Abstract
“I was drawn into their stories, but mostly I was drawn to this place where time didn’t exist. It was a place of memory, of loss, but each memory treasured lasted only for the moment.” (p. 63)
Practitioners, teachers, and scholars of social work spend a great deal of time thinking about the experiences of our clients as we move through our work. It is a rare and beautiful gift to be shaken from our objective, and at times even distanced, thoughts when we are drawn deeply into lived experience. From its first pages, Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness situates the social work reader in the vantage point of our clients and invites us to see the structures and routines that have become familiar to us through the eyes and ears of lived experience. Catherine Cho, throughout her narrative, offers her readers the gift of immersing deeply into the profound and vulnerable experience of the onset, navigation, and continued management of her acute mental health crisis of postpartum psychosis.
Inferno is a work of contextual elegance; Ms. Cho’s Korean-American identity and her cultural experiences of family are intertwined with her mental health experiences as a woman and mother. With poignant clarity, she walks the reader through a labyrinth of personal and family history, present experience, and future expectations as if we were companions to her bio–psycho–social–spiritual journey. Time ceases to exist at points in this narrative, and the reader begins to wonder whether her acute hospitalization has been days, weeks, or months. This temporal confusion mirrors Catherine’s own experience of psychosis where time lacks relevance and profound truths break through in fleeting moments of clarity from unexpected people and events. As reflected in the quote above, she herself is drawn to the timeless qualities of others’ experiences, just as we are drawn into her own narrative, and eventually, the timelessness of events that wrap around each other as she reconstructs her story. As this narrative memoir unfolds, several profound themes emerge for social work scholars embracing a feminist and womanist standpoint.
Positionality matters: Very quickly, we are immersed in the intensity of Catherine’s story and compelled to confront our own positionality within it. If we align with the system of acute mental health crisis and response, we will find ourselves arguing with the intention and perception of those services and quickly realize the limitations of the system. If we align with family, we will be left bewildered and confused, as families often are in their midpoint position balancing desire for the person’s autonomy and concern for their well-being. If we align with Catherine (which is the intention), then we are taken on a whirlwind journey where we must confront our socialized understandings and internalized stigma surrounding mental health and motherhood. Those of us who have been providers and teachers will be invited to deconstruct the future-focused orientation of intervention and discharge planning in deference to simply being present in relation to the author’s experience as it is unfolding. Engaging the memoir in this way, we will emerge with a transformed understanding of women’s experiences of navigating motherhood and mental health through Catherine’s standpoint.
Culture, as well as gender, must be centered: Ms. Cho’s memoir is as much about her Korean-American experience as it is about her identity as a woman and mother. The systems in which she finds herself entangled are often patriarchal and euro-centric; this becomes evident when her experience as a Korean-American woman becomes the author’s key focus. The systems of oppression evident in both her past experiences and current mental health crisis highlight the invisible and unchecked structural power at the intersection of race and gender. The most poignant moments of this memoir emerge when people within her narrative see, name, and confront the structures of power and in doing so, concentrate their full attention and respect on her humanity. Scholars and students engaging this text will encounter powerful lessons in the intersectional experiences of race and gender, both interpersonally and structurally. These lessons are experiential rather than didactic. Intersectionality is woven into this narrative because intersectionality is unquestionably present in the author’s life.
Motherhood and mental health are complex in presentation, experience, and meaning. As someone whose scholarly career has focused on the intersection of motherhood and mental health, I assert that the complexity of meaning-making regarding motherhood and mental health is one of the most misunderstood pluralities of the childbearing experience. Throughout the narrative, Catherine openly struggles with her own maternal identity in ways that reflect both internally and socially constructed meaning-making. The reader may be forced to contend with the social misconception that there is an instantaneous and fixed maternal identity associated with childbearing. The reader may be forced to confront internalized and socialized stigma which seeks to differentiate “good” and “bad” (or “fit” and “unfit”) mothers. The meaning of motherhood continues to swirl and surface through the narrative, as does the meaning of mental health. Ms. Cho’s chosen subtitle, “a memoir of motherhood and madness”, seems, in itself, a way to simultaneously inhabit and take distance from the sudden and acute onset of psychosis into what otherwise might be perceived as a normal, joyful experience of pregnancy and childbirth. As readers, we are compelled to acknowledge the complexities of maternal identity and the complexities of mental health colliding in bodily, relational, and existential ways. The discomfort of the reader’s experience encountering the vivid and honest details of Ms. Cho’s narrative is a telltale sign that our profession continues to categorize and catalog people rather than centering on the complexities of human experience. We, as social work practitioners and scholars, are given much to consider between the lines of this memoir.
Inferno: A memoir of motherhood and madness would be an excellent supplement to graduate social work courses in mental health practice and policy and a particularly valuable resource for those teaching and preparing for clinical practice. Ms. Cho’s detailed memoir would provide ample case-based detail for course discussions regarding identity and meaning-making; oppression and power; structural intersectionality; the role of race, culture, and gender in family systems; interpersonal violence; adverse childhood events; relational and generational trauma; women’s mental health; reproductive health; voluntary and involuntary hospitalization; discharge planning and policy; person-centered practice; mental health intervention and treatment; and psychopharmacology. For anyone engaging in scholarship, teaching, and/or practice with women during and around the time of pregnancy, Inferno is a valuable and necessary consumer experience narrative for our continued reflection and professional development.
