scholarly journals Cringe and Sympathy: The Comedy of Mental Illness in Flowers

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 121
Author(s):  
Linda M. Hess
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
Humor Studies ◽  
The Way

This article on brings together findings from humor studies, especially work on cringe comedy, and disability studies. It analyzes how Flowers uses elements of cringe to question societal norms of the “proper person” in connection to mental illness, but also how Flowers broadens the genre of cringe so that, at times, it becomes a cringe tragedy rather than a cringe comedy, thus taking seriously the pain of mental illness. As a third point, this analysis focuses on the way in which Flowers self-reflexively employs elements of narrativity to draw attention to the cultural constructedness and storyfication of mental illness throughout history.

Unstoppable Decay and Relentless Hope: Study of Alterity in Popular Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 56-76
Author(s):  
Adrien Ordonneau
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Consequences of capitalism’s crises and their manifestations in arts have deeply modified the way we can approach mental health. As Mark Fisher pointed out in 2009 with his book Capitalist Realism, neoliberalism is using mental illness as a way to keep existing. The capacity to think a way out of alienation is deeply linked with arts and popular culture. The article proposes to study the uncanny dialogue between arts and politics in relationships to people, and mental health. The theoretical framework will show how arts are trying to build a way out of alienation, since 2009. The article will illustrate this research with the study of many artistic practices, including our own. The findings will show how the ambiguous and uncanny relationships with the world is used by artists as a way out of alienation, despite the difficulties occurring with mental health in time of crisis.

Mental Health Ontologies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janna Hastings
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
The Public ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
Public Health Challenges ◽  
Health Related ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Way

Mental health presents one of the defining public health challenges of our time. Proponents of different conceptions of what mental illness is wage war for the hearts and minds of patients, practitioners, policy-makers, and the public. Debate and fragmentation around the nature of the entities that feature in the mental health domain divide resources and reduce progress. The way mental health is publicly discussed in the media has tangible effects, in terms of stigma, access to healthcare and resources, and private expectations of recovery. This book explores in detail the sorts of statements that are made about mental health in the media and public reporting of scientific research, grounding them in the wider context of the theoretical frameworks, assumptions and metaphors that they draw from. The author shows how a holistic understanding of the way that different aspects of mental illness are interrelated can be developed from evidence-based interpretation of the latest research findings. She offers some ideas about corrective, integrative approaches to discussing mental health-related matters publicly that may reduce the opposition between conceptualisations while still aiming to reduce stigma, shame and blame. In particular, she emphasises that discourse in the media needs to be anchored to an overview of all the research results across the field and argues that this could be achieved using new technological infrastructures. The author provides an integrative account of what mental health is, together with an improved understanding of the factors driving the persistence of oppositional accounts in the public discourse. The book will be of benefit to researchers, practitioners and students in the domain of mental health.

What Do Dreams Do?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Llewellyn
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Emotional Stability ◽  
Evolutionary Time ◽  
Brain Functions ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Hidden Patterns ◽  
Access To Food ◽  
The Way

What is a dream? It’s a complex, non-obvious pattern derived from your experience. But you haven’t actually experienced it. Strange. Revealing complex, hidden patterns makes dreams odd. Dreams associate elements of different experiences to make something new: a pattern you didn’t know was there until you dreamt it. Patterns are discernible forms in the way something happens or is done. Some patterns are easy to spot, being certain and obvious: night follows day. Patterns in human/animal experiences are less obvious because, first, the patterned elements appear at different times or places and, second, the pattern exhibits tendencies not certainties. Spotting such patterns depends on non-obvious associations. If prompted with ‘sea’, while awake, your logical brain makes obvious associations, ‘beach’ or ‘boat’, with a seaside pattern i.e. beach-boat-seaside. But after awakening from dreaming, when your brain is still tuned to non-obvious associations, ‘sick’ may come to mind. A less obvious element of sea experiences. You tend to seasickness when it’s rough. But you also get sick if you eat shellfish, have a migraine, or travel in cars—but only if you read. Sea–rough–car–read–shellfish–migraine. Visualizing these non-obvious associations between elements of different experiences becomes dream-like. Dreaming brains evolved to identify non-obvious associations. Across evolutionary time, you didn’t want to get sick. Survival depended on being well enough to anticipate the non-obvious patterns of predators and human competitors, while securing access to food and water. Making associations drives many, if not all, brain functions. Dream associations support memory, emotional stability, creativity, unconscious decision-making, and prediction, while also contributing to mental illness. This book explains how.

Stanford’s Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation

2021 ◽  
pp. 389-410
Author(s):  
Anjali Albuquerque ◽  
Neha P Chaudhary ◽  
Gowri G Aragam ◽  
Nina Vasan
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
World Views ◽  
Health Innovation ◽  
Sustainable Solutions ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
One To One ◽  
The Way

Stanford Brainstorm, the world’s first lab for mental health innovation, taps into the combined potential of academia and industry—bridging medicine, technology, and entrepreneurship—to redesign the way the world views, diagnoses, and treats mental illness. Convergence science has facilitated Brainstorm’s emergence as a pivotal protagonist in the history of the mental health innovation field. In turn, Brainstorm has catalyzed innovation within mental health by applying convergent approaches to tackle the scope, immediacy, and impact of mental illness. Stanford Brainstorm’s thinking about mental health represents a shift in the discipline of psychiatry from a focus on one-to-one delivery to collaborative and sustainable solutions for millions.

The biopsychosocial model in psychiatry: Engel and beyond

2020 ◽  
pp. 6-22
Author(s):  
Rebecca Roache
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Effective Treatment ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Biopsychosocial Model ◽  
Biopsychosocial Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the biopsychosocial model in psychiatry. The term ‘biopsychosocial’ is most strongly associated with George L. Engel, whose most famous article on the biopsychosocial model was published in 1977. In advancing the model, Engel aimed to make explicit how the biological, the psychological, and the social all had a place in conceptualizing mental disorder, and to systematize and enshrine this recognition in the way in which psychiatry is practised. In making decisions about how to treat mental illness, or a given patient, adopting a biopsychosocial approach should involve keeping in mind that the most effective treatment may involve a solely biological intervention, a solely psychological one, a solely social one, or a combination of these. Indeed, a useful and effective biopsychosocial approach reminds one to consider all of these possibilities, and select the most promising one, based on the available empirical evidence.

Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

2019 ◽  
pp. 234-247
Author(s):  
René Rosfort
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Hermeneutical Phenomenology ◽  
Phenomenological Psychopathology ◽  
The Way

The aims of phenomenology are to clarify, describe, and make sense of the structures and dynamics of pre-reflective human experience, whereas hermeneutics aims to articulate the reflective character of human experience as it manifests in language and other forms of creative signs. This suggests that the two approaches differ in aims, methods, and subject matter. A closer look at the two disciplines reveals, however, that in terms of history, themes, and philosophical goals they have more in common than that which separates them. This chapter examines these differences and common features in the philosophy of Heidegger and Gadamer, then demonstrates how Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology provides us with a dialectical account of personal identity that can contribute to phenomenological psychopathology. The combination of a phenomenological clarification of selfhood and a hermeneutical emphasis on interpretation paves the way for an interdisciplinary approach to mental illness.

Disability Studies and the Destruction of Jerusalem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Watts Belser
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Gender Discourse ◽  
The Way

This chapter uses disability studies theory to analyze the political and cultural significations of the body amidst Roman conquest. Extending the insights of scholars who have examined way Roman colonial dominance reshapes Jewish gender discourse, it argues that imperial violence similarly restructures the way rabbinic narrative portrays the body. Bavli Gittin and Lamentations Rabbah both recount stories of Rabbi Tsadok, a celebrated priest who fasted for forty years in an attempt to avert the destruction of Jerusalem. In contrast to the beauty tales examined in the previous chapter, Rabbi Tsadok’s body is used to mark the visceral impact of Roman conquest—and to chronicle the enduring scar that catastrophe leaves upon the flesh. Yet even as these stories use disability to make visible the tremendous loss that destruction brings, they also resignify the cultural logic of imperial victory, emphasizing the subversive power of disabled Jewish flesh.

scholarly journals Metaphoric Recurrences of Dreamlike Imagery in M. Khvylovy’s “My Self (Romantica)” and N. Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daria Polianska
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Time Change ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Party Ideology ◽  
The Way

Delusional states such as madness and hallucination are traditionally viewed as mental disorders characterized by a chaotic activity or as an experience in which something is perceived as true but is not real. In a literary discourse, madness and hallucination can be viewed as analogous to metaphoric perception of reality. Primarily, due to the fact that the way protagonists think and see things shifts from accepted societal norms to unaccountable patterns of behavior.In this article I approach madness and hallucination as dreamlike states of mind and follow George Lakoff’s belief that everyday abstract concepts like time, change, causation, and purpose appear to be metaphorical (1). From this point, I explore the narrative of madness and hallucination through the metaphoric recurrences of dreamlike imagery in Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” and Mykola Khvylovy’s “My Self (Romantica).”I suggest that both stories present situations of crisis, in which the characters appear on the edge of mental breakdown and thus experience the dreamlike states. Symbolically, the recurrent images that appear in the stories are connected to the idea of nationhood and social pressures within imperial Russia (1835) in “Diary of a Madman” and to the Communist Party ideology during its early rule in Ukraine (approximately 1920s-1930s) in “Myself (Romantica).” Therefore, by depicting the progression of their protagonists’ mental disorders, the writers reveal the truth about social and political struggles of their times

scholarly journals Media for Mental Health

1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 380-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Ramsay
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
Real Situation ◽  
The Real ◽  
Broadcast Media ◽  
The World ◽  
Responsible Attitude ◽  
The Way

Broadcast media can powerfully influence the way we view the world. Journalists drawn to sensational news items do not necessarily portray the real situation they are describing. Often they strengthen belief in stereotyped images, such as the ‘mad axeman’. Yet they have the potential to foster greater public understanding of mental illness and a more responsible attitude to sufferers.

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