What can't be talked about: Secrets and silences across the lifecycle A graphic novel can break silence by showing what is hidden without giving it voice: the reader/viewer is engaged and in dialogue with what is hidden before it is revealed. Using the framework of secrets and silences in illness experience this panel will explore loss, stigma and isolation in four age clusters in the lifecycle—childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and old age—as narrated in selected graphic works. We will demonstrate how the graphic medium enhances accessibility by moving these stories out of silence into a mix of visual and textual cues ripe for examination and reader engagement. Allan Peterkin MD is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at the University of Toronto, where he heads the Health, Arts and Humanities program. He is a founding editor of ARS MEDICA : A Journal of Medicine, the Arts and Humanities and is the author of twelve books for adults and children including the picture book The Flyaway Blanket (2012) and Staying Human During Residency Training: How To Survive and Thrive After Medical School (2012-fifth edition). Marsha Hurst, Ph.D., Columbia University, Program in Narrative Medicine, teaches on narratives of illness and disability, and of death, dying and caregiving in the masters program, and co-chairs the University Seminar on Narrative, Health, and Social Justice. She is co-editor of Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies. Linda Raphael is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Director of the Program in Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine at The George Washington University School of Medicine and director of the track in Medical Humanities. She is also Associate Professorial Lecturer in the George Washington University Department of English. She is the author of Narrative Scepticism: Moral Agency and Representations of Consciousness in Fiction, and co-editor of When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Fiction. She currently writes about literature and medicine, the fiction of Henry James, and graphic medicine, in which she has a very keen interest. Patricia Stanley, MBA,MA., Columbia University, Program in Narrative Medicine is the clinical coordinator for the students in the masters in narrative medicine program. She runs two narrative writing workshops for oncology patients, and is President of the Mt.Pleasant/Blythdale UFSD school board and serves as a trustee for the Blythedale Childrens Hospital.
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