the same time, disability studies has to further solidify an understanding that despite their differences, the needs of those living with physical and mental disabilities are equally pressing and that the disabling forces in the world are equally affecting. Finally, humanities and social sciences scholarship should strive to acknowledge those areas of knowledge (and their contributors) that do not fit neatly within its epistemic beliefs about the nature of self and of constructed realities.