Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia

by W.J. Thomas Mitchell

How does a parent make sense of a child’s severe mental illness? How does a father meet the daily challenges of caring for his gifted but delusional son, while seeking to overcome the stigma of madness and the limits of psychiatry?  W. J. T. Mitchell’s memoir tells the story—at once representative and unique—of one family’s encounter with mental illness and bears witness to the life of the talented young man who was his son.

 Gabriel Mitchell was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age twenty-one and died by suicide eighteen years later. He left behind a remarkable archive of creative work and a father determined to honor his son’s attempts to conquer his own illness. Before his death, Gabe had been working on a film that would show madness from inside and out, as media stereotype and spectacle, symptom and stigma, malady and minority status, disability and gateway to insight. He was convinced that madness is an extreme form of subjective experience that we all endure at some point in our lives, whether in moments of ecstasy or melancholy, or in the enduring trauma of a broken heart. Gabe’s declared ambition was to transform schizophrenia from a death sentence to a learning experience, and madness from a curse to a critical perspective.    

Shot through with love and pain, Mental Traveler shows how Gabe drew his father into his quest for enlightenment within madness. It is a book that will touch anyone struggling to cope with mental illness, and especially for parents and caregivers of those caught in its grasp.
 

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Psychology

192 pages, Hardcover

Published April 21, 2020

About the author

William J. Thomas Mitchell is a professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. Editor of the journal Critical Inquiry.

His monographs, Iconology (1986) and Picture Theory (1994), focus on media theory and visual culture. He draws on ideas from Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to demonstrate that, essentially, we must consider pictures to be living things. His collection of essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005) won the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize in 2005. In a recent podcast interview Mitchell traces his interest in visual culture to early work on William Blake, and his then burgeoning interest in developing a science of images. In that same interview he discusses his ongoing efforts to rethink visual culture as a form of life and in light of digital media.

Reviews

[Lauren Heintz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was hard for me to judge. On one hand I found myself pushing to get through certain sections/chapters, and on the other I was overcome with feelings towards Gabe and his family. The author, Gabe’s father, is an academic professor who spent his life giving seminars around the world and lecturing at colleges so of course the book is written at a very high level of academic. However, I expected the book to be more personal regarding Gabe’s experience with schizophrenia and how it affected them as a family. Often times anecdotes of Gabe were interrupted by (what felt like) long lectured analysis of what was happening and unnecessary details that felt like bragging. It seemed like he was critiquing their life and the causes of his sons illness. The family seemed to be very wealthy and prestigious, often interacting with other well-off and prestigious people and the author repeated these peoples names as well as specify each seminar and country they traveled too. It often felt like it circled around his academic accomplishments and then back around to Gabe. I don’t feel like this was his intention, but how the specific details were perceived. I think it’s also important to acknowledge that films and music were very important in Gabe and his fathers relationship, so a lot of the people they named were probably of great importance to them, but not entirely necessary multiple times throughout the book.

Besides what I mentioned above, I do feel that w.t.j mitchell did a throughout job of expanding on the impact and creative genius his son Gabe carried. His ability to connect with anyone in the room, his openness, and generosity to anyone he crossed paths with. You could tell by the way he explained the family interactions with Gabe that it was in fact a struggle coping every day with his mental health, but it never took away from the person they knew him to be and admired. Gabe’s mother also included her own personal poems surrounding Gabe’s life,death, and absence in their life. Gabe was deeply loved by many, especially his family.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, sad, and deeply human. Mitchell's story is iconic in many ways: working adjacent to the critical theory that so valorizes madness (in its less careful moments) despite the caution of those for whom madness was a subject without parallel - cue Foucault, Deleuze, etc - is one thing, but to have a son for whom mental illness became the defining theme of existence is a darkly tragic combination. For readers, this is by turns fascinating, depressing, and enraging, with the temptation to second-guess, to "know better", and to question the unrecognized prestige that may have contributed to the whole of affair. Imagine being Mitchell and having to guide your mentally ill son through a conversation with the generous but too-painfully brilliant conversation of Jacques and Marguerite Derrida - imagine Mitchell's aesthetic psychoanalysis coming into brusque and impatient contact with the golden child whose humour cannot deflect from his tragic obsessions and paranoia. No ordinary concatenation of philosophies and life events, this, and for these reasons a singular, and singularly painful, book, both to read and also to write. Across it all Mitchell stresses the need to champion the creativity and real contributions of his son, over and above whatever illness the latter suffered, and it is in that struggle for dignity over prurient curiosity that defines this book.

[Keri · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book should have been good but was completely academic, cold, and removed.

[Lee Savino · Rating 2 out of 5]

First half of the book really held my interest, but the rest of the book tanked and I ended up not even reading much of it.

[Mindy Greiling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful elegy.