Themes

Bitter Medicine is a story about mental illness. It explores what it is like to live with schizophrenia, and aims to criticize how we treat people with mental illness both as an individual and as a medical patient. This is made clear in the memoir’s foreword, which states that “Clem and Olivier Martini make one of the strongest and most compelling cases that I have ever encountered as to how we as a society have failed those with mental illness.” (p. 8)

There are many avenues in which this theme is explored, the first is how Canada’s medical system is often unequipped to give people with mental illnesses the care they need. Instead of getting proper care in a hospital, psychiatric parents often see their responsibilities offloaded onto relatives or other caregivers but without giving them proper resources to help combat their condition. This is referred to as the Laissez-fare approach.

“In Laissez-faire Health Care, there’s a striking difference between how psychiatric patients and patients with all other ailments are treated, and the difference isn’t a good one. Psychiatric patients are certainly “let alone.” p. 153

Another issue that is explored is how labor and mental illness negatively contribute to each other. Liv’s illness keeps him from getting hired at many places, and one company that did hire him publicly shamed him and fired him after he was slower than his peers. According to CAMH, “Seventy to 90% of people living with serious mental illnesses in Canada are unemployed” (para. 1). Despite this, Liv was expected to work even though it had a negative impact on his paranoia and depression. He was expected to work because we believe that people require labour to live meaningfully, the fact that he was in fact not able to work because of his illness didn’t seem to combat this belief. According to Clem this also impaired the judgement of Liv’s doctors, “For the longest time, even Liv’s doctors urged him to hang in there, to hold on for dear life to whatever bone the job market might throw his way.” (p. 133)

- Zach