The Critical Art and Hope of Unraveling: A Review of M. F. Alvarez's Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal.

This review engages with the powerful critical and evocative autoethnography, Unraveling: An Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal (2024). Written by M. F. Alvarez, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of New Hampshire, this book narrates the embodied experiences of a young Filipino gay man named Mike whose suffering from childhood trauma slowly escalates into relentless delusions and self-harm that eventually propel him to seek professional help. Alvarez's beautifully sculpted book captures Mike's multidimensional psychological life as he lives, observes, and narrates it within structures that medicalize people's mental health experiences. Dividing his text into story and analysis, Alvarez brings a critical gaze to normative medical and psychiatric accounts of mental health and highlights the agency of people navigating their embodied landscapes, trauma, suicidality, and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]