The Most Costly Journey

For the past several years the Vermont Folklife Center, along with UVM Anthropology and Marek Bennett’s Comics Workshop, have been partners in an ongoing public mental health project led by the Open Door Clinic and UVM Extension Bridges to Health — El viaje más caro/The Most Costly Journey.

El viaje más caro is an ethnographic cartooning and graphic medicine project that uses collaborative storytelling as a tool to mitigate loneliness, isolation, and despair among Latin American migrant farm workers on Vermont dairy farms. This May, the project released The Most Costly Journey, a 252 page collection of these comics for an English speaking audience.

The El viaje más caro project emerged when Open Door Clinic outreach nurse Julia Doucet and her colleagues began to recognize that many of their patients struggled with mental health issues—depression, anxiety, substance abuse—resulting from isolation, trauma, loneliness, work-related conflict and other factors. With mental health care as practiced in the US unfamiliar—and often simply unavailable—to migrants, Julia and her fellow health care providers came up with a plan that they hoped would provide some relief to people suffering in silence: comics.

Aware of the long held place of comics in Latin America as popular sources of public health information, Julia reached out to the Center for Cartoon Studies and connected with then-student Tillie Walden. Working from an interview conducted by Open Door Clinic staff, Tillie created the project’s first comic, A New Kind of Work. From there the project team grew—as did the number of comics created.

This winter, the project launched a Kickstarter to fund the printing of an English collection of the stories. In the coming months we will launch a second Kickstarter to help cover the costs of the Spanish edition.

You can order a copy of the Most Costly Journey via Amazon or through your favorite local bookseller. For more information see:

You can also read the comics online in English and Spanish on the Open Door Clinic website:

El viaje más caro

The Most Costly Journey