Pathologizing Pop Culture Blog Posts

Visual disturbances became a medium for processing perception and experience. Through color, form, and distortion, these works allow us a rare glimpse into the artists’ perceptual worlds and in doing so, we are invited to reflect on our own ways of seeing.

Simone’s story offers both a caution and an invitation. Chronic pain care often centers on explanation, optimization, and sequencing: once I understand, once I control, then I can live. The subtle cost of this approach is that patients may delay engagement with what matters, waiting for certainty that may never arrive.

Within this landscape, RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) occupies a paradoxical position. The series offers unprecedented visibility for marginalized identities, including queer, disabled, and chronically ill people, while simultaneously transforming those identities into consumable performance.

For physicians, it’s a reminder that therapeutic relationships can serve both as a lifeline and a site of emotional vulnerability, one that we must honor and care for.

When moral and political ideologies make accessing care so adversarial, people internalize these beliefs. Pain becomes a personal failure; seeking help becomes immoral. 

Shelley’s own experience of medical loss gives this story its emotional force. Frankenstein is a musing of how easily medical advancement and harm can become entangled. Medicine continues to live within that tension.

The idea of art as therapy is often sentimentalized, but in Sesow’s case it feels exacting and unsentimental. His paintings present the raw psychological labor of trauma recovery.

‍The terror of Rosemary’s Baby lies in its all-too-human realism. The film externalizes the fears many pregnant people face: of being silenced, isolated, and stripped of agency during one of life’s most vulnerable phases. That’s why it remains a horror classic, and why it continues to speak loudly to the fears and lived realities of today.

While Succession is widely known as an epic saga of corporate power and media empires, at its core it is a story about family under stress.

“Lately, Polly thought her mind was a river, constantly scouring and pooling, constantly disappearing, filling with details that glinted and vanished.”

But what stayed with me wasn’t just the history or the artifacts; it was a profound reminder of a relationship that remains crucial in medicine: the interplay between trauma and surgical innovation, and the often-overlooked role of creativity and artistry in that process.

As healthcare professionals, particularly those who are able-bodied, we can inadvertently reinforce the “fix-it” mindset. The idea that disability is solely a medical problem to be solved rather than a state to be integrated as an aspect of identity.

Written between 2017 and 2020, the album captures the emotional chaos of the era, just before the world locked down. “Body Terror Song,” the album’s third track, wasn’t written in response to COVID-19, but it certainly resonates.

Postpartum PTSD isn’t always recognized by patients or providers because it doesn’t look like the script we expect. When sadness isn’t the dominant emotion, support may not be offered. When high functioning or irritability masks distress, the window for help can quietly close.

Gregor’s first and overriding concern is not his shocking transformation, but his inability to get out of bed and go to work. This culminates in his frantic attempts to convince his manager while locked in his bedroom that he is still fit for the job, all while trying to hide the fact that he has, well, become a gigantic bug. The scene would be absurdly comical if it did not so accurately capture the lengths to which people living with chronic illness often push themselves to meet society’s expectations of normality and productivity.

Kahlo’s work resonates with me for its unflinching portrayal of medical trauma and the emotional impact of traumatic injury and acquired disability. In describing her relationship with Dr. Farill, she captures the complex interplay of gratitude and grief that often defines post-injury recovery.

Widely remembered as a landmark horror film about demonic possession, The Exorcist is, in many ways, also a story about medical trauma. I point to one infamous scene in which Regan undergoes a cerebral angiography with disturbing realism.