La ‘graphic medicine’: curarsi con i comics

Abstract

The doctor-patient relationship and the improvement of the patients’ health conditions through storytelling multiple forms, from cinema to digital diaries, is the current research issue of the narrative medicine. Recently the graphic medicine has been establishing itself as a form of sick and disabled persons’ self-understanding. The patients transform their suffering into images as to be able to better express their condition. Indeed neuroscientists and cognitivists have shown how the empathy coefficient increases when the analogical language replaces the verbal one, since communication occurs through a progressive emotions’ physicalization. The graphic novels, narrating the diseases course, have a therapeutic function both on the authors who decide to tell about themselves in first or third person, as well as on the readers, in which the scientific community currently detects empathic identifications and consequent cathartic processes.