The Patient Is an Unreliable Historian

A poetry collection that questions the current construction of psychiatric treatment while speaking through lived experience and advocating for disability justice.

The poems of Brody Parrish Craig’s new collection upends narratives around current psychiatric treatment models to focus on the lived experience of survivors and to speak toward liberation, abolition, and disability justice. Titled after the author’s own medical records, The Patient Is an Unreliable Historian questions the prevailing narrative that the medical industry knows stories of disability and madness better than those who have lived them.

Craig uses lyricism to expose the intersection of madness and criminality in contemporary American culture, moving through institutions, community spaces, and loss of kin. Through the course of the collection, the speaker turns toward irreverence and interrogation, carves out their own freedom, and challenges the script of the patient, the mad, and the ＂criminal.＂ These poems deconstruct the ＂patient＂ to set the person free.

Brody Parrish Craig (they/them) is the author of Boyish, which won the 2019 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their writing has been published in Muzzle Magazine, Poetry, Mississippi Review, New South, Missouri Review, and TYPO, among others. They are the editor of TWANG, a regional anthology of trans and gender nonconforming creators from the South and Midwest. A 2022 recipient of Artist 360’s Community Activator Award, Craig currently co-leads TLGBQ+ community arts programming in the Ozarks.