Diagnosing America: The Literatures of Mental Health in the US

Abstract

Abstract Once one is alive to it, scholarship on the literatures of mental health in the US seems to be everywhere, though it is evolving out of so many different sources that its parameters as a subfield can be hard to establish. That is, many studies not overtly focused on psychology and well-being investigate these concerns—from studies of national political mindsets to gendered, racialized, and otherwise biopolitically defined life experiences. The ever-widening scope of the health humanities can also be seen either to include an expanding ring of mental health studies or, in a post-Cartesian world, to be nearly synonymous with studies of psychic life. The scholarly turns to neuroscience, affect, and ontology express a similar set of interests, even as they align with a broader cultural attention to the so-called mental health epidemic that the COVID-19 pandemic, climate disasters, race-based violence, and our myriad other global health crises exacerbate.In part, our present interest reflects what many might consider as an overdue reckoning with the literary representations of the inequitable psychological vulnerabilities of US existence.