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Wednesday, March 20, 2019
5:30-7:00 pm
Cineworks
1131 Howe St. Vancouver.
(Access is by way of the lane between Howe Street and Hornby Street. Knock on the door that says Cineworks.)

Hidden Lives: true stories of people who live with mental illness
(Touchwood, 2017)
Edited by Lenore Rowntree and Andrew Boden

In this ground-breaking collection, well-known and cutting-edge authors bring to light life with mental illness. These evocative essays, by writers who either suffer from or have close family members diagnosed with mental illness or a developmental disorder, aim to break down the stigma that surrounds one of the most devastating of human tribulations. The writers recount their experiences with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, clinical depression, anorexia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. Hidden Lives gives readers a place to turn and communicates not despair but courage.

“A privileged if uncomfortably close look at one of the most devastating a human tribulations. For all the raw honestly of its revelations, Hidden Lives communicates not despair but courage.” —Gabor Maté, MD

Readings and discussion by co-editors Lenore Rowntree and Andrew Boden

Additional discussion by invited guest Sandra Luckow

Attendance is free but please RSVP to https://goo.gl/forms/jyLip8P6AsgsKWiU2 by March 17, 2019.  (An optional light meal is available at $10.00 per person payable by cash at the event.)

More about Hidden Lives:
https://www.touchwoodeditions.com/book/hidden-lives/

About the facilitators:

Lenore Rowntree is a Canadian author and playwright. She is a co-editor and contributor to the collection of life stories Hidden Lives: true stories from people who live with mental illness (Touchwood Editions/Brindle & Glass, 2nd ed. 2017). Her novel Cluck is the darkly comic story of Henry whose mother lives with bipolar disorder and was a finalist for the Great BC Novel contest (Thistledown Press, 2016).
http://lenorerowntree.com

Andrew Boden‘s articles on mental illness have appeared in Open Minds Quarterly and Other Voices. His stories and essays have appeared in The Journey Prize Stories: 22, Prairie Fire, Descant, Vancouver Review, and the anthology Nobody’s Father: Life Without Kids. Andrew is vice-president and director of the Institute for Cross-Cultural Exchange, a Canadian children’s literacy charity.
http://www.andrewboden.ca/

Sandra Luckow teaches documentary and narrative film production at Columbia University, Barnard College and Yale School of Art. Her film THAT WAY MADNESS LIES will be screened at the Cinematheque on March 20^th at 7:30 PM as part of the Frames of Mind Mental Health film series.

Note: Sandra’s comments this evening will be informed by a book she highly recommends: I Am Not Sick, I Don’t Need Help! How To Help Someone With Mental Illness Accept Treatment by Dr. Xavier Amador
http://www.vidapress.com/i-am-not-sick-i-dont-need-help

Additional details about tonight’s event:

A reminder: Attendance is free but please RSVP to https://goo.gl/forms/jyLip8P6AsgsKWiU2 by March 17, 2019. (An optional light meal is available at $10.00 per person payable by cash at the event.)

Interested attendees of Lucid can purchase tickets to attend the Frames Of Mind screening that immediately follows the Lucid event. See http://www.thecinematheque.ca/nightly/2019/3/20

Feel free to email us with any questions or comments at lucidreadinggroup@gmail.com, and be sure to check out our blog: blogs.ubc.ca/lucid for updates!

Thank you for supporting Lucid!

June 14, 2016 7:00pm
Hardwick Hall, UBC Medical Student and Alumni Centre
2750 Heather St, Vancouver

For the June meeting of the Lucid Book Club and Reading Series, we will be featuring a diverse group of writers and mental health practitioners from the local communities, presenting their writing projects. The event will showcase a variety of work, ranging from memoir to poetry, fiction and self-help.
Continue reading →

Monday April 4, 2016 7:00 pm
Hardwick Hall, UBC Medical Student and Alumni Centre
2750 Heather St, Vancouver

Discussant: Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Professor of Clinical Medicine and Executive Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.

Readers note – only the first essay of the collection (also titled “The Empathy Exams”) will be discussed.

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor, paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about one another? How can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain—real and imagined, her own and others’—Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace. The Empathy Exams is a brilliant and forceful book by one of America’s vital young writers.

“Extraordinary . . . she calls to mind writers as disparate as Joan Didion and John Jeremiah Sullivan as she interrogates the palpitations of not just her own trippy heart but of all of ours. . . . Her cerebral, witty, multichambered essays tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say we feel someone else’s pain. . . . I’m not sure I’m capable of recommending a book because it might make you a better person. But watching the philosopher in Ms. Jamison grapple with empathy is a heart-expanding exercise.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“[A] stunning collection. . . . A profound investigation of empathy’s potential and its limits.”—Cosmopolitan, “10 Books by Women You Have to Read This Spring”

More Reviews at: https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/empathy-exams

Download the reading guide (PDF)

Tuesday, November 24, 2015
7:00pm-9:00pm
Alumni Room
UBC Medical Student & Alumni Centre (MSAC)
2750 Heather Street, Vancouver, BC  Canada  V5Z 4M2
(Corner of 12th and Heather)

“Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks has written, are travellers to unimaginable lands. An Anthropologist on Mars offers portraits of seven such travellers– including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette’s Syndrome except when he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who has great difficulty deciphering the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.

These are paradoxical tales, for neurological disease can conduct one to other modes of being that–however abnormal they may be to our way of thinking–may develop virtues and beauties of their own. The exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be made in a consulting room or office, and Dr. Sacks has taken off his white coat and deserted the hospital, by and large, to join his subjects in their own environments. He feels, he says, in part like a neuroanthropologist, but most of all like a physician, called here and there to make house calls, house calls at the far borders of experience.

Along the way, he gives us a new perspective on the way our brains construct our individual worlds. In his lucid and compelling reconstructions of the mental acts we take for granted–the act of seeing, the transport of memory, the notion of color–Oliver Sacks provokes anew a sense of wonder at who we are.”

Discussion facilitated by Dr Robert Stowe. Dr. Robert Stowe obtained an MD at Queen’s University; a year of graduate studies in philosophy of mind and a neurology residency at  the University of Toronto; and a fellowship in behavioral neurology at Harvard Medical School. He was a founding Core Faculty member of the joint University of Pittsburgh-Carnegie Mellon University Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Since 1998 he has been practising behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry in Vancouver, where he is based in the UBC Neuropsychiatry Program, and lectures on disorders of higher cortical function.

The Lucid Book Club and Reading Series is seeking 10-15 minute creative readings on the theme of mental illness/health for our June 11th meeting, running from 7:15-9:00PM.  We are open to all genres of creative expression, from poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, drama, graphic novel, etc. Please submit a brief description of the work you’d like to present by May 1st to lucidreadinggroup@gmail.com