Pathologizing Pop Culture Blog Posts

Over the past year, Pathologizing Pop Culture has become a way of examining these dimensions of illness through the lens of storytelling. By looking closely at the ways illness, disability, caregiving, and healing are portrayed in the stories that surround us, the column has helped illuminate recurring themes about the human experiences of healthcare. The following reflections represent the central ideas that have emerged from a year of exploring what stories can teach us about suffering, resilience, and what it means to care for one another.

The world may be “violent and mercurial,” but the answer is not to surrender our humanity by searching for someone who can absorb the cost.

Like many survivors of serious illness or injury, Francis emerges from trauma with an urgent desire to repair what feels broken. Life-threatening events often reorder priorities as an awareness of our mortality presses in to clarify values or create existential anxiety.

If there is a through-line between Satrapi’s reported death by sadness and the cardiology of broken heart syndrome, it is this tension between metaphor and mechanism. We sometimes reach for emotional explanations because they feel intuitively true. While medicine reaches for physiological explanations because they are measurable.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a critique of the rest cure and of nineteenth-century women’s healthcare more broadly. It exposes patterns of gender-based medical invalidation and asks what happens when a patient's reality is consistently subordinated to someone else's certainty.

Nearly fifty years after its release, Alien continues to resonate because it understands something profoundly destabilizing about embodiment itself. The film’s terror does not emerge solely from gore or violence, but from the recognition that the body can conceal danger long before it becomes visible to others or even to ourselves.

Recovery after serious illness is often described in terms of return. We seek return to baseline, return to function, return to life as it was before. But for many patients, there is no clear return. There is only reorientation: learning the contours of an altered body, adapting to new conditions, and slowly constructing meaning within a life that no longer fits its previous form.

Hamnet does not argue that grief becomes lighter. It suggests something more modest and more useful: that it becomes more shareable. And in that redistribution, the work of carrying it changes. Not because the loss is repaired, but because it is no longer held in isolation.

Innovation often comes through the synchronization of our bodies, tools, and contexts. These stories provide a reminder that human potential is realized by embracing our ability to shape and be shaped, and in doing so, generate new possibilities for expression, creativity, and innovation.

Peele’s film offers a similar warning: harm is often perpetuated not solely by overt malice, but by individuals shaped within systems that normalize exploitation and dull moral alarm.

The choice Maxwell describes is not whether pain exists, but how it is held. Whether sensations are allowed to be sensations, emotions allowed to be emotions, or whether they are immediately absorbed into a story about danger, defectiveness, or loss.

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.