Lyn Mahboub is many things: trainer, consultant, mother, daughter, student, teacher and, also, one who has navigated the psychiatric service system from within. Lyn’s passion for social justice and psychiatric reform is driven largely by her own first hand experience of mental distress over many years, and also by her work as a witness to many other survivor stories.

Lyn has been on her recovery journey for many years having had her struggles with ‘self medicating’, visions (mostly) but also voices, or what she calls ‘The Interpreter’ or ‘heard thought (an inner voice), and has been terrified by external voices at various times. At times, Lyn also hears 'spirit' guiding her and ‘coming through’ for others when doing readings for people. Lyn's first 'breakdown' at 15/16 years old was understood by her then, as a spiritual experience. Her "awakening of the Kundelini" was brought about as her foray into Eastern wisdom drew her far from the usual paradigms of 'knowledge' too quickly while so young. Lyn’s aversion and horror of ET energy has been a strong element of her distress, along with many very difficult life events.

Although her recovery journey continues and, not unlike many, she still struggles with distress, she currently is employed in the role of Director of the Hearing Voices Network Australia (for Richmond Fellowship WA) and in her 'spare time' as an Official Visitor, Independent Consumer Consultant and volunteer with the informal WA Consumer Movement. Lyn’s background in Nursing, Equal Opportunity/Disabilities, Natural Childbirth Education, and more recently, in Critical Psychology & Cultural Studies informs her practice forging recovery focused services.

Lyn’s unpublished honors thesis ‘Reifying The ‘Broken Brain’: Minds Madness & Machine’s That Go Ping’ can be obtained by email lyn@rfwa.org.au

Abstract

Rhetoric surrounding the promise of a technologically enabled understanding of the ‘broken brain’ permeates the popular, pedagogic and peer reviewed texts. Alert to the proliferation and prominence of brain images situated alongside talk on and about mental illness within such texts, this dissertation examines the organisation and effects of such accounts. The question of how we come to understand mental distress in terms of abnormal neuropathology (‘broken brains’) is considered, asking how such accounts are accomplished. It is argued that crucial to the production of biopsychiatric accounts of mental illness is the use of computer-mediated images generated by neuroimaging technologies, and that the deployment of neuroimages, along with ‘biomedical mental illness talk’, cements the notion of a ‘broken brain’. Further, close analysis of mental illness talk, along with strategically placed neuroimages, can offer valuable insight into how such texts are constructed in routine and artful ways to effect persuasion. A case study of such a discursive production of a putative technologically visible ‘broken brain’ is offered. Discursive psychology (DP) and membership categorization analysis (MCA) are employed to analyze the descriptions employed by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in a web based ‘information page’ pamphlet.