The Medicalization of Mental Health and American Literature

Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming

Between 1890 and 1955, four influential mental health diagnoses—chlorosis (anorexia nervosa), schizophrenia, alcoholism, and narcissism—entered popular culture as the US mind sciences came into their own. Clinicians described these conditions as failures of individual character. Writers and mind scientists from minoritized backgrounds thought otherwise. These latter thinkers attributed such conditions to social and structural forces—while also often reinscribing stereotypes that we can now see as troubling and essentializing.  This history has never been told. And it matters today: mental health disparities have persisted—and even worsened—despite decades of awareness and efforts to close these gaps. We can look to this buried history for education as well as inspiration.

A (now outdated) introductory gloss of the project appears in American Literary History’s Second Book Project special issue. Modernism/modernity published an early version of the chapter on race and alcoholism in Harlem Renaissance-era literature and addiction science. Arizona Quarterly published an early work from the chapter on the gender of schizophrenia, focused on ambivalence’s trajectory from a psychotic symptom of schizophrenia to a feminized neurosis and an esteemed masculine artistic disposition. Another occasional piece, on the prehistory of the contemporary quantified self movement, appeared in Modernism/modernity’s online feature In These Times. Also for Modernism/modernity, Heather A. Love and I co-edited a related Print+ essay cluster on “Modernism & Diagnosis.” With Gordon Hutner, I co-edited a special issue of American Literary History on “Diagnosing America: The Literatures of Mental Health in the US.”

Research for this book has been supported by a long-term fellowship at The Huntington Library, a travel grant from the Modernist Studies Association, and a travel award from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts and the US National Science Foundation.

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