From Passive Patient to Active Narrator: A Foucauldian Reading of David Adam’s The Man Who Couldn’t Stop

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, there was a growing resistance against medical authorities’ control of illness stories so they could claim power to shape their illness accounts through personal writings. This paper examines David Adam’s The Man Who Couldn’t Stop through which the medical field’s traditional system of knowledge comes under scrutiny because it focuses on the personal experience of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Through power-knowledge theory Foucault reveals how medical institutions have dominated clinical speech over patient accounts. David Adam uses his memoir to provide deep insights into OCD while criticising the clinical community’s usual treatment approach to the condition. Doctors maintain an unbalanced power dynamics with their patients that promotes a treatment system which keeps patients unaware about realfacts. Adam develops an opposing perspective which eliminates medical control over the patient story through his courageous recovery of personal voice. Through Foucault’s theoretical framework this study demonstrates that his memoir transform mental illness knowledge boundaries as well as reveal medical knowledge constraints. It fights metaphorically to establish a revolutionary change which establishes balanced empathetic and fair partnerships between medical staff and patients in mental health care systems.