Adventures in the DSM-5: Three Prose Collages

Georgia Poplett’s three prose collages combine acrostic poetics with surrealist erasure techniques, exploring the lived experience of postpartum psychosis.

Postpartum psychosis – a severe mental illness arising after giving birth, whose symptoms may spiral luminously between mania, paranoia, hallucinations, and cognitive disorientation – has no entry of its own in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM-5), the handbook used by mental health professionals in the USA and beyond in the diagnosis of psychiatric conditions. Instead, postpartum psychosis is included as a sub-branch of general ‘psychosis’, disregarding the unique contexts of childbirth, with tangible impacts on appropriate treatment pathways and care plans. This bewildering illness has historically been interpreted through a variety of lenses, from witchcraft to demonic possession to hysteria. 

Combining acrostic poetics with surrealist erasure techniques, these three prose collages decontextualise page 148 of the DSM-5-TR (American Psychiatric Association 2022), in which the term ‘postpartum psychosis’ appears. In doing so, they jumble, disentangle, revise, and reimagine the enduring elisions – or arbitrariness – of certain specifiers which drift upon the high seas of diagnostic category, reflecting the lived experiences of those who encounter and move through this disorienting system. 

I. Past History of Trawling 

No bigger than a cuttlefish eye, I hold the world of you. Cephalopod eyes are typically

invaginated, being apex aquatic predators, much like your own marine behavior: 

jostling, frothing, sending up frogspawn bubbles through guts. Intestinal disorder.

You fail criteria for hops. You ferment too long and hatch before you can be kegged, 

risk yeast autolysis: sulphur and starch and sugar, slick meat, spoiled fish

in oceanic darkness. The ultrasound, a cuttlefish experience. Rubbering flesh gone concave in ethanol,

Hauled up, prodded and pickled and preserved. My past history of trawling. 

II. Sugar and Heat

Pregnancy: if mania could be jarred. My brain become a thing electric, withering within. 

The old, slow association with my mother. The animal I came from. Animal behaviour,

Birth: all milk and syrup and blood-rust, mixing stink and sweet.  

I have heard the midwives gave the labouring nutmeg and caudle to warm off the alcohol.

In those days, women went to birth with sugar and heat 

on their lips. My mood bears down on all fours as if a French king 

cranes his neck and his men command to see the crowning. 

III. Molten Gold  

Lord deliver me from bed seven – this manic

clutching at Thoughts: spin, miller’s daughter, straw-like. Nothing but molten gold flecks 

of sun-glint mixed with polystyrene ceiling. I suspect a beekeeper in disorder

my ceiling crawls like – what is the line? ‘Pour for thee this golden wine,’ 

– snatches of Rossetti – Christina, not her brother – who exhumed poems from his wife’s graveside 

as if it were the pocket of a drowned man. Those crepuscular rays move through the room 

in golden coves, and spend days depressed in bed seven.

Note on method

The monster woman is simply a woman who seeks the power of self-articulation.

– Gilbert and Gubar 2020, 79

Given postpartum psychosis’s historic association with the madwoman in the attic, witchcraft, and other stigmatising stereotypes, we might think of it in proximity to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s misrepresented ‘monster woman’ – a charged and loaded designator, which this work grapples to undo. I started out by separating p. 148 of the DSM-5-TR into numbered lines, and used the word ‘monster’ to alphabetise and isolate non-consecutive lines. Once I had jumbled the page up in this way, I used erasure techniques to rework these excerpts into three different poems representing an experience of maternal mental health. 

Certain themes emerged organically from this approach, which are reflected in the visual excerpts, organised around the sense of being observed, prodded, poked – hence the dissected frog, taxidermied possum in bell jar, and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s – indexed to one speaker’s encounters with pregnancy, birth, and maternal mental illness. 

About the author

Georgia Poplett is a writer, editor and researcher specialising in representations of postpartum psychosis and Gothic literature. Her doctoral thesis, combining the innovations of creative practice and the critical medical humanities, was awarded a Northern Bridge Consortium Doctoral Award. Her words have been published in The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Lucy Writers and elsewhere, and she has presented her creative work at conferences around the world.  She lives in London and is currently working on her first novel. 

References 

American Psychiatric Association. 2022. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR).

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar 2020. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press.

About In Practice

‘In Practice’, The Polyphony’s creative practice research project, showcases multi-modal creative engagement with the lived experience of chronic illness, disability, caregiving and health from a range of creative practitioners within and beyond academic research. Founded by Aly Fixter and Grace Brimacombe-Rand, they wanted to bring their own creative practice and academic engagement with creative texts to the medical humanities digital community and foster new connections. If you are a creative person who explores their lived experience of health or the body through writing, art, photography or any creative methods, please get in touch to share your work with The Polyphony’s audience. 

Full image credits for collages

Figure 1. Past History of Trawling. Original collage. Georgia Poplett, 2025. Featuring Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library. 1. Keeled Nosed Toad, Bufo carinatus; 2, 2a. Doubtful Toad, Bufo dubius. Bengal. February 2, 2025. Photo by The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1830-1834, licensed under CCO; Brain coral background. July 15, 2023. Photo by Ed Rush on Unsplash; Pond background. January 19, 2024. Photo by Evan Aker on Unsplash; Cursive font. Committing by Alpaprana Studio. Roman font. Courier Polski 1941 by Tomasz Skowroński; Design assets (ripped paper, strikethroughs) via Adobe Stock.

Figure 2. Sugar and Heat. Original collage. Georgia Poplett, 2025. Featuring Nini. January 8, 2022. Photo by Nataliia Rabinovych on Unsplash; Albert Seba. Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio, et iconibus artificiosissimis expressio, per universam physiees historiam. July 24, 2024. Photo by Museums Victoria Rare Book – Albertus Seba, Locupletissimi Rerum Naturalium Thesauri, Planches Tome 1 & 2, Amsterdam, Janssonio-Waesbergios,1734-1735, licensed under PDM; UNITE the union poster produced by the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers in 1976 on the maternity leave rights under the Employment Protection Act 1975. TUC Collections, London Metropolitan University; The Embalming Jars of Frederik Ruysch, licensed under PDM. January 24, 2012. Photo by Biodiversity Heritage Library / Smithsonian Libraries and Archives via The Public Domain Review. Newspaper clipping graphics via Newspaper Generator; ‘Syrup’ font. Honey Script by Dieter Steffman. ‘Milk’ font. Baked Salmon by Subectype & Orenari; Design assets (ripped paper, text) via Adobe Stock.

Figure 3. Molten Gold. Original collage. Georgia Poplett, 2025. Featuring Anderson, Tempest. A Geyser Erupting in Yellowstone National Park (Possibly the Beehive Geyser). 1900. Photo by York Museums Trust / Wikimedia Commons via Public Domain Image Archive; Newspaper clipping graphics via Newspaper Generator; Advertisement for the Sunny Side Apiary (BevSF523.C6). May 26, 2016. Photo by University of St Andrews Library; Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 1961. April 14, 2024. Trailer screenshot via Wikimedia Commons; Design assets (ripped paper, film grain) via Adobe Stock.