Pathologizing Pop Culture

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.

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.

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.

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.