The Vanishing Body
Psychiatry and the Recovery of the Embodied
During my medical training, one question kept surfacing: Where is the body in psychiatry? In exam rooms and treatment plans, we focus on the brain—its chemistry, thoughts, and patterns—while the body often fades into the background. A patient's trembling hands, the grief in their shoulders, or the way psychosis disconnects them from their physical self rarely appear in diagnostic codes like F33.1 (major depressive episode, recurrent). These codes, grounded in the DSM-5, guide clinical care but often miss the lived experience of embodiment. What aspects of how people inhabit their bodies during mental illness remain outside our frameworks?
Perhaps psychiatry already holds space for the body in ways I haven't yet learned to see. This project is born from curiosity about what I might discover with closer attention to embodiment. It's also a chance to reflect on medical ethics—autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. How do we honor patient autonomy if our language can't capture embodied experience? How do we ensure justice when certain kinds of pain remain illegible to our diagnostic systems?
"The Vanishing Body" is a week-long essay series, part of my final Medical Humanities and Ethics elective, exploring the relationship between psychiatry and embodiment. Drawing on philosophy, trauma research, humanities, and creative expression, I'll examine how clinical practices, institutional spaces, and cultural portrayals shape mental health.
This series will include essays, poetry, and reflections on topics like how hospital spaces affect patients, what sacred texts reveal about bodily suffering, and how modern technological tools depict mental illness.
This series is by no means a critique of psychiatry as a practice. This is a curious exploration of how my future specialty thinks about embodiment, and how I might think about it too. As I prepare for residency, this project reflects some of the questions I'm carrying into the next stage of training. I hope this work sparks new ways of seeing mental health care.
What might we discover if we listened more carefully to the body's story? Join me this week to explore.